The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [55]
Though he listened carefully to the arguments Middagh and Morelli were making, Castle was still not 100 percent convinced. He made a mental note that Rogers’s change of heart would have been more convincing if he had done his studies immediately after the 1988 carbon tests were announced, not after he knew he had cancer and just before he died.
Considering the carbon-dating discussion over for now, Castle looked through the notes he had taken in his telephone discussion with Gabrielli. “What about this medieval letter Bishop Pierre d’Arcis wrote to the pope in 1389, claiming the Shroud was a painting and that he knew who the artist was?”
“Scholars have argued the letter was motivated by jealousy and money more than an honest desire to state the truth about the authenticity of the Shroud,” Middagh explained. “At the time the letter was written, Pierre d’Arcis was the bishop of Troyes and the Shroud was being exhibited in the nearby town of Lirey. Pierre d’Arcis did not like the pilgrims with their bags of gold going to a neighboring town and bypassing him. I’m pretty sure the letter might never have been written if the Shroud had been shown in Troyes.”
Castle, no stranger to charging fees, appreciated the motive.
“Besides, we know the image on the Shroud was not painted,” Middagh said. “The Shroud of Turin Research Project in 1978 tested on linen every painter’s pigment known to have been used before 1532. Extensive tests were conducted on the samples to see how the pigments would have suffered the massive fire of that year. The medieval paints were chemically modified in fire and would have been washed away in the water that was used to extinguish the fire. Medieval paints were water-soluble and the 1978 STURP tests showed that no part of the image currently on the Shroud is soluble in water.”
Castle was beginning to conclude that for every argument the skeptics produced about the Shroud, the believers managed to concoct a response. He wondered if he would ever get to the bottom of the debate with definitive scientific proof, one way or the other. It amused Castle, but in a way the case for the authenticity of the Shroud was a lot like the question about God’s existence. Logic and science were not going to prove the Shroud was authentic, but he wondered if logic and science might end up disproving the authenticity of the Shroud. That’s what so fascinated Castle about the work Gabrielli was proposing to do.
“So, you are convinced the Shroud was not painted?” Castle asked Middagh.
“Yes, I am,” Middagh answered. “The image does not penetrate into the linen fibers the way you would expect paint to penetrate the cloth. At best, the image is one fiber deep, almost as if the image lies on top of the linen fibers. No fibers are cemented together, as you would expect paint to do, and the image does not cross fibers. The image areas are very brittle, with the image on the surface like what you would expect from material that had oxidized by dehydration. All the colored fibers are evenly colored such that an exposed fiber is either colored or not colored. There is no density of coloration on the fibers. What shading is apparent comes from the number of colored fibers we observe microscopically in any given unit area of the Shroud, not from a deeper or denser coloration of the fibers. The colored fibers are very uniformly colored. None of these observations are what we would expect if an artist had painted the image on the linen. The body image rests only on the very top of the fibers. The way the image is placed on the Shroud is consistent throughout—on the full-body dorsal image that resulted from the