Open Letter to John Dominic Crossan

For More Information See: Shroud of Turin Story
 

How well do some of us understand history?

At the time of the 1988 carbon 14 tests, when an Oxford researcher commented that anyone who now believed that the Shroud was real must be a member of the Flat Earth Society, there really was a Flat Earth Society.

The Flat Earth Society was, and still is, a worldwide organization with a few hundred members, headquartered in Lancaster, California. The worldview of its members is rooted in the tenets of the Universal Zetetic Society, which flourished in England in the 19^th century. Charles K. Johnson, its president in 1988, had, as he saw it, “reduce[d] truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable . . .” His history was right out of the King James Bible and from a collection of highly imaginative conspiracy theories, mostly in his head. “It’s the Church of England that’s taught that the world is a ball,” proclaimed Johnson. “George Washington, on the other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions.” What is true, at least, is that in the late nineteenth century, a Yorkshire Church of England vicar, the Rev. M. R. Bresher, was so horrified by the Zetetic movement that he went about England strenuously arguing that the world was certainly round, like a ball.

Johnson and his wife Marjory wanted to scientifically verify the claims of Samuel Birley Rowbotham, a founder of the Zetetic movement who wrote Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. To do so, they carefully examined the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and saw no curvature. This satisfied them that Rowbotham’s scientific conclusions were correct and that the world was indeed flat.

Marjory Johnson, who came to California from Australia, was so upset that her native country was called “down under” that she swore out an affidavit stating that she had never hung by her feet in Australia. Though she probably did not know it, she had provided an answer to a question that Augustine of Hippo had pondered in The City of God:  were there “men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours.”

Most of us – I hope most of us – know better. It doesn’t take much knowledge of science and history to know that the world isn’t flat. We might say that our own worldviews are better tuned to reality than those of the flat earthers. But, how much better do we know the truth?

There are some of us who believe that Columbus discovered America and demonstrated that the world was round. Perhaps, if we believe this; if this is part of our worldview, we are not as well educated about history as we should be – or perhaps we are victims of a bad education or cultural influences.

This misconception about Columbus is repeated every year throughout America when we celebrate Columbus Day. I remember a fifth grade class in which we reenacted Columbus’ grand return to Spain. One lucky student, picked to play Columbus, explained that the world was round to the amazed Ferdinand, Isabella, and assembled bishops wearing cardboard mitres. Just this year, a Columbus Day parade on television featured a float with a costumed Columbus pointing jubilantly at a giant paper-maché globe, forming his arms into a big circle above his head and then pointing at his brain – miming for all, ‘Surprise. The world is round.”

If we believe this about Columbus, if we believe that he discovered America and proved that the earth was round, it is also unlikely that we know that we have learned the wrong things. It has become part of our worldview. And unless we run into contradictions and are open to investigating them, we continue to believe it. And, it affects other things which we may believe.

Those of us who know better probably know that the Pythagoreans, as early as the 5^th century BCE recognized that the world was round. Aristotle, Euclid, and others knew it too.  In the second century CE, an entire school of astronomers and mathematicians in Alexandria, led by Ptolemy, knew the earth was round and even calculated the circumference of the earth with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. Possibly, we also learned that profoundly rearward Christian thinking suppressed, or at least forgot, that the world was known to be round. At least, that is what some historians tell us. For instance, the popular historian Daniel Boorstin, wrote in The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself:

Boorstin:  A Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia . . . afflicted the continent from AD 300 to at least 1300. During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers.

Another popular historian, William Manchester, in addressing the matter of the world being thought flat, wrote in A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance:

Manchester:  During the long medieval night, Hellenic and Egyptian learning was preserved by Muslim scholars in the Middle East, where it was discovered by early Renaissance humanists.

But this, too, is erroneous. Such wrongheaded thinking started with Antoine-Jean Letronne, an academic with strong anti-religious prejudices, a member of the Institut de France, the French Academy. In his 1834 work, On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers, he clearly misrepresented the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth. Washington Irving, at about the same time, wrote the amazingly popular The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. In it he convincingly tells the story of Columbus explaining to the incredulous Council of Salamanca that the world is not flat.  Historians have bought into this and even today propagate the myth.

While it may be true that a segment of the population believed the world was flat, it was not because of Christian thought and dogma but because of simple folklore, much of it pagan. Few who thought the world was flat ever read Topographia Christiana, the absurd biblically-based description of the world by Cosmos, a sixth-century monk. Those educated enough to read his works, did not take him seriously. Arguably, much of the population just didn’t think about the shape of the world at all – it wasn’t important to most people who lived in small communities and never ventured more than a few miles from home. Those that did think about the shape of the earth were educated and actually understood that the world was round.

Clement, Origen, Ambrose and feet-opposite-ours Augustine all thought that the world was round. Thomas Aquinas when he wrote Summa Theologica spoke of a globe at the center of a universe encircled by transparent spheres holding the heavenly bodies. Aquinas was much into angels – his worldview – and so he thought that angels moved the heavenly bodies about the earth. Isidore of Seville, once a custodian of the Sudarium and one of the most gifted, influential and best read writers of medieval Europe, expounded on the ancient view of a round world. His compendiums of classical learning were read throughout medieval Europe for many centuries. Dante wrote of “our hemisphere” in The Inferno.  The Venerable Bede described the earth as round “like a playground ball.” Roger Bacon, we know, also knew that the world was round. We can be confident that the world was well understood to be round in the medieval court of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain. It was a well-known fact throughout all of Christendom.

Malformed perspectives and misunderstood history shape our worldviews. It makes dark ages of the Middle Ages. It helps sustain a feeling about an era when theologians debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. It is unlikely that they did so. This false idea seems to have originated with Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848), the father of the great Prime Minister Benjamin D’Israeli. Isaac took great pleasure in lampooning the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas had wondered if an angel, in moving from one place to another, passes through the area in between. He also wondered if several angels could be in the same place at once. The myth of the dancing-on-a-pin question, it seems, was nothing more than D’Israeli’s comical restatement of Aquinas’ ruminations. 

Malformed history also fuels a picture of an age of naiveté in which it is easy to suppose that anyone in the medieval era could be duped into believing anything, so long as the Church fostered false information. It is easy to suppose – believe – imagine – that anyone could be duped into thinking relics were real when they were not. It translates to our modern worldview that we should be suspicious of all relics that had an historical footprint in medieval times. How right are we in being suspicious?

I suspect that much of the reason we don’t accept the possibility that the Shroud is real is because of its footprint in medieval Europe. Dom, just as you posit that Jesus was not buried because men like him who were crucified were usually not buried, even left on their crosses to be devoured by dogs, we can reconstruct a history of the Shroud from likely plausibility.  Should we not, however, try to stretch the envelope of our worldview, just as Aquinas did when he wondered if angels can go from one point to another without going through the in between? Should we not wonder that, if the Shroud is really 2000 years old and that it is now in Turin, that it had to pass through the in between, which was medieval Europe. History that is far more credible than much of the history understood about Columbus seems to bear this out. If that is so, then Constantinople from 944 to 1204 was between Edessa and Europe. Perhaps Edessa was in between Jerusalem and Constantinople.

Unless we know that our worldview of history is absolutely correct, we should not let it rule what we will consider. And the same must be said for science, particularly science used by history. Most of us, when hearing that something has been dated by some scientific method assume that the results are definitive. It is the gospel truth. It is science, after all.

How well do some of us understand scientific dating?

In 1965, Yale researchers discovered a map that was known to have been produced at least fifty years before Columbus’ first journey to America. The map, which showed Vinlandia Insula, the Island of Vinland or Newfoundland as it is known today, was part of a small medieval volume, the Tartar Relation.  The Tartar Relation had originally been bound together with the Vinland Map and another medieval volume, the Speculum Historiale. Wormhole alignments between the map and both volumes clearly showed that they had been all bound together at one time. The Tartar Relation volume was reliably dated by contemporaneous references to the Katatas people (Mongols) who dominated one end of the Eurasian land mass. There were also references to a certain bishop of Gada and Greenland that further corroborated the dating.

The map was significant because it supported archeological finds of Norse landings in Newfoundland as well as medieval Icelandic chronicles, the Graenlendinga Saga and Eirik’s Saga. The map was chronological proof that by the time Columbus made his famous journey of discovery, some people in Europe clearly knew about North America.

In 1972, Walter McCrone, who would later debunk the Shroud, examined some particles of ink and found titanium anatase, a material scientist discovered in the 1920s. He thus concluded that the map was a recent relic-forgery.

Several people doubted McCrone’s conclusion including George Painter, the curator of ancient documents of the British Museum. In 1985, physicist Thomas Cahill, of the University of California at Davis, analyzed the map using a newly developed process, Particle Induced X-ray Emission, and found only minute traces of titanium anatase, amounts that were consistent with what would be expected in the common green vitoral ink of the 15^th century.

As with the Shroud, McCrone had found the substances that he claimed were there. They are there. But they are there in amounts too miniscule to support his conclusions. Columbus, who did not discover that the world was round, did not discover America ahead of the Norsemen.

Yet, myths and doubts about the Vinland Map persist. Why? Because a scientist had proven it was a hoax and PBS television reported the results of McCrone’s findings. There was very little reporting about the Cahill’s later findings at Cal-Davis.

Carbon 14 testing is another scientific method that we intuitively trust. But field archeologists and historians, who regularly use radiocarbon dating, know only too well how anomalous radiocarbon dating results can be. They know that carbon 14 dating procedures are best used for testing organic archeological finds that have been left undisturbed and protected from the environment and people. That, of course, was not the case with the Shroud. Archeologists also know that it is important to obtain multiple samples at diverse places on an object to be tested, and then by statistical method determine a reasonable range of ages for the object.  That also, was not the case with the carbon 14 testing of the Shroud.

Yet, even with ideal conditions, carbon 14 results are sometimes highly erroneous. In one test, living snails – at least alive until just before testing – were found to be 26,000 years old. In another test, a newly killed seal was found to have died in 700 CE. Bone tools made from caribou ribs were once found to be twenty-seven thousand years old while a core sample from the innermost portion of the same caribou bone was found to be only 1,350 years old. There is the unexplained mystery of Mummy number 1770 at the Manchester Museum in England that has wrappings that date 800 to 1000 years younger than the body they contain. Other mummy samples have demonstrated this same peculiarity in which cloth wrappings are measured to be newer than the bodies they contain. This could only make sense if the mummies had been rewrapped hundreds of years later. Egyptologist cannot support such supposition. 

Sometimes, erroneous results in Carbon 14 testing remain inexplicable. In most cases adequate reasons for improbable dates are found.  Contamination, not properly cleaned from samples, can seriously affect results. Sometimes, newer or older matter is introduced into samples, as was the case with the caribou bones that had absorbed chemically rich ground water.

In the case of the Shroud, three independent laboratories used a recently developed Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) method for measuring the date. AMS has proven to be an accurate measurement technology that does not require that large samples be burned, as was necessary with older radiocarbon dating methods. The labs used control samples to ensure proper calibration. The few anomalous results encountered during calibration were thought to be few enough to be within appropriate margins of error. Unfortunately, the labs used identical testing protocols, thus it was really only one test performed three times. They also used an identical unproven cleaning procedure on three snippets of cloth; regrettably all cut from a single sample. The single cutting was taken from a corner of the Shroud, which was probably the most contaminated part of the entire old dirty piece of linen, and one that had been mended with new thread.

Knowing all too well about such problems, archeologist William Meacham wrote in an essay entitled, Radiocarbon Measurement and the Age of the Turin Shroud: Possibilities and Uncertainties:

Meacham:  No responsible field archaeologist would trust a single date, or a series of dates on a single feature, to settle a major historical issue, establish a site or cultural chronology, etc. No responsible radiocarbon scientist would claim that it was proven that all contaminants had been removed and that the dating range produced for a sample was without doubt its actual calendar age. The public and many non-specialist academics do seem to share the misconception that C-14 dates are absolute.

If we are to consider the authenticity of the Shroud, we must be willing to stretch the envelope of our worldview and we must be careful not to be selective with evidence on the basis of what fits our worldview.