It’s a banner day for science!
“I cannot disprove that this cloth was the burial shroud that was used on Jesus,” Raymond N. Rogers, a retired chemist from the University of California-operated Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in a telephone interview Friday from his home.
Other claims about the Shroud that Mr. Rogers will be unable to disprove.
1. That the Shroud was the focus of a thousand year war between the Insectivore Warriors of Zetabin Three and the Interstallar League of Astro-Monks.
2. That when used as a prayer mat by certain elderly nuns, rain falls in unobserved parts of the Sahara.
3. Tying a thread from the Shroud around one’s wrist delays the onset of cancer by up to six months.
4. That the original title of the Shroud was “Self-Portrait With Camera Obscura,” but the accompanying documentation was eaten by starving Jesuits during the Thirty Years War.
5. That the real value of the cloth is due to the accidental ventral x-rays of the last remaining Ichthyosaurus found on either side, discovered swimming in Como Lake in the 14th century.
6. That the portrait is not of Jesus at all, but rather of a 7th Century Italian knight who was ashamed about the size of his package.
“The chemistry says it was a real shroud, the blood spots on it are real blood, and the technology that was used to make that piece of cloth was exactly what Pliny the Elder reported for his time,” about 70 A.D., Rogers said, referring to the naturalist of ancient Roman times.
Other things reported by Pliny The Elder; Dog headed people! Elephants writing in Greek! Basilisks!
The American chemist said he decided to analyze the amount of vanillin, a chemical compound that is present in linen from the flax fibers used to weave it. Vanillin slowly disappears from the fiber over time at a calculated rate, he said.
Judging by those calculations, a medieval-age cloth should have had some 37 percent of its vanillin left by 1978, the year the threads were taken from the shroud, Rogers said. But there was virtually no vanillin left in the shroud, leading the chemist to calculate it could be far older than the radiocarbon testing indicated, possibly some 3,000 years old.
Shocking fact somehow left out of the article above, presumably due to the sudden death of the reporter. The rate of vanillin decay varies with temperature.
Unfortunately, Rogers’s test is much less accurate and precise than radiocarbon dating because its crucial parameter is the temperature at which the Shroud was stored. Small differences in storage temperature, however, lead to very divergent results, which is the reason why Rogers could only give a huge range of 1700 years for his dating. By contrast, the relevant parameters for radiocarbon testing are known independently of the item’s history and the radiocarbon testing yielded more precise 130-year range for its results.
Of course, the Shroud had not been stored at a constant 20-25C temperature, and its actual storage temperatures can only be guessed since this information has not been recorded for much of the history of the Shroud. But the temperature is critical to Rogers’s dating. For example, using his equation, I estimate that if the temperature of the Shroud were raised to 150C (300F), it would only take about six (6) hours to lose 95% of all the vanillin. This is not an unreasonable possibility since the Shroud nearly perished in a serious fire
The chemist said he doubted the shroud could be reliably tested any more, contending that a top-secret restoration in 2002 likely would influence chemical results.
How very convenient.
