OK, so everyone on the planet has heard of the Shroud of Turin, which some claim is the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ, but which carbon-dating has shown to be medieval in age. The Shroud of Turin Museum in Alamogordo NM makes no pretense to be neutral on the matter—it is unabashedly in the “Jesus Christ’s burial cloth” camp. The Museum is run by Shroud investigator Peter Schumacher, who in 1978 announced that his analysis of photos of the Shroud (the Museum displays a high-resolution large-scale photograph of the entire Shroud) indicated that it had 3-d properties and could not be a 2-dimensional painting. The Museum displays one of Schumacher’s VP8 image analyzer machines. And I was fortunate enough that Schumacher himself was there when I visited the museum and was happy to give me a talk on the subject—we chatted for an hour and a half. That will be another diary. For now, here are some photos of the museum taken during my visit.
What do I think? Well, three different teams have done C-14 testing on the Shroud and dated it to the 13th-14th century. Schumacher and others argue that those teams actually dated a patch that was added later to repair fire damage, and that carbon from the fire or something else has contaminated the samples. Me, I think that given C-14 dating has been done by archaeologists for decades now and I can’t believe three different teams all woke up stupid one day and didn’t know how to reliably carbon-date a piece of cloth, that settles the matter.