TWENTIETH CENTURY (6)
© Stephen E. Jones[1]
This is the fourth installment of part #30, "Twentieth century" (6) of my "Chronology of the Turin Shroud: AD 30 - present" series. For more information about this series see the Index #1. I will use in-line referencing to save time in renumbering out-of-order footnotes. Emphases are mine unless otherwise indicated. This page was initially based on Ian Wilson's 1996, "Highlights of the Undisputed History: 1900."
[Index #1] [Previous: 20th century (5) #29] [Next: 20th century (7) #31]
20th century (6) (1989-2000).
1989a 15 February. In a talk at the Logan Hall, Institute of Education, London, the Director of Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory, Prof. Edward Hall (1924-2001), lectures to the British Museum Society on 'The Turin Shroud: A Lesson in Self-Persuasion'. He very forcefully declares anyone continuing to regard the Shroud as genuine a 'Flat Earther' and 'onto a loser'[WI89, 10; WI98, 311]. But since the evidence is that the Shroud (as the Image of Edessa) was in Edessa in 544 (see "544"), which is "more than seven centuries (716 years) before the earliest 1260 radiocarbon date of the Shroud"[04Oct18], it is Prof. Hall and his anti-Shroud ilk who were and are the victims of "Self-Persuasion," are "onto a loser" and are the "Flat Earthers," refusing to consider all the other non-radiocarbon evidence! However Hall made the significant point that Oxford's dating was "blind," so the other two laboratories could have been, but weren't:
"He [Hall] said that at Oxford at least the carbon dating was done `blind'. After the combustion of the samples to gas, they were recoded so that while he, Professor Hall continued to know the identity of the samples, Dr. Hedges, who was actually carrying out the work, did not"[WI89, 10]1989b 16 February. Publication, in the scientific journal Nature, of the official results of the Shroud radiocarbon dating. This has twenty-one signatories. It declares that the results 'provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval'[DP89; WI98, 311].
1989c 20 March. Retirement of Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero (r. 1977-89) as Archbishop of Turin, to be succeeded by Giovanni Saldarini (r. 1989-99). Ballestrero temporarily remains official custodian of the Shroud[WI98, 311].
1989d 24 March. A press release to the UK press announces that forty-five businessmen and 'rich friends' have donated 1 million pounds to create a chair of archaeological sciences at Oxford to perpetuate the radiocarbon-dating laboratory created by Edward Hall. The first incumbent is to be the British Museum's Michael Tite[WI98, 311]. Rochester's Prof Harry Gove (1922-2009) noted that there were "unworthy foreign whispers" against the appointment of Michael Tite, of the British Museum's Research Laboratory, as an independent coordinator of the Shroud's radiocarbon dating because, "the head of the Oxford Research Laboratory, Professor Edward Hall, is a trustee of the British Museum"[GH96, 273]. One would have to be naive not to think that Hall, with £1M funding of his Oxford laboratory depending on a medieval radiocarbon date of the Shroud, did not say to Tite, words to the effect,`get it right Mike and the Director of Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory job is yours'!
1989e 28 April, Interviewed by journalists during a plane journey forming part of the papal visit to Africa, Pope John Paul II (r. 1978-2005) guardedly speaks of the Shroud as an authentic relic, while insisting that 'the Church has never pronounced on the matter'[WI98, 311].
1989f 6-7 May. International Shroud Symposium 'La Sindone e Le Icone' held in Bologna'[WI98, 311].
1989g 4 June. Death of University of Arizona physicist Timothy Weiler Linick (1946-89)[JS89], one of the authors of the Nature report on the
[Right: Photograph of Linick and report that "He died at the age of forty-two on 4 June 1989, in very unclear circumstances ..." (my emphasis)[BB00].This is consistent with my theory (see "My theory that the radiocarbon dating laboratories were duped by a computer hacker") that the KGB executed confessed KGB hacker Karl Koch (1965–89) between 23 and 30 May 1989[21Jul14; 02Jun16; 17May15; 27May19; 03Feb21], and police publicly identified the body as Koch on 3 June 1989, and the KGB executed Linick a day later on 4 June 1989[05Jul14; 17May15; 31Mar15; 30Jun15; 03Aug19; 30Dec15; 22Feb16; 02Jun16; 30Jul16]; where their murders by the KGB were made to look like suicides to stop them revealing that the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud as 1260-1390 (1325 ±65) was the result of a KGB-sponsored computer hacking by Linick, aided by Koch[05Jul14; 13Dec14; 31Mar15; 22Feb16; 02Jun16]; 30Jul16; 03Feb21].]
Shroud's radiocarbon dating[WI98, 311]. Chapter 16 of my book, "Shroud of Turin: Burial Sheet of Jesus!" (see 06Jul17, 03Jun18, 04Apr22, 13Jul22 & 8 Nov 22) will be, "Were the laboratories duped by a hacker?"
1989h 7-8 September. Shroud Symposium organized by the French Shroud group CIELT (Centre international d'études sur le linceul de Turin) is held in Paris. The speakers include Michael Tite[WI98, 311]. When asked in an interview at the symposium why blind testing of the Shroud did not occur, Tite answered, "We had decided it could not be a blind test because they'd [the laboratories] been given whole pieces of the Shroud which they could immediately identify and therefore it could not be a blind test:"'[AM00, 182]. This wasn't true. See above that Oxford's dating was blind.
1989i 30 September. New Scientist reports findings of the scientific workshop at East Kilbride that 'the margin of error with radiocarbon-dating ... may be two or three times as great as practitioners of the technique have claimed' "In 1989 Britain's Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) decided to conduct a trial in which the carbon-dating technique itself would be tested. Thirty-eight laboratories were involved in the trial, each being asked to date artefacts whose age was already known:
"Murdoch Baxter, the director of the Scottish Universities Research andReactor Centre at East Kilbride near Glasgow, and one of the organisers of the trial ... says that accelerator mass spectrometry, used last year by a laboratory at the University of Oxford to date the Turin shroud, allegedly the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, came out of the survey badly. Five of the 38 participating laboratories used this technique, for which samples weighing a few milligrams are acceptable. The other techniques require grams of the sample. Baxter says that some of the accelerator laboratories were way out when dating samples as little as 200 years old. Because so little material is used in accelerator mass spectrometry, the effects of chemical pre-treatment are likely to be more serious, says Baxter"[CA89, 26]The Oxford laboratory, one of those that had dated the Shroud the previous year, declined to participate[WI98, 311]. It was found that 'The margin of error with radiocarbon dating ... may be two to three times as great as practitioners of the technique have claimed ... Of the thirty-eight [laboratories], only seven produced results that the organizers of the trial considered to be satisfactory.' In other words, about 80 per cent of the laboratories failed the test. The three laboratories that dated the Shroud the previous year employed a technique known as Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), which 'came out of the survey badly'. According to one of the organizers of the trial, `some of the accelerator laboratories were way out when dating samples as little as 200 years old'[CA89, 26]. So, just a year after the Shroud was damned by AMS, the authority of this carbon-dating technique itself took a severe blow"[DT12, 163]. Further evidence that the 1325 ±65 carbon date of the Shroud was the result of a computer hacking!
1989j 9 March-2 September. London's British Museum holds exhibition entitled 'Fake. The Art of Deception'. This includes a life-size transparency of the Turin Shroud[WI98, 311-312].
1989k 8 November. The Spanish Center of Sindonology (CES) began their complete, multidisciplinary study on the Sudarium of Oviedo[BJ01, 273]
1989l c. December. Alan and Mary Whanger submit for publication their article, "Floral, Coin, and Other Non-Body Images on the Shroud of Turin"[WA90] but it is rejected[DB98, 202-203, 214; DA10, 8]. In the article they reported:
"While there are vague or partial images of hundreds of flowers on the Shroud, we feel that we have tentatively identified 28 plants whose images are sufficiently clear on the Shroud to make a good comparison and to be compatible with the drawings in Flora Palaestina ... Of the 28 plants we identified on the Shroud, 23 are flowers, three are small bushes, and two are thorns. All 28 grow in Israel, and 20 grow in Jerusalem itself (i.e., in the Judean mountains) ... Of the eight plants not growing in the climate of Jerusalem itself, all eight grow either in the Judean Desert or the Dead Sea area or in both. Hence these plants or flowers would be available in Jerusalem markets in a fresh state"[WA90, 13; IJ98, 28-29; WA98, 78-79; AM00, 112; WA08, 142; DA10, 12].
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
AM00. Antonacci, M., 2000, "Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY.
BJ01. Bennett, J., 2001, "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA.
BB00. Bonnet-Eymard, B., 2000, "The Holy Shroud is as Old as the Risen Jesus, IV. Caution! Danger!, The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, No 330, Online edition, May.
CA89. Coghlan, A., 1989, "Unexpected errors affect dating techniques," New Scientist, 30 September.
DA10. Danin, A., 2010, "Botany of the Shroud: The Story of Floral Images on the Shroud of Turin," Danin Publishing: Jerusalem, Israel.
DB98. Danin, A. & Baruch, U., 1998, "Floristic Indicators for the Origin of the Shroud of Turin," Paper presented at the Third International Congress on the Shroud of Turin, 6 June 1998, Turin, Italy, in Minor, M., Adler, A.D. & Piczek, I., eds., "The Shroud of Turin: Unraveling the Mystery: Proceedings of the 1998 Dallas Symposium," Alexander Books: Alexander NC, 2002.
DP89. Damon, P.E., et al., 1989, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16 February, 611-615.
DT12. de Wesselow, T., 2012, "The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection," Viking: London.
GH96. Gove, H.E., 1996, "Relic, Icon or Hoax?: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Institute of Physics Publishing: Bristol UK.
IJ98. Iannone, J.C., 1998, "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY.
JS89. Jull, A.J.T. & Suess, H.E. , 1989, "Timothy W. Linick," Radiocarbon, Vol 31, No 2.
WA98. Whanger, M. & Whanger, A.D., 1998, "The Shroud of Turin: An Adventure of Discovery," Providence House Publishers: Franklin TN.
WA08. Whanger, A. & M., 2008, "Aspects of the Shroud in Botany and Related Art," in Fanti, G., ed., 2009, "The Shroud of Turin: Perspectives on a Multifaceted Enigma," Proceedings of the 2008 Columbus Ohio International Conference, August 14-17, 2008, Progetto Libreria: Padua, Italy, 140-144, 142. .
WA90. Whanger, A. & M., 1990, "Floral, Coin, and Other Non-Body Images on the Shroud of Turin," Shroud News, No 59, June, 10-20.
WI90. Wilson, I., 1990, "Flower images on the Shroud?," BSTS Newsletter, No. 24, January, pp.11-13, 11. .
WI89. Wilson, I, 1989, "Lecture by Professor Hall of Oxford," BSTS Newsletter, No. 21, January/February, 7-10.
WI98. Wilson, I., 1998, "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY.
Posted 21 March 2023. Updated 28 March 2023.