A quest for the Grail

In his brilliant, labyrinthine novel Foucault's Pendulum, about the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories, Umberto Eco's character Jacopo Belbo is explaining to the main character (Casaubon) the difference between cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics, and explains the last-mentioned as follows:

A lunatic is easily recognized.  He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes.  The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be.  The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits.  For him, everything proves everything else.  The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.  You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

I couldn't help but be reminded of this passage when I stumbled across an article in The Birmingham Mail about one David Adkins, a historian (I wasn't able to find out what his credentials are, but the article calls him that, so I'll go with it), who claims that the Shroud of Turin was actually a fourteenth-century tablecloth manufactured in Burton-upon-Trent, in Staffordshire, England.

So far, I sort of went, "Meh."  Back in 2018, scientists did a radiocarbon analysis on the linen cloth and found it dated from some time between 1260 and 1390 C. E., so whatever the Shroud is, it is conclusively not the burial cloth of Jesus.  And I guess it could as well have been manufactured in Staffordshire as anywhere else.

But Adkins wasn't content to walk well-trodden ground and just stop there.  No, he says, the image on the cloth isn't an imprint of the body of Jesus.  That would be silly.

The image is an imprint of the Fisher King.

Those of you who are into the Arthurian legends will undoubtedly know that the Fisher King is supposed to be the last in a long bloodline of custodians of the Holy Grail.  He was named "Anfortas" in Chrétien de Troyes's tale Perceval, written in about 1180, and was a nobly-descended king who had been wounded in the leg or genitals (or both) and left unable to do anything but sit in a boat outside his castle and fish in the river.  He was waiting for someone to heal him, and this was eventually accomplished by (depending on what version you read) either Percival or Galahad.

To be fair to Adkins, he's not claiming that it's an imprint of the body of the actual Fisher King (who, after all, was fictional); he says the Shroud was a linen tablecloth that had been used to wrap around an alabaster carving of the Fisher King, and stored in a cellar, where "the alabaster had reacted with chemicals in the mustiness of the cellar" and created the image.  The bloodstains, he says, were added later by monks to make it look like Jesus's burial shroud.  Conveniently for Adkins, the statue doesn't exist, or at least doesn't any more; he says that when the monks happened upon the idea of creating a fake burial shroud, they destroyed the statue so no one would notice the similarity.

As far as I can tell, his only support for this theory is that the Shroud contains alabaster dust.  "The presence of gypsum in the shroud confirms, in my mind, that the cloth was indeed originally used to wrap up a statue of the Fisher King in Burton-upon-Trent where the minerals alabaster - and particularly gypsum - originate," Adkins says.  "This can be the only explanation for finding it on a shroud."

Always perk your ears up when someone says "this can be the only explanation."  Here, there's another obvious explanation; that lots of Italian churches have marble and alabaster statuary, and the Shroud has been housed in Italian churches at least since the fifteenth century.  Burton-upon-Trent is far from the only place in the world to produce and/or use alabaster.

My curiosity was piqued, however, and I started digging into other claims Adkins had made.  He seems fixated on Burton-upon-Trent for some reason, and I found that he says there are other valuable archaeological finds to be made there.  In particular, he's interested in Sinai Park House, on the grounds of the ruins of Burton Abbey, which -- and apparently geologists have confirmed this is true -- sits on top of labyrinth of natural caverns and tunnels in the limestone bedrock.  These caverns, Adkins says, would be a great place to hide treasure, so down there somewhere are the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant, which were secretly brought to the site and hidden there by...

... wait for it...

... the Templars.

And you thought the final resting place of the Holy Grail was the Castle Aaaaaaaarghhh.  A lot you know.

Specifically, Adkins says the Grail and the Ark were brought to Burton-upon-Trent by Hugues de Payens (1070-1136), founder of the Knights Templar.  The problem with this assertion is there seems to be no particular connection between de Payens and Burton-upon-Trent; de Payens (who was French) did visit England and Scotland in 1128, but focused his attention on starting two Templar houses, one near London and the other in Midlothian, Scotland.

The connection between de Payens and Staffordshire, Adkins says, is via William Paget (1506-1563), a statesman who served under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, amazingly enough outlived all three of them, and died of something besides losing his head.  Adkins claims Paget is a corruption of "de Payens," although they don't sound much alike even if you pronounce "Paget" the French way.  (Genealogists believe that the surname Paget was Norman, and was originally Pachet -- the name of the village in Normandy where they lived.  Certainly makes a lot more sense, linguistically, than it coming from de Payens.)  

In any case, Paget did purchase Burton Abbey in 1539 and then demolish it -- that part is accurate -- but Adkins says this is only explicable if you buy that Paget was looking for buried treasure.

There's that unfortunate word "only," again.  Paget's demolition of Burton Abbey couldn't, for example, be because Paget was working for Henry VIII at the time, and the purchase and destruction of the Abbey happened right in the middle of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, wherein King Henry decided that the Catholic abbots were entirely too Catholic, but mostly too wealthy, and proceeded to pull down most of the monasteries in England and annex the property to the crown.  No, that's just too far-fetched.

Must be Templars and the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant and so forth.

So you can see why I was reminded of the passage from Foucault's Pendulum.  What we have here is an elaborate conclusion about artifacts that are either fakes or simply don't exist, based upon the slimmest of evidential support (none at all, in the case of the Templar treasure underneath Burton Abbey).  I guess it falls into the "no harm if it amuses you" department, but he's got the current owner of Sinai Park House on board, and plans to explore the tunnels thoroughly.

I suppose something might turn up; tunnels are great places to hide things, even if they're not the Holy Grail.  So I wish them luck in their explorations.  And if he does stumble on the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, I'll be happy to eat my words.

But I'm not holding my breath.

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Beneath the shroud

One of the most revered, and controversial, relics of the Roman Catholic Church has finally been shown to be an unequivocal fake.

The Shroud of Turin has engendered more speculation, criticism, and questioning than any other relic, and that includes things like the skull of Mary Magdalene.  The Shroud is a 4.4 meter long piece of linen cloth with the impression -- it looks very much like a photographic negative -- of a naked man showing the traditional injuries suffered by Jesus Christ during the crucifixion.

I've always suspected it was a fake, but I have to admit, it's a pretty inspired one.  The image is nothing short of creepy in its realism:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's generated incredible devotion -- not least from an Italian firefighter who dashed into the burning Guarini Chapel in 1997 and risked his life to save it.  While church leaders have not come right out and said it's real, they've made statements that amount to the same thing.  In 1958, Pope Pius XII approved reverence of it as "the holy face of Jesus."  More recently, Pope John Paul II called it "a mirror of the Gospel."

The whole thing began to unravel -- literally -- about thirty years ago, when scientists were finally allowed to do radiocarbon analysis on a tiny snippet of the linen cloth, and dated it to between 1260 and 1390 C.E. with 95% confidence.  Oh, but no, the True Believers said; it had more than once been through a fire, and soot would change the C-12 to C-14 ratio and throw off the dating.  Plus, the yellow-brown dye on the cloth was shown through chemical analysis to be older, and the cloth snippet was from a more recent repair job, anyhow.

So back and forth it went, with the skeptics saying the preponderance of evidence supported its being a hoax, and the devout saying it was the real deal.  But now two Italian scientists, Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli, have presented a paper at the 66th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that takes an entirely different approach.

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Garlaschelli's name.  He was the one who back in 2016 did a simple little demonstration of how the miraculous "weeping saints" -- statues of saints that appear to cry real tears -- can be faked.  So he's not a man who would be easy to fool.

And what Borrini and Garlaschelli did was to look at the Shroud through the lens of blood-pattern analysis.  Anyone who's fond of the series CSI probably knows that a trained forensic scientist can tell a lot from blood spatter, and this is no different.  The story goes that Jesus's body was wrapped in the cloth after he died, staining it with blood from his various wounds, and that's what created the image.

But the problem is... gravity.  If he was laid on his back (which seems probable), any blood dripping from the wounds would land on the cloth in a distinct way.  (The same is true, of course, if he was laid on his side, or any which way.)  And what Borrini and Garlaschelli found was that the cloth shows a completely random pattern of blood drips.  On the same side of the cloth, drips appear to be coming from a variety of directions, consistent with... a fake.  A clever, highly artistic fake, but a fake nonetheless.  Borrini and Garlaschelli write:

An investigation into the arm and body position required to obtain the blood pattern visible in the image of the Shroud of Turin was performed using a living volunteer.  The two short rivulets on the back of the left hand of the Shroud are only consistent with a standing subject with arms at a ca 45° angle.  This angle is different from that necessary for the forearm stains, which require nearly vertical arms for a standing subject.  The BPA of blood visible on the frontal side of the chest (the lance wound) shows that the Shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner for a standing position while the stains at the back—of a supposed postmortem bleeding from the same wound for a supine corpse—are totally unrealistic.

And yes, you read that right -- they got a volunteer to lie enshrouded in a linen cloth after having nicked his/her wrists to simulate bleeding wounds.  (They didn't, fortunately, flog the poor sucker, or do any of the various other horrible things the Bible says happened to Jesus.)

Hey, all for the good of scientific research, right?

So this should close the book on the Shroud of Turin, but of course it won't.  The Shroud apologists have argued against every other piece of evidence, so I have no doubt that they'll argue against this one, too, especially since Garlaschelli is involved.  The Italian Catholic powers-that-be hate Garlaschelli for his role in the Weeping Mary Caper.  But anyhow, it's good enough for me, and should be good enough for anyone else who is a self-styled skeptic.

But it still leaves me wondering how it was done, because whatever else you can say about the Shroud, it's really realistic.  Take a look at many 14th century paintings of people -- they're stylized, cartoonish, with zero attention to perspective.   This?  It's painfully accurate, down to the last detail.  So say what you will, whoever created this thing had some serious talent.  It's a shame he put it to use creating a fake that has duped people for over six hundred years.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Layers of fiction

The Shroud of Turin is still an object of reverence for the devout.  Purportedly the burial cloth of Jesus, it shows the front and back of a man who has the injuries one would expect from a crucifixion.  The problem is, there was a peer-reviewed study that appeared in Nature all the way back in 1989 that used cotton fibers from the shroud to establish an age by carbon-14 dating -- and pretty conclusively showed that the cloth was made between 1260 and 1390.  In other words, a good twelve centuries too recent to be the cloth Jesus was wrapped in when he was put in the tomb.  The study was replicated, performed in several different labs, and any possible source of skew ruled out.

So it would have appeared that this was case closed.  The Shroud of Turin is a medieval fake.

But of course, nothing is ever case closed when it comes to true believers.  Joseph G. Marino and M. Sue Benford wrote a paper in 2000 claiming that the date was inaccurate because the sample used in the 1989 study had come from a more recent repaired area.  That contention, and others like it, were taken apart piece by piece in a study in 2005.  Then only a month ago, forensic scientists Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli published research that showed that the pattern of blood stains shown on the shroud was inconsistent with any reasonable pattern that would form if a man was killed by crucifixion, wrapped, and placed prone (either face up or face downward) on a solid surface.

So to repeat: it's a fake.  A remarkable fake, yes.  But a fake.

Which is what makes the latest from the people who venerate the Shroud of Turin even funnier.  Because some specialists in facial reconstruction and computer forensics in Italy have taken the image of the face on the shroud, and used digital analysis to come up with what Jesus looked like when he was alive -- then reverse-aged the image to see what Jesus looked like as a child.

So without further ado, here he is... the Christ child:

Now, have I made this adequately clear?  The Shroud of Turin isn't really the burial cloth of Jesus.  It was the work of some medieval dudes based on what they thought Jesus looked like, 1,200 years after the fact.  Even the gospels themselves weren't contemporary eyewitness accounts; most scholars believe that the earliest gospel, that of Mark, was written in about 70 C.E., or nearly forty years after Jesus died.  Add to that the fact that there is still a considerable debate in academia over whether Jesus existed at all -- or if, perhaps, he was a composite figure, put together from several historical individuals along with characteristics from mythological personages such as the Egyptian god Osiris.  New Testament scholar Robert MacNair Price writes, "There might have been a historical Jesus, but unless someone discovers his diary or his skeleton, we'll never know."

So what the Italian forensic scientists have done is take an image from a faked artifact, made by people who lived twelve centuries after the fact, of a guy who is only known from writings that were done four decades or more after he died, and who may not have existed in the first place... and reverse-aged the image to see what that person looked like as a boy.

How far removed from reality can you get?  It's as if I took a poorly-rendered drawing of Ian McKellen, reverse-aged it, and decided that was what the real Gandalf looked like in his youth in Valinor.

So anyhow.  The whole thing is harmless enough if it amuses them, I suppose, although you have to wonder what they thought they were accomplishing by all of this.  And once again, we have a group of people whose devotion to an object seems to have rendered them incapable of understanding what's meant by the term "reliable evidence."

Just as well, I suppose, because the kid's sneery expression actually reminds me not so much of the Holy Child as of Joffrey from Game of Thrones:

But heaven knows, Joffrey certainly didn't need any more ideas about his divinity.  So maybe it's better if we don't give that point any further attention.

Shrouded in pseudoscience

I hate to break it to you, LiveScience, but in the interest of accuracy, it's probably time to take the word "Science" out of the name of your website.

What you're promoting isn't really science, any more than The History Channel has anything even remotely to do with history.  You're passing along to the public the idea that science is this mushy, hand-waving pursuit, where you can do an "experiment" to support an idea you'd already decided was true, generate essentially nothing in the way of data, and then claim that your results support whatever your original contention was.

I say this in light of a recent story called "Shroud of Turin: Could Ancient Earthquake Explain Face of Jesus?"  If the very title makes you suspicious, then good; you're starting out from the right vantage point.

Let's begin with the facts.  The Shroud of Turin is a piece of linen cloth that has been preserved for centuries as a holy relic -- supposedly the sheet that covered Jesus' body after the crucifixion.  It shows the image of a naked man, with wounds similar to those described in the bible.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, the linen cloth was carbon-14 dated -- a step that the religious powers-that-be resisted for decades -- and it was conclusively shown to date to around 1350 C.E.  It is, put simply, a fake.  So you'd think that would be that.

As we've seen before, that is never that when religion enters the picture.

The article in LiveScience tells about a study headed by Alberto Carpinteri of the Politecnico di Torino, in Turin, Italy, which discovered that when you crush rocks using a mechanical press, it can cause a brief emission of neutrons.  From that single piece of information, he concludes the following:

• Earthquakes can therefore be associated with neutron emissions.
• The neutrons could interact with nitrogen atoms in the linen cloth (or in anything else, presumably), and mess up the carbon-14 dating protocol, causing it to give a wrong answer.
• The neutrons could also have burned a pattern into the cloth as they passed through it.  Because the cloth was wrapped around a human body, it would have caused an image to appear on it, much like an x-ray.
• The bible says that there was an earthquake around the time of Jesus' resurrection, and the "stone rolled back from the tomb."  [Matthew 28:1-2]
• So: the Shroud of Turin is actually the burial cloth of Jesus.  Therefore god and the Catholic Church and all of the rest of it.  q.e.d.

Oh, come on, now.  This qualifies as science?  It's about as bad an example of assuming your conclusion as I've ever seen.  And if earthquakes interfered with carbon-14 and nitrogen-14 levels, then radiocarbon dating would never work, since earthquakes happen basically all the time, all over the Earth.  And yet carbon-14 dating has been shown to be extremely accurate, over and over again.

Funny thing, that.

So you have to wonder why Carpinteri et al. don't just say, "It was magic, and I believe it," and be done with it.  Why all of the scientific trappings?

Well, I know the answer, of course; people these days are getting a little iffy in the firmness of their religious convictions, and science is beginning to hold more sway over people's minds than religious authority does.  If you can convince folks that the science supports religion, you've pulled 'em right back in.

To LiveScience's credit, at least they took the time to talk to an actual scientist, geochemist Gordon Cook of the University of Glasgow.  Cook, unsurprisingly, was dubious.  "It would have to be a really local effect not to be measurable elsewhere," Cook said.  "People have been measuring materials of that age for decades now and nobody has ever encountered this."

However, even though they quoted Cook, the fact that LiveScience chose to publicize this non-science means that they're giving it unwarranted credence, and that's just irresponsible.  A "study" like this wouldn't make it through the first round of peer review.  Carpinteri and his team are relying on press statements -- and sites like LiveScience -- to publicize what is, at its heart, a religious statement of faith.

So the whole thing is a little frustrating.  It won't change anything, probably; the scientists will almost certainly just roll their eyes and go back to what they were doing, and the religious people who want to believe in the Shroud's relic status will continue to believe.

But I maintain: LiveScience, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and other popularizers of a pseudoscientific worldview are not doing science any favors by convincing the public that this sort of foolishness deserves to be considered seriously.  I'd almost rather that they stick to Bigfoot, UFOs, and pieces about how the Vikings were alien time-travelers.  At least that stuff is mildly entertaining.