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!]

Rings, Rome, and relics

In our ongoing effort to consider weird things people believe, today we have: the veneration of Jesus's foreskin.

If you've never heard of this before, you'll probably think I'm making this up, but I'm not.  In Wikipedia's article on the topic, we find out that "At various points in history, a number of churches in Europe have claimed to possess Jesus's foreskin, sometimes at the same time," which raises the awkward question of how many foreskins he had.

The first recorded mention of the relic was all the way back in the year 800 C.E., when the Emperor Charlemagne presented it to Pope Leo III and told him that an angel had delivered it to him while he was praying at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.  And for you doubtful types, allow me to mention that its authenticity was later confirmed in a vision by Saint Bridget of Sweden, so I think we can all agree that the claim is pretty well proven.

Unfortunately, the "holy prepuce" (as the relic is called) was stolen by a German soldier during the Sack of Rome in 1537, but he was captured in the Italian town of Calcata shortly thereafter and thrown into prison.  Somehow he snuck the jeweled reliquary into prison with him (you'd think the guards would have noticed), and no one knew what was going on until miraculous "perfumed fog" repeatedly appeared over the town.  At that point, the game was over, because what other explanation for fog could there be other than there being a preserved piece of Jesus's penis somewhere in town?  So it was recovered from the imprisoned soldier, and afterwards housed in the church in Calcata, which then became a major pilgrimage site.

Things only got more complicated from then.  At some point, foreskins showed up at the Cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay, Santiago de Compostela, the city of Antwerp, Coulombs in the diocese of Chartres, Chartres Cathedral itself, and churches in Besançon, Metz, Hildesheim, Charroux, Conques, Langres, Fécamp, Stoke-on-Trent, and two in Auvergne.  Which even if you accept that they weren't actually from Jesus, still brings up the troubling question of where they were getting all of these foreskins.  Guys are generally only equipped with one each, so that's a lot of people circumcising their sons, and worse, deciding afterwards that it would be a good idea to save the cut-off bit and give it to the church in a box.

Which I find a tad creepy.

But we're not nearly done with the creepy parts of the story.  Once again turning to the Wikipedia article, we find out that the one in Antwerp was sent there after being purchased by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem following his success in taking back the Holy Land from the Muslims during the First Crusade.  And I'm thinking, "How do you go about buying something like this?"  Did he just cast about for people who were selling random holy body parts until he found one he wanted?  Did he go to Foreskins-"R"-Us?  Or did a relic salesman go up to him and say, "Hey, your majesty, I bet you've never seen anything like this before?"  In any case, Baldwin bought it, and sent it back to Antwerp, where it resided until it mysteriously disappeared in 1566.

But no worries, there were plenty of others to take its place.  And the arguments over which one was the real item were still going on as late as the 1850s, when the Holy Prepuce of Charroux went head-to-head (rimshot) with the aforementioned Holy Prepuce of Calcata, leading to a "theological clash" that was resolved in 1900 by a decree from the Vatican that said that anyone speaking or writing about the foreskin of Jesus would be summarily excommunicated.  (Which after writing this post would put me in an awkward position, vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church, if I weren't already there for about fifty other reasons.)

Be that as it may, making a big deal out of the alleged relic persisted well into the 20th century despite the church's injunction.  In 1983, on the Feast of the Circumcision, the jeweled box with the Holy Prepuce of Calcata was taken out and paraded down the street, where a thief stole it.  Contents and all.  It hasn't been recovered, and my impression is that the Vatican isn't really too upset by this.  They seem to be kind of embarrassed by the whole thing, which is certainly understandable.

But by far the oddest claim, and actually the reason I thought about writing this post in the first place, is the one by 17th century theologian Leo Allatius, who thought that all of the relics were fake, because the actual foreskin of Jesus was taken into heaven with him when he ascended, where it became the rings of Saturn.

Once again, I swear I'm not making this up.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Anyhow, that's today's adventure in bizarre beliefs.  I'm not sure what else I could add in the way of commentary, other than to thank the loyal reader of Skeptophilia who ran across the Leo Allatius article, and gave me the tip-off.

So to speak.

Divine message recognition module

Superstition in general leaves me a bit mystified.  As long as I can remember, I've never understood how people can believe in good luck charms and actions that will curse you to its opposite, or that some purely natural phenomenon is a sign from god... or a message from his infernal counterpart.

This is why I responded with frank bafflement at people's reaction to the photograph that went viral this week in the aftermath of the tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma.

The photo was reposted tens of thousands of times on social media, usually with messages like, "God is with us even in difficult times!" and "Praise the Lord!  He is here!"  This elicited two main questions in my mind:  (1) Aren't telephone poles always shaped like a cross?  And (2) if the Almighty wanted to send the people of Oklahoma a sign of his presence, wouldn't it have been more considerate to do it without smashing the shit out of the town first?

This last question is especially pertinent, given that Moore has been hit by tornadoes seven times in the past twenty years, with the ones in 1999 and 2013 being particularly devastating (the tornado in 1999 cut a 38-mile-long swath of destruction, and resulted in the highest windspeed ever measured on the Earth's surface -- 301 miles per hour).  So my guess is that given the choice between receiving a cross-shaped sign from god, and not being blasted to smithereens by a tornado again, most of the citizens of Moore would choose the latter.

So I found people's responses to the photograph pretty perplexing.  Of course, I had the same reaction to the kerfuffle over the cross-shaped chunks left in the wreckage after 9/11:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Because, after all, this is what the intersection of two girders looks like.  But this one resulted in a war of words between people who wanted to clear away the debris and people who saw this as a holy message from god and wanted it left as-is.  In the end, it was installed on a pedestal at Ground Zero, and has become an object of devotion by the religious.

[image courtesy of photographer Samuel Li and the Wikimedia Commons]

Once again, I find this kind of incomprehensible.  You'd think if god wanted to send a sign to the faithful, a bunch of writing in the sky an hour earlier saying "THERE ARE CRAZIES WHO HAVE HIJACKED AIRPLANES AND ARE ON THE WAY TO DESTROY THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, GET OUT NOW!" would have been more to the point.

Note that this is a completely separate question from the question of whether an all-powerful deity exists in the first place.  My only point here is that if there is a deity, then leaving behind cross-shaped debris after something has wreaked destruction, ruin, and death is a pretty peculiar way to communicate with his followers.

On the other hand, I guess if it brings people solace after a tragedy, there's some benefit to it.  It's better than despair, after all.  But while I went through times in my life when I desperately wanted to believe in the supernatural -- during my teens and early twenties, I was pretty much constantly casting about for evidence of such phenomena -- the whole "Sign from God" thing never made sense to me.  Which is probably why it used to piss me off no end in English Lit classes when the teacher would tell us that in chapter 3, the Clouds In The Western Sky were foreshadowing the horrible events that would unfold for the Main Character And His Doomed Lover in chapter 7.  "Oh, come on," I recall thinking.  "They're clouds.  As in big blobs of condensed water droplets.  They don't give a rat's ass about the Main Character And His Doomed Lover."

Nor, I suspect, does the broken telephone pole in Moore, Oklahoma have anything to do with a divine message.  It's a striking photograph, yes, but no more than that, especially given that telephone poles are already more-or-less shaped that way.

Or maybe I'm just missing the Divine Message Recognition Module in my brain.