Shroud of Turin News, May 2022

© Stephen E. Jones[1]

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This is the May 2022 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. It was originally "May-July 2022" but it was only about a May 2022 article. I will continue from June 2002 articles, briefly, until I catch up Emphases are mine unless otherwise indicated. The articles' words are bold to distinguish them from mine.

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"`Shroud is 2000 years old'," The Catholic Weekly, Guest Contributor, 7 May 2022.

[Right (enlarge): The face on the Shroud of Turin is seen in souvenir prints near the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, Photo: CNS/Paul Haring]

New technology enables a closer look at Turin Shroud A study based on new technology for the dating of artefacts has placed the fabric of the Shroud of Turin within the time of Christ. See 04Apr22, 22May22a The peer-reviewed study contradicts the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud which achieved global prominence when it concluded that the relic many faithful believe to be the burial linen of Christ originated about 700 years ago. So the only scientific evidence against the Shroud being Jesus' is now 34 years old! Yet while the 1988 study suggested the shroud was not authentic, it has done little to abate the faith of thousands who make pilgrimage to Turin to venerate the relic. Make that "millions":

"From April 19, 2015 through June 24, 2015, more than two million visitors came to Turin from around the world to view the Shroud while it was on public display" ("The 2015 Shroud Exposition," Shroud.com, 16 August 2015)

The study was conducted by Dr Liberato de Caro of Italy's Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council, in Bari. Dr de Caro employed a method known as `Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering', or WAXS, which measures the natural aging of flax cellulose and in order to estimate the elapsed time since manufacture. The process has several key features that make it more desirable than radiocarbon dating, not least of which is that it is non-destructive to the samples. Furthermore, the size of the sample required for WAXS is much smaller, requiring just a portion of cloth approximately 0.5mm x 1mm. In his report, published on the website of Italy's Department of Chemical Sciences and Materials Technologies, de Caro pointed out potential flaws with dating by Carbon-14 analysis. He noted that textile samples can easily become contaminated with substances that could skew results. That is true in general. But in the case of the Shroud, for carbon contamination to shift its 1st century radiocarbon age 13 centuries into the future, to 1260-1390, the mid-point of which, 1325 ±65, `just happpens' to be 30 years before the Shroud entered undisputed history in 1355, would be a miracle, as physicist Frank Tipler pointed out (Tipler claims it was a supernatural miracle by God):

"If the radiocarbon date is ignored, there are quite a few reasons for accepting the Shroud as genuine ... But ... what must be answered before the Shroud can be accepted as genuine - is why the radiocarbon date is exactly what one would expect it to be if the Turin Shroud were actually a fraud. A very plausible history of the Shroud from A.D. 30 to the present has been constructed ... However, the first time the Shroud is agreed by all scholars to have existed is 1355, when a French squire, Geoffrey de Charny of Lirey, in the bishopric of Troyes, petitioned the Pope to display it as the unique burial cloth of Jesus. ... A few decades after de Charny's death, the bishop of Troyes denounced the Shroud as a fake and said that he knew the name of the forger, who had confessed. So if the bishop and later skeptics were correct, we would expect the linen of which the Shroud is made to date from the time of the forgery. That is, the middle of the fourteenth century. When the radiocarbon date was discovered to be between 1260 and 1390 (95 percent confidence interval), most scientists (including myself until a few years ago) were convinced that the Shroud had been proven a fraud. If bacterial or other contamination had distorted the date, we would expect the measured radiocarbon date to be some random date between A.D. 30 and the present. It would be an extraordinary and very improbable coincidence if the amount of carbon added to the Shroud were exactly the amount needed to give the date that indicated a fraud. That is, unless the radiocarbon date were itself a miracle ..."[2]

Tipler didn't even consider scientific fraud to be a far more likely explanation than "bacterial or other contamination" or "the radiocarbon date were itself a miracle" (i.e. a supernatural miracle by God), for why the 1st century Shroud `just happened' to have a "between 1260 and 1390 radiocarbon date." But as the agnostic art historian Thomas de Wesselow pointed out, "if fraud was involved ... Had anyone wished to discredit the Shroud, '1325 ± 65 years' is precisely the sort of date they would have looked to achieve":

"The third possibility is that a fraud was perpetrated ... Most sindonologists regard these fraud theories as plainly incredible ... However, scientific fraud is by no means unknown, as the editors of science journals are well aware ... One important consideration weighs in favour of the possibility of deception. If the carbon-dating error was accidental, then it is a remarkable coincidence that the result tallies so well with the date always claimed by sceptics as the Shroud's historical debut. But if fraud was involved, then it wouldn't be a coincidence at all. Had anyone wished to discredit the Shroud, '1325 ± 65 years' is precisely the sort of date they would have looked to achieve"[3].

See my series, "The 1260-1390 radiocarbon date of the Turin Shroud was the result of a computer hacking" for the only viable explanation why Jesus' 1st century Shroud had a "1325 ± 65 years" radiocarbon date. De Caro explained that the WAXS method has been already used on a variety of historical textile samples that have been documented to be aged from 3000 BC to 2000 AD. He placed the Shroud of Turin against these samples and found that it best matched a piece of fabric known to have come from the siege of Masada, Israel, in 55-74 AD. If accurate, the findings would suggest that the shroud originated around the time of Christ, and this could mean it was indeed Jesus' burial cloth. However, de Caro advised caution, given that the new date contrasts the Carbon-14 dating by such a large margin. He suggested the WAXS analysis should be performed by other laboratories in order to confirm the findings. In an interview with National Catholic Register, he said: "The technique of dating linen by X-ray is non-destructive. Therefore, it can be repeated several times on the same sample… it would be more than desirable to have a collection of X-ray measurements carried out by several laboratories, on several samples, at most millimetric in size, taken from the Shroud." De Caro also noted some exciting elements that could help trace the shroud's history and migration from the Middle East to Europe. He noted that the samples of the shroud contained samples of pollen from the ancient region of Palestine, which could not have originated in Europe. This factor alone suggests that the Shroud of Turin spent extensive time in the Middle East. So that's five scientific tests for the Shroud's age (see 22May22b) which cover the date of Jesus' crucifixion in AD 30:

Test	Max/Min	Range
Vanillin	150 BC ±850	1000 BC-AD 700
FT-IR	300 BC ±400	700 BC-AD 100
Raman	200 BC ± 500	700 BC-AD 300
Mechanical	400 AD ± 400	AD 0 - AD 800
WAXS		AD 0-100

So why is that one scientific test of the Shroud's age, AMS radiocarbon dating, privileged over the five scientific tests of the Shrouds's age, which show it could have been 1st century? Especially considering that the other evidence is overwhelming that the Shroud is Jesus' burial sheet!

"The Doctor Who Crucified Medical Students For Science," IFLScience, James Felton, 31 May 2022. ... First out to bat was Dr Pierre Barbet, who took the trouble to experiment on people who were already dead. Barbet was intrigued by the "shroud of Turin", a large piece of cloth supposedly wrapped around Jesus Christ after his crucifixion or someone else who was executed in this manner ... Barbet ... believed that the blood from the person's hand wounds depicted in the shroud appeared to flow in two different directions. He believed that the bloodstains could be caused by Jesus shifting his position, lifting himself up in order to breathe. Naturally, Barbet wanted to test this by finding himself a corpse to nail to a cross he had built himself. This is false! It was only amputated arms with weights attached to simulate a body nailed to a cross that Barbet used. The experiment appeared to confirm what Barbet believed: the body slumped into a similar position to that on the shroud, suggesting that this position made it difficult to breathe, and it was from this position that the occupant of the shroud attempted to pull himself up. This was not good enough for others interested in crucifixion. So, in the 1940s, German radiologist Hermann Mödder began crucifying medical students. Thankfully opting for leather straps instead of nails, Mödder hung his students on crosses in positions designed to mimick crucifixion ... He monitored their vital signs during their crucifixion, taking them off the cross at around the six-minute mark when their blood pressure began to drop and breathing became difficult. "What will set in after the end of the sixth minute can be foreseen by the physician: unconsciousness, intense pallor, sweating," he wrote of his experiments. "In short: collapse due to insufficient blood supply to the heart and brain." ... The position during crucifixion causes difficulty breathing. If the victim doesn't die of blood loss (from the nails or whipping before execution) they will die of exposure or difficulty breathing. I have omitted Dr Frederick Zugibe's `explanation.' For why see my series, "Why I prefer Barbet's hypotheses over Zugibe's." Thanks to far too much experimentation, and our knowledge of the human body, we now know that victims of crucifixion did die through difficulty breathing. "The weight of the body pulling down on the arms makes breathing extremely difficult," Jeremy Ward, a physiologist at King's College London told the Guardian. Those who don't suffocate could die as "the resultant lack of oxygen in the blood would cause damage to tissues and blood vessels, allowing fluid to diffuse out of the blood into tissues, including the lungs and the sac around the heart." As bad as these experiments were, evidence for this hypothesis comes from a much worse source. During World War II, the Nazis conducted crucifixions as a method of torture. At Dachau, one Father G Delorey witnessed the Nazis suspending inmates by their wrists on a horizontal bar. "After their hanging for one hour," Delorey wrote, "the victims could no longer exhale the air that filled their chest." They could only breathe when they were able to pull themselves up high enough to take the weight off their chests. A useful summary of why crucifixion victims died of asphyxiation when they could no longer raise themselves up to exhale (i.e. when their legs were broken - Jn 19:32-33).

"Further Ruminations on the Shroud of Turin," Associates for Biblical Research, Rick Lanser, 5 June 2022. Back in 2014, I wrote an article to bring people up to date on the status of Shroud of Turin research at that time. Now eight years old, "Some Ruminations on the Shroud of Turin" easily escapes the notice of newer visitors to our website. It seems to be an appropriate time to revisit some of the timeless exegetical details covered there and take them a bit further. ... consider the following insights that come from reading the original Greek of the New Testament ... 4 – Othonia is another plural term (sing. ὀθόνιον). BAGD Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich & Danker Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament says it refers to a "(linen) cloth, cloth wrapping." This is an excellent article. I take issue only with Lanser's claim that the othonia in Jn 20:7, i.e. "linen wrappings," includes the sindon, i.e. "linen cloth ... in which the bodies of the dead were wrapped" ... "a ... garment worn at night over a naked body." I had previously posted [11Jul12, 06Nov14, 21Jan16 & 08Sep19] that `all my New Testament Greek lexicons state that othonion (singular) is a diminutive of othone, a large linen cloth [Acts 10:11], hence othonia (plural) are small linen cloths. Therefore othonia is correctly translated "strips of linen" as in Lk 24:12; Jn 19:40 and 20:5-7 (NIV) and Mounce Interlinear'. And therefore, the Shroud was not in the empty tomb when Peter and John entered it (Jn 20:6-7), the risen Jesus having taken it with him out of the tomb and given it to the Apostle John (the "servant of the priest") - see those references. But I can't find where I provided quotations from my New Testament Greek lexicons, so here they are (my transliteration of Greek and Hebrew, emphasis original):

Thayer (1901):

"othonion, ou, to, (dimin. of othone, q. v.), a piece of linen, small linen cloth: plur. strips of linen cloth for swathing the dead, Lk. xxiv. 12 [T om. L Tr br. WH reject the vs.] ; Jn. xix. 40; xx. 5-7. (In Grk. writ. of ships' sails made of linen, bandages for wounds, and other articles; Sept. for cadiyn, Judg. xiv. 13; for pishteh or pash, Hos. ii. 5 (7), 9 (11).)*"[4].

Note: "plur. [othonia] strips of linen cloth for swathing the dead" (Lk 24:12).

Abbott-Smith (1937):

"othon, -es, e (of Semitic origin, cf. Heb. ('etun), yarn); 1. fine linen (Hom., al.). 2. Later, a sheet or sail: Ac 10:11, 11:5.+"

"othonion, ou, to (dimin. of othon q.v.), [in LXX Jg 14:13 (sadiyn), Ho 2:5 (7), 9 (11) (pishteh) *;] a piece of fine linen, a linen cloth. [othonia] Lk 24:12 (WH, R, mg., om.), [othonia] Jo 19:40 20:5,6,7 +"[5].

Note: "othonion ... (dimin[utive]. of othon"...).

BAGD (1979):

"othone, es, e (Hom.+ ; pap.; Jos., Ant. 5, 290; 12, 117) linen cloth, sheet (Appian, Bell. Civ. 4, 47 §200) Ac 10: 11; 11: 5. Esp. of a sail (Isishymnus v. Andr. [I BC] 153 Peek; Lucian, Jupp. Trag. 46, Ver. Hist. 2, 38; Test. Zeb. 6: 2) oth. ploiou sail of a ship MPol 15: 2. M-M. *

othonion, ou, to (Aristoph., Hippocr. et al.; inscr. [e.g. the Rosetta Stone: Dit., Or. 90, 18-196 BC]; pap. [e.g. UPZ 85, 8; 42-163/60 BC]; Judg 14:13 B; Hos 2:7, 11; Ep. Arist. 320. Cf. Wilcken, Ostraka I p. 266ff. On the origin of the word s. HLewy, Die semit. Fremdworter im Griech. 1895, 124f; Thumb 111) dim. of othone; linen cloth, bandage used in preparing a corpse for burial (so UPZ 85, 8; PGiess. 68, 11) J 19: 40; 20: 5ff; Lk 24:12 t.r.-JBlinzler, OTHONIA etc.: Philol. 99, '55, 158-66. M-M.*"[6].

Note: "othonion ... dim[inutive]. of othone ... bandage used in preparing a corpse for burial" (BAGD)!

Zodhiates (1992):

"othonion; gen. othoniou, neut. noun, a diminutive of othone (3607), a linen cloth, sheet. A smaller linen cloth, bandage. In the NT, used only of material in which dead bodies were swathed for burial (Luke 24:12; John 19:40; 20:5-7; Sept.: Judg. 14:13)."[7].

Note: "othonion ... a diminutive of othone ... A smaller linen cloth, bandage."

In previous posts [11Jul12, 26Jun08], I corrected my earlier claim that the othonia found by Peter and John in the empty tomb on resurrection Sunday (Lk 24:12; Jn 20:4-8) was a "collective singular" for all Jesus' linen burial cloths. That is because all my New Testament Greek lexicons state that othonion (singular) is a diminutive of othone a linen cloth, hence othonia (plural) are small linen cloths. Therefore othonia is correctly translated "strips of linen" as in Lk 24:12; Jn 19:40 and 20:5-7 (NIV) and Mounce Interlinear. I therefore maintain that the Shroud (sindon) was no longer in the Tomb when Peter and John entered it, Jesus having taken it with Him out of the Tomb. See my 2014 "Servant of the priest" series and my post of 08May18.

See also 06Nov14:

"The Gospels don't record that Jesus' burial shroud [sindon] was in the empty tomb. Indeed, despite the desire by most Shroud pro-authenticists to place the Shroud in the empty tomb, included among the othonia, or even as the soudarion, both mentioned in Jn 20:5-7, the evidence is that sindon wasn't there. What Peter and John saw in the empty tomb, as recorded in Luke 24:12 and John 20:5-7, was the linen strips [othonia] which had bound [edesan] Jesus' hands and feet and the spices (Jn 19:40), as well as the sweat-cloth [soudarion] (the Sudarium of Oviedo) which had been on [epi] Jesus head, but no Shroud [sindon]. From seeing this arrangement of the othonia ("looped together and knotted exactly as they had bound the hands and the feet") and soudarion but no sindon, John believed that Jesus had risen from the dead (Jn 20:6-9)."

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. Tipler, F.J., 2007, "The Physics of Christianity," Doubleday: New York NY, pp.178-179. My emphasis. [return]
3. de Wesselow, T., 2012, "The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection," Viking: London, p.170. [return]
4. Thayer, J.H., 1901, "A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Being Grimm's Wilke's Clovis Novi Testamenti Translated Revised and Enlarged," T & T. Clark: Edinburgh, Fourth edition, Reprinted, 1961, p.439. [return]
5. Abbott-Smith, G., 1937, "A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament," [1921], T. & T. Clark: Edinburgh, Third edition, Reprinted, 1956, p.311. [return]
6. Bauer, W., Arndt, W.F., Gingrich, F.W. & Danker, F.W., 1979, "A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature," University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, Second edition, p.555. [return]
7. Zodhiates, S., 1992, "The Complete Word Study Dictionary: New Testament," AMG Publishers: Chattanooga TN, Third printing, 1994, p.1028. [return]

Posted 16 August 2022. Updated 22 April 2024.