Chapter 7: The carbon-dating of the shroud of Turin
The great empirical breakthrough of the mystery of Christ comes from scientific research on the authenticity of the Turin Shroud. The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth believed to be the shroud of Jesus. The cloth, a fourteen foot length of ivory-colored linen, bears the shadowy imprint of the front and back of a crucified man, laid out in death. It is kept in Turin's Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, and referred to by the Italians as the Santa Sidone, or Holy Shroud. When the first photographic plates of it were made in 1898, there appeared on the negatives with photographic sharpness the picture of a naked, bearded man with a crown of thorns. After an exhaustive study, two professors of the Academy of Sciences (Italy) arrived at the conclusion that the image on the piece of linen was not a painted picture but the imprint of a human body, in fact the imprint of the body of Jesus Christ. Since the history of the Shroud does not go back beyond the fourteenth century and for a number of other reasons, the authenticity of the Shroud, the Roman Catholic Church's most precious relic, has remained contentious until the end of the last century.
Authentic, or a medieval forgery? On a dull afternoon, Thursday, October 13, 1988, the definitive opinion was given at a packed press conference in the British Museum when atomic scientists announced the results of the radiocarbon dating tests of the Shroud performed by three different laboratories (in the U.S., England, and Switzerland). As Dr. Tite from Oxford University explained, the flax from which the cloth was made was harvested between 1260 and 1390. The best estimate of the year in which the raw product had been processed into the linen of the Shroud was 1325. This conclusion tallies nicely with the historical fact that in 1355 the Shroud was exhibited for the first time in the village Lirey near Troyes in France.1 This date provides the first incontestable evidence of the existence of the Shroud. The carbon dating results provide conclusive evidence that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval forgery. Or, so it appears. As professor Hall of the Oxford Laboratory stressed at the packed press conference, no one with any scientific background can any longer believe in the authenticity of the Shroud. "If they do, they might as well join the Flat Earthers," the professor added. End of the story!
Science found itself on a collision course. A decade earlier American physicists and other scientists of STURP (Shroud of TUrin Research Project) had proven in a comprehensive study involving 150,000 manhours that the image of the Shroud could not have been made by human hands or be the result of natural agents, such as sweat, etc. In short, translated in normal terms: the Shroud is a miracle, or, more precisely, a divine miracle. So, the conundrum is: "How could an image not made by human hands be a medieval forgery?" There are only to options: either the result of the STURP research is false, or the carbon dating is wrong. When I learned about the results of the carbon dating from 1988, I was, like thousands who had closely followed the STURP findings, dumbfounded. Still, one thing was clear to me: the carbon dating was wrong. It had to be wrong. Every measurement is actually nothing but the reading of a measuring device. For me and others, it was like driving a car at one hundred miles per hour while the speedometer indicates zero, or, as Ian Wilson puts it: like a jumbo jet cruising over the Atlantic while the fuel gauge reads empty.
The source of error: "young" cotton
The theory of "the medieval forgery" received its deathblow on January 20, 2005, when Dr. Raymond N. Rogers's"Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin" appeared in the science journal Thermochimica Acta (425, 189–194, 2005). Dr. Rogers, an internationally known chemist-physicist of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a member of STURP, died shortly thereafter, on March 8, 2005. It almost looks as if the Good Lord had meted out his days. Rogers's work proves that the sample had not been taken from the material of the original shroud but from a rewoven repaired area of the cloth. The following is quoted from the paper's summary:
As unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the Shroud of Turin in1988 was taken from a rewoven area of the Shroud. Pyrolysis-mass spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the Shroud.
The world media paid a great deal of attention to this shocking dénouement of a mystery that had stirred the emotions for seventeen years. In its "science" column the New York Times (01/27/2005) gave this comment under the heading "Shroud of Turin: old as Jesus?":
The Shroud of Turin is much older than the medieval date that modern science has affixed to it and could be old enough to have been the burial wrapping of Jesus, a new analysis concludes.
Since 1988, most scientists have confidently concluded that it was the work of a medieval artist, because carbon dating had placed the production of the fabric between 1260 and 1390.
In an article this month in the journal Thermochimica Acta, Dr. Raymond Rogers, a chemist retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory, said the carbon dating test was valid but that the piece tested was about the size of a postage stamp and came from a portion that had been patched.
"We're darned sure that part of the cloth was not original Shroud of Turin cloth," he said, adding that threads from the main part of the shroud were pure linen, which is spun from flax.
The threads in the patched portion contained cotton as well and had been dyed to match.
From other tests, he estimated that the shroud was between 1,300 and 3,000 years old [so between 1000 BC and 700 AD].
The icing on the cake
Dr. Rogers's findings were, however, but "the icing on the cake," providing the conclusive proof. The fact that the samples had been taken from a patched area was already established in 2000. At the World Congress "Sidone 2000" held in Orvieto, Italy, the Shroud experts Joseph Marino and Dr. Sue Benford jointly read a paper titled "Evidence for the Skewing of the C-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin Due to Repairs." In this historic paper, which later appeared in print, the researchers were able to establish that in the sample used by the laboratories a "patch" of cloth dating from the sixteenth century had been expertly interwoven with the original material of the Shroud. (With it, photographs were shown to "blind" observers, experts on medieval weaving techniques. They were all fooled by those sixteenth century craftsmen, who were real magicians.)
This conclusion was confirmed by computations performed by AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) laboratory Beta Analytic, the largest carbon dating concern in the world. (Incidentally, it's worth noting that the three laboratories involved in the 1988 tests were also AMS laboratories.) The analysis showed that the observed percentage of medieval material in relation to the original material of the Shroud in the samples used (60/40 ratio of new material to old), would result in a C-14 age of AD 1210, which correlates closely with the Oxford mean date of 1200 AD as reported in Nature.
In order not to burden the reader any further, I shall leave the interesting work of Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdez concerning another potential source of error of the 1988 carbon dating results out of consideration (see appendix VI).
Final note
Since the theory of "medieval forgery" has been shown to be false, all kinds of "silly" theories varying from "Leonardo Da Vinci's hand," to "secret medieval photography" can be resigned to the wastebasket. We are now in the position to focus our full attention on STURP, the scientific investigation of the Shroud, the most solid piece of evidence of the historical reality of Jesus and the Passion story.
Note
d' Arcis Memorandum from 1389. 1996.
Appendix I
The French Dominican monk Père A.M. Dubarle of the Saint Joseph's monastery in Paris made the following discovery while studying one of four colored drawings in the Pray Manuscript which was produced in Budapest around 1191. In the lower half of the page with the body of Jesus and the Shroud, a partially rolled shroud is seen on the cover of the sarcophagus. In the words of the Shroud researcher Ian Wilson: "If this piece of cloth is studied very closely, it can be seen that it bears a set of tiny 'poker holes,' three in a line and then one offset, forming a L-shaped figure, precisely corresponding to those found on the Shroud and known to predate the 1532 fire" (Illustrations in figure 17a and plate 35b of his book The Blood and the Shroud).
There are a number of striking similarities, among which a blood stain above the right eye, and the hands with four fingers without a thumb, across the pubic area of Jesus' naked body. In Byzantine art the picture of a naked Jesus is never seen. However, this is just a secondary point. The absence of the thumb is of far greater significance. Contrary to all manmade pictures,1 it can be seen on the Shroud that the nail had not been driven through the palm but through the wrist-joint. As the French surgeon Dr. Pierre Barbet showed experimentally in the 1930s with the use of crucified human corpses, a nail through the palm is unable to bear the weight of the body. The tissues simply tear apart. The only option is a nail in the wrist-joint, driven through the so-called mesocarpal space of Bestot, as Dr. Barbet had been able to establish. A very important point for our theme is that Dr. Barbet made the unexpected observation that when a nail was driven through the wrist of an amputated arm or a corpse, the thumb automatically snaps against the palm due to the pressure on the median nerve. So, if the Shroud is the authentic shroud of Jesus, the thumb should be absent on the image. Sure enough, on the cloth only the four fingers of each hand are visible.
Mirabile dictu, this is also the case on the picture of the Pray Manuscript. This is an additional piece of evidence that the Shroud of Turin has served as a model for this twelfth century drawing. Using mathematical statistics, it is possible to estimate the odds of the similarities of the striking characteristics (pattern of poke holes, etc.) of the drawing in the Pray Manuscript and the Shroud of Turin being due to chance. If the outcome is one in a hundred or less, the statistician concludes that there must be a causal connection. At my request, the Cambridge trained statistician Dr. M.E. Wise came up with an impressive answer: 1 in 30,000. This proves that the Shroud had served as the model of the drawing made in the twelfth century, which of course proves that the 1988 carbon dating must be incorrect since it suggests that the cloth was produced in the fourteenth century.
Let me conclude on the following note. The need to drive the nail through the wrist as shown by Dr. Barbet hits the nail on its head. As the article on crucifixion in the Encyclopaedia Britannica shows, sources from ancient history also mention the wrist as the point of impact for the nail. The following quote presents a picture of what the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero called "the most horrible death":
Usually, the condemned man, after being whipped, dragged the crossbeam of his cross to the place of punishment, where the upright shaft was already fixed in the ground. There he was stripped of his clothing and bound fast with outstretched arms to the crossbeam or nailed firmly to it through the wrists [italics this author].
The nail through the wrist and the nakedness in the Shroud correspond to the historical facts, as opposed to virtually all depictions of Jesus, where, with regard to the latter, he is always shown with a loincloth. Finally, the following passage of the Encyclopaedia article is relevant:
Crucifixion was thought to be a suitable punishment chiefly for political or religious agitators, slaves, and those who had no civil rights.
"Religious agitators." No wonder Jesus had to suffer this cruel fate, if the gospels are based on reality.
Note
A notable exception is Anthony van Dijck's crucifixion painting in which the nail is in the wrist.
Appendix II: Three reliable witnesses
The following three historical facts lend strong support to the view that the Shroud is older than 1260 as the carbon dating results suggest. In other words, these facts by themselves show that the 1988 tests are skewed.
In 1157 the Icelandic abbot Nicholas Soemundarson returned home from a pilgrimage to Constantinople. The Soemundarson Catalogue in the library of Yale University contains a list of relics that the abbot had seen and studied. Professor John Heller from Yale and member of the STURP team found the following entry in the travel diary of the adventurous abbot: " … a shroud with the blood and the image of the body of Christ in the St. Mary of Blachernae Church in Constantinople." The testimony of a single witness does not constitute evidence. At least two are needed. So let me present the second witness.
Robert de Clari was a simple French soldier who had taken part in the sacking of Constantinople during the infamous Fourth Crusade in 1204. He, too, saw the shroud in the same church. In his memoir,1 written in 1204, as dictated to a scribe, de Clari mentions among the "wonders": "There was another church, called the Church of the Holy Virgin at Blachernae, where the shroud was kept in which our Lord had been wrapped, and every Friday this shroud rose by itself, so that one could see the figure of our Lord in it."
A few months after this experience the Great Sack took place. Since that event in 1204, the Shroud disappeared from the radar until it turned up in about 1350 in the French village Lirey.
In summary, we have three historically reliable records about a much earlier existence of the Shroud than the "indisputable" result of the 1988 carbon dating of 1325 ± 65,
1. The Pray Manuscript: 1195
2. The Icelandic Catalogue: 1157
3. The travel diary of Robert de Clari: 1204
These three historical facts provide the evidence that the Shroud existed at least one hundred years before the earliest date from the carbon dating: 1260
Note
The original manuscript (reference code MS 49-87, folio 123) is in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. The definitive modern publication is Philipp Lauer's text translated from old-French, La conquête de Constantinople, Classiques français du moyen âge, 40, 1924, reprint 1956.
Appendix III: Note on radio-carbon Dating
The principle is simple. As you may know, the element carbon (C-12 in chemical notation) is an essential component of all life. Plants, animals and humans, but also proteins, sugars, enzymes, etc. are all composed of long chains of carbon atoms. This carbon (C-12) is not radioactive. Only one out of a trillion carbon atoms in a living organism is, however, radioactive. It's slightly heavier than C-12 and is called C-14. What does radioactive mean? It means that the element is unstable, i.e., that it "decomposes" with time, and thus slowly disappears. But in the living organism this makes no difference, as C-14 is constantly replenished from the atmosphere via food in animals or photosynthesis in plants.
Archeology
Radio-carbon dating
The "activity" (intensity of radiation) of the radioactive carbon (carbon-14) present in bone, wood, linen, etc. at archaeological locations is measured. Because the rate at which the activity decreases with time is known the age of the (dead) material can be determined by comparing this activity with the carbon-14 activity of living material of present-day corresponding organisms (plant, etc.).
A more technical note on radio-carbon dating
The method was invented shortly after World War II by W.F. Libby who received the Nobel prize for his invention. The technique is based on the decay of radioactive carbon-14 into nitrogen by the emission of an electron. Carbon-14 is produced by the action of so-called neutrons on nitrogen-14 in the atmosphere. These neutrons are continually produced by the action of cosmic radiation on the earth's atmosphere. Radiocarbon-14 present in carbon dioxide molecules enters the so-called biological cycle and is taken up by animals and plants through the food chain. After the death of the organism the carbon-14 content is no longer maintained by photosynthesis, or, indirectly, via the food chain, and will thus decay radioactively (half-life 5730 years).
The formula for the age of an archaeological artifact like the shroud is given by:
where T is the half-time (5730 years) and Am the activity of the sample. In words: the age of the artifact is equal to the half-life multiplied by the natural logarithm of the ratio of the initial (specific) activity of the sample and the present (specific) activity.
In the STURP study of 1978 (see later) the carbon dating could not be used, since prior to 1980 the required sample had to be the size of a handkerchief. Professor Harry Gove of Rochester University in New York succeeded in reducing the sample size a thousand-fold by a new technique called AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry). After years of negotiations the cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Ballestrero, finally granted permission for the carbon dating study in 1978. The three institutes receiving the samples for the tests were: the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art in Oxford, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and the University of Arizona in Tucson. All three laboratories employed the AMS-method.
Appendix IV: A Harvard professor's critique of the carbon-dating result
In the same issue of the leading science journal Nature in which the findings of the radio-carbon dating were published, professor Thomas J. Philips of the High Energy Physics Laboratory of Harvard University made the following comments:
From T.J. Phillips's Letter to the Editor, Nature, February 16, 1989:
If the Shroud is in fact the burial-cloth of Christ … then according to the Bible it was present at a unique physical event: the resurrection of a dead body. Unfortunately this event is not accessible to direct scientific scrutiny, but the body may have radiated neutrons, which would have irradiated the Shroud and changed some of the nuclei to different isotopes by neutron capture. In particular, some carbon-14 would have been generated from carbon-13.
If we assume that the Shroud is 1,950 years old and that the neutrons were emitted thermally, then an integrated flux of 2 x 1016 neutron cm2 would have converted enough carbon-13 to carbon-14 to give an apparent carbon-dated age of 670 years (i.e. fourteenth century).
Appendix V:
The following points are relevant to the conclusion of both Dr. Raymond Rogers and Dr. Sue Benford that the C-14 results are invalid because the sample contained material (fibers) from the sixteenth century.
"Invisible weaving" was a handicraft held in high esteem in the Middle Ages, partly due to the fact that in those days special fabrics were very expensive. "Thesixteenth century weavers were magicians," wrote Dr. T.P. Campbell, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, in his book Tapestry in the Renaissance. During the next two centuries of the Renaissance the art of invisible repair fell into disuse.
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The reason why Dr. Raymond Rogers's paper was rejected by the leading science journal Radiocarbon had nothing to do with the scientific merits of the study. As one of the reviewers, Dr. Jacques Evin said in his comment: "All people involved in the sampling and in the laboratory analyses [in 1988] will be very angry with these suspicions turning on so an important mistake or misconduct." Protecting the "old boys network," avoiding a screaming row, that's what it was all about; the first rejection in Dr. Rogers's stellar career.
Dr. Rogers's study was inspired by the Marino-Benford study. See Rogers, R.N., Comments on Benford-Marino hypothesis, British Society of the Turin Shroud (BSTS) Newsletter, November, 2001 (No. 54).
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Further details on the Marino-Benford and Rogers papers can be found on http://www.shroud.com/papers.htm in which also the computations of Beta Analytic are presented.
Appendix VI: A second source of error: Bioplastic material
In 1993, Dr. L. Garza-Valdes discovered that the test area of the C-14 measurements was heavily contaminated by living bacteria, fungi, and their collective end-product, the so-called bio-plastic varnish.1 This constitutes a potential source of error resulting in an artifact (Maya vase, Egyptian mummy, Shroud, etc.) being rated hundreds of years "younger" by the C-14 method than it actually is. Dr. Garza-Valdes repeated the preliminary treatment used in 1988 in the C-14 tests and was able to show that this cleaning procedure had no effect on the organisms and the "varnish." Actually this resulted in an increase of the systematic error as the chemicals dissolved some of the cellulose of the flax.
A rough calculation shows that taking all these sources of error into account, the (corrected) C-14 results suggest that the flax was harvested between 200 BC and 100 AD. However, for our discussion this is a matter of minor importance. The only thing that counts is that the 1988 carbon dating is null and void.
Notes
1) Garza-Valdes, L.A. e.a., Lichenothelia Varnish and the Shroud of Turin, Holy Shroud Guild Newsletter, 1993.
Garza-Valdes, L.A. e.a., Filamendous Fungi on the Shroud of Turin, 96th General Meeting American Society of Microbiology, Abstracts, 1996.
The DNA of GOD?, Dr. L. A. Garza-Valdes, Doubleday, 1999.
