WAXSing and waning (2)

In September 2022, Liberato de Caro and his team published a follow-up to his previous papers (reviewed in the previous post, WAXSing and waning), called ‘Long-Term Temperature Effects on the Natural Linen Aging of the Turin Shroud,’ in an MDPI journal called Information. Starting with their previous conclusion, that the Shroud has suffered similar deterioration […]

A Freshly Killed Seal

Of all the odd things one might associate with the Shroud of Turin, this has got to be one of the oddest, but Googling “Shroud,” “Turin,” and “Freshly killed seal” returns an extraordinary 17000 hits. Not “recently dead seal” or “newly harpooned seal,” but always “freshly killed.” The use of exact phrases like this can […]

The Side Strip

Among the most visible mysteries of the Shroud is the thin strip, about 8cm wide, which appears to have been originally part of the Shroud, then cut off, then sewn back on, in almost exactly the same place. That it is not from a different cloth can be shown by the correspondence of the weft […]

The Most Studied Artefact?

Of all the most widely circulated canards about the Shroud, probably the commonest is that the Shroud is the most studied artefact, “in human history,” “in Christendom.” “in the history of the world,” “of all time” (to quote just the front page of a Google search), and no doubt many more. This claim is generally […]

Where and When?

The most important questions for the Medieval hypothesis to answer are not How, or Why, the Shroud was created, and certainly not Who created it, but Where, and When. It might be supposed that the second of these was fairly rigorously satisfied by the radiocarbon dating, but although fifty years or so either side of […]

Raes Ruminations

In 1973, a snippet of the Shroud was given to the Belgian textile expert Gilbert Raes for analysis. It was described as shaped as an irregular right-angled triangle, with sides 40mm, 13mm and 42mm. The hypotenuse was the actual cut, from the end of the Shroud, up one of the herringbone ‘spines’ and diagonally across […]

Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’…

The gospels are quite specific. The tomb of Jesus was blocked by a stone (λίθος, lapis), which had to be rolled in place (προκυλί-, advolv-), and rolled away (ἀποκυλι-, revolv-). The roots of those words, κυλι- and volv-, wherever they occur definitely implies some kind of circular movement. So why, in almost every single interpretation […]

Follis Follies

Justin Robinson is an enthusiastic, engaging, and knowledgeable numismatist convinced that some early Byzantine coins are indisputable evidence of the Shroud of Turin in Constantinople, and before that as the Image of Edessa. His paper ‘Byzantine Coins, the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Grail’ appeared in April 2021 in the Coins & History Foundation […]

Coincidence or Correlation?

PART ONE Robert Rucker has used the remarkable computing power of Monte Carlo N-Particle software to calculate the enrichment of radiocarbon that would ensue in a shroud, given a simple model man-in-a-tomb, a uniform generation of neutrons within the man, and just enough to produce a radiocarbon date 1400 years ahead of the cloth’s actual […]

Here be Dragons

Did dragons exist? I mean real dragons, those huge flying fire-breathing monsters we read of in History and Fable, not the lumbering Komodo of Indonesia. Some years ago, an enchanting book by Peter Dickinson1 explored the possibility pseudo-scientifically, beginning with the aerodynamic problem of how such a huge animal could fly. His solution was that […]