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I love most of my viewers. You’re smart and funny and very kind with your thumbs ups and your subscribing and your patronizing! But there are a few commenters I can’t stand: the pornbots, the misogynists, and the guy who reminded me that the Shroud of Turin is a thing. That’s right, I’m talking about you, “pattheplanter.” You suck!
Okay just kidding but I really did not know that the Shroud of Turin was still a thing and I did not need to be reminded. If you’re not familiar with the Shroud of Turin, just imagine this: you know that JD Vance couch-fucking story from a few weeks back, the one we all immediately knew was fake? What if in 700 years, a bunch of people were really invested in insisting that it was actually real? And when historians were like, “Here’s the mainstream press at the time saying it’s fake,” the other guys, we’ll call them the couch fuckers, they say “that was just political intrigue designed to install Trump and Vance as god emperors,” and when the historians say “we read the book he wrote and it doesn’t say anything there about couch fucking” the couch fuckers reply “you read the only remaining printing of that book, which omitted the passage in question.” And then they go “Where do you think all these JD Vance semen collection cups got that jizz from?” because that future civilization’s archaeologists uncovered a bunch of those JD Vance jizz cups after a volcano wiped out a Trump campaign rally stop. And the historians just throw their hands in the air because humans gonna human.
Anyway, that’s what happened with the Shroud of Turin.
The Shroud is a 14.5-foot long (or 4.4 meters) linen rag featuring the full body, front and back, of some guy. Many Christians believe that it is Jesus Christ’s death shroud–the fabric Jesus was wrapped in after he was crucified, which the Bible says he left behind after he rose from the tomb. The Bible doesn’t say anything about him leaving behind a selfie, but honestly the Bible doesn’t mention even half of the shit Christians think it does so whatever, it doesn’t matter.
The reason why the Shroud is back in the news now is because, as pattheplanter noted, a bunch of mainstream media outlets like The Daily Mail, the New York Post, and the Independent are suddenly running stories about a “new study” that used x-rays to date the shroud to the time of Jesus. Before I get into the study (which is in fact two years old), let me just lay out what the couch-fuckers are up against:
The very first time any historian can find any reference to the Shroud of Turin is in 1390 AD, when a French Bishop wrote a letter to Antipope Clement VII to tell him all about how his predecessor had found the man who forged the shroud and got him to confess, saying that he made it up as part of a scam to get religious pilgrims to pay him money to be “healed” by the fake religious relic. When the forger was exposed, he and his cohorts hid the Shroud away for 34 years until the heat died down, at which point they tried it again at the time of his writing the letter. The Bishop wanted to be sure the Antipope knew not to fall for it, and the Antipope agreed, and to this day the Catholic Church officially does not consider the Shroud to be real.
Now I know what you’re wondering right now: what the fuck is an Antipope? Is that the mirror universe pope? An evil pope? If the antipope and the pope touch, would it destroy the universe? And the answer to all those questions is YES. You can trust me because I learned all about antipopes in the BEST history course I took in college, “Heresy and Persecution.”
So yeah, the very first thing we know about the Shroud of Turin is that it turns up for the first time 1400 years after it was supposedly created, and everyone at the time knew it was just a big old scam.
Scam artists aren’t so easily put off, though, as we can tell from the fact that the original guys hid the shroud for THIRTY YEARS before trying their scam again. So the rag got passed around and its popularity grew, and occasionally “experts” would weigh in. A handful of religious guys would look at it and go “oh this is definitely how they wrapped Jesus up” and historians would say “Uh actually they always used strips and wrapped the head separately, which is exactly how it’s described in the Bible” and the religious guys would be like “well that’s totally what Jesus looked like” and art historians would say “literally no human looks like this, this is just how medieval artists painted people.” And the religious guys would say “this is DEFINITELY real blood though” and then chemists would say actually these are “two common artist’s pigments of the 14th century, red ocher and vermilion, with a collagen (gelatin) tempera binder.”
Oh, and scientists also used radiocarbon dating on the shroud. All organic matter, plants and animals and you and me, contain radiocarbon, or carbon-14. When we die, we stop exchanging radiocarbon and the stuff that’s left inside us starts to very slowly decay at a constant rate. Scientists can therefore figure out about how long it’s been since we died by seeing how much radiocarbon is left. This works for anything that was alive in the past 50,000 years or so.
In 1988, researchers carbon dated the Shroud at three different labs. First, a lab in Tuscon determined the shroud was 646 years old, ± 31 years. Then, a lab at Oxford found the shroud was 750 years old, ± 30 years. Finally, a lab in Zurich found that the shroud was 676 years old, ± 24 years old. Taken together, they determined with 95% confidence that the Shroud of Turin was created some time between 1262–1312, or 1353–1384 CE. Again, that letter from the Bishop was written in 1390, 34 years after a man confessed to making the forgery, which would be 1356, smack dab in that later date range.
So yeah, that’s the evidence that this “new” “study” is up against. The one that The Independent says may show that the Shroud of Turin is truly the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Let’s have a look.
“X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample” was published two years ago in Heritage, a journal with an impact factor of 1.7 which is…not great. Impact factor is a flawed but convenient way to quickly know how reputable a journal might be. For instance, the impact factor of Nature, where the radiocarbon results were published, is 50.5. Again, it’s a flawed metric but I figured it was worth mentioning.
One coauthor of this study immediately rang a bell for me: Giulio Fanti, a name I recognized from this Chemistry World article I read during my research. Richard Corfield wrote back in 2013 that Fanti had recently “used spectroscopic methods to test samples of the Shroud taken in the 1970s. Fanti’s results date the Shroud to between 300 BC and AD 400: a 700-year interval that nevertheless brackets the death of Christ.”
Corfield goes on to note that experts were skeptical of Fanti’s results in part because his “technique is not only new, but seems to have been devised specifically to address the issue of the Turin Shroud. In short, the scientific cart seems to have been put in front of the methodological horse.”
That’s important. Remember that.
Anyway, on to this study: the researchers used a brand new technique of using Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering to detect the deterioration of the threads in order to date ancient textiles. This technique was previously shown to be accurate in a study published four years prior, also in Heritage, and also BY THE VERY SAME TEAM OF AUTHORS. In that study, they proved the x-ray technique was accurate by examining various textiles and comparing their findings to radiocarbon dating, which matched.
In this case, the x-ray technique most definitely did not match the radiocarbon dating, because obviously this team found that the Shroud must have been made, oh, about 2022 years ago.
But wait, it gets funnier: the researchers admit, in their first paper and also in this one, that their x-ray technique is only accurate if the textile in question has remained, for the entirety of its life, in a climate controlled environment with a temperature between 20 and 22.5 °C (68 to 72.5 °F) and a relative humidity between 55 and 75%. For 2,000 years. I just…do they think that two thousand years the Shroud of Turin was being protected in the Temple of the Sun with the Holy Grail? Do they think it only ended up at a church in Turin because Indiana Jones correctly identified it amongst that old knight’s cum rags?
Look, it would be hard to believe any historical object was kept in such pristine conditions for so long, but we know FOR A FACT that the Shroud of Turin was absolutely not. How can I be so sure? Well, to give you just one example, IT CAUGHT ON FIRE in 1532. For another example, it was in ANOTHER FIRE in 1997. It may have even been through three fires! There is absolutely no way in hell that this thing made it 2,000 years at room temperature.
But like every other piece of “evidence” deluded believers cling to showing the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial shroud of Jesus Christ, none of that matters. They will grab a hold of this “study” like a life preserver. Or like a blankie! Someone should make a Shroud of Turin comfort blankies. Did I just give away a million dollar idea??
