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SEP 23- SEP 30, 2014

Former City Engineer at Shroud of Turin Conference Skurka Says 'Radiocarbon Dating is Proof of Christ's Resurrection!'

By Mike Hudson

September 23, 2014

Jeffrey Skurka, one of the leading authorities on the Shroud.

The Shroud of Turin, believed by skeptics to be a witless13th Century forgery and by other believers to be the true Holy Grail, where water and the Blood of Christ are truly mixed, remains one of the most controversial objects in the history of mankind.

Former Niagara Falls City Engineer Jeffrey Skurka has been on a 20-year quest to find the truth. And he believes he has been successful. He will be speaking on the subject on Sunday, Oct. 5, at 1 p. m. at the Joylan Theatre in Springville, and again at the International Shroud of Turin Conference in St Louis, Oct. 9 – 12th.

He calls his presentation, "The Shroud of Turin and Nuclear Physics: Why the Radiocarbon Dating Results is Proof of the Resurrection!"

The Shroud is an undoubtedly old piece of woven cloth, measuring just under 15 feet in length and about 4.5 feet across, that bears the full length image of a naked man. The individual conforms in appearance to conventional representations of Jesus of Nazareth and appears to bear wounds similar to those Jesus received before the passion and during his crucifixion, as described in the New Testament.

According to former Nature editor Phillip Ball, "it's fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever. Not least, the nature of the image and how it was fixed on the cloth remain deeply puzzling."

But a series of radiocarbon tests performed in 1988 by the University of Oxford, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona agreed that the cloth was produced during the Middle Ages sometime between 1260 and 1390 and therefore could not have any connection with the historical Jesus.

The negative of the photograph of the Shroud shows clearly the image of what some believe is the body of Jesus Christ.

Soon, a dissenting view was heard from scientist R.N. Rogers of the Los Alamos Laboratories and the University of California. In a 2004 paper published by Thermochimia Acta, a leading platform for high quality, peer reviewed scientific papers, Rogers postulated that exposure to radiation at some time during its history could have skewed the radiocarbon date, and made the Shroud appear to be of much more recent vintage that it actually is.

Skurka's own theory takes Rogers' scientific paper one step beyond, theorizing that the act of Christ's "resurrection to a glorified body," physically involved some sort of what we would call today a nuclear event. And that the effect of this on the cloth would result in a skewed radiocarbon reading.

Certainly, radiocarbon dates have been known to be wrong. In Native American archeology, sites lying in close proximity to coal or iron ore deposits – both of which produce low levels of radioactivity – have resulted in comical readings. And, Rogers wrote, that storage in basements or tombs where radon is present have produced similar results.

One radio-carbon test that Skurka was directly involved in showed a radio-carbon test that was 400 years off the true, known date of a book owned by a man named George Mott.

Skurka pointed out, "The hill where George Mott's house was in Crown Point/ Hamlet of Ironville which has iron ore deposits that are permanently magnetized causing the bogus dating. These tests are clearly fallible."

The history of the Shroud is fairly well documented. It was in the possession of the family of Geoffroi de Charney, a member of the Knights Templar, who, family tradition asserts, brought it back to France with him from Jerusalem sometime prior to his arrest, with all other known Templars, on Friday, Oct. 13, 1307.

"It has been suggested that Geoffroi de Charnay was the great nephew of Geoffrio de Charney, the Commander of Normandy that was burnt at the stake in 1314 with Jaques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar," Skurka points out, as an historical aside, "but no historical family connection has been confirmed. There was a lot of inter marrying between the noble families and a family tree would be almost 700 years old."

Charged with heresy, sodomy, blasphemy and witchcraft, de Charnay and his comrades were imprisoned and eventually burned at the stake.

Possession of the Shroud passed to his great nephew, also named Geoffroi de Charnay, an author and knight, who was killed in battle in 1356. His widow, Jeanne de Vergy first publicly exhibited the artifact and it was later bequeathed to the House of Savoy, which placed it in a specially built chapel in Turin.

"In my view, the radiocarbon date represents evidential proof of the glorified resurrection of the body of Christ," Skurka told the Niagara Falls Reporter. "What I'm trying to do is follow the objective, scientific data wherever it may lead as the guiding factor in pursuit of the truth."

Skurka likens the event to Spontaneous Human Combustion, another controversial and esoteric area of study. A 1998 experiment he conducted with the late author M. Sue Benford found that the dust jacket of a book published in 1976 and collected at the scene of an incidence of Spontaneous Human Combustion returned a radiocarbon date of 2400 AD.

"There were also other mysteries unexplained anomalies reported throughout the house, as are among other SHC fire scenes, which in clear evidence of neutron activation which is responsible for the increased mass of carbon-14 that was measured in 1998. I will give examples of these during the presentation and explain why they happened which makes the presentation fun," Skurka added.

"But in any event, the book obviously didn't come from the future," Skurka added. "Something happened to it, something in connection with the event that skewed the radiocarbon date to make it appear as though it had."

Skurka, who has viewed the Shroud, and twice visited various obscure and "mystical locations" in France traditionally associated with the history of the Knights Templar, said that his quest will not end until he gets to the bottom of the matter.

"The Shroud may be the most studied and analyzed object in the history of the world," he said. "And we still don't know what it is.

"But if my hypothesis is correct, I do know why the superficial body image is on the surface of the cloth. It was 'Superparamagnetism' just before the resurrection event that left a residual alignment of the unpaired electron spin in the hydrogen and possibly even the nitrogen atoms in the cloth. It's also this Superparamagnetism which is responsible for the shrunken skulls of George Mott and Mary Reeser and is what gives my hypothesis credibility.

"This alignment of the electron spin is also what is giving the body image the properties of being like a hologram, which is normally created with constructive/destructive interference from the monochromatic light of a LASER, and the other optical anomalies known about the image.

Skurka is also at work writing a trilogy about the Knight Templars, "A Knights Quest," "The Wisdom of Solomon" and the "Resurrection."

"I call them unscrewing the DaVinci Code," he said.

The Shroud of Turin

 

 

 

 

 

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