Contradictions involving the Shroud of Turin?

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“In 944 A.D. the Byzantine Roman Emperor, Romanus Lecapenos, sent General John Curcuras with an army of 80,000 to the walls of Edessa, not to conquer that city, but to negotiate for the surrender of the Image of Edessa.” Well, not exactly.

General Kourkouas set off in 942 AD, and enjoyed both success and setback in the attempt to extend the limits of the Byzantine Empire, including three unsuccessful assaults on Edessa. Both attackers and defenders were well worn out by the time the Emir agreed to surrender the Image in exchange for prisoners and a vast amount of cash, an arrangement which enabled the conflict to end without either side losing face, and enabling Kourkouas to return in triumph to Constantinople.

There is no doubt that the Image of Edessa was extremely important to Edessa, although to its Muslim rulers it probably had more political than religious significance, and I think it quite possible that after its arrival in Constantinople, it became the basis for the portraits of Christ on icons, mosaics, frescoes and coins. However shortly after its arrivale, it was placed among a vast collection of other alleged relics, among which, as we have seen, it was of no great significance.

Ian Wilson’s books are all essential reading to any scholar of the Shroud, but in some cases his account is clearly a personal interpretation of the, admittedly rather scarce, sources available.

On the video recommended above, whose findings, to Wm777, “basically prove the shroud couldn’t be anything other than authentic”, there is little to say. Its ideas are wholly based on blurring Enrie’s photo to the extent that almost anything can be seen in the resulting smudges - a technique which Giuseppe Maria Catalano has the chutzpah to call “very high resolution scans’”. Among his more controversial ‘discoveries’ is that Jesus was placed face down on the cloth, clothed in a skirt. Needless to say not a single authority on the Shroud, for or against authenticity, concurs.

"The International Institute for Advanced Studies of Spacial Representation Sciences” does not exist and never has, being entirely the invention of Catalano, and is not doing any studies. A Youtube video of the same name appears to be nothing more than drone footage of Catalano’s family house.
 
Please provide a reference for the Edessa campaign. I am not doubting your account, but I might have an unread book about it that I should take a look at.

On a different note, you have not provided an explanation for the congruence of the face on 10th century Byzantine coins and the face found on the Shroud. Fanti’s statistical analysis of the face of Christ found on 6th century gold coins proved that the source of the coin images was the face found on the Shroud.*

*THE SHROUD OF TURIN, FIRST CENTURY AFTER CHRIST, Fanti/Malfi, 2015
A second edition was to have been published last spring. It has been delayed, and I think that this delay is because the British Museum was finally subjected to a court order to release the raw data of the 1988 carbon fourteen investigations. That data was supposed to have been shared with an Italian institute for statistical analysis, but never was. Fanti will most likely have a lot to say about this data.
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
“In 944 A.D. the Byzantine Roman Emperor, Romanus Lecapenos, sent General John Curcuras with an army of 80,000 to the walls of Edessa, not to conquer that city, but to negotiate for the surrender of the Image of Edessa.” Well, not exactly.

General Kourkouas set off in 942 AD, and enjoyed both success and setback in the attempt to extend the limits of the Byzantine Empire, including three unsuccessful assaults on Edessa. Both attackers and defenders were well worn out by the time the Emir agreed to surrender the Image in exchange for prisoners and a vast amount of cash, an arrangement which enabled the conflict to end without either side losing face, and enabling Kourkouas to return in triumph to Constantinople.

There is no doubt that the Image of Edessa was extremely important to Edessa, although to its Muslim rulers it probably had more political than religious significance, and I think it quite possible that after its arrival in Constantinople, it became the basis for the portraits of Christ on icons, mosaics, frescoes and coins. However shortly after its arrivale, it was placed among a vast collection of other alleged relics, among which, as we have seen, it was of no great significance.

Ian Wilson’s books are all essential reading to any scholar of the Shroud, but in some cases his account is clearly a personal interpretation of the, admittedly rather scarce, sources available.

On the video recommended above, whose findings, to Wm777, “basically prove the shroud couldn’t be anything other than authentic”, there is little to say. Its ideas are wholly based on blurring Enrie’s photo to the extent that almost anything can be seen in the resulting smudges - a technique which Giuseppe Maria Catalano has the chutzpah to call “very high resolution scans’”. Among his more controversial ‘discoveries’ is that Jesus was placed face down on the cloth, clothed in a skirt. Needless to say not a single authority on the Shroud, for or against authenticity, concurs.

"The International Institute for Advanced Studies of Spacial Representation Sciences” does not exist and never has, being entirely the invention of Catalano, and is not doing any studies. A Youtube video of the same name appears to be nothing more than drone footage of Catalano’s family house.
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I believe there was pollen present on the shroud that shows it spent time in the Anatolian region.

That just brought me to another thought… I wonder if anyone has bothered to see if there were hairs on the shroud, or perhaps they might have been dismissed as modern contamination. I would expect to find many hairs attached or stuck to the linen fibers with such a distressed body. The same goes for the cloth in Oviedo. The amount of time that has passed should not matter.
 
Try The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium, by Stephen Runciman. I think the primary source is Theophanes Continuatus Chronographia, but I can’t readily find an English translation of it.

I’m afraid that I, in common with most numismatists of the period, don’t think that the Christ of the Byzantine coins was derived from the Shroud. They are usually thought to have derived from the Christ Pantocrator, which in turn may have derived from Roman iconography rather than an Eastern model.

There are many ways of degrading linen, and nuclear radiation is no doubt one of them. However, being consistent with something is not proof of causality. Paolo di Lazzaro has been using pulses of high-energy UV radiation, and Christophe Donnet has achieved the same effect with infra-red. Actually anybody can do the same by brushing a hot metal spatula across the surface, or lightly painting the surface with vinegar, although this last seems to require heating to produce the discolouration.

The pollen on the Shroud has been extensively reviewed since Max Frei made his wildly over-precise identification, and his findings largely discredited, not least by his erstwhile supporter Avinoam Danin, who was not only Israel’s formost botanist, but an ardent supporter of authenticity.

Gerard Lucotte has been examining a minute fragment of a sticky tape sample from the forehead of the image, and thinks he has found a fragment of hair. It is very thin, and shows signs of being cut on both ends, as if it was a remnant of a shave. Google “Scanning Electron Microscopic Characterization and Elemental Analysis of One Hair Located on the Face of the Turin Shroud”.
 
I think the Shroud of Turin is real. I’d love to pray before it! The bit in Isaiah about the Messiah’s beard being assaulted doesn’t mean that the whole thing was pulled out: just that some jerks who were hurting him probably tore out a little bit. The major pains of the stations of cross are more significant.
 
I’m afraid George Sluter’s Acts of Pilate are a transparent fake. They were originally created by Rev. William Dennes Mahan, who published numerous spurious alleged documents, but was fairly quickly unmasked and suspended from his ministry.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
I’m afraid George Sluter’s Acts of Pilate are a transparent fake. They were originally created by Rev. William Dennes Mahan, who published numerous spurious alleged documents, but was fairly quickly unmasked and suspended from his ministry.
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Good to know. I suspected it was but I didn’t know the backstory. I just remember reading that detail on the hair color a while back.
 
The title of this thread is: Contradictions Involving the Shroud of Turin.
In my opinion, the greatest contradiction is the Shroud’s radio-carbon evidence which shows a greater amount of C-14 than would be expected of a relic that is 2000 years old. One way of explaining this evidence would be, as the British Museum did, to postulate that the Shroud was only about 700 years old. However, that theory is in opposition to most of the other evidence that we have on the Shroud. Only the Shroud’s mysterious appearance in 14th century France is consistent. The C-14 evidence does not pass the robust statistical analysis required for the proof of a date, and a systemic bias is noted: the C-14 content of the linen increases as the part of the sample tested becomes closer to the Shroud’s image.

An alternate theory that would explain the Shroud’s enhanced C-14 content would be to theorize that the Shroud was subjected to a neutron radiation event that was caused by the vanishing of the corpse it enveloped. The Gospels record that the corpse was missing from a tomb that had been sealed and guarded. The theory that the vanishing corpse left a residual neutron radiation is consistent with the Shroud’s C-14 evidence. A neutron event would also imply a proton event since atoms are composed of both, and proton radiation is a possible mechanism for the image formation.

Of these opposing theories regarding the Shroud’s C-14 evidence, one is consistent with all of the other scientific evidence that has been gathered on the Shroud, and the other has only the Shroud’s unprovenanced appearance in 14th century France to support it. If there were no prior history or tradition of a miraculous image of Jesus existing on a cloth, that would present a problem. But we find a very strong history of just such a relic going all the way back to the sixth century with an associated legend going back to the first.

If we choose to accept the Historically Consistent Hypothesis for the Shroud’s enhanced C-14 content, then we have before us a remarkable conclusion: the evidence found on the Shroud of Turin constitutes proof that the corpse of Jesus vanished into another dimension. That vanishing, while not the same as the post-execution appearance of the Lord’s living body, strongly implies the same. So strongly, in my view, that we ought to conclude that the Holy Shroud of Turin contains proof of Jesus’ resurrection.
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
The pollen on the Shroud has been extensively reviewed since Max Frei made his wildly over-precise identification, and his findings largely discredited, not least by his erstwhile supporter Avinoam Danin, who was not only Israel’s formost botanist, but an ardent supporter of authenticity…
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Are you saying that the pollen on the shroud tells us nothing of where its been? The environments where its supposedly been are quite diverse. It may be overly precise in terms of saying Jerusalem or Antioch, but to say Europe vs Anatolia vs the Levant doesn’t seem overly precise to me and is still quite informative.
 
Lotsa’ arguin’ and discussin’ goin’ on! Did anyone even bother to watch Fr. Robert Spitzer (PhD Physics) as he elaborated on the uniqueness of the image?

(Crickets)
 
Nicolas Idruntino and Nicolas Mesarites mention it in lists of relics dating 1207. A reference by Gervase of Tilbury, a Rome-educated English lawyer, ca. 1211 says:
The story is passed from archives of ancient authority that the Lord prostrated himself with his entire body on whitest linen, and so by divine power there was impressed upon the linen a most beautiful imprint of not only the face, but the entire body of the Lord.
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This is before the earliest date of the C14. It doesn’t mean the Shroud is genuine, but once again it shows C14 test is not reliable. Since the science of C14 is reliable, there must be something wrong with the samples tested.
 
irenaeuslyons said:
This is before the earliest date of the C14. It doesn’t mean the Shroud is genuine, but once again it shows C14 test is not reliable. Since the science of C14 is reliable, there must be something wrong with the samples tested.
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I would say that the C-14 evidence is accurate. The mistake comes in the insistence on using that evidence to calculate a date of origin for the Shroud. The C-14 evidence is not indicative of a date, but rather of a neutron radiation event.
 
jan10000 said:
As an aside, there are literally dozens of things proving the Shroud is a fake. The Church itself declared the Shroud a fake when it was first discovered. A Bishop at the time even claimed to have gotten a confession from the artist and the model.
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In 1978 the Shroud was subjected to an intensive examination and evidence gathering by a team of volunteer scientists. Three years of research went into evaluating that evidence, and in 1983 the team said that they could not find anything that would preclude the Shroud from being authentic.

The Church has never “declared the Shroud a fake.”
 
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jan10000 said:
All independent blind tests showed the exact same date,
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First of all, you do not “get a date” from the testing for C-14 of a sample. What you get is a ratio of C-14 to C-12. The evidence from several C-14 tests must be subjected to what is called a “statistical analysis” to see if that evidence is compatible with the assignment of a date. The C-14 evidence from the Shroud did not pass this mathematical test, but the British Museum ignored that problem and assigned a date anyway.

The many C-14 results from the Shroud were disparate (heterogeneous in scientific terms) whereas the C-14 evidences from the medieval control samples were closely grouped. Furthermore, the Shroud’s C-14 evidence showed a systemic bias which means that as the part of the sample tested became closer to the image, its C-14 content became greater.

The references are:
TEST THE SHROUD, Antonacci, 2015
THE SHROUD OF TURIN, FIRST CENTURY AFTER CHRIST!, Fanti/Malfi, 2015

Fanti and Malfi first proved that the Shroud is ancient rather than medieval. Then they used alternate methods to research a date. That date turned out to be 35 B.C.E., +/- 250 years with a 95% certainty.

In 1988 the British Museum was, by previous agreement, required to share the raw C-14 evidence with an Italian institute for statistical analysis. The museum refused to do that and did not release that data until forced to do so by a court order in 2019. The second edition of the Fanti/Malfi book has been delayed by months, and I suspect it is because of the need to properly assess the recently released raw data.
When their second edition is released, I expect it to be a blockbuster.
 
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What an interesting selection of comments, covering the whole gamut of sindonological inquiry!

Irenaeuslyons. Max Frei-Sulzer’s pollen identification was queried almost as soon as the reports on them were published in Shroud Spectrum International, one by him and two by Werner Bulst. He identified far too many plants from far too few specimens, his identification was too precise, the proportion of wind-blown to insect-carried pollen was absurd, and so on. Eventually even Avinoam Danin, who confidently thought he saw heaps of plant material ‘imprinted’ all over the Shroud, disowned him completely. However, it has taken even longer to find out why he could have been so right, and then so wrong, and the truth lies in his methodology. As palynology was in its infancy, there were no databases of reference specimens, so anybody attempting to interpret a suspect pollen had to collect their own. Assuming that the Shroud was genuine, Frei collected samples, mostly from brightly flowering (and therefore insect-carried) plants, and tried to match his Shroud samples to them. Whenever he came upon a match, he identified the species. However, he didn’t know (or didn’t care) that pollen is not as individual as many people like to think. Whole genera of plants have such similar pollen that even today only a DNA analysis can really tell them apart. His most confident identification, Gundelia tournefortii, is a case in point - it has been re-identified as two completely different species by two subsequent researchers. The fact is that had he collected his reference specimens from Japan or Brazil instead of Israel and Turkey, he could have come up with similarly ‘conclusive proof’ that the Shroud was from the Far East or South America.

Some attempt to justify the disproportionate number of insect-carried pollen has been made by claiming that these plants did not arrive adventitiously, but were placed around the body as part of the funeral rites. However, they do not match the collections of flowers ‘seen’ on the Shroud by researchers such as Alan Whanger and Avinoam Danin, there are far too many species of them, many do not grow in the precise vicinity of Jerusalem where Jesus was buried, and many are from scrubby desert thistles that no-one would use for a funeral anyway.
 
po1guy. Fr Spitzer’s lectures on the Shroud are powerful and superficially compelling, but he makes so many basic mistakes regarding almost every aspect of the Shroud that they cannot be considered authoritative statements regarding its authenticity. Many people agree with his conclusions, indeed, given the authority and conviction with which he speaks it is difficult not to, but they are insufficiently founded on fact to be definitive.
 
iranaeuslyons. Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia is a huge collection of myths, legends, fairy tales (literally, tales about fairies), folklore and ‘marvels’ designed, as its title suggests, to amuse the Royal Court in its leisure time. Sadly the full English translation costs hundreds of dollars, but extracts can be found on various subjects around the internet. The Story of the Image Of The Lord In Edessa is Chapter 26 of a selection of tales from around the world, including The Wood Which Turns To Stone, The Upside-Down Bean, Water Which Never Boils, and Hens Which Burn Anyone Who Eats Them. Gervase tells the story of two full length images of Christ, one the Image of Edessa, (Chapter 26), made voluntarily by Christ lying on a cloth, as you quote above, and one which is much less well known (Chapter 27).

"When Our Lord was hanging on the cross, stripped of his clothing, Joseph went up to Mary, the Lord’s mother, and said “Ah! The love by which which you were bound to this man can be judged by your actions. For you have seen him hanging naked and have not covered him. Upset by this comment, his mother went and bought a cloth of finest linen, so large that it covered the whole body, and when he was taken down, an image of his whole body was seen to have been imprinted upon the cloth. Making a copy in its likeness, Nicodemus fashioned the image of Lucca. Inside it he enclosed the cloth, a flask of the Lord’s blood, one of the nails, fragments of the crown of thorns, the sponge, the clothing of the Lord and the Blessed Virgin, pieces of the Lord’s cradle and umbilical cord.” [Some excisions for brevity].

The Image of Lucca, and the legends that surround it, can be explored elsewhere. Gervase’s indiscriminate accounts of the full-length images of Christ seem to derive from two different sources, but if one were to take him at face value, it would surely be the second story that suggests the Shroud, not the first. The fact that it has been ignored by those determined to conflate the Shroud and the Image of Edessa is, I think, significant.

(to be continued)
 
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