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 justified on the grounds that the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STuRP) spent “hundreds of thousands of hours” studying it, not to mention all the work carried out by other researchers since, and certainly not to mention (especially if you are American) the 1973 Italian commission, who also studied the Shroud and by and large concluded that it was not authentic.
But it’s all nonsense. The truth is that the Shroud has hardly been studied at all, let alone so extensively as to place things like the tomb of Tutankhamun, Stonehenge or the Dead Sea Scrolls in the shade. The fact that in 1978 a team of imaging specialists were given 120 hours of continuous access to the Shroud is trivial: in that time they took photographs (including visible light, X-ray, Ultra Violet fluorescence and Infra Red), about three dozen sticky tape samples, and about the same number of fluorescence spectra. Although it was peered at through microscopes, the highest magnification actually recorded was a few photos at X64.
The scientists who carried out the 1978 investigations subsequently wrote reports, some of which were published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. Shroud.com lists thirty-five papers of which one or more members of STuRP were authors or among the authors, to which at least one by Walter McCrone could be added, but was omitted because of his questionable status as a formal member of STuRP. According to several academia.edu articles by Joe Marino, these papers were published in “twenty-four peer reviewed journals,” but this is both incorrect and somewhat irrelevant. Several of the papers were merely descriptive of methods and/or results, and some were summaries, without original observations or conclusions. Few of the listed authors showed any further interest in the subject, and few of their investigations have been investigated further. Almost none of the work carried out by the NASA imaging specialists was ever published at all. The report of the 1973 Commission appeared as a supplement to a diocesan magazine. There were further examinations in 1988, as part of the radiocarbon sampling process, and more still in 2002, when the backing cloth was replaced and the Shroud given a new climate-controlled case, but minimal new information was discovered or published.
Exceptions to this are the investigations into the STuRP tape samples, by Walter McCrone, John Heller, Alan Adler and later Ray Rogers, and the ‘pollen’ tapes by Max Frei. All of these have, to a greater or lesser extent, been reviewed by other scholars. For different reasons, none of them is uncontroversial, and none were thought of, even by STuRP, as definitive.
But the trope persists, sometimes bolstered by its alleged endorsement by “a statement in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal” (Joe Marino), namely the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose article, “The Remarkable Metrological History of Radiocarbon Dating [III] (Volume 109, No. 2) does include the words: “The Shroud of Turin is the single, most studied artifact in human history.” However Marino quotes this right out of context. In fact, the renowned journal simply says that the metrological impact of the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud “is shown, in part, by widely accepted statements,” such as “the Shroud of Turin is the single most studied artefact in human history.” The journal does not say that it thinks the widely accepted statement is true, and, although it is in quotation marks, it does not give a source for it. It is part of the banner page of shroud.com, in its most common manifestation: “It is, in fact, the single most studied artifact in human history, and we know more about it today than we ever have before.” Presumably this was written by Barrie Schwortz, but on what basis is impossible to say. More people have climbed Mount Everest than have actually studied the Shroud or fragments of it. More people have sailed solo around the world, or been to the South Pole, or swam the English Channel than have studied the Shroud.
The online search engine for academic journals, JSTOR, lists 2700 papers on the Turin Shroud. Tutankhamun gets 3100, Machu Picchu 3500, the Great Pyramid 4000, the Colosseum 5100, the Rosetta Stone 5400, the Mona Lisa 8900, Stonehenge 11100, the Dead Sea Scrolls 17200 and the Titanic 29100.
In 1984, STuRP put forward a list of 85 questions that they hoped would be answered by a new investigation. They included:
Is the blood human?
Is there mercuric sulphide in the ‘blood’?
Are there artists’ materials on the Shroud?
What proportions are there of flax and cotton?
What is the structure of the seam?
What elements are present in the different regions of the cloth?
In other words some of the most basic information necessary for a full characterisation of the cloth is still missing. We don’t know what it’s made of, or what’s on it.
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On a related note, another thing authenticists like to claim is that, after the radiocarbon dating, academic interest withered completely, only recovering over many years. This is nothing more than an unwarranted guess. The graph below shows the numbers of papers listed on JSTOR, under the search terms “shroud” and “turin,” for all the years between 1970 and 2010. The radiocarbon dating caused barely a ripple.
