New:(August 21, 2008) The Ohio Shroud conference ended on August 17, 2008. Unfortunately, I could not attend the conference. On the other hand, soon, I hope to report and comment some of the papers that were presented. In particular, the paper by Sue Benford and Joe Marino regarding a possible reweaving of the Shroud where the C-14 radio carbon dating sample was taken in 1987. Meanwhile, the reader can access audio presentations of the papers at Shrouduniversity.com.
(Feb 29, 2008) A very high definition photograph of the Shroud has recently been done. It is reported to be over 12 billion pixels, which is probably over 50GB in size. It was done by taking almost 1,300 individual photographs over the entire Shroud. I think this is very good news! The company HAL9000 has done the technical work. I have always been a promoter of such a photograph and I am happy to see that it was finally done. Let see how this photograph, or photographs, will be made available to Shroud researchers. A lot of new and interesting results will come out by analyzing these photographs. More details can be seen at Shroud of Turin Gets High-Def Scrutiny.
(Feb 25, 2008) It is being reported in the press that Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, one of the three laboratories that radiocarbon dated the Shroud in 1988, is reconsidering the results of the 1988 dating based on new hypothesis. A documentary by David Rolfe to be shown during Easter will cover this story. Christopher Ramsey, though, does not think the new hypothesis will substantially change the 1988 radiocarbon dating.
I came across the following 58 minutes Shroud video (in French) available on the web. It was produced in 1978 by Raymond Beaugrand-Champagne. Even if you do not understand French, it contains many interesting interviews, among them Ian Wilson, Baïma-Bollone, Hary Gove in his lab discussing carbon-14 dating, Walter McCrone, Max Frei, John Jackson, etc. There is in particular two segments of an interview with the late cardinal Ballestrero. He mentions, in Italian, that many experts have pointed out to him that the Carbon-14 dating would be unreliable for the Shroud. This is stated well before the Shroud carbon dating of 1988. I invite you to listen to it. It is very instructive. (I believe you can order a DVD version from Raymond Beaugrand-Champagne for 15$CND.)
Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, the textile expert and supervisor of the 2002 major restoration of the Shroud, recently wrote an informative article related to the C14 radio-carbon dating. The article argues against the reweaving hypothesis proposed by Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, but I think that its most important aspect is her definitive statement that the radio-carbon dating of 1988 is very doubtful given the amount of greasy material readily visible at the sample area . The article can be found on Barrie Schwortz's website: The Invisible Mending of the Shroud, the Theory and the Reality, by Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, 2007. I think the major positive point of this article is very informative and very often forgotten or never mentioned: the location of the linen sample for the 1988 C14 radio-carbon dating is heavily contaminated, and this can be readily seen with the naked eye. Flury-Lemberg reports that the location shows thread stuck together. I quote from her article:
"The presence of the greasy dirt deposit at the removal site alone would be sufficient to demonstrate the uselessness of the carbon-14 method, ..." (The emphases are from the article.)
I am sure that Flury-Lemberg did not mean that the C14 radio-carbon method is useless, but rather that for the sample location chosen in 1988 on the Shroud, the method becomes useless. This has been debated for many years, and it comes back again and again: a much better sampling should have been done. I always thought that this was the primary reason to doubt the 1988 radio-carbon dating. When I saw the Shroud in 1998 in the Turin cathedral, from a distance of around two meters, the coloration of the corners were brownish, indeed looking greasy and dirty. If only the Turin authorities in charge of the Shroud would release high resolution digital pictures of the area where the sample was taken, this would dissipate many misunderstandings. And definitely, a second radio-carbon dating is needed to correct the lack of proper sampling in the first dating.
(May 2007) A Souvenir from the Cluny Museum in Paris.
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