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What Rogers found was that the carbon 14 sample was taken from a mended area of the
cloth that contained significant amounts of newer material. This was not the fault of the
radiocarbon laboratories. But it did show that the dating was invalid.
Immediately after the publication of Rogers’ paper, Nature published a commentary by
scientist-journalist Philip Ball. ”Attempts to date the Turin Shroud are a great game,” he
wrote, “but don't imagine that they will convince anyone . . . The scientific study of the
Turin shroud is like a microcosm of the scientific search for God: it does more to inflame
any debate than settle it.” Later in his commentary Ball added, “And yet, the shroud is a
remarkable artefact, one of the few religious relics to have a justifiably mythical status. It
is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made.”
Ball, who understood the chemistry of the shroud’s images, rejected a notion popularized
by many news accounts that Leonardo da Vinci created the image using primitive
photography. He called the idea flaky. He also debunked the sometimes reported
speculation that the image was “burned into the cloth by some kind of release of nuclear
energy” from Jesus’ body. This he said was wild.
Almost all serious shroud researchers agree with Ball on these points. When flaky and
wild ideas appear in newspaper articles or on television, as they often do, scientists
cringe. Rogers referred to those who held such views as being part of the “lunatic fringe”
of shroud research. But Rogers was just as critical of those who, without the benefit of
solid science, declared the shroud a fake. They, too, were part of the lunatic fringe.
The idea that the shroud had been mended in the area from which
the carbon 14 samples had been taken had been floating around for
some time. But no one paid much attention. In 1998, Turin’s
scientific adviser, Piero Savarino, suggested, “extraneous
substances found on the samples and the presence of extraneous
thread (left over from ‘invisible mending’ routinely carried on in
the past on parts of the cloth in poor repair)” might have accounted
for an error in the carbon 14 dating. Longtime shroud researchers
Sue Benford and Joe Marino independently developed the same
idea and explored it with several textile experts and Ronald
Hatfield of the radiocarbon dating firm Beta Analytic. The art of
invisible reweaving, Benford and Marino discovered, was
commonly used in the Middle Ages to repair tapestries. Why not
the shroud, they thought? The believed they saw evidence of it.
But the skeptically minded Rogers did not agree. He had already
debunked every other argument so far offered to explain why the
carbon 14 dating might be wrong. According to Ball, “Rogers thought that he would be
able to ‘disprove [the] theory in five minutes’.” Instead he found clear evidence of
discreet mending. He also showed, with chemistry, that the shroud was at least thirteen
hundred years old. And he proved, beyond any doubt, that the sample used in 1988 was
Yellow dye can be seen
from spliced thread.
Newer material was dyed
with alizarin from madder
root to match age-
yellowed older thread.
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