Freethought & Rationalism Archive

semiopen · 02-18-2010, 11:44 AM

The acceptability of the radio carbon dating isn't clear. Shroud sluts mention that nine guys from Los Alamos believe it is false; this sounds impressive but I'm not sure what it means. The first Los Alamos guy got his C14 stuff into a peer reviewed journal, but the nine other guys didn't. I'm not clear if his objections are valid.

Presence of blood on the shroud isn't clear. There was a difference of opinion by STURP scientists where one guy thought it was primate blood and the other guy thought it was AB human. AB human blood is a problem because it probably didn't exist before about 700 CE, and is not very common in the middle east. Shroud sluts will say that Jews have a high percentage of AB, this seems to be a lie.

The shroud is said to be similar to material found at Masada, but without seeing the Masada stuff, I have to guess it is in bad shape. This is problematic anyway because current thinking is that the Masada material is probably Roman.

One has to figure the shroud is not legitmate, but the pro arguments are not easy to defeat.

rob117 · 02-18-2010, 12:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semiopen

AB human blood is a problem because it probably didn't exist before about 700 CE.

This doesn't sound right as the full ABO system of blood types exists in the Great apes. Type AB blood is a heterozygous condition of individuals who have inherited both A and B genes, which are co-dominant. Both are dominant over O. I.e. someone with the genotype AA or Ao has type A blood; someone with BB or Bo type B blood; AB type AB blood, and oo type O blood.

semiopen · 02-18-2010, 01:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rob117

Quote:

Originally Posted by semiopen

AB human blood is a problem because it probably didn't exist before about 700 CE.

This doesn't sound right as the full ABO system of blood types exists in the Great apes. Type AB blood is a heterozygous condition of individuals who have inherited both A and B genes, which are co-dominant. Both are dominant over O. I.e. someone with the genotype AA or Ao has type A blood; someone with BB or Bo type B blood; AB type AB blood, and oo type O blood.

My comment is mentioned in

Shroud_of_Turin and appears to be correct.

Quote:

A problem with a blood type AB for an authentic shroud is that it is today known that this type of blood is of relative recent origin. There is no evidence of the existence of this blood type before the year AD 700. It is today assumed that the blood type AB came into the existence by immigration and following intermingling of mongoloid people from central Asia with a high frequency of the blood type B to Europe and other areas where people with a relatively high frequency of the blood type A live.[71][72]

This references http://www.dadamo.com/knowbase/theory/anthro.htm

Quote:

Little evidence for the occurrence of group AB extends beyond 900 to 1,000 years ago, when a large western migration of Eastern peoples took place. Blood group AB is rarely found in European graves prior to 900 A.D. Studies of prehistoric grave exhumations in Hungary indicate a distinct lack of this blood group into the Langobard age (fifth to seventh century A.D.). This would seem to indicate that, up until that point in time, European populations of blood groups A and B did not come into common contact. If they did, they neither mingled nor intermarried.

I've got to admit your discourse is impressive, but I'd be more inclined to believe you know what you're talking about if you showed an awareness of the difference between peer reviewed journal and peer reviewed journals.

rob117 · 02-18-2010, 01:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semiopen

Quote:

Originally Posted by rob117

This doesn't sound right as the full ABO system of blood types exists in the Great apes. Type AB blood is a heterozygous condition of individuals who have inherited both A and B genes, which are co-dominant. Both are dominant over O. I.e. someone with the genotype AA or Ao has type A blood; someone with BB or Bo type B blood; AB type AB blood, and oo type O blood.

My comment is mentioned in

Shroud_of_Turin and appears to be correct.

This references http://www.dadamo.com/knowbase/theory/anthro.htm

Quote:

Little evidence for the occurrence of group AB extends beyond 900 to 1,000 years ago, when a large western migration of Eastern peoples took place. Blood group AB is rarely found in European graves prior to 900 A.D. Studies of prehistoric grave exhumations in Hungary indicate a distinct lack of this blood group into the Langobard age (fifth to seventh century A.D.). This would seem to indicate that, up until that point in time, European populations of blood groups A and B did not come into common contact. If they did, they neither mingled nor intermarried.

I've got to admit your discourse is impressive, but I'd be more inclined to believe you know what you're talking about if you showed an awareness of the difference between peer reviewed journal and peer reviewed journals.

Ha, actually I mentioned before that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that I'm trying to get my facts straight.

Although the citation you linked to is from a guy pushing a diet plan and his tracing of the history of the AB blood type is unsourced (although some of his other claims are).

EDIT: According to here, his account of the origins of the ABO blood groups seems to be wrong, and the ancestry of these blood groups go back 6 million years or so.

semiopen · 02-18-2010, 01:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rob117

Quote:

Originally Posted by semiopen

My comment is mentioned in

Shroud_of_Turin and appears to be correct.

This references http://www.dadamo.com/knowbase/theory/anthro.htm

I've got to admit your discourse is impressive, but I'd be more inclined to believe you know what you're talking about if you showed an awareness of the difference between peer reviewed journal and peer reviewed journals.

Ha, actually I mentioned before that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that I'm trying to get my facts straight.

Although the citation you linked to is from a guy pushing a diet plan and his tracing of the history of the AB blood type is unsourced (although some of his other claims are).

This is an obscure subject and difficult to research, but my impression is that the AB comments are reasonable.

The Sudarium of Oviedo is a shmata they supposedly used to cover Yoshke's head for some reason and this also has type AB blood (or not). Seems like it has a much better pedigree than the Shroud.

You've presented many reasons that the Shroud should be given some credibility. These include:

the nutty Jew,
the old lady textile expert (she's one of my heroines) who once took a vacation to Masada at a time when this site was totally misunderstood,
the nine mysterious Los Alamos compadres (I've never seen their names listed),
The retired Los Alamos guy who got an article published in a peer reviewed journal,
the pollen samples that somehow passed through the hands of a guy who thought the Hitler Diaries were genuine,
two STURP scientists who agreed there is blood on the shroud.

This is hardly a convincing case, seems like a long way to go to see this wrapped around Yoshke.

mountainman · 02-18-2010, 05:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semiopen

One has to figure the shroud is not legitmate, but the pro arguments are not easy to defeat.

The pro arguments were developed in a papal dark room with many mushrooms in the 19th century when forgeries were being fabricated hand over fist

Quote:

Source

In 1898, the cardinal of Turin commissioned Secondo Pia, a lawyer, to take pictures of the relic. At around midnight of May 28, that year Pia was in the dark room developing negatives, when he got the greatest shock of his life; the photographic plate on the reverse showed the image of a man and a face that could not have been observed with the naked eye.

What a shock for Ancient History!
Another 19th century papal forgery is fabricated.
De Rossi was no longer on the payroll.
The Vatican needed new "researchers".

Have a google around Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894)

Quote:

Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894) considered the greatest of the 19th century Roman archaeologists. As a loyal member of the Catholic Church, he was asked by Pope Pius IX to publish his works under the Vatican imprint. In 1857 the Vatican press printed his Inscriptiones christianae Urbis Romae. The work contained 1126 inscriptions dating from the year AD 71 to 589[1] His most famous discovery was made in 1849. In a shed belonging to a wineyard, he found a stone with the partial inscription
...NELIUS MARTYR.

The only possible name was Cornelius. Pope Cornelius (251-253) died in exile, and was therefore considered a martyr.

NB: A later edition of Inscriptiones contained a total of 1374 inscriptions. The first four were scrapped as forgeries, meaning that the oldest known Christian inscription in Rome is a memorial to Emperor Caracalla's chamberlain Prosenes, who died in 217.

The Prosenes inscription is by all accounts an interpolated gravestone, and is iutterly ambiguous, but believers in the traditional (and perhaps even transcendental) history of the "Early Canonical Christian Church" dont have many unambiguous archaeological citations, --- if any at all! --- and will clutch at straws till the cows come home.

Besides its good for the "Holy Relic Tourist Industry".

Joan of Bark · 02-18-2010, 06:06 PM

Another point made in an earlier thread:

If the shroud were really wrapped around a human body, it would produce a distorted image, with the ears flat and the arms and leg widened.

John Kesler · 02-18-2010, 08:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jayrok

It seems silly that even Christians may believe the Shroud of Turin might be authentic. I don't understand why the issue even gets attention.

All we have to do is see what the Bible says. John 20:3-7 -- So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen.

The Bible tells us Jesus had a separate cloth wrapped around his head and there were "strips" of linen to wrap his body.

The shroud of Turin is 14 feet by 3 feet in size. It's one whole piece of cloth. This contradicts what the gospel of John states. Why is this an issue for debate?

One point about the burial of Jesus is that John's gospel not only doesn't agree with the synoptics about the spices, but because the amount of spices is so high, John necessarily diverges regarding the number of cloths used to bury Jesus. The synoptics picture Jesus as being hastily wrapped with a single cloth, while John states that Jesus was wrapped in cloths (plural) "according to the burial custom of the Jews." This is similar to what is said of Lazarus in John 11:

Quote:

43 When he [Jesus] had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Quote:

Mark 15:46
46 Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.

Matthew 27:59a
59 So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth 60 and laid it in his own new tomb...

Luke 23:53
53 Then he took it down, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and laid it in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever been laid.

John 19:39-40
39 Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. 40 They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.

mountainman · 02-18-2010, 08:23 PM

And the literary evidence of the gPeter has the author suggesting to the reader that Jesus walked away and out of the tomb, supported by a pair of very large people, and followed by the walking-talking Cross itself. "Yes"!

PhilosopherJay · 02-18-2010, 08:24 PM

Hi rob117,

It is not surprising to me that an orthodox Jewish photographer working for an organization supporting the authenticity of the shroud finds it authentic. He probably believes many things that lack scientific evidence. Orthodox Jews do not challenge the existence of Jesus, only his supernatural nature.

Ray Rodgers is quite interesting. Since, he was hired in 1978 as Director of Chemical Research for the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), until his death in 2005, he never deviated from his support of the authenticity of the shroud. Geology Professor, Steven D. Schafersman and Chemist Walter McCrone (1916-2002) were highly critical of his work.

Schafersman notes this:

Quote:

As pointed out by Antonio Lombatti (personal communication), editor of Approfondimento Sindone, the skeptical international journal of scholarship and science devoted to the Shroud of Turin, only after one month of careful study on where to cut the linen samples for dating were the samples removed from the Shroud. This process was observed personally by Mons. Dardozzi (Vatican Academy of Science), Prof. Testore (Turin University professor of textile technology), Prof. Vial (Director of the Lyon Ancient Textiles Museum), Profs. Hall and Hedges (heads of the Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory) and Prof. Tite (head of the British Museum research laboratory). There is no way these scientists and scholars could have made such an error and failed to see that the cloth samples they removed was really from a patch, "invisibly" rewoven or not.

Apparently. we have to believe in a fourth miracle, that 16th century repairers without the aid of microscopes (invented 1590) would be able to replicate 1st century technology so exactly that they could produce a patch that could fool 20th century textile experts into believing it was part of the original fabric.

An inquiry into how much money Ray Rodgers received each year as the Director of Chemical Research for the Shroud of Turin Research Project might clear up why he was such an enthusiast for the authenticity of the Shroud.

As far as the stitching pattern, textile expect Flury-Lemberg who dismissed the idea that the shroud had been patched (which directly contradicts Ray Rodgers conclusion) said this:

Quote:

"This kind of weave was special in antiquity because it denoted an extraordinary quality," she says. (Less fine linens of the first century would have had a one-to-one herringbone pattern). That same pattern is present on a 12th century illustration that depicts Christ's funeral cloth, which, she says, is "extremely significant, because it shows that the painter was familiar with Christ's Shroud and that he recognized the indubitably exceptional nature of the weave of the cloth." Flury-Lemberg also discovered a peculiar stitching pattern in the seam of one long side of the Shroud, where a three-inch wide strip of the same original fabric was sewn onto a larger segment. The stitching pattern, which she says was the work of a professional, is surprisingly similar to the hem of a cloth found in the tombs of the Jewish fortress of Masada. The Masada cloth dates to between 40 B.C. and 73 A.D. The evidence, says Flury-Lemberg, is clear: "The linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin does not display any weaving or sewing techniques which would speak against its origin as a high quality product of the textile workers of the first century."

Ms. Flury-Lemberg notes the similarity of the Shroud to a 12th century manuscript illustration, the Pray Codex http://www.shroudforum.com/exhibit/praycodex01.htm. Ms. Flury-lemberg takes this are proof that the 12th century illustrator saw the shroud. She does not consider that it is at least as likely that the illustrator was depicting shrouds of the 12th century and the 13th or 14th century forger was simply using similar shrouds from his time period. Thus the coincidences of this pictures and the shroud are additional proof that we are dealing with a late medieval production.

She also says that the weave is similar to a piece of cloth that was found at Masada, so it is not impossible that the weave could have come from the First century. Exactly how they are similar she does not say. Her statement that this was extraordinary quality for antiquity might suggest that it was very uncommon for the time and therefore highly unlikely to be from that time period.

Incidentally, Ms. Flury-Lembeck, who worked on the cloth in 2002 has said that she always always doubted the results the carbon-14 dating tests carried out on the shroud in 1988, not because the area was patched as Ray
Rodgers later concluded in 2005, but "The fact that the shroud has been exposed to its surroundings could have falsified the data," (an odd conclusion showing that as much as she knows about textiles, she apparently knows little about carbon-14 dating). The idea that the cloth had been contaminated by x, y or z elements was put forward repeatably by Shroudists without any evidence in order to discredit the carbon 14 testing, from 1988 to 2005. It was Ray Rodgers, the year that he died from cancer who brought forth the scientific evidence to prove the incredible story of the samples being from a patch that went unnoticed by the people who selected the samples.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Quote:

Originally Posted by rob117

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi rob117,
{snip}

Regarding scientists who are subject to the same social pressures as everyone else, you are right, especially since most of the scientists involved, including those who believe it is a fraud, are practicing Catholics. However, I don't know how to explain the pro-authenticity position of Ray Rogers, who explicitly says he "doesn't believe in miracles" and that the shroud was produced "naturally." Additionally, there's the case of Barrie Schworz, the official documenting photographer STURP, who believes the shroud is genuine and yet somehow, paradoxically, has remained an Orthodox Jew, in addition to the Hebrew University botanists who allegedly found evidence of Palestinian pollen on the shroud and yet are presumably not Christian.

Additionally, as has been said before, it has been claimed (in peer-reviewed publications) that the C14 dates were in fact from a "repaired" area of the shroud, that there is documentary evidence for the shroud's existence before the 14th century under other names (e.g. a picture in a 12th-century Hungarian manuscript that allegedly shows some of the "damaged areas" on the shroud, an image in Constantinople that was venerated there, etc.), and that the proof of forgery in the 14th-century manuscripts could have been propaganda from neighboring dioceses whose economies were fueled by pilgrimages for their own relics that competed with the shroud. Additionally, two textile experts (Mechthild Flury-Lemberg and Gilbert Raes of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology in Belgium) claim that the 3:1 weave of the shroud is in fact found at the fortress of Masada in the first century and is "consistent with Syrian design." Joe Nickell, who claims that the 3:1 herringbone weave is not known from Palestine at the time of Jesus, is not a textile expert. He's an English professor. Ordinarily, I would be more inclined to believe statements about a certain field of knowledge by someone trained in that field of knowledge than by someone not trained in that field.

The reason I am disturbed (as a skeptic) is because this seems a lot more difficult for me to just dismiss than creationism. Creationism doesn't get into peer-reviewed biology journals. "Shroud science" apparently does get into peer-reviewed chemistry and optics journals. In fact, it seems like the vast majority of the peer-reviewed research I can find is pro-authenticity.

While I understand that peer-review can be faulty and that scientists can make mistakes, I have been conditioned, as a skeptic, to believe that one of the main things that distinguishes science from pseudoscience is absence of the latter in reputable peer-reviewed journals. In the case of the shroud of Turin, almost all of the detailed skeptical refutations of the authenticity claims (including the ones you brought up) appear outside of peer-reviewed journals. It seems, at least at first glance, intellectually dishonest to me to reject information that appears in peer-reviewed journals in favor of information that does not, especially when some of the statements (e.g. the differing interpretations of the 3:1 herringbone pattern) blatantly contradict.

Of course even if the shroud was in Palestine before the 14th century does not make it authentic. It could have been painted in the 4th, 5th, or 6th centuries, as the relic trade was just as booming then (in the newly-Christianized Roman Empire) as it was in 14th-century Europe.

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version	Search this Thread: Advanced Search

02-18-2010, 11:44 AM	#21
semiopen Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Hillsborough, NJ Posts: 3,551	The acceptability of the radio carbon dating isn't clear. Shroud sluts mention that nine guys from Los Alamos believe it is false; this sounds impressive but I'm not sure what it means. The first Los Alamos guy got his C14 stuff into a peer reviewed journal, but the nine other guys didn't. I'm not clear if his objections are valid. Presence of blood on the shroud isn't clear. There was a difference of opinion by STURP scientists where one guy thought it was primate blood and the other guy thought it was AB human. AB human blood is a problem because it probably didn't exist before about 700 CE, and is not very common in the middle east. Shroud sluts will say that Jews have a high percentage of AB, this seems to be a lie. The shroud is said to be similar to material found at Masada, but without seeing the Masada stuff, I have to guess it is in bad shape. This is problematic anyway because current thinking is that the Masada material is probably Roman. One has to figure the shroud is not legitmate, but the pro arguments are not easy to defeat.

02-18-2010, 06:06 PM	#27
Joan of Bark Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Pua, in northern Thailand Posts: 2,823	Another point made in an earlier thread: If the shroud were really wrapped around a human body, it would produce a distorted image, with the ears flat and the arms and leg widened.

02-18-2010, 08:23 PM	#29
mountainman Contributor Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Falls Creek, Oz. Posts: 11,192	And the literary evidence of the gPeter has the author suggesting to the reader that Jesus walked away and out of the tomb, supported by a pair of very large people, and followed by the walking-talking Cross itself. "Yes"!

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.