Robert Price – Is The Shroud of Turin Real?

Robert Price – Is The Shroud of Turin Real?

Derek Lambert on MythVision asked Dr Robert Price what he thinks of the TS:

1:31
Dr Price, the Shroud of Turin is still used by many, not all, apologists and like-minded people who want to prove Jesus did exist. We see his imprint, there’s like blood stains and you could tell where someone was in there, that had a beard and didn’t he look like Jesus, like we all know what he looked like. What are your thoughts on the Shroud of Turin?

Price brings up it’s a fake like all other medieval relics.

1:59
Yeah I think it is a fake like all these medieval relics were. It suggest that isn’t to try to suggest people were trying to pull a wool over the eyes of their contemporaries. I mean there might have been. There’s always been plenty of that going on too. But it could be that such a thing was kind of was made as a sort of an icon. Just like for instance there’s a place a monastery off of route 46 in New Jersey where Iused to live. Holy face monastery and they had a copy an admitted duplicate of the shroud as as like an object of contemplation and devotion. The point not being a piece of cloth of course but the idea that Jesus had suffered for you and all that. Well nobody thought that’s the real thing they knew it well.

Just because a lot of fake things exist does not demonstrate something cannot be authentic. There exist a bunch of fake Rolexes, fake US dollars, fake images of Trump, and fake images of the Pope, but it doesn’t mean the authentic versions of these are fictional.

What is relevant is the evidence. The first one he mentions is the 1988 C-14 dating.

3:22
There’s no way to know anymore but it seems to me the carbon dating done with great care on this thing years ago now has settled the question.

Obviously he didn’t study much on the C-14 dating because “great care” was not done. I’ve argued 12 protocol violations can be identified at:
viewtopic.php?p=1113255#p1113255

4:24
That it’s the thing stems from the 14th century and which just happens to be the same century in which the pope produced the artist who confessed to having made it. It meshes perfectly with the carbon dating for pete’s sake.

I’ve addressed the d’Arcis memo at:
viewtopic.php?p=1110516#p1110516

Since the C-14 dating is suspect and the d’Arcis memo is suspect, their alignment of dates fundamentally has no meaning. Only if both the C-14 dating is valid and the d’Arcis memo is genuine would it be corroborating evidence with each other.

4:31
Also Joseph McCrone, I think his name is, is a great probably the greatest authority on pigments and paint. And because of course you use that in analyzing great works of art and all that from the past. And he says it the stains on the shroud of the blood of Jesus is red paint. It’s red ochre I think he says. And if it were blood it would not retain its color and it wouldn’t look red after all these years.

It’s Walter McCrone, not Joseph McCrone.

I addressed McCrone’s claims at:
viewtopic.php?p=1118417#p1118417

5:19
I mean back to the time of Jesus people have said, oh yes but there are microscopic deposits from plants that only existed in the middle east. Well I don’t care you can explain that a bunch of waste but that doesn’t trump carbon dating.

Since the C-14 dating is not valid, then Price should care about all the evidence for the authenticity.

5:34
That it’s like once you start attacking the methodology of science as they do with uh creationism right they have to to start fudging things and getting into pseudoscience.

Actually, it was the C-14 scientists that were fudging things. Obviously they thew away some of their raw data in order to skew their results. And they tried to hide this since they did not release their raw data until Casabianca went to court for them to release it in 2017.

6:17
And did the ancients have the ability to create an image like this that seems to be negative in some way? I forget all the details.

Even if a medieval forger could create a negative (which is disputable), why would he even do it? How did he even conceptualize what is a negative? How did he confirm it was a negative? Why paint a negative when it would be centuries afterwards when people recognize it’s a negative? Why even bother to do it even if he was centuries ahead of his time? Why did he not create another other negative images? Why is nobody in the art or photography community recognizing the shroud as the first photographic negative artwork?

6:24
Well yeah people have done it with known ancient methods, including I’m thinking of all these different guys named Joe, the one that does on the committee for the scientific investigation the paranormal. Oh good god I can’t believe it he’s been a friend of mine for years I can’t think of his last name.

His name is Joe Nickell.

6:54
There’s another interesting theory that if this were really the impression made by a corpse. The fact that it has wounds like those ascribed to Jesus could mean that this was a print taken of a medieval flagellant. You know these guys that walked around in the time of the black plague and all that lashing themselves to atone for the sins. That they figured had brought on the plague as a punishment from god.

I’ve never heard it anywhere else but that makes a lot of sense too. It’s the right historical period you would have this result.

Yes, that is a unique theory, but it doesn’t match up with the evidence. Not only would he have done self-flagellation, but also self-crowning of thorns, self-side wound, and self-crucifixion. It also does not account for how the body image got there, plus a host of unanswered questions.

5:53
The drops of blood on the forehead say chrown of thorns you wouldn’t have with an imposed cloth. You wouldn’t have discrete drops anymore visible.

But it’s acceptable if someone performed self-flagellation?

7:46
And of course oh yeah one other thing that shroud apologists like to say is that the carbon dating can be disregarded because there are patches on the shroud from when it was nearly consumed in a fire. Which is known that’s certainly true and you can even tell where the patches are very clearly. And they said the scientists were so stupid that they took samples to test from the obvious patches. Get out of here that’s just ridiculous.

No, the patch where the C-14 sample was taken was not the same patch from the 1532 fire repair. So, that’s a strawman argument.

8:25
It’s like more of what Albert Cchweitzer called the crooked and fragile thinking of christian apologetics.

With Price’s weak and fallacious arguments, who’s the one with the crooked and fragile thinking?

https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1127764#p1127764