Colorado Springs Professor Revives Shroud Riddle

Electa Draper in The Denver Post writes:

John Jackson, says radiocarbon dating of the shroud may be inaccurate and that findings suggest the shroud is Christ s burial cloth. (Lyn Alweis, The Denver Post)

COLORADO SPRINGS — A physics professor here has resurrected the mystery of the Shroud of Turin, the fabled burial cloth of Christ that 20 years ago scientists declared a fake.

Millions of faithful believe the shroud's bloodstained image of a battered, crucified man is the miraculous image of Jesus, formed as he rose from the dead.

Scientists at three laboratories using radiocarbon dating in 1988 and 1989 determined the shroud was a medieval forgery, though they could not explain how the image was created.

[Note: it was dated in 1988 and the results were published in 1989]

Now, John Jackson, a physics lecturer at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has done something his colleagues consider nearly miraculous. Jackson, a leading researcher on the 14-foot-long linen sheet, has persuaded the Oxford laboratory that dated the shroud to the 13th or 14th century to revisit the question of its age.

Professor Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, has agreed to test Jackson's hypothesis that contamination by carbon monoxide could throw off radiocarbon dating by more than a millennium.

It is possible, Jackson said, that even minimal contamination of the shroud by environmental carbon monoxide could have skewed the dating by 1,300 years — making it not medieval but contemporaneous with Jesus's life.

Jackson, who must prove a viable pathway for that contamination, is working with Oxford to test samples of linen under the various conditions the shroud has endured, such as outdoor exhibitions and exposure to extreme heat during a 1532 fire.

[Note: Keep in mind that the vast majority of scientists studying the shroud have determined that the likely cause for an incorrect date is that what was dated was a mixture of original cloth and threads from repairs, and that this could make the cloth 2000 years old.]

"Science still has much to tell us about the shroud," said Jackson, a devout Catholic. "If we are dealing with the burial cloth of Christ, it is the witness to the birth of Christianity. But my faith doesn't depend on that outcome."

Ramsey also acknowledged the need to reconcile radiocarbon-dating results with other forensic and historical evidence that indicate the shroud is much older than 600 to 700 years old.

Scientists must arrive at a coherent story about the enigmatic shroud, Ramsey said.

The shroud is either authentic or a hoax so ingenious that state-of-the-art scientific analysis has yet to explain how it was done, said David Rolfe, director of a new documentary, "Shroud of Turin."

"The shroud is brilliant and unfathomable," Rolfe said.

First documentation

The Vatican keeps the shroud locked away in a special protective chamber of inert gases in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.Yet the Catholic Church makes no claims about the relic's authenticity.

The first documented exhibition of the Shroud of Turin was in Lirey, France, about 1360, by its owner at the time, French knight Geoffrey de Charney. The shroud's last public display was in 2000 in Turin. The next is set for 2010.

[Note: to be accurate it should state the first documented exhibition in Europe]

Jackson led a research team in 1978 given unprecedented access to the shroud by the church.

The Shroud of Turin Research Project determined that the shroud was not painted, dyed or stained.

It is not known how the shroud's faint brown discolorations, which form a negative image of a man, came to mark the linen, Jackson said.

It was only with the advent of photography, centuries after the shroud's first public appearances, that its clearer positive image could be seen.

Jackson is working on a radiation hypothesis to explain the markings.

His 1978 findings were enough to heighten curiosity about a relic that no modern artist or scientist can reproduce.

Jackson's work is so critical, Rolfe said, "that I sometimes think it should be called the Shroud of Colorado Springs."

In 1988, the church allowed tiny samples of shroud to be removed for radiocarbon dating by laboratories at Oxford, in Zurich and at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Researchers concluded that the cloth was made between A.D. 1260 and 1390 and could not have been the burial cloth of Christ.

Conflicting evidence

Yet Jackson; his wife, Rebecca; and fellow researchers at his Turin Shroud Center of Colorado have assembled, with other scientists around the world, reams of documentary, genealogical and forensic evidence challenging the radiocarbon dates.

Their evidence suggests the shroud is as old as Christianity.

Forensic data shows the bloodstains on the shroud are real. Jackson said blood stained the cloth before the body image appeared. This rules out scorching the cloth to produce the image because the blood was not degraded by heat.

Forensic experts have documented that stains around the head are consistent with punctures by thorns. The scourge marks on the back are consistent with those made by a Roman whip called a flagrum.

A large puncture wound to the man's side is consistent in shape and size with a Roman spear of the era.

Although medieval paintings and Christian iconography portray Jesus nailed to the cross through his palms and the front of the feet, archaeologists have found the bones of a Roman crucifixion victim nailed through the wrists and heels.

The shroud is consistent with the archaeological find and not centuries of artwork.

In 2002, renowned textile restorer Mechthild Flury-Lemberg went to Turin to help preserve the shroud. She found a style of stitching she had seen only once before — in the ruins of Masada, a Jewish settlement destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 74.

The cloth's herringbone weave, while common in the first century, was rare in the Middle Ages, she said.

Historical links

Historical evidence also suggests that the shroud might be the Shroud of Constantinople, which was displayed in the 1100s but disappeared from that city, now called Istanbul, during the Fourth Crusade in 1204.

Genealogical and literary researcher Alexei Lidov found that the Shroud of Turin's former owner, de Charney, was married to a direct descendant of a French crusader who sacked Constantinople.

The Shroud of Turin also has been linked to the Sudarium of Oviedo, a face covering touted as another burial cloth of Jesus. The sudarium has been on display in Oviedo, Spain, since the mid-600s.

[Note: in Spain since the the mid-600s but in Oviedo only at a later date. It is seldom on display.]

When researcher Mark Guscin compared the bloodstains on the sudarium and the Shroud of Turin, by laying one over the other, he found a match.

Science has shown the shroud is remarkable, whatever its genesis, Jackson said.

As for his hypothesis on shroud dating, he said it will take months or years to test because of the project's complexity and limits on time and money.

"The shroud doesn't rise or fall on this one hypothesis of mine," Jackson said. "But it's part of a first-class adventure story in science and religion."

This is overall a positive article but it ignores (as Jackson often does) significant research by others. Only recently, Jackson has joined with the Shroud Science Group, a group of more than a hundred researchers. Bracket text [] are my additional comments.