Do people still believe that Shroud thing?

March 18, 2018

by Fr Richard Simon

(The Rev. is taking a break and is offering this article from March, 2015)

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

Is it true that there are still Neanderthals that believe the shroud of Turin is the real thing even after it has been clearly disproven by science?

Yours,

Alba Leavnutin

Dear Alba,

I am sure that you are referring to the carbon dating tests that were done on a corner of the shroud in 1988. They dated the shroud to around 1300AD, exactly when the shroud appeared in France. Case closed. The thing’s an obvious fraud.

I’m not so sure. The tests done on the shroud were amazingly badly done. They were supposed to take ten samples from all over the shroud. They took one sample from the most contaminated corner of the shroud, a corner that had been held repeatedly by dirty medieval hands over the course of centuries. The corner they took is clearly different in appearance from the rest of shroud, especially when photographed by instruments that are able to determine chemical composition by means of light waves. That corner is chemically different from the rest of the shroud. In fact, it seems to have been made of cotton and rewoven sometime in the Middle Ages or early renaissance.

Dr. Ray Rogers, who thought the whole shroud thing was nonsense after the carbon dating tests, and was enraged at the Binford-Marino theory that the sampled area was a patch. He had some of the shroud threads from that exact area in his possession and set out to disprove the whole Binford-Marino theory. He ended up doing exactly the opposite. He discovered that the sample they tested had been a patch! His work confirmed by Dr. Villareal of Los Alamos labs in New Mexico. He and a team of nine scientists from Los Alamos examined the material from the area of the carbon 14 sampling. This is what they found in 2008.

“The age-dating process [in 1988] failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.”

Add to this the tremendous financial benefit that accrued to the English team and the British Museum, especially Dr. Michael Tite who supervised the tests, and the whole thing stinks like Limburger cheese.

Nor did he (Michael Tite, the project supervisor) shy from exploiting his laboratory's 'success' in its work on the Shroud in order to raise £1 million pounds to found the Edward Hall Chair in Archaeological Science, a post shortly after taken up by the British Museum's Dr. Michael Tite. This directly secured the laboratory's future." (Wilson, I., 2001, "Obituary: Professor Edward Hall, CBE, FBA," BSTS Newsletter, No. 54, November, p.59).

In other words, Dr. Michael Tite was able to raise one million pounds from anonymous businessmen for a job well done in debunking the shroud and with this money was able to provide a nice post for himself at the British Museum. (That’s $1,870,000 dollars in 1988 dollars when a million dollars was real money!) The whole thing stinks!

Now the cherry on the cake! That one sample taken from a dirty mismatched corner of the shroud instead of ten pieces from all over the shroud was cut into four pieces and sent to carbon dating labs in Oxford, Zürich and Tucson. The three labs all came up with different medieval dates that went from more recent to less recent as they moved down the sample. This was fairly odd. The conclusion of the “patch” theorists is that the sample had less contamination on one end and more on the other in a fairly consistent manner.

In addition this testing was supposed to happen under the greatest secrecy until the results were all in. I happened to be in Albuquerque, not that far from Tucson, at a wedding that summer in 1988. At the rehearsal dinner when all the guests were happily liquored up, I struck up a conversation with a physicist from a rather prestigious local institution. I said something like, “Hey, how about that shroud test?” He suddenly got very solemn and shook his head, indicating by a few choice words and grunts that the results were in and they proved that the shroud was a medieval fake.

In other words, I knew the test results a month in advance of the National Enquirer! I’m nobody! I don’t know science from a bowl of pudding. Still, I was in on one of the supposed greatest secrets of the era a month before the rest of the world. If that doesn’t convince you that the supposed tests were a bunch of stinking fish wrap, well, nothing will. Those tests were done contrary to scientific protocol on a dirty, probably repaired corner of the shroud, the fellows supervising the tests made a bundle on the bragging rights and I, a Midwestern rube, knew about the results well before they were announced.

If that’s your idea of science, perhaps your driving privileges should be revoked before you hurt yourself. People say that those who believe in the shroud are indulging in wishful thinking. The opposite is just as easy to maintain. Those who believe science has said anything that demystifies the shroud are indulging in wishful thinking themselves. They are more befuddled than Bigfoot believers.

ss. peter & Lambert

Roman Catholic Parish

Do people still believe that Shroud thing?