Until a few years ago, I was as keen to believe in the authenticity of the Shroud as any devout authenticist, and had mounted two exhibitions to illustrate the evidence in favour of it. I had carried out some experimental confirmations of some ideas about the scourging and crucifixion, and had a letter about a small experiment published by the British Society for the Turin Shroud, to the effect that the photographic hypothesis promoted by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince was at least chemically feasible (BSTS Newsletter 39, January 1995).
However, although I was a member of the BSTS, and read its newsletters assiduously, it wasn’t until 2012 that I began to join the various internet communities concerned with the Shroud, beginning with Colin Berry’s shroudofturinwithoutallthehype (although I’m not sure that’s what its title was at the time – I think it has changed over the years), on 9 October, and then joining Dan Porter’s shroudstory.com on 23 October, responding to ‘Thibault Heimburger: Now, I know for sure that the TS body image is not a scorch.’
In those days I was actively experimenting with the idea that the Shroud image could have been a scorch, but was continually stymied by the bright ultraviolet fringe that kept appearing, when the STuRP team had insisted that there wasn’t any. This led to a greater study of the STuRP papers, the discovery of shroud.com, and further investigation into the primary sources of sindonology.
Looking back on these earlier comments I see that I maintained an equivocal position, although if pressed I think I would have plumped for authenticity. In general, discussion was civilised, with Colin’s site acting as primarily medieval, and Dan’s mostly authenticist, but the interpretation of the facts being much more important than proselytising for one side or the other.
But then on 22 April 2013 I joined the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) skeptics forum, as hardened a bunch of cynics as you could find, whose comments varied from the sharply critical to the outright abusive, based on very little fact, just the fanatical belief that the Shroud must be a fake. My first post was a criticism of the Freer-Waters/Jull paper describing a fragment of Shroud still in the possession of the Tucson laboratories, deriving from the sample they were given for radiocarbon dating (Investigating a Dated Piece of the Shroud of Turin, Radiocarbon, Vol 52, No 4, 2010). The authors had got their figures for the warp and weft thread counts the wrong way round, which, I thought, gave little confidence in their work. I was immediately asked for the original sources for my contradictory statement (fair enough), and whether I had had personal experience of weaving hand-spun thread of a hand-loom myself, which I thought irrelevant. In general I was branded an authenticist, and therefore fair game for skeptics regardless of the soundness of my arguments.
Later the same day. to make matters worse (!), I nailed my colours to the mast: “While I am indeed a cradle Catholic, if you read most of my posts on shroudstory you will find that I hold no particular candle for the shroud being 1st century, and even even if it is, am certain that nothing supernatural is involved. The first few months of my internet involvement with the shroud were devoted to experiments demonstrating that the image could indeed be a simple bas-relief scorch, mostly posting on shroudofturinwithoutallthehype. What I mostly do is examine claims from either side logically, and point out inconsistencies which must be explained if the claim is to be considered valid. There are huge inconsistencies with the hypotheses that explore the possibility that the shroud was made by emanations from a dead body; but the same goes for those involved with forgery, and I don’t think the question will be solved until they are all resolved.”
Much of the length of the Shroud thread was due to the persistent efforts of one Richard Savage, who, under the pseudonym Jabba, attempted to argue for the authenticity of the Shroud. His confused attempts to marshal his ideas using nested bullet points, his references to papers he clearly hadn’t read or understood, his inability to follow a coherent line of thought and his charming self-abasing attitude of humble inquiry drove his opponents mad, and I enjoyed being “on his side” and submitting more incisive arguments on his behalf. In fact, even after I changed my mind completely and decided that the Shroud was indeed medieval, I continued privately to help him marshal his ideas into sensible responses to the unending baying of his tormenters, under a pseudonym (Sally!).
However, while attempting to justify the incorrectness of the radiocarbon date in terms of contamination, I finally worked out for myself the proportion of modern contamination which would be required to alter a first century to a fourteenth century date, and, discovering that it must amount to at least double the material of the Shroud itself, I became convinced that it was indeed medieval, and said so on 20 May; Post number 7269.
I joined the thread ‘Miracle of the Shroud / Blood on the Shroud” (a merger of two separate threads), at Post 6459, and continued to contribute, albeit increasingly rarely as it moved on relentlessly, morphing after 9569 posts into Miracle of the Shroud II: The Second Coming (4088 posts), and then successively as Miracle of the Shroud III: Revenge of the Cloth (3555 posts), Miracle of the Shroud IV: The Phantom Image (3335 posts) and Miracle of the Shroud V: Blood and Limestone (2768 posts), whose last contribution was in mid-2018. Sometime along the way the whole forum separated from the James Randi foundation and set off on its own, under the name International Skeptics.
Even before Miracle I, the Shroud had been the subject of several other threads, and it has been the subject of several more since. I did contribute to ‘The Turin Shroud: The Image of Edessa created in c. 300-400 AD?’, but it didn’t have the same appeal, so I quietly bowed out.
Abandoning International Skeptics I turned to the Catholic Answers website (forums.catholic.com), and challenged the overconfidence of several authenticist polemicists, particularly one going by the name of Undead_rat, who became increasingly unhinged, eventually convinced I was a militant Baha’i. Apparently his intemperance extended well beyond his interaction with me, as some time after our Shroud conversations had finished, he was banned from the site altogether.
For a while I also contributed to the Discussions forum at ‘Evidence for God from Science’ (discussions.godandscience.org), particularly ‘Shroud of Turin,’ and ‘Shroud of Turin – Summary of Evidence for its Authenticity.’ My chief opponent on these was called Bippy123, who was less intemperate and more informed than Undead_rat, but nevertheless was frequently reduced to deliberate misreading and emotional overstatement to present his case. The thread is still open, although has not been very active since 2018.
Shroudscience closed on 27 May 2019, although thank goodness its archive remains open, and even as I type this, Catholic Answers expires on 31 December 2020, the last few posts including a final skirmish between me and Undead_rat, briefly resurfacing under the name Tootle_toot. Around the internet, Podcasts and YouTube videos are now the only currency of independent sindonological debate, although Stephen Jones’s theshroudofturin.blogspot.com ploughs gamely on, and a handful of scattered stars in the cyberfirmament flicker from time to time, such as this blog, and David Montero’s sombraenelsudario.wordpress.com.
Somewhere along the way, in September 2013, as Mark Guscin bowed out of the job of putting together the Newsletter of the British Society for the Turin Shroud, which for some time has been its only manifestation, I was offered the post of Editor, and accepted. Although I championed the impartiality of the Society’s attitude, it was difficult to find people who had original research to contribute, so my own made up a substantial minority, and in the end the rigour of my investigations convinced some of the leading lights of the Society that I was “pissing all over it,” and generously offered me the opportunity to relinquish the task. The necessity of charging for an online version of the Newsletter has meant that it is no longer accessible to non-subscribers, and although its Aims still proclaim that the Society is for research into “all aspects” of the Shroud, the prominence of videos showing “the injustice done to the Shroud”, which “go to the heart of the BSTS mission,” (which are accessible without subscription) suggest that its editorial stance is no longer as impartial as it was.
Over the years I have to say that my stance has slid more and more towards the medieval side of the ‘origin’ argument, from slipping gently off the fence in 2013 to becoming the leading proponent of non-authenticity in 2020. As such I have debated Alan Whanger, Joe Marino and Bob Rucker publicly, and read papers at the Shroud Conference (‘Science, Theology and the Turin Shroud’) in Toronto in 2019.
Recently I have become less of an advocate for the ‘authenticity debate,’ not, I hasten to add, because I am any less of an authenticist, far from it, but because increasingly the focus of sindonological interest has drifted away from that debate and become more centred on internecine discrepancies within the ‘authenticist’ camp. There are different factions of ‘miraculists’ and ‘rationalists,’ whose opposing views on the whole of theology are far more discordant than either of their disagreements with ‘medievalist’ views, especially mine. Remarkably, the ‘general public’ does not seem to notice this, and cheerfully supposes that all is coherent in the authenticist camp. “Science has proved…” they chant, unaware of the profound academic disagreement between say, Ray Rogers and Alan Adler, Fred Zugibe and Robert Bucklin or Joe Marino and Bob Rucker, to name only a few. It has been my interest recently to point these out to the blind adherents of authenticity, to the usual opprobrium and resentful acknowledgement.