Customer Reviews

Inquest on the Shroud of Turin

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Inquest on the Shroud of Turin by Joe Nickell is a clear, concise, 155-page work explaining the evidence that refutes the authenticity of the 3 1/2' x 14' cloth that allegedly covered the body of Christ after crucifixion and bears his image. Nickell's work is one-sided. He believes the shroud was created by an artist near the time it was first publicly introduced around 1353. He picks apart (sometimes in a mocking manner) the evidence shroud believers use to prove authenticity. As Nickell states at the beginning of the book, his collaboration with a panel of scientific and technical experts accomplishes equal time for the skeptics. According to Nickell, many reports on the shroud are done by pro-authenticity investigators who lack objectivity (p. 8). Mentions made in this book about Roman anatomist Dr. Luigi Gedda who, detecting a slump in the right shoulder of the image, deduced that the image was of a right-handed carpenter (p. 109) and the story of how renown microanalyst Walter McCrone was "drummed out" of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) for publicizing his findings of iron earth pigment on the blood stains and body image (p. 125) seem to back up his claims of bias accounts of the shroud's authenticity. I do not recommend reading only this one book on the shroud because it is too one-sided (any of the books by Ian Wilson would make a good companion as would Dr. John Heller's Report on the Shroud of Turin) but I also do not think that, because Nickell has an agenda, this book should be discounted. Whether you believe, are skeptical, or are just curious, Nickell makes excellent cases for his side of the issue.

Nickell includes chapters that cover a variety of topics: the history of the shroud, ways the shroud does not follow traditional Jewish burials at the time of Christ, the shroud versus Biblical accounts of Jesus' death and resurrection, ways that the image could be left on the cloth, and scientific consideration of the type of linen, blood stains, and the image itself. The chapters on blood and the yellow fibers on the image are a little dry and scientific (14 pages worth), but the rest of the work makes for fascinating reading. Nickell drives home his points with clarity and precision. He describes the shroud's past as one cloaked in controversy, politics, and profits which left more of an impression on me than the scientific evidence. The shroud was only first introduced to the public in 1353 and was denounced as a forgery almost immediately. Documents even show that the artist confessed.

The book ends with a summary of the areas considered in the work and the evidence the shroud is a forgery as well as information of members leaving (or being "drummed out") of STURP. The additional chapter includes an update to 1987 (four years after this book was first released) about books published during this time and about the formation of the Association of Scientists and Scholars International for the Shroud of Turin (ASSIST). Obviously much has happened since then. I saw a television documentary showing a man who claims the image is an x-ray of Jesus. An expert on ancient cloth also claimed that the type of weave used in the shroud is inconsistent with Medieval times but is found much earlier (something Nickell refutes).

The occasional tone of the book may turn off staunch believers. Nickell uses past mistakes of scientists to help discredit what they say about the shroud (p. 72). He refers to the idea that the image could be formed through resurrection as "nonsense" (p. 86). His arguments that, if the image was created supernaturally, why is it "not of better quality than it is" (p. 92) is a bit weak. Despite the author's arrogance, an objective reader will find that he makes many important points. Before the skeptics claim this book to be a slam dunk for their side, however, they should definitely check out John Heller's Report on the Shroud of Turin. Heller has a completely different take on the work of Walter McCrone. All these accounts show what an intriguing mystery the Shroud of Turin was, is, and probably will always be.

Nickell does a clear, thorough job of debunking all the silly contradictions and self-delusions of those folks who insist on believing that this long-acknowledged fraud actually contained the body of Christ(even the Catholic Church denies its authenticity). A good review of the actual "shroud" tradition (contradicted by the bible itself) and the scientific data disproving the shroud's miraculous nature. Highly recommended for clear thinkers who prefer fact and data to fanciful speculation and self-delusion.

Inquest on the Shroud of Turin is one of the best examples of competent scientific effort that has thus far been conducted on any topic that is of interest to a large segment of the human population. I read every word in the entire book, and I did not find it tedious or excessive in its coverage. Also I found no incident of mocking or belittling of Christian belief or its adherents. In my opinion, the book is an impartial assessment of forensic evidence which is still pertinent. When you consider who is more likely to be guilty of lying, clearly the churches of Christian belief are guiltier than scientists. And when you consider who is more likely to believe whatever their leaders tell them, Christian believers take the cake there also. This book does not even mention these factors, which, in any rational person's mind, would rightly rank high among the priorities of proof or belief. More than one item of evidence talked about in this book decisively proves the falsity of the shroud without any additional evidence being needed. As we human beings enter the new age which we are just now stepping onto the threshold of, and take our place in the world as genuine adults conscious of the need to believe only what is true, this book will stand above all but a very few others as an example of how we need to conduct ourselves whenever we are confronted by purveyers of false gifts and broken promises.

Joe Nickell has brought us another beautifully written, fascinating and pleasantly arranged book about the Shroud of Turin. Unfortunately, few reviewers have many constructive things to say about it. Such critical luminaries as Matthew Spigelman have been hard pressed to find adjectives more descriptive than "entertaining and complete" or "interesting and informative". Hogwash, says this reviewer!

Nickell gives a entertaining and compleet history of the scientific inquery of 1978 into the Shroud of Turin. He occasionaly gets bogged down in scientific jargen but is very conciously writing for a popular audience. He dedicates a large part of the book to his research (and debunking his adversaries) and this can be tedious at times. All in all it is an interesting and informative book for the scientificly minded person who is interested in the Shroud of Turin.

Skepticism is a perfectly natural response to the Shroud of Turin. It is such a bizarre and incredible object to begin with, and the claim that it dates back to the 1st century and is the actual burial shroud of Jesus, with its image of him having formed during a resurrection, is enough to cause most reasonable people to scoff.

However, the causes for such skepticism can and should be neatly separated. Many people, including most Christians, apparently confuse the question of the Shroud's authenticity with the question of the image formation: "If it was the actual burial shroud of Jesus, its image of him must have been caused by his resurrection." So goes the logic. Hence the polarized attitudes and sometimes ferocious hostility over the Shroud between Christians and non-Christians (and even among Christians themselves).

Yet those two claims should really be differentiated. To conclude that the Shroud is probably authentic in no way implies that one must also conclude that its image was formed by a supernatural event (resurrection). I myself am an agnostic and secular humanist, somewhat distrustful of Christianity and other religions, yet I eventually came to believe in the authenticity of the Shroud, after 30 years of uncertainty, and still believe in it today. But I strongly doubt that the image was due to any supernatural cause, or that Jesus was otherwise supernaturally resurrected. I may be alone in holding all these views, but they seem very reasonable to me.

In any case, Joe Nickell's Inquest on the Shroud of Turin is one example of the entrenched standpoints described above. During his career as a skeptic, Nickell has certainly done valiant work in exposing many bogus paranormal and supernatural claims. But his arguments against the authenticity of the Shroud are weak. He ignores much evidence and misrepresents still other evidence. As for the image, he doesn't permit the possibility of any spontaneous natural cause for it, seeing it only as man-made and medieval fakery.

Admittedly, Nickell's skepticism was seemingly confirmed by the well-known 1988 Carbon-14 testing of tiny pieces of the shroud, which yielded a date of "1260-1390," that is, a medieval origin. If that dating is correct, the shroud is clearly not a 1st century object. Yet, dozens of other pieces of forensic evidence from the Shroud argue against that medieval dating, and the C-14 procedure done on the Shroud was itself deeply flawed.

Among the evidence for the Shroud's authenticity, or at least for it being older than the Carbon-14 dating indicated, are some things not discovered or well publicized until after Nickell's 1984 book was published. For example, the Hungarian Pray Codex depicts an object that must be the Shroud of Turin, complete with four small holes forming a unique L-shape which the Shroud still bears today, yet that manuscript definitely dates from no later than 1192. A photograph of that illustration was first published, to the best of my knowledge, in Ian Wilson's 1986 work, The Mysterious Shroud (p. 115). But additional years then passed (and the celebrated 1988 Carbon-14 testing with them) before the illustration became more widely known.

Already in chapter 1 of Nickell's book the reader finds several historical arguments against the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin that seem strong on the surface but are weak upon closer examination. Nickell stresses that the Shroud had no known provenance prior to the 1350s; that the people then in possession of it were deceptive about it; that several clerics of that time denounced the Shroud as a fake; and that an artist confessed to painting the image on the Shroud. And yet, while all this evidence does justify caution about the Shroud's authenticity, none of it is as strong as Nickell suggests. The silence surrounding the Shroud's previous history is well explained if it was war plunder taken from Constantinople in 1204 and then held in private hands long afterward. The deceptions of the people later in possession of the Shroud can be well explained by their own pride, greed, and protectiveness, which in no way imply that the Shroud itself is dubious. The denunciation of the Shroud as a fake by certain late-14th century clerics could easily be due to the fact that those same clerics had a financial interest in the relic trade and suffered diminishing pilgrimage income because of the competition suddenly posed by the remarkable Shroud, which was not displayed in their churches but in another church nearby. Finally, the "artist" who supposedly made the shroud was never named, nor was his location ever specified, while the anatomical perfection of the body image on the Shroud is unlike any known medieval painting, and many microscopic aspects of that image make it impossible for any artist, medieval or otherwise, to have painted, rubbed, or otherwise fabricated.

Furthermore, some very recent historical findings further support the existence of the shroud prior to the 1350s. The most mysterious period of the shroud's medieval history has long been the 150 years from 1204 to the mid-1350s, but that gap has now apparently been largely filled. In 1204, or soon thereafter, the shroud was taken from Constantinople to Athens, where it was seen about 1207. That has long been well established by old documents. A leading French crusader named Otho(n) de la Roche was the new ruler of Athens after 1204, so it was long rumored in the Shroud field that he was the one who possessed it and that he then took it to France (Nickell oddly omits to mention Otho's name). But in very recent years, especially since about 2005, several Shroud scholars (Cesar Barta, Alessandro Piana, et al.) have uncovered abundant and apparently conclusive evidence tying Otho more closely to the Shroud and thus filling in its once-missing 150 years. During that time, the Shroud was apparently preserved either at a Besancon church or, more likely, at Otho's own castle in a village named Ray-sur-Saone in the vicinity of Besancon (or perhaps at both locations in different years). Documents attesting to Otho's possession of the Shroud have finally been found. Moreover, an old family tradition had always said that he had brought the shroud from Constantinople. Otho's family tree also reveals him to be a direct ancestor of Jeanne de Vergy, whose husband Geoffroy de Charny was the one to build a church for the Shroud in France in the 1350s (after he married Jeanne). He built that church in the village of Lirey, located not far from Ray-sur-Saone. At least a dozen other pieces of evidence strongly support this whole case.

A more familiar theory for the Shroud's whereabouts during that same 150-year period, involving the Knights Templar secretly possessing it, has thus apparently been disproved by these latest findings. Nevertheless, tantalizing connections exist between the Knights Templar and the family of Otho de la Roche, which may have led to the Knights at least knowing about the Shroud and perhaps even owning a copy of it.

Previous reviewers here have gone into useful detail about some of the faults in Nickell's book. They have instead recommended John Heller's Report on the Shroud of Turin and Ian Wilson's several Shroud books. I would also highly recommend those books, which convincingly refute the evidence presented by Nickell. John Iannone's 1998 Shroud of Turin book is another fine and fairly recent work, albeit more of an introduction to the subject. All these and other such books strongly support the Shroud's authenticity as the burial shroud of Jesus. And most of them diplomatically leave open the question of the origin of the image (though many of the authors, as Christians, lean toward a supernatural origin).

If more scholars and scientists, especially non-Christians, would get involved in the field, they might succeed in discovering exactly what (natural) process was involved in the formation of that remarkable image. Personally, I wonder if the image might be due to some delayed bioelectrical discharge after the intense pain of the crucifixion only hours before. But that's just one possibility.

Even today, twenty-five years after his Inquest book was published, Joe Nickell maintains his role as the great Shroud debunker, though extremely few other Shroud researchers share his view that the Shroud image is a medieval rubbing, painting, or other such man-made fake.

Earlier this very month (October 2009), an Italian scientist named Garlaschelli claimed, amid great and gullible fanfare by the world press, to have "reproduced the Shroud of Turin" using medieval artistic rubbing techniques. His techniques, however, were basically those of Nickell and others. The image and bloodstains on Garlaschelli's shroud are still very poor approximations of the originals on the Shroud of Turin.

With new findings from a scientist of the Los Alamos laboratory, the main thesis of this book-that the Turin Shroud is a medieval forgery-has been dealt a death blow. The new information clearly shows that the portion of the Shroud used for the 1988 C-14 test was, in fact, an additional weave to the Shroud threads made much later than the cloth itself, and that the winding sheet is much older than C-14 indicated.
Even without this explosive new information, much of Nickell's thesis was outdated well before the year 2005. His "recreations" of the Shroud are amateurish and are not clear evidence of forgery. Most of his other information-"paint on the Shroud", no provenance before the Middle Ages-has also been debunked many times over. And his star witness, Walter McCrone, had his own reputation tarnished beyond repair when it was proven that his analysis of the Vineland Map was discredited and debunked(ironic, since both Nickell and McCrone tried to destroy and besmirch those who didn't agree with them).

In short, Nickell's book is now passe, and obsolete. It gets two stars for its entertainment value, but the main arguments and ideas of this book have been thoroughly refuted,once and for all.

Woe is Nickel, professional skeptic and member of "CSICOP" and "The Skeptical Inquirer."

His star Shroud expert is Walter McCrone, a researcher who never looked at the Shroud firsthand. Included within the Shroud of Turin Research Project, McCrone was sent a collection of stcky tape linen thread samples.

For a firsthand account of McCrones' sandoffish and unprofessional demeanor, please read "Report on The Shroud of Turin" by researcher John Heller.

McCrone found a handful of paint paticles, far too random and sparse to account for the Shroud image.... which is proven to be a dehydration of the topmost linen fibrils. He found many samples of iron oxide particles, but these particles were too "Chemically pure" to be related to any paint pigment. They were found to be the result of "rhetting," involved with the ancient manufacture of linen.

STURP tried to publically confront McCrone regarding his conclusions. The man dodged and weaved like a pro. He avoided direct debate. He even called one reaseracher from STURP...

"an a$$, ... and you can quote me."

Very professional. Very mature.

It's just logical... "it is easier to tear down than to build up." Nickell is a professional "tear down"er, which is a career choice that is truly "the easy way." Debunk, discredit and cast doubt... yeah, that's a real challenge for an author... NOT.

For man, doubt comes naturally. To honestly confront any mystery that challenges a naturalistic world view takes courage, a courage few "mainstream" scientists possess. Thank God for the minority!!

Jeff Messenger, author of the novel "The Shroud of Torrington."

Joe Nickell, who admits he doesn't believe in anything supernatural, offers his lop-sided analysis of the Shroud. In 1978 about 3 dozen scientists, mostly non-believers, went over to Italy with tons of scientific equipment; they spent 120 hours taking data (mostly photographic and chemical) on the Shroud. They came back to their labs with their data samples and photos of all types (e.g. infra-red, microscopic, etc.) and then spent months analyzing all the data. All but one admitted they could not explain, scientifically, how the image got on the Shroud. So, now comes Joe Nickell, a magician by trade, and he relies mostly on that one doubting scientist to explain that the image got there by using brushes and iron oxide to produce the image. Only, he cannot reasonably explain how all the other scientists have found so little trace of the alleged pigment on the cloth to account for even the tiniest fraction of the entire image; and also that there are NO microscopic signs of any DIRECTIONALITY that brushes would have necessarily left on the cloth. This book belongs in the same bag as a recent one on the Shroud that "proves" that the Shroud was painted by Leonardo da Vinci (who wasn't even born when the Shroud was being exhibited publicly in Europe). Religious sceptics, like Nickell, first assume a disbelieving stance and then force their data to fit their stance. Ridiculous.