A thing of shreds and patches

NEWS ANALYSIS
But the Turin Shroud mystery remains unsolved . . . as investigative writer and Shroud expert Ian Wilson reports
EXACTLY ten years ago this weekend the Turin Shroud was taken down from display after its first public exposition in nearly half a century. During the previous six weeks well over three million pilgrims, one of these the present Pope, had filed past it as it hung illuminated above the high altar of Turin Cathedral.
During the following few days, intensive examination by a team of American scientists seemed to offer the promise that the Shroud's extraordinay photographic imprint might genuinely be that of Jesus when laid in the tomb nearly 2000 years ago.
Today the evidence for the Shroud's authenticity as presented by those scientists and others, might seem to be in tatters. During the last three months, as the carbon dating laboratories of Arizona, Zurich and Oxford have each completed their work on Shroud samples, scarcely a week has gone by without some new "leak" story that it is a medieval forgery. Throughout all this the nonCatholic media, consistently and not a little gleefully, have nurtured two assumptions. The first is that "science" really has now smashed any possibility of the Shroud's genuineness. The second is that the relic-loving Catholics, whom they assume to have held the Shroud for centuries as some fundamental prop to their faith, must thereby be automatically shattered by this news.
Now although a Jong way from being a relic-lover, I have advocated the cause of the Shroud's genuineness during some 30 years acquaintance with the subject (only half of those years as a Catholic). I also have the highest respect for science, and for the competence and integrity of the laboratories who carried out the recent carbon dating test on the Shroud. Among others, I urged that the carbon dating test should be carried out, and have no intention of either crying "foul" or burying my head ostrich-like in the sand simply because the result happens not to support my personal view of the Shroud's true date.
But what I cannot emphasise enough is that carbon dating, on its own, cannot and should not be regarded as any form of final arbiter on the issue of whether the Shroud may genuinely be that of Christ, or the work of some medieval artist. Regrettably, tremendous confusion has been created in the public mind by carbon dating laboratories quoting "accuracies" for their work of plus or minus a hundred or so years.
The fact is that these are statistical accuracies, not actual accuracies. Within archaeology there are many instances not only of archaeologists disputing carbon dating findings, but also of carbon dating laboratories disagreeing by several centuries one from another. A classic recent example is that of Lindow Man, the well-preserved body of a sacrificial victim uncovered in 1984 in a Cheshire peat-bog, and now on display in the British Museum.
As reported in the August 1986 issue of Curren( Archaeology . . . "there are continuing problems over his (Lindow Man's) date. Three sets of radiocarbon dates have been obtained. Firstly there are those obtained by conventional methods from the peat that surrounded him, which has been dated both by Harwell and by the British Museum at dates around 300 BC, and this is the
date they are adopting for publication. The other dates are done by the two new superduper small measurement laboratories at Harwell and at Oxford, which can date minute samples of the body itself, of the hair, bones and skin. However, whereas all the Oxford samples come out consistently in the 1st century AD, all the Harwell samples come out consistently in the 5th century AD. At one time they thought that the difference might be due to the differing pre-treatment at the laboratories, so they swapped samples following pretreatment, but the resulting measurements came out within the respective series for each laboratory. The archaeological world waits with bated breath to see how this problem is resolved."
the case of the Shroud the plain fact is that anything from bucketfuls of water used to douse a fire which nearly destroyed it in 1532, to a hypothetical release of ionising radiation from Jesus's body when forming the mysterious
imprint, conceivably could have affected the carbon dating reading. Only by some totally conclusive demonstration of how an artist produced an image of the Shroud's extraordinary subtlety. and accuracy will the current cries of "fake" be truly sustainable. And for this there would need to be more tests . . .
There remains the media assumption that the Catholic world either is, or should be, devastated by all the furore. Few non-Catholics seem to realise that Catholic bishops condemned the Shroud as a forgery as early as the 14th C entury.
Only comparatively recently, and only because of so many seemingly convincing scientific findings, had the Catholic Encyclopaedia carried a more sympathetic entry on the subject. It is science, far more than the Catholic Church, that has advanced claims for the Shroud's genuineness, and it is absurd that on the basis of one single, demonstrably failable scientific test, all other scientific findings on the Shroud should be tossed aside as worthless.