Word: clothing
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Because she is such a calming presence, always a kind word, always a candy bowl on her desk, a cold cloth for the forehead, Betty Currie has been painted through this winter of scandal as a simple, sanctified sister of mercy. But she is also a puzzle, with a resume and reflexes that speak to lessons learned in 40 years of bureaucratic trench warfare. Is she too loyal ever to betray the President? Is she too honest ever to shade the truth? Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton are each hoping that they know which side she will come down...
...most notably a chronology that appears to track the shroud back long before 1260. Wilson finds several European references to what appears to be the shroud in the early 1200s. But more important, he seems, through historical detective work, to have connected it to something called the Edessa Cloth. A historically well-documented object of reverence in Constantinople for 350 years, the cloth disappeared when the Crusaders plundered the city in 1204. Most Byzantine witnesses described it as being a mystically precise likeness of Jesus' head. But Wilson cites a 13th century memoir by a French soldier, housed...
TAINTED SAMPLES? The strongest and most obvious technical critique of the radiocarbon dating, springing from an indisputable weakness in the testing procedure, is that since all three labs' specimens came from a single swatch of cloth, all would be affected if the swatch were atypical or contaminated. The mantra for this position, quoted fervently by shroud proponents who might otherwise have little to do with one another, is that "the tests could have been precise without being accurate." Chemist Alan Adler, an emeritus professor at Western Connecticut State University who has worked on the shroud, takes this possibility very seriously...
...Adler believes the image must have been triggered by some sort of radiation process. But he stays away from speculation as to whether such radiation could have been divine in origin. "You can't go to the literature and find an explanation," says Adler. "Science can never authenticate this cloth, because there's no lab test for Christ-ness...
...played with the possibility. In November, Doubleday plans to publish Garza-Valdes' provocatively titled The DNA of God? Scientifically, Garza-Valdes carefully hedges his statements about the shroud, saying only that "as of now, I have no reason to believe the Shroud of Turin is not the burial cloth of Jesus Christ" and that he thinks the blood on the shroud is human, male and ancient. In the early 1990s, Garza-Valdes asked Victor Tryon, director of the Center for Advanced DNA Technologies at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, to help him identify the organisms...