A Dozen Years Of Shroud Science Group

Founded in 2002 by Mario Latendresse and coordinated by the author from 2005, the SSG (Shroud Science Group on Yahoo!) is currently a group of 147 scholars mostly from USA, composed of academics, researchers and scholars. In September 2002, pushed by the author, Emanuela Marinelli formed a mailing list named SDP (Shroud Debate Project), consisting of a dozen Shroud scholars, that began a scientific discussion on open issues related to the most important Relic of Christianity. After a rich exchange of information, and following a proposal by Mario Latendresse, the leaders of SDP (Emanuela Marinelli, Raymond Rogers and the author) decided to disband SDP to form a new private group in December 2002, named SSG. From December 2002 to April 2014 more than 25000 messages have been exchanged and among them, there are interesting scientific information on body image, bloodstains, pollen, coins and many other topics, still open, with reference to studies on the Turin Shroud. The group is composed of several academics from around the world, researchers, scholars and it has the advantage of presenting a remarkable multidisciplinary, necessary for Shroud studies. In 2005 the group published a paper on the characteristics of the Shroud, to be considered for the study of the body image formation (Ref. 1). In 2008 it organized an " International Conference The Shroud of Turin: Perspectives on a Multifaceted Enigma," in Columbus, Ohio. Many interesting results about the Relic have been obtained from the rich discussion of SSG and from the work of SSG members. Among them it must not forgotten the “Doubly superficiality” body image (Ref. 2); the first dating after the 1988 radiocarbon results made by R. Rogers (Ref. 3) who demonstrated that the Shroud is much older than the Medieval date obtained in 1988; the mechanical and opto-chemical dating (Refs. 4, 5) that determined a date of the Shroud (33 B.C. ±250 years at 95% confidence level) compatible with the age in which Jesus Christ lived in Palestine; some new hypotheses of body image formation like those of the author and of Paolo Di Lazzaro (Refs. 6, 7). This paper describes in the details the most important results published by SSG members in this dozen years also yielded by the rich discussions among the Group members who frequently offered interesting cues and comments that helped the authors in their researches.