Article
of Faith?
My letter to the Editor about the Shroud of Turin
On May 18, 1998, I wrote a letter to the Chicago Sun-Times in response to John Bobek's letter about the Shroud of Turin. He claimed that there was irrefutable proof that the Shroud was authentic. Since it's so obvious that the Shroud is real, he went on to write, non-believers are in denial and simply refuse to believe in God.
Now I don't claim to be a Shroud expert, but I knew enough to tell that he had no idea what he was talking about. So I decided to be a good skeptic, and write a letter to the editor. On May 25, the Sun-Times published the letter:
In John Bobek's letter [May 18], he claims that fire damage to the Shroud of Turin has caused scientists to misdate the shroud.
What Bobek doesn't realize is that the amount of contaminants required to throw off the dating would weigh twice as much as the shroud. Plus the team that did the carbon dating cleaned the samples before testing them. Even if there is real blood on the shroud, which is debatable, it wasn't around when Christ died.
True, it may be an act of faith to believe the shroud is real. Then again, it's also an act of faith to believe that the Sun-Times has been publishing for a million years.
After I wrote the letter, I learned that samples of the Shroud were tested by three independent laboratories. Their results dated the Shroud from 1260 to 1390 AD. I could see one lab making a mistake, but three? Try as Shroud supporters might, there's no way that it could be old enough to be Christ's burial shroud.
In the earlier drafts of the letter, I mentioned that an artist confessed to faking the Shroud, which lead the Church at the time to label it a fake. Plus, the "blood" on the Shroud is really red paint. Forensic tests failed to detect blood on the Shroud. Also, it's interesting to note that the Shroud has been yellowing ever since its "discovery." Allegedly, it hadn't faded in the thousand plus years since Christ died. Why would it start fading after being revealed to the public?
To me, the answer's simple. The Shroud is a fraud, and the only people in denial are believers like Bobek and other so called "sindonologists."
Sources:
"The
Shroud of Turin Controversy" by Joe Nickell
Shroud of Turin Research