Asymmetrical Information

I was in Turin a few months ago, and was a little disappointed that the shroud wasn't on display to the public. Apparantly they only pull it out of the vault on really special occasions (I think the last was the millenium), and the line to see it stretches for miles.

I find it amazing that such a basic scientific error could have been made. I mean how do you not notice that you are taking a mended piece of the Shroud? Given advances in dating methods, I would expect this mystery to finally be cleared up.

How could a cloth, of herringbone weave, be damaged and then patched so undetectably that previous tests specifically intended to settle the antiquity question once and for all used parts of it that were not original?  This is very, very suspicious.

It also would not affect the other evidence that the shroud is a fake, including the style, lack of distortion of the image, and the nature of the coloration (ochre and vermillion tempera paint).

These claims are going to be debunked yet again, but the believers are not going to be paying attention.  Affirmed in their false faith, they are going to go forth in their continued ignorance.

Indeed. At best, the available evidence points towards the hypothesis that someone in the Middle Ages acquired an old piece of cloth from the Holy Land and used it to make an impressive-looking but unrealistic fraud.

Considering the number of religious relics that are known to be fake simply because there are too many of them, it's obvious there was and is a sizable market for false faith.

The scientific evidence is not accurately described by the above posters. In fact, it is the carbon dating results that are at odds with all the other facts.

And no one has any explanation at all for how a three-dimensional, negative image could have been produced in the 14th century. Nor by whom (he would have had to been greater than Leonardo, as an artist). Here's a good site for the details:

http://www.shroudstory.com/

This story is far from over. It will probably *never* be over. As noted before, the notion that the C14 samples were taken from patches beggars belief. Permission to take those samples was given only after a long, difficult, and close-run debate within the Vatican. The scientists involved all knew that this would be a one-shot deal, and had plenty of time to plan every detail of the sampling operation.

A friend was a student of one of the scientists involved in the C14 study, who told her that many of the other team members were fervent believers in the Shroud, one of whom apparently pronounced on at least one occasion, "we are not testing the Shroud, the Shroud is testing us". They (or their friends) were apparently not above leaving anonymous death threats for the more skeptical team members). In fact, the Vatican itself has taken a much more sane and balanced view of the Shroud; I'm not sure it has even given an official statement about this latest press release by the true believers.

Oh, the Shroud of Turin gets complicated. Very, very complicated. Check out this page, in which Frank Tipler, a professor of mathematical phyics at Tulane and author of "The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead," discusses a possible relationship between his Omega Point theory and Christianity, with an extensive examination of how the Shroud of Turin might have come about, with a number of citations. Good stuff.

"the notion that the C14 samples were taken from patches beggars belie"

Not at all. First, the patching was undoubtedly done by experts at repairing tapestries. Second, the patches were about 450 years old at the time. The Church only agreed to let the scientists have some fibers that were well away from the image, making it more likely that they'd get patches.

An alternate explanation is that the severe heat of the fire--it melted the silver surrounding the shroud--did something to the linen too; therefore the carbon dating was getting the date of the fire, not the age of the linen.

The site linked to by Paul Snively is indeed interesting, also.

I have serious doubts about what you do not, Mr. Sullivan, based on the rather obvious patches visible in the image on this page.

The Shroud first appeared in 1357, the fire was in 1532.  There are two ways for the Shroud's radiocarbon age to have changed so drastically:

1. Something could have tripled the amount of C-14 in it from some unknown source (yeah, riiiight)
2. Something could have preferentially driven off roughly 2/3 of the C-12 while leaving the C-14 in place (which would have converted the Shroud into charcoal).

Just because some patches are visible, doesn't mean all repairs would be.

Did you actually read what you linked to?

Yes, I read the whole thing.  I consider the authors to be putting way too much weight on parts of the evidence which are far from conclusive; they may be motivated by the same things as Rogers.  However, the evidence of obvious patching in the image is not subject to equivocation.

If a repair could even be made invisibly, you have to explain why any of the repairs were not.  Even an "invisible" repair would leave gaps between threads, or knots where they were tied.  If the threads are continuous the area was not repaired, QED.

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