Bad day at the office?
@Chris Collins: I bet he wishes he hadn't bothered coming to work that day.
As for the Shroud: It's hard to know what evidence would be definitive enough to change either sides' opinion. The cotton is too new? Medieval repair job. The cotton actually dates to 33AD? The forger used an old cloth. The cloth has medieval human DNA? Somebody handling it in the 13th C left fingerprints. The cloth has seeds only found in the middle east? Somebody took it with them on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
The only things we can say for sure about the Shroud, pro and con, are:
Con: It has no provenance, suddenly appearing in the historical record at about the same time that a massive number of known fake religious items were created. If the shroud were any conventional item like a book, map, or painting, that lack of provenance would set off alarm bells in the head of any antiquarian until the Missing Millennium could be accounted for.
Pro: If it is a fake, it's a damn good one that's withstood a lot of scrutiny. It's a lot better than the typical chips off the old cross and saints' finger bones in jars that were more or less mass produced in the age of cathedral building. Whoever did it went to a lot more trouble than the average scam artist who expected to be long gone before his fake was discovered.
Unfortunately, real life is more complicated than some silly Sherlock Holmes story, where the villain conveniently has mud on his boots that is found in only one place in the country, or smokes a blend of tobacco only found in a certain corner of Istanbul. If Holmes ever met a villain who cleaned his boots and smoked Benson and Hedges, he'd be stumped.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
