Getting your dates right

Further curiosities about The Shroud of Turin

I subjected you to a load of hogwash about conspiracy theories (you got that one right - Ed) in my last post.

So I thought I’d bang on about them again in this post, focusing specifically on a possible conspiracy tied in with The Shroud of Turin, which is intrinsically linked to my new upcoming novel The Fragment from The Shroud.

*** For more information on the novel and The Shroud itself, see here ***

OK. The conspiracy (in my head at least) is as follows:

1. The carbon dating carried out in 1988 on the Shroud of Turin under the watchful eyes of the British Museum and Oxford University, which apparently showed the Shroud to be a medieval forgery, is clearly flawed.

2. Evidence that it was flawed was deliberately hidden by the British Museum.

Barrie Schwortz, an Orthodox Jew from the United States, who has studied the Shroud for decades and believes that it is the very cloth that Jesus of Nazareth was wrapped in, explains this in the video embedded in the post (see above from about the 6:00 min mark).

Now, why does Barrie Schwortz say that the dating was flawed? Well, his main reasons to believe this is the case are as follows:

a) Two American researchers, Joe Marino and Sue Benford, who were investigating the Shroud, came into possession of some photographs of the samples that were tested in 1988. They took the images to three separate textile experts at the turn of this century. Two in Ohio in the United States, and one in Ireland, who happened to be the world’s foremost expert on linen. Marino and Benford did not tell them that it was from a section of the Shroud tested in 1988. The experts all concluded that the cloth was an old piece of herringbone weave that had been manipulated. The Irish expert identified the reweaving to have been done by weavers who were skilled in French invisible reweaving. Further intrigue emerges when they found out that French invisible reweaving was pioneered in France in the 1300s — at the time the Shroud was held in the country.

b) Barrie Schwortz mentions (in passing, in the the video excerpt I have embedded into this post) that the parts of the Shroud that were used for carbon dating were also found to have been coated in a substance called gum arabic. This stuff was used all the time in re-weaving repair work apparently. In addition, the sample used for the 1988 testing contained alizarin dye. The re-weavers would have used alizarin dye to make the repaired areas match the colour of the original main cloth. No dye has been found on any part of the original Shroud since then.

c) According to another Shroud researcher (Brendan Whiting) the people managing the test (representatives from the British Museum and Oxford University) did not follow the correct agreed procedures to carry out chemical analysis of the cloth samples before they were destroyed during the carbon dating process. That, or they chose not to reveal (or dismissed) the results of any chemical analysis.

d) As the section the cloth that was tested had been manipulated, it was not the “original” material.

e) A French researcher and law student (Barrie Schwortz does not name him) used the UK Freedom of Information Act a few years ago to obtain as much information as possible about the samples that were tested in 1988 from the British Museum.

f) This raw data reveals that nowhere along the tested strip of cloth could a consistent result be found. This means that the carbon dating was coming up with all sorts of different dates at the time. So those carrying out the carbon dating in 1988 must have manipulated the data, as at the time they said they were 95% sure that the Shroud was a medieval forgery from about 700 years ago.

Since then, five or six peer-reviewed journal articles have proved point f) to be true.

OK, so that is why there are serious questions to be answered about the famous test in 1988.

Now consider this. Prior to the successful Freedom of Information Act request, researchers had been trying to get hold of the raw data held by the British Museum for 27 YEARS. Each time they asked, the request WAS DENIED.

Therefore, there would appear to be a DOUBLE DECEPTION going on here.

i) The wool was pulled over people’s eyes (pun intended eh? — Ed) in 1988 with the original carbon dating tests, which were seriously flawed.

ii) There was a clear refusal to be open and transparent about the processes and tests conducted in 1988 for 27 YEARS. It took the use of a law introduced by the UK government in 2005 to allow this deception to be uncovered.

Why the apparent deception in 1988? And if there was no attempt to deceive in 1988, then what was the British Museum trying to hide by not sharing the raw data for so long? Incompetence? Or something far worse?

---

Progress report:

1. I am halfway through editing The Fragment from The Shroud. My other novels (The Dojang and Redemptio) needed extensive rewriting and restructuring in places. This does not appear to be the case with The Fragment from The Shroud at present, which pleases me no end.

2. I have started work on my new novella, The Anchorite. I have written 1,246 words so far. If it stretches to the same length as my other novellas then I am about 1/20th of the way through already. I mentioned my synopsis for this novella in my last post. Here is a reminder:

“A story about a monk who is given permission to be a hermit by his Abbot back in the 1950s. Then a new abbot drags him out of there in the 2000s maybe. Or 2010s. The story would cover his time in his little hermit house out in the countryside somewhere and then his shock at discovering all the changes that have take place in the world and his own monastery. This might be straight down-the-line. No quips. Dark. A bit like where it will be set. In the North York Moors. Bleak, as I tell the wife and mother-in-law. They agree with me, secretly.”

Take it easy, and thanks for reading.