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During a 1999 conference of the Missouri Botanical Society in St Louis,
Missouri, Avinoam Danin, a botany professor at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem and a leading authority on the flora of Israel, along with Uri Baruch,
a pollen specialist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported that the
combination of pollen spores lodged in the Shroud’s surface, as well as floral
images mysteriously “imprinted” on the cloth, could only have come from plants
growing in a restricted area around Jerusalem. How floral images came to be on
the cloth is as big a mystery as are the body images.
Pollen identification is a common method used in criminal forensics to determine
where an object has been geographically. Max Frei, a Zurich criminologist, had
previously identified a total of 58 different pollens on the Shroud. These
pollens are native to areas around 1) the Dead Sea and the Negev, 2) the
Anatolian Steppe of central and western Turkey, 3) the immediate environs of
Constantinople, and 4) Western Europe. Danin and Baruch confirmed much of Frei’s
work. They also confirmed some previous floral image identifications by Oswald
Sheuermann, a German physicist, and Alan Whanger, a professor at Duke
University.
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The
scientific study of the Turin shroud is like a microcosm of the
scientific search for God: it does more to inflame any debate than
settle it.”
It is
simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was
made.”
Scientist-Journalist Philip Ball Nature, that most prestigious of scientific journals, that once had bragging rights to claim that the Shroud was fake, responding to new, peer-reviewed studies that discredit the carbon 14 dating and show that the Shroud could be authentic. WHAT WE KNOW IN 2005
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