[Previous: January-June 2024] [Next: January - June 2025].
This is the fourth installment of my Shroud of Turin News for July - September 2024. The articles are in date order (earliest first). My words will be in [bold square brackets] to distinguish them from the articles' words.
"5 things you shouldn't miss at the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress," Catholic News Agency, Francesca Pollio Fenton, 17 July 2024 ...There will also be five key exhibits that attendees can visit daily. These are the National Shroud of Turin Exhibit ... Here's a closer look
[Right (enlarge): The National Shroud of Turin Exhibit at the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. Credit: Ursula Murua/EWTN News]
at these five activities open to all participants at the congress: National Shroud of Turin Exhibit A replica of the incredible 14-foot linen burial shroud will be on display in an interactive and immersive high-tech educational exhibit daily from noon to 6:30 p.m. at the Indiana Convention Center. ... There will also be three 45-minute presentations taking place each day at the exhibit. Dr. Cheryl White will give a talk titled "Jerusalem to Turin: The Shroud's Elusive History," Father Andrew Dalton will discuss how the shroud is a mirror of the Gospel, and Pam McCue will give a talk titled "Power of a Traveling Shroud Exhibit." [I have emailed Prof. White, asking her if there is a transcript of her talk, "Jerusalem to Turin: The Shroud's Elusive History," at the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis? And if so, could she send it to me as a PDF or Word document, that I could post it, or excerpts from it, to my blog?].
"Scientist Converts to Catholicism After Studying the Shroud of Turin: It's a "Photograph of Jesus Himself," ChurchPOP, 19 July 2024 ...
[Leftt (enlarge). Negative of the Shroud face, digitally processed[XFW]
Bill Lauto is an environ-mental scientist and energy consultant who has been following and studying the Shroud of Turin since he was 14 ... "So I was a 14-year-old going into the field of science and questioning the possibility that there was no such thing as a God. I looked up Jesus Christ in the Encyclopedia Britannica, saw that photograph, and from there, it all started for me". He attests that studying the Shroud gave him faith like never before, as it is also based on reason. "Now when people come up to me and say ‘Bill you're a scientist, you don't believe in all that God stuff ...` I say, 'You're right, I don't believe, I know.'" ... [This is similar to my experience. I came from a non-Christian home and was converted to Christianity from Atheism/Deism at age 20. So as an adult convert to Christianity, with no childhood faith, I always have `tested everything and held fast to what is good' (1Th 5:21). My Christian faith was, and is, based on reason, but the Shroud has added a new dimension to it. I wrote somewhere, it may have been in a comment, that, "I am now like the Apostle John in the empty tomb in Jn 20:6-9, who found "the binding strips looped together and knotted exactly as they had bound the hands and the feet" but Jesus' body was no longer inside them:
"From his account of the finding of the cloths on Easter morning it is fairly obvious that something in the arrangement of both the sweat cloth and the binding strips assures him [John] that the body could not possibly have been stolen, but that Christ had risen from the dead. The simplest clue to this startling information would have been to find these cloths each in its proper place: the binding strips looped together and knotted exactly as they had bound the hands and the feet; the sweat cloth "not together with the binding strips" but "in a place by itself" ... still "folded together" lengthwise, and perhaps knotted at the top. In the state of glory, the risen body has no need of first untying knots"[BW57, 99].So, from what I now know about the Shroud, I know that Jesus has risen from the dead!]
"Shroud of Turin dates from time of Christ, scientists reveal," Catholic Herald, Simon Caldwell, 22 August 2024 ... Italian researchers have used a new X-ray technique to demonstrate that the Shroud of Turin dates from the time of Jesus Christ. Scientists at the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) studied eight tiny samples of fabric from the shroud, a burial garment which bears the imprint of a man killed by crucifixion, using a method called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS).
[Above (enlarge)[22May22]: Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) curves. The green "2000 years" curve is from a linen sample recovered from the Jewish fortress Masada which was conquered by the Romans in AD 74 and and thereafter occupied only between the 5th and 7th centuries by the Byzantine monastery of Marda[25Aug24]. The orange curve is from a Shroud sample. As can be seen, the Shroud sample's WAXS curve very closely matches that of the 1st century Masada sample! See 22May22; 09Sep23; 16Aug22; 11May24 & 25Aug24]
They were able to age flax cellulose – long chains of sugar molecules which slowly deteriorate over time – to show that the shroud is 2,000 years old, based on the conditions it was kept in. They deduced that the shroud was kept in conditions maintaining a temperature around 22.5 degrees Celsius and a relative humidity of about 55 per cent for 13 centuries before it was brought to Chambery, France, in the 1350s; thereby taking the shroud's chronology all the way back to the time of Christ. [The Shroud's temperature and humidity assumptions are corroborated by the Masada result. The Shroud's "2,000 years old" age is corroborated by that Masada sample's age, and four other scientific tests of the Shroud's age: Vanillin content: "between 1300- and 3000-years old" - a range of ~146BC ± 850 years; Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR): "300 BC ±400 years", i.e. 700 BC - AD 100; Raman spectroscopy: "200 BC ± 500 years"[i.e. 700 BC - AD 300; Mechanical: "AD 400 ± 400 years", i.e. AD 1 - 800[25Aug24]. So now five scientific tests of the Shroud are consistent with the death of Jesus in AD 30[FJ64, 296, 300; DK15]. But since STURP found that the Shroudman's image was not painted, which even Joe Nickell (1944-) has admitted, and therefore Bishop d'Arcis' "cunningly painted" claim must be wrong[11Jul16], the 1988 radiocarbon dating claim that "the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval ... AD 1260-1390"[DP89, 611], is not corroborated by anything!] ... "The data profiles were fully compatible with analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, found at Masada, Israel," said the study in the journal Heritage. The samples were also compared with similar linens from the 13th and 14th centuries but none was a match. Dr Liberato De Caro, one of the scientists involved in the study, dismissed a 1988 test which concluded that the shroud was probably a Medieval forgery and only seven centuries old as inaccurate ... "To make the present result compatible with that of the 1988 radiocarbon test, the Shroud of Turn should have been conserved during its hypothetical seven centuries of life at a secular room temperature very close to the maximum values registered on the earth" ...! [This is a refutation of the 1260=1390 radiocarbon date of the Shroud, by a recognised scientific test, Wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), in a peer-reviewed scientific journal! The surviving authors of the 1989 Nature article must either: 1) show where De Caro, et al.'s experiment is wrong; or 2) retract the Nature article! For some reason this 2022 WAXS experiment belatedly caught the attention of the media in August 2024, including Newsweek and Al Jazeera! Read "Shroud of Turin discovery catches attention of world’s media," Aleteia, 27 August 2024. Are we entering a second "Golden Age of the Shroud" after the first from the 1960s to 1988?]To be continued in the fifth installment of this post.
Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]
Bibliography
BW57. Bulst, W., 1957, "The Shroud of Turin," McKenna, S. & Galvin, J.J., transl., Bruce Publishing Co: Milwaukee WI.
DK15. Doig, K.F., 2015, "New Testament Chronology: "The 30 CE Crucifixion."
DL22. De Caro, L.,et al., 2022, "X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample," Heritage, Vol. 5, No. 2, 11 April.
FJ64. Finegan, J., 1964, "Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible," Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ.
XFW. "Extract from File:Turin shroud positive and negative displaying original color information 708 x 465 pixels 94 KB.jpg," Wikimedia Commons, 7 July 2021.
Posted 25 October 2024. Updated 28 October 2024.
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