Shroud of Turin Allusions
Back in 2004, someone noticed that Curt Schilling’s right sock was soaked with blood during the second game of the World Series. He had just undergone surgery to repair a ruptured tendon. Something was wrong. As television cameras zoomed in on the blood seeping through his sock, a sportscaster commented that it looked like the Shroud of Turin. And thousands upon thousands of baseball fans wondered what he was talking about.
Back then, journalists usually avoided allusions to the shroud for fear that their readers had never heard of the shroud. Or perhaps, it was, that the journalist had never heard of it. But these days we see allusions almost every day: Rick Perry has wrapped himself in the shroud, one reporter told us. A caddy did not. But would golfing fans have noticed if he had? Yesterday, a reporter wrote, “In a press release that I have scrutinized like the Shroud of Turin to make sure it is not a fake . . . .”
The Shroud is now very famous. It has taken five years for Ray Rogers’ theory about the carbon dating to gain widespread acceptance. It has taken even longer for skeptics to realize that they, like everyone else, can’t explain how the images were formed. But in trying and looking very foolish they have provided good publicity. We must thank them when we meet them.
Allusion are good – well, almost always.
The picture is from a display in the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
the lions share of the credit goes to people like Ray Downing, Barrie Schwartz, Russ Breault, Emanuela Marinelli, Mark Oxley, David Rolf, Stephen Jones, and all the others publishing great documentaries, books and internet pages rather than the skeptics.
Don’t forget our good friend here Mr Dan Porter, he’s also doing great justice here with his great blog, website, and not to mention some of his writings. ;-)
Ron