Sir, - You report (April 1st) that a BBC programme, The Body in Question, will discuss "the impact on Christianity if the bones of Christ were ever discovered".
The programme makers and all concerned with this endeavour to find Christ's bones ought to study the facts on the Turin Shroud as established by science. Science, in the shape of the carbon dating test to determine the age of the shroud, appeared to establish that the shroud image was a forgery, and this claim has been too widely accepted.
Ian Wilson, a respected historian on the shroud, in his book, Holy Faces, Secret Places, published in 1991, sets out a succession of carbon dating failures. He also describes a test, carried out after the carbon dating of the shroud, on the competence of the carbon dating experts themselves. Out of the 38 teams which agreed to take part, seven passed.
So much for carbon dating. In his earlier book. The Turin Shroud, published in 1978, Wilson describes an experiment carried out on the image by a team of scientists working for the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Their specialism was processing pictures of planet surfaces sent back to earth by space probes. These pictures reached the earth as radiated images, not photographs. They were then placed in a "computer" called a VP8 Image Analyser. This produced a 3D effect, helpful in estimating heights and depths on a planet's surface. Note, this 3D effect can only be obtained with an image caused by radiation.
One of the team placed a transparency of the shroud image in this "computer" and it came up 3D. For him this was an emotional experience equal to that of Seconds Pia, the discoverer of the image in 1898. The experiment demonstrated that the shroud image had been caused by a burst of radiation emitted from inside a body which at the time was in a state of rigor mortis.
The seekers after Christ's bones will need a lot of luck. Yours, etc.,
Turvey Woods, Donabate,
Co Dublin.