"News and Editorial," Shroud of Turin News, January 2019

Shroud of Turin News - January 2019
© Stephen E. Jones[1]

[Previous: December 2018, part #1] [Next: February 2019, part #1]

This is the January 2019 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. I have listed below linked news articles about the Shroud in January as a service to readers, without necessarily endorsing any of them.

News:
• "New discoveries prove man on Shroud of Turin was ‘really crucified’," LifeSiteNews, 11 January 2019, Diane Montagna.
• "Seeking Christ's face: Some believe hilltop shrine holds true relic," Catholic News Service, 18 January 2019, Junno Arocho Esteves. [This is about the Holy Face of Manoppello [Right (enlarge): (extract from article photo)]. See 09Dec17 for Ian Wilson's reasons why this is merely a copy (or even a copy of a copy) of the Vatican's Veil of Veronica (now very deteriorated-see 27Jul17), which itself was merely the Vatican's early 12th century copy of the Shroud face.]

Editorial
Rex Morgan's Shroud News: In Shroud.com's January Update the final 8 issues of Rex Morgan's Shroud News, nos. 111-118 appeared in Barrie Schwortz's Shroud News, archive. On 3 January I mailed back to Ian Wilson his 118 issues of Shroud News and he emailed me on 15 January that he received them. So ended a project that began on 4 April 2015 - 3 years and ~9 months ago! But the sad news is that Rex Morgan, who is
[Left (original): Rex Henry Morgan, JP, Member of the Order of Australia (AM), Member of the British Empire (MBE), etc, etc] in his 80s, emailed me in large capital letters that his eyesight is failing and he is having difficulty reading the online versions of his "life work" as he once told me his Shroud News was (yet see what else Rex Henry Morgan is and has done!). At least Rex knows that his "life work" has been "immortalised" by being digitised and put online.

Posts: In January I blogged 6 new posts (latest uppermost): "Abgar VIII: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia" - 31st; "Chronology of the Turin Shroud: Fifteenth century (2)" - 14th; "Abgar V: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia" - 8th; "`News and Editorial,' Shroud of Turin News, December 2018" - 5th; "Date index 2019: The Shroud of Turin blog" - 4th; "Index A-Z: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia" - 3rd.

Updates Updates of past posts in the background included adding to my "Abgar V: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia" post after I had posted the final installment, what I had overlooked, the c.945 Official History's account of how the Image of Edessa/Shroud came to be in Edessa.

Turin Shroud Encyclopedia. In January I restarted my "Turin Shroud Encyclopedia." The main reason I did that is because it enables me to post Shroud topics that might never come up otherwise.

Comments: I deleted an anti-authenticist mocking comment in January. If anti-authenticists knew deep down that they had truth on their side, their comments would reflect a polite serenity. But instead their nasty `body language' tells me that deep down they fear they are wrong!

In January I received a follow-up comment under my 21 August 2018 post, "`Poker holes' #29: Other marks and images: The evidence is overwhelming that the Turin Shroud is authentic! from a Dr. Tibor Szarvas, a radiochemist in Budapest. I reply commented to Dr Szarvas that I would respond to his comment in a separate post. But since tomorrow, 16 February 2019, is the 30th anniversary of the Nature paper, "Radio-carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin" [Right], and I will need to post near to that date in my series, "On this day 30 years ago in the radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud," it will have to wait until after that. But after waiting so long, it will probably be an anticlimax for Dr Szarvas because I will probably repeat much of what I wrote in my earlier comment under that post.

Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud. I still have had no response to my "Open letter to Professor Christopher Ramsey" of 4 October 2018. I recently found where Ian Wilson wrote that Ramsey was a "professed Christian":

"Professor Edward Hall died in 2001, and his successor Dr Michael Tite has retired from what has been renamed the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, now moved to rather more salubrious premises in Oxford's South Parks Road. The unit's present director, Professor Christopher Bronk Ramsey, a professed Christian, was a young student at the time the Shroud was radiocarbon dated and has none of Hall's Old Etonian braggadocio. Characteristically soft-spoken, he has declared himself very willing to make his laboratory's facilities available for any sensible, properly scientific fresh approach to the subject"[2]

I therefore still hope and pray that Prof. Ramsey will put Jesus (or at least the truth) first and either collectively, or him individually, write to Nature, requesting it retract its 16 February 1989 article, "Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin," on the grounds that the artistic and historical evidence is overwhelming that the Shroud was in Constantinople in the mid-12th century, and therefore it arrived in Constantinople as the Image of Edessa in 944, and therefore was in Edessa from 544 [see 04Oct18].

My radiocarbon dating hacker theory As can be seen above, I blogged no new post on my hacker theory in January.

My book: After a slow start, in January I began making progress word-processing my draft book manuscript, "The Shroud of Turin: The burial sheet of Jesus!"

[Right (enlarge): The planned cover of my book.]

Pageviews: At midnight on 31 January 2019, Google Analytics [Below (enlarge)] gave this blog's "Pageviews all time history" as 1,011,448. This compares with 842,205 at the same time in January 2018. That is 169243 pageviews over the past 12 months, or an average of ~464 pageviews per day.

Google Analytics also gave the most viewed posts for the month (highest uppermost) as: "Re: Shroud blood ... types as AB ... aged blood always types as AB, so the significance of this ... is unclear," Mar 18, 2011 - 127; "`News and Editorial,' Shroud of Turin News, December 2018," Jan 5, 2019 - 94; "Abgar V: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia," Jan 8, 2019 - 74; "Chronology of the Turin Shroud: Fifteenth century (2)," Nov 9, 2018 - 69 and "Index A-Z: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia" - Jan 3, 2019 - 66.

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]
2. Wilson, I., 2010, "The Shroud: The 2000-Year-Old Mystery Solved," Bantam Press: London, pp.98. [return]

Posted 14 February 2019. Updated 7 November 2023.