Vatican researcher takes a long shot at proving the shroud of Turin is authentic

The Gospel of John also states, "Nicodemus ... brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. They took the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury" (John 19:39–40, KJV). No traces of spices have been found on the cloth, though it's arguable whether the Gospel of John is reliable in its crucifixion details, and disingenuous to use it uncritically in this context.

SHOOT: I always imagined that Jesus' body was wrapped in strips of linen resembling bandages. Of the same type associated with mummies. If this was not the case, one would imagine that if you placed a sheet over the body, you would have to be very careful not to get it smudged with blood. You'd have to wait for it to dry. You'd have to be extremely careful folding it and preserving it.
But the clue in the title of this post should be obvious. Not a scientist, not a neutral party, but someone employed by the Vatican, is making these claims. Motive is important when you want something to appear a certain way, and if your motives are honest, well then you might be honestly misled by what you want to see, and want to believe, as the information below, you will see, will attest.

In fact, the Shroud was widely dismissed as a forgery in the 14th century for the very reason that the Latin Vulgate Bible stated that the nails had been driven into Jesus' hands and Medieval art invariably depicts the wounds in Jesus' hands.

SHOOT: Of course Christians will argue that here the Bible may have made a mistake in saying where exactly the nails were inserted into Jesus' body. What happened to the Bible being the divine inspired word of God? Would God have been so lacks as to make a mistake regarding injuries to his own son?

"People work on grainy photos and think they see things," said Antonio Lombatti, a church historian who has written books about the shroud. "It's all the result of imagination and computer software." Lombatti said that artifacts bearing Greek and Aramaic texts were found in Jewish burials from the first century, but the use of Latin is unheard of.

He also rejected the idea that authorities would officially return the body of a crucified man to relatives after filling out some paperwork.

SHOOT:You'd think the Bible would make reference to this paperwork, since it makes reference to everything else, in detail.

Victims of the most cruel punishment used by the Romans would usually be left on the cross or were disposed of in a dump to add to the execution's deterring effect.

Lombatti said "the message was that you won't even have a tomb to cry over."
Unusual sightings in the shroud are common and are often proved false, said Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pavia.

Garlaschelli recently led a team of experts that reproduced the shroud using materials and methods that were available in the 14th century, proof, they said, that it could have been made by a human hand in the Middle Ages.

SHOOT: The article itself is almost convincing for a few moments, where words in the document such as Iber [Emperor Tibirus] and Jesus of Nazareth appear. But foods and vitamins make similar claims, especially butter, ice cream, cereals and bread - purporting to be more nutritious, containing various vitamins [which are enriched or added] when all these foods are hardly nourishing in the first place. Religion, with its focus on guilt and redemption, is, in a sense, similarly wasted intellectual food, based on empty calories. Religion has a significant impact in creating communities, but this can be negated when these close-knit communities then begin to rally against other communities with different beliefs, and vice versa.

I suspect that this ploy by the Vatican is a desperate move to rally people to 'evidence' of Christianity, when there is a consensus of reasoning and science, that a personal God doesn't exist in reality.

This point is also significant:

[Garlaschelli said] any theory about ink and metals [in the shroud] would have to checked by analysis of the shroud itself.

In other words, if writing appears in the shroud, the fabric ought to show a reasonable analysis that these metals and inks had interacted with the materials for 2000+ years and thus would be appropriately dispersed and deteriorated.

It does seem more logical that at the time of the Knight Templar, Christendom needed an icon, an artifact, to rally 'believers' to their cause. And so they simply 'fabricated' one.

Read more on the general consensus view of the shroud here. My guess is that most Christians won't bother, since they're believers rather than readers/researchers.

In their book "The Second Messiah: Templars, the Turin Shroud and the Great Secret of Freemasonry", Masonic historians Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas claim that the image on the shroud is actually that of Jacques de Molay.^[33] Jacques de Molay was the last Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Templar, arrested for heresy at the Paris Temple by Philip IV of France on 13 October 1307, and tortured under the auspices of the Chief Inquisitor of France, William Imbert.^[34][35] Per Lomas and Knight, De Molay’s arms and legs were nailed to a large wooden door or panel, creating wounds similar to crucifixion, and after one period of torture De Molay was wrapped in a piece of cloth in the fashion of a shroud and left to recover, during which time acids in the traumatised De Molay's perspiration created the image on the shroud.^[33] This is supported by the hypothesis of Dr. Alan A. Mills in his article "Image formation on the Shroud of Turin," in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 1995, vol. 20 No. 4, pp 319–326, who calls the chemical reaction auto-oxidation. He also notes that the image corresponds to what would have been produced by a volatile chemical if the intensity of the color change were inversely proportional to the distance from the body of a loosely draped cloth.

Per Knight and Lomas, De Molay was later executed together with a fellow Templar leader, Geoffroy de Charney, into whose family the possession of the shroud then passed, until Jeanne de Vergy, the widow of De Charney’s grandson, put the shroud on display at a church in Lirey.^[33]

Radiocarbon dating

In 1988, the Holy See agreed to permit six centers to independently perform radiocarbon dating on portions of a swatch taken from a corner of the shroud, but at the last minute they changed their minds and permitted only three research centers to undertake such analysis. The chosen laboratories at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, produced results indicating that the analysed portion of the shroud dated from the 13th to 14th centuries (1260–1390).^[2] Some members of scientific community had asked the Holy See to authorize more samples, including from the image-bearing part of the shroud, but this request was refused. One possible account for the reluctance is that if the image is genuine, the destruction of parts of it for purposes of dating could be considered sacrilege. The 13th and 14th century dating matched the first appearance of the shroud in church history.^[53]

Harry E. Gove of the University of Rochester, the nuclear physicist who designed the particular radiocarbon tests used on the shroud in 1988, stated, "There is a bioplastic coating on some threads, maybe most." If this coating is thick enough, according to Gove, it "would make the fabric sample seem younger than it should be." Skeptics, including Rodger Sparks, a radiocarbon expert from New Zealand, have countered that an error of thirteen centuries stemming from bacterial contamination in the Middle Ages would have required a layer approximately doubling the sample weight.^[63] Because such material could be easily detected, fibers from the shroud were examined at the National Science Foundation Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska. Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry examination failed to detect any form of bioplastic polymer on fibers from either non-image or image areas of the shroud. Additionally, laser-microprobe Raman analysis at Instruments SA, Inc. in Metuchen, NJ, also failed to detect any bioplastic polymer on shroud fibers.

Alan Adler, a chemist specializing in analysis of porphyrins, identified the reddish stains as type AB blood and interpreted the iron oxide as a natural residue of hemoglobin.

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.

clipped from news.yahoo.com ROME – A Vatican researcher claims a nearly invisible text on the Shroud of Turin proves the authenticity of the artifact revered as Jesus' burial cloth. The fragile artifact, owned by the Vatican, is kept locked in a special protective chamber in Turin's cathedral and is rarely shown. Skeptics point out that radiocarbon dating conducted in 1988 determined it was made in the 13th or 14th century. Frale is noted in Italy for her research on the medieval order of the Knights Templar and her discovery of unpublished documents on the group in the Vatican's archives. Earlier this year she published a study claiming the Templars at one time had the shroud in their possession. That raised eyebrows because the order was abolished in the early 14th century and the shroud is first recorded in history around 1360 in the hands of a French knight.