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New claims for truth of Shroud of Turin
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| By KERRY MYERS
3 September, 2006 |
THE authenticity of the Shroud of Turin has been given renewed support by revelations in a new book by a Sydney researcher and author.
Previous carbon dating of the linen cloth, believed to have been the burial shroud of Jesus, suggested it was from the 14th century, but the book, The Shroud Story, says the testing was done on samples chemically different to the rest of the cloth – and in fact were actually remnants of invisible mending carried out in the Middles Ages.
Author Brendan Whiting says this information means that there is now no scientific evidence supporting any argument against the shroud, now housed in Turin’s cathedral, being 2000 years old.
The carbon dating was carried out in three independent laboratories in 1988. The results were used by skeptics and the mainstream press to label the shroud a fake and a fraud.
“Many people were falsely led to believe that the shroud’s life-size image of a naked crucified man is a medieval forgery,” Mr Whiting said.
“But recent scientific tests proved the carbon-dating result was anomalous.
“In 2005 the corner of the cloth from which the test sample had been taken was proved [by the late Los Alamos physical chemist Raymond Rogers] to be totally different in chemical composition from the main part of the cloth.
“It was found to contain cotton threads that were woven in the edge of the original cloth during invisible-mending in the Middle Ages, so causing the dating of the shroud to be younger than its true age.”
Rogers was also quoted by the National Geographic magazine as agreeing that the results were “undoubtedly accurate for the sample supplied”.
“However, there is no question that the radiocarbon sampling area has a completely different chemical composition than the main part of the shroud,” he said.
“The published date for the sample was not the time at which the cloth was produced.”
Mr Whiting said this evidence has been ignored by the mainstream media to date.
Rogers’ suggestion of “weaving repairs” was also supported in 2000 by shroud researcher Sue Benford and scholar Fr Joseph Marino, OSB that the carbon-dating had involved fabric which had been added during a mending process in the Middle Ages.
According to a Swiss textile expert quoted in the The Shroud Story, the weave and style of the shroud material was from the Dead Sea area and could only have been woven in the period from 40 years before the birth of Christ up to 70 years later.
The book lists the accumulated findings by an international group of 24 scientists that the Shroud of Turin is the surviving evidence of the crucified Christ.
Their studies of the cloth’s body-image formation concluded: “the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead cannot be rejected on scientific ground”.
Mr Whiting, author of Ship of Courage (the story of HMAS Perth and her crew), has spent four years in researching and writing his book.
He has used the resources of shroud experts including Australian Rex Morgan, Ian Wilson, Dr Leoncio Garza-Vales, Dr Alan Whanger and research photographer Barrie Schwortz.
The book, to be launched by the State Minister for Commerce John Della Bosca later this month, marks the fifth centenary of the Church’s official recognition of the Holy Shroud.
On May 1506 Pope Julius II issued a papal bull to inaugurate an annual feast day for the shroud.
While awaiting the 1988 test results Pope John Paul II downplayed the tests as being the crucial determinant of the cloth’s authenticity or otherwise.
“As it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce itself on these questions,” the Pope said.
“It entrusts the task of research to scientists to arrive at appropriate answers for questions related to this cloth.
“What really counts for believers is that the Holy Shroud is a mirror of the Gospel.”
Mr Whiting said that rather than the story of the shroud being long finished, important new discoveries have been made in recent times.
“Like an epiphany, it seems science has kept resurrecting evidence that the shroud indeed dates back to the time of Christ, as if repeatedly defying those who have attempted to condemn it as a medieval fake,” he wrote in the book.
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