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Shroud of Turin stirs new controversy
Posted on Sunday, August 24, 2008 (CDT) by Thoth
 The tie that binds John and Rebecca Jackson is about 4 feet by 14 feet, woven of herringbone twill linen. It once led to their romance; years later, it still dominates their thoughts and fills their conversations. It brought Rebecca, an Orthodox Jew, to the Catholic Church; it led John to suspend himself from an 8-foot-tall cross to study how blood might have stained the cloth. Together, the two have committed to memory every crease, scorch mark and unexplained stain in their years-long pursuit of the mystery:
Is the Shroud of Turin -- which allegedly bears the image of a crucifixion victim -- the burial cloth of Jesus? In 1988, science seemed to put that question to rest.
Radiocarbon dating by three separate laboratories showed that the shroud originated in the Middle Ages, leaving the "shroud crowd" reeling. Shroud skeptics responded, "We told you so." The Catholic Church admitted that it could not be authentic. Many scientists backed away.
But John
Jackson, one of the shroud's most prominent researchers, was among
those who insisted that the results made no sense. Too much else about
the shroud, they said, including characteristics of the cloth and
details in the image, suggested that it was much older.
Twenty years later,
Jackson, 62, is getting his chance to challenge the radiocarbon dating.
Oxford University, which participated in the original radiocarbon
testing, has agreed to work with him in reconsidering the age of the
shroud.
If the challenge is
successful, Jackson hopes to be allowed to reexamine the shroud, which
is owned by the Vatican and stored in a protective chamber in the
Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.
Jackson, a physicist who
teaches at the University of Colorado, hypothesizes that contamination
of the cloth by elevated levels of carbon monoxide skewed the 1988
carbon-14 dating by 1,300 years.
"It's the radiocarbon date
that to our minds is like a square peg in a round hole. It's not
fitting properly, and the question is why," he said.
On that point, Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, seems to agree.
"There is a lot of other
evidence that suggests to many that the shroud is older than the
radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly needed,"
says a statement on his website. "Only by doing this will people be
able to arrive at a coherent history of the shroud which takes into
account and explains all of the available scientific and historical
information."
Steven Schafersman, a
geologist who maintains a website skeptical about the shroud, dismisses
the effort as one that's bound to fail.
"He's had other ideas, but
they've all been shot down, and this one will be shot down too," he
said of Jackson. "Ordinary people know this is just a relic."
But others are challenging the radiocarbon date.
At a conference sponsored
by the Shroud Science Group at Ohio State University this weekend, the
Los Alamos National Laboratory presented findings that the 1988 test
results were flawed because the samples tested came from a portion of
cloth that may have been added to the shroud during medieval repairs.
The shroud's historical
record dates back to 1349, when a French knight wrote to the pope of
his possession of a cloth he described as the burial shroud of Christ.
In 1978, a team of scientists led by Jackson conducted a series of
tests on the shroud, including X-rays and chemical analyses. They
concluded that the shroud was not painted, dyed or stained and that the
blood stains were real. But those findings did little to quell the
controversy surrounding the shroud.
Many believe that Jesus
imprinted his image on his burial cloth during his resurrection, and
others think that the shroud is the authentic burial cloth but that the
image was formed by natural processes. Skeptics maintain that the
shroud is a forgery created by a medieval artist seeking to display it
to relic-hungry pilgrims. The debate often is bitter; each side accuses
the other of twisting facts and ignoring evidence that doesn't fit its
view.
In this world, Jackson has long been a central figure.
A former professor at the
Air Force Academy and scientist at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory,
Jackson holds a doctorate in physics from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate
School. Born and raised in Denver, he also is a devout Catholic who has
been transfixed by the shroud since he first saw its image at age 13.
"If you love Christ, why
wouldn't you want to explore the possibility that you have an artifact
of his material existence on Earth?" he said, adding that his faith
isn't incompatible with his scientific training: "How I think about the
shroud comes from the shroud. It's not, 'Gee, I'm a Christian, so I'll
force it to be what I want it to be.' That's not scientific logic."
Whereas Jackson has focused single-mindedly on the shroud for 35 years, his wife is a relative newcomer.
Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
Rebecca Jackson, now 60, was 34 when she impulsively decided to enlist
in the Army and ended up at Ft. Carson, near Colorado Springs, as a
cook. She converted to Christianity, a religion she said began to
appeal to her as a teenager.
In 1990, she was watching a
documentary on the shroud when it occurred to her that the image of the
man's face looked like her grandfather's. She tracked down Jackson, who
had appeared in the film and also lived in Colorado Springs, to talk
about her reaction. Their shared interest in the shroud led to a
relationship between the soft-spoken academic and the effusive woman,
and her religious conversion followed. Together, they give speeches
worldwide and run the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado, with their
research funded mostly by donations.
Twice a week, John Jackson
works with a team of volunteer researchers in his Colorado Springs
laboratory. Stretched across one wall is a life-size photo of the
shroud; on a table is the Styrofoam figure of a man, dubbed Roger, an
approximation of Jesus' body in his tomb. Jackson has conducted
research on the shroud's crease marks, image formation and how blood
flows from a crucified body, which he studied by suspending his own
body from a cross.
Keith Propp, 55, has worked
with Jackson for the last 23 years. "It's like we're on an
archaeological expedition that's not finished. I'm not sure we'll ever
be truly finished," he said. "A lot of the pleasure is in the journey
itself."
These days, the journey focuses on the radiocarbon issue -- working to prepare samples for evaluation at Oxford.
"If we get to the point
where we believe we have a viable hypothesis that works in the lab,
then we have scientific grounds to go to Turin and say, 'Here's what we
think has happened to the shroud. These are the effects we need to look
for. Can we please have access?' " said Jackson, who does not subscribe
to the theory that the tested sample was different than the rest of the
shroud.
Though Ramsey, of Oxford,
agreed to collaborate, he has said that he doesn't believe
contamination would have had much effect. So far, Jackson's initial
tests have shown no significant reaction. But the team has yet to
reproduce the specific storage conditions of the shroud, Ramsey noted.
Because his laboratory is
small, with only one reaction chamber in which to prepare the samples,
Jackson said, it could take many months to complete the experiment.
But to a man who has
already spent 35 years on the subject, that may not be so long. "We'll
do what we have to do to get the information we need," he said.
Copyright: Los Angeles Times
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