Wednesday, June 1, 2016

"Editorial and Contents," Shroud of Turin News, May 2016

Shroud of Turin News - May 2016
© Stephen E. Jones
[1]

[Previous: April 2016, part #4] [Next: May 2016, part #2]

This is the "Editorial and Contents," part #1 of the May 2016 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. Following this editorial, I will add excerpts from Shroud-related April/May 2016 news articles in separate posts, linked back to this post, with the articles' words in bold to distinguish them from mine. Click on a link below to go to that article. Articles not yet linked are planned to be commented on in this issue.

Contents:
Editorial
"New Study: The Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo Covered the Same Person"
"The Shroud of Turin, Authenticated Again"


Editorial. Rex Morgan's Shroud News: My scanning and word-processing of issues of Rex Morgan's Shroud News and emailing them to Barrie Schwortz for him to convert to PDF and add to his online Shroud News archive, continued in May up to issue #50, December 1988 [Right (enlarge)], which is a bumper issue of 68 pages, mostly about the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud as "mediaeval ... AD 1260-1390"[2]. Issues are up to issue #36, August 1986, in that archive, but Barrie had advised me there will be a Shroud.com update today, 1 June (Colorado time-which is 14 hours behind my Perth time) [which there was], and that will [and did] include issue #50 (less six pages which I will send him by 4 June).

Topic index: I had not found the time to add any more of my old posts to my Topic Index in May, so it is still up to and including my post of 28 March 2012.

Posts: In May, I blogged only 4 (time-consuming) posts: "Editorial and Contents": Shroud of Turin News - April 2016; "Has Science Proven the Shroud of Turin to Be a Medieval Forgery? (1)": Shroud of Turin News - April 2016; "Has Science Proven the Shroud of Turin to Be a Medieval Forgery? (2)": Shroud of Turin News - April 2016; and "The Shroud of Oviedo: A Legendary Cloth Connected to the Death of Jesus" (2): Shroud of Turin News - April 2016. As mentioned in "My review of `The Keramion, Lost and Found: A Journey to the Face of God' (2016) by Philip E. Dayvault" I am still working on a review of Dayvault's book to be posted on Amazon.com [Abandoned-see 10Jul16].

My radiocarbon dating hacker theory: In May Joe Marino emailed me the following (name replaced with "AN" by me):

"I've been in contact with AN about the C-14 issue and he has given me his okay to mention something we discussed to you, which is interesting in light of your 10 part series about a possible hacking. He's only told a few people and never wrote about it in any of his books because he can't prove anything. He said that not long after the C-14 dating--he thinks it was probably around April 1989, he received a call about 1:30 in the morning. The (male)person, who did not apologize for calling so late, sounded distraught. The person told AN he had been involved in falsifying the results of the 1988 dating. AN thought the accent might have been German and thought the person was in his 40s but wasn't sure because of the accent and emotional nature of the call. The person would not reveal his name (the person claimed it wasn't important) or where he was calling from. He kept asking AN if he would forgive him for having done a disservice to humanity. The person even mentioned the word `espionage' in relation to the event. The only detail he gave about the procedure was saying that the real Shroud sample was thrown in the trash. That last detail, of course, doesn't fit with a computer hacking, but other details do fit with your description of Koch. AN said the person said he also planned to call other Shroud researchers, but as far as we know, no one ever did receive a call. AN has wondered over the years whether the call itself could have been a fraud, but he is firm that the person sounded distraught to the point that AN said he wouldn't have been surprised if the guy would have said `I've got a gun and I'm going to shoot myself.' Even now, AN just isn't sure what to think. But I know you'll find this interesting one way or the other."
I regard this as highly significant, first because it shows that my hacker theory is starting to be taken seriously by leading Shroud pro- authenticists. Not only by Joe Marino, but also by AN, who (as indicated by "any of his books") is a well-known pro-authenticist author. For him to offer new evidence for my hacker theory is to me as good as it gets! Second, as I replied to Joe, "because of the unusual word `espionage,' I believe it was Koch":
"The caller being German does fit Karl Koch but him throwing the Shroud sample in the trash does not. There is no doubt that the Shroud sample was dated, because the dating was not blind and the Shroud has a distinctive weave. However, it could have been a metaphor for him having `trashed' the Shroud. The word `espionage' is very significant because that was what the hackers were charged with and were granted amnesty for under then West German law. That word has, as far as I know, never been used of the Shroud dating. I only found it in books about the West German hacker ring who were prosecuted in 1988 for selling computer secrets to the USSR. Koch became a Christian in late 1988 / early 1989, and could have obtained AN's name from his ... book `...'. It would have been more certainly Koch if he had mentioned hacking. But because of the unusual word `espionage,' I believe it was Koch."
I will comment on this further in part #8 of my "The 1260-1390 radiocarbon date of the Turin Shroud was the result of a computer hacking" which is next in that series and will be about Karl Koch. In fact I will make part #8 my very next post!

Other news: In May Joe Marino also emailed me a PDF (which `weighed' 12.5 Mb) of a 1989 sociology PhD thesis, titled, "The socio-politic of a relic: carbon dating the Turin Shroud," by a H. Laverdiere. She is Hélène Laverdière, now a Canadian MP [Left: Twitter]. In Joe's words,

"It's 291 pages long! ... It looks like a real gold mine. How in the world did this go unnoticed since 1989?"
I am only part way through it, but from what I have read, it probably is not going to be either pro- or anti-authenticity. However, I posted this quote from an interview she had with the then British Museum's Dr. Michael Tite, the coordinator of the dating, in a comment under one of my posts, where Tite admits that there was nothing in it for the Vatican to have the Shroud dated, because even if it did date 1st century, extreme anti-authenticists like him would still not accept that the Shroud was authentic:
"`... there is no way I can see that the Vatican real interest to have it [the Shroud] authenticated at all really. Well I can't see the interest of the Vatican and Turin particularly to have it done. Well I mean you can't authenticate it. All you can do it's prove it is a fake... there is only one wrong date, it's the one which is 'not 0' because the other one doesn't prove anything... it could still be a 12th Century forgery using a 0 aged cloth.' (Tite, interview)" ("The Socio-Politic of a Relic: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Submitted by H. Laverdiere for the degree of PhD of the University of Bath 1989, p.27)
The PDF can be downloaded from the University of Bath at the above link, but Joe said the site "was a bit difficult to navigate." As I didn't relish emailing a 12.5 Mb PDF to anyone who requested a copy, I emailed Ms Laverdiere over two weeks ago, asking could she put her thesis on her website for Shroudies to download? But apart from an email of acknowledgement from one of her assistants, Ms Laverdiere herself has not responded. Then, while writing this, I discovered that I could copy the PDF to my Dropbox public folder, and then post a link to it so that anyone can download it, which I have now done. To download the PDF, click on, "Laverdiere Socio-Politic of a Relic Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud." I tested it and the download worked for me. Joe Marino has emailed me since that it also worked for him.

Pageviews: At midnight on 31st May, Google Analytics [Below (enlarge)] gave this blog's "Pageviews all time history" as 536,240 and "Pageviews last month" as 11,339. It also gave the most viewed posts for the month as: "The Shroud of Turin: 2.6. The other marks (5): Coins over eyes," May 10, 2013 - 180; "Has Science Proven the Shroud of Turin to Be a Medieval Forgery? (1)," May 7, 2016 - 154; "The Shroud of Turin: 3.6. The man on the Shroud and Jesus were crucified," Dec 2, 2013 - 103; "Has Science Proven the Shroud of Turin to Be a Medieval Forgery? (2)," May 19, 2016 - 74 and "Re: Shroud blood ... types as AB ... aged blood always types as AB, so the significance of this ... is unclear," Mar 18, 2011 - 65.

Continued in part #2 of this May 2016 issue of my Shroud of Turin News.


Notes:
1. This post is copyright. Permission is granted to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its subject heading, its date, and a hyperlink back to it. [return]
2. Damon, P.E., 1989, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16th February, pp.611-615, 611. [return]

Posted: 1 June 2016. Updated: 13 April 2021.

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