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So Why Does The Taylorsville UMC Website Have A Shroud Page?
A Message From Jeffrey L. Taylor, Ph.D.
Let me be perfectly clear, modern science will never be able to prove that the Shroud of Turin was once the vburial cloth of Yehoshuah bar Yosef (i.e. Jesus the Christ). That being said, the Shroud still remain one of the greatest unsolved mysteries under active investigation by some of the top scientific minds in the modern world. To this date no one has successfully proposed a theory on the formation of the Shroud's image that accounts for all the image's properties. This also means that the best scientists today have yet to reproduce an image identical in properties to the image on the Shroud.
I am not an expert on the Shroud, but I am an expert in materials characterization via molecular spectroscopy (how light interacts with different chemical substances). My particular area of interest is fluorescence spectroscopy. Think back to the 1970's "black light" posters that glowed under ultra-violet light. My role in Shroud research was as a minor spectroscopy consultancy way back in 1979 when the Vatican permitted the first scientific research on the Shroud.
Back then one of the most promising theories on Shroud image production was a theory called "faint scorch". This theory said the image was produced by heating a metal statue of a man and wrapping the linen cloth around the hot metal. The hot metal would then faintly darken the cloth by slightly scorching (burning) the material much the same way a hot iron burns clothes. The degree of scorching would be dependent on the distance of the cloth from the hot metal. This was one of the best theories, at the time, to account for the three dimensional and photo negative properties of the image on the Shroud.
Scorching any type of fabric causes the production of chemical compounds called polyaromatic hydrocarbons. These compounds are highly fluorescent and are a diagnostic "fingerprint" of burned fabric. The image on the Shroud has no fluorescent signature whatsoever; therefore, the "faint scorch" theory was ruled out.
While my role was a very minor one, it did make me a "fan" for 40 some odd years of Shroud research. There is a copious amount of Shroud research and unfortunately a lot of it is sensationalist and poorly done. Because the Shroud is a religious artifact, much of the "science" is biased on either side. The mainstream media tends to concentrate on data that disproves the authenticity of the Shroud. The information I provide here is hopefully balanced and illuminating.
Enjoy!!!
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This page does not represent a comprehensive treatment of all Shroud of Turin data. It is only a sampling of some of the things that I find interesting. The Shroud of Turin website (shroud.com) still remains the single largest comprehensive repository for Shroud information and publications. It archives over 40 years of Shroud scientific research and history. The button below will link you to this amazing site.