The palynology is not so simple as you make it out to be, Fred. It is the pollens from the Jerusalem areas that are co-incindent that are important, not just the similar pollen from other areas. Some of those pollens are VERY specific to a time and place. One pollen is particularly telling because it is of a plant that went extinct everywhere in about the sixth Century and it was found on both the Turin Shroud and on the Sudarium. There is no way any 14th Century Fraudster could have anticipated the need to find the pollen of an extinct Palestinian plant to hide on his hoax for 20th Century palynologists to find and identify for his hoaxing of 14th Century
The greatest percentage of pollens in the census on both cloths were Eastern Mediterranean, with a majority from the area around Israel. The Shroud has some pollens native to the area around Sanliurfa, Turkey, (Edessa) and Istanbul (Constantinople), places we know the from the post 1350AD history of the Turin Shroud it has never been, yet the quantities of pollens present up until 2002 AD indicate extended stays in those areas. In 2002AD the Shroud was both washed, vacuumed, and ironed, in an ill-advised "restoration" under the direction of Madame Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, which removed the in situ pollens and other evidence which could have been studied in the future.
Your skeptical take ignores the fact that the 1988 C-14 test has been falsified by three different peer-reviewed scientific papers, all taking different approaches, and even the head of the Oxford labs has now agreed that the sampling was totally flawed right from the beginning. The protocol was NOT followed and as a result, the dating was flawed and is not reliable for any valid purpose in that the corner where they took the sample was the very corner of the Shroud where all the scientists agreed should have been avoided because it was both chemically and physically different (that corner fluoresces under UV light while the main body of the Shroud does not indicating chemical and physical differences) from the main body of the shroud.
How do you explain the presence of Travertine Aragonite dust with a specific spectrographic signature found only in the area outside the eastern gate of Jerusalem on the back of the Shroud, specifically on the backside of the dorsal image in the areas of the feet, calves, buttocks, shoulders and hear, and on the front side of the dorsal image in the foot print and knees. This Travertine Aragonite, with this particular spectrographic signature, has never, so far, been found anywhere else in the world. Are you going to tell us that a Fourteenth Century forger knew to get dust from the shelf of Tomb in Jerusalem and brush it into the appropriate areas of where the body rested on the back side of the cloth and then only on the foot print on the front of the cloth where the feet and knees would have picked it up on the road to the crucifixion and then transferred it to the cloth? The forger would have been quite a genius to anticipate 20th Century spectrographic analysis. . . or even the need of having the dust there in the first place, or the pollen.
What a brilliant piece of work. . . and not one other sample of his work or anything like it. Which would be the greater miracle, Fred? That a known miracle worker leaves behind this relic of his existence or that an unknown polymath created an artistic work so perfect that no one even with 21st abilities can duplicate it or even determine how it was done or even plumb the depths of mysteries this unknown polymath included in his work for us to find 700 years later? Frankly, Fred, for me, that would be the far greater miracle.
Somewhere on the hard drive of my old, broken computer, I have my correspondence with Barry Schwartz regarding a theory I have about the origin of the shroud. Not being any sort of authority on the subject, I have nonetheless been interested in it for many years.
An earlier discussion here on Free Republic suggested that the image must have been made by the release of some sort of high energy. I remembered a couple of YouTube videos I had seen which showed 1) a man disappear for awhile and then return under unusual circumstances. Both his disappearance and subsequent return were marked with bright flashes of light; and 2) a UFO traversing the sky in a Chinese city. It cruised along at a relatively slow pace for a distance, then disappeared in a bright flash of light.
I pointed out to Mr. Schwartz that scientists had already moved very small particles through similarly small spaces and times but that the experiments required huge amounts of energy to accomplish. My theory was that the corpse wrapped in the shroud had been “transported” away by some outside force using energy we have no knowledge of.
Mr. Schwartz replied that the energy required to do that would be roughly equivalent to that which could be generated by the sudden atomic disintegration of the body being transported.
Perhaps God does work in mysterious ways.
Please cite them, because the three papers you've produced are not in peer reviewed journals.