medevil artifacts

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wiggbuggie

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so I was wondering and something was kind of bothering me. Seems as if a ton of artifacts was found that belonged to Jesus most of these appeared during the middle ages namely

shroud of turin
foreskin of Jesus
the true cross
nails
crown of thorns
holy grail
list goes on

Some of these are hard to believe like I read that multiple churches during that era claimed they have jesus foreskin or holy prepuce. The church of notre dame said they house the crown of thorns and makes seldom public appreances (to this day). Seems like the church in the middle ages scammed believers or tried to make converts guess my question is are we required to believe these artifacts as real? to my knowledge the church never never acknowledged these artifacts as authentic and is as skeptical.
 
Definitely NOT required! I think relics have various degrees of credibility.
 
wiggbuggie said:
Some of these are hard to believe like I read that multiple churches during that era claimed they have jesus foreskin or holy prepuce. The church of notre dame said they house the crown of thorns and makes seldom public appreances (to this day). Seems like the church in the middle ages scammed believers or tried to make converts guess my question is are we required to believe these artifacts as real? to my knowledge the church never never acknowledged these artifacts as authentic and is as skeptical.
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While I expect the idea of some of them was as a means of making converts, Churches, Abbeys etc with relics gained (along with their surrounding populations) something very important to the Medieval economy - tourists or, as they would have been called then, pilgrims. An important relic (whether ‘real’ or not) could bring considerable prosperity.
 
More recent relics certainly have more chance of being authentic than ones from more than a thousand years ago.
Kaninchen said:
While I expect the idea of some of them was as a means of making converts, Churches, Abbeys etc with relics gained (along with their surrounding populations) something very important to the Medieval economy - tourists or, as they would have been called then, pilgrims. An important relic (whether ‘real’ or not) could bring considerable prosperity.
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You might say that the lack of things such as the TV or Internet certainly helped stuff. So it didn’t really matter whether there were, like, ten heads of John the Baptist scattered all across Europe, since not too many people would have known about the other ones. 😉

Actually, you might say the Western Church was generally more big over relics than with icons. (One historian suggested that the cult of icons in the East was a development over the veneration of relics; while the East shifted from a cultus of physical remains to a cultus of physical representation, the West never really made the shift.)

One of the reasons the Western ‘relic craze’ started was because the Franks in the 9th century decided to enact the decree of the Fourth Council of Carthage made about four centuries ago, that all altars should have relics - which resulted in a huge demand for them. Ever since that time, the transfer (‘translation’) of relics became highly-solemn, important affairs. (There was also the fact that the Germanic peoples had the custom of taking oaths on an object: so when they were Christianized, relics became one of the things they swore on.)

In fact, it was deemed perfectly acceptable to gain relics by questionable means - such as by stealing them - and move them to a new home: furta sacra ‘holy theft’ it was called. (The logic was, if the saint did not want his/her relics to be moved away, no power in the earth could ever force them - so these ‘thefts’ must have been in perfect accordance with the will of God and the saint!) Stolen relics were believed to be more valuable and authentic than ones that had been gained legitimately, that’s why you even have some places where they invented stories of the relic being stolen from someplace else.
 
wiggbuggie said:
so I was wondering and something was kind of bothering me. Seems as if a ton of artifacts was found that belonged to Jesus most of these appeared during the middle ages namely

shroud of turin
foreskin of Jesus
the true cross
nails
crown of thorns
holy grail
list goes on

Some of these are hard to believe like I read that multiple churches during that era claimed they have jesus foreskin or holy prepuce. The church of notre dame said they house the crown of thorns and makes seldom public appreances (to this day). Seems like the church in the middle ages scammed believers or tried to make converts guess my question is are we required to believe these artifacts as real? to my knowledge the church never never acknowledged these artifacts as authentic and is as skeptical.
Click to expand...
A joke I heard was that if you assembled all the pieces of the True Cross that were claimed to exist, you could rebuild Noah’s Ark. 😃
 
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