Shroud of Turin

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In spite of His efforts to walk erect, the weight of the heavy wooden beam, together with the shock produced by copious blood loss, is too much. He stumbles and falls. The rough wood of the beam gouges into the lacerated skin and muscles of the shoulders. He tries to rise, but human muscles have been pushed beyond their endurance. The centurion, anxious to get on with the crucifixion, selects a stalwart North African onlooker, Simon of Cyrene, to carry the cross. Jesus follows, still bleeding and sweating the cold, clammy sweat of shock, until the 650 yard journey from the fortress Antonia to Golgotha is finally completed. Jesus is offered wine mixed with myrrh, a mild analgesic mixture. He refuses to drink. Simon is ordered to place the patibulum on the ground and Jesus quickly thrown backward with His shoulders against the wood. The legionnaire feels for the depression at the front of the wrist. He drives a heavy, square, wrought-iron nail through the wrist and deep into the wood. Quickly, he moves to the other side and repeats the action, being careful not to pull the arms to tightly, but to allow some flexion and movement. The patibulum is then lifted in place at the top of the stipes and the titulus reading, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” is nailed in place.

The left foot is now pressed backward against the right foot, and with both feet extended, toes down, a nail is driven through the arch of each, leaving the knees moderately flexed. The Victim is now crucified. As He slowly sags down with more weight on the nails in the wrists, excruciating pain shoots along the fingers and up the arms to explode in the brain — the nails in the wrists are putting pressure on the median nerves.

As He pushes Himself upward to avoid this stretching torment, He places His full weight on the nail through His feet. Again there is the searing agony of the nail tearing through the nerves between the metatarsal bones of the feet. At this point, as the arms fatigue, great waves of cramps sweep over the muscles, knotting them in deep, relentless, throbbing pain. With these cramps comes the inability to push Himself upward. Hanging by his arms, the pectoral muscles are paralyzed and the intercostal muscles are unable to act. Air can be drawn into the lungs, but cannot be exhaled. Jesus fights to raise Himself in order to get even one short breath. Finally, carbon dioxide builds up in the lungs and in the blood stream and the cramps partially subside. Spasmodically, he is able to push Himself upward to exhale and bring in the life-giving oxygen.

It was undoubtedly during these periods that He uttered the seven short sentences recorded:

The first, looking down at the Roman soldiers throwing dice for His seamless garment, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

The second, to the penitent thief, “Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

The third, looking down at the terrified, grief-stricken adolescent John — the beloved Apostle — he said, “Behold thy mother.” Then, looking to His mother Mary, “Woman behold thy son.”

The fourth cry is from the beginning of the 22nd Psalm, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”

Jesus experienced hours of limitless pain, cycles of twisting, joint-rending cramps, intermittent partial asphyxiation, searing pain where tissue is torn from His lacerated back as He moves up and down against the rough timber. Then another agony begins – a terrible crushing pain deep in the chest as the pericardium slowly fills with serum and begins to compress the heart. One remembers again the 22nd Psalm, the 14th verse: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.”
 
It is now almost over. The loss of tissue fluids has reached a critical level; the compressed heart is struggling to pump heavy, thick, sluggish blood into the tissue; the tortured lungs are making a frantic effort to gasp in small gulps of air. The markedly dehydrated tissues send their flood of stimuli to the brain. Jesus gasps His fifth cry, “I thirst.” One remembers another verse from the prophetic 22nd Psalm: “My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou has brought me into the dust of death.” A sponge soaked in posca, the cheap, sour wine which is the staple drink of the Roman legionaries, is lifted to His lips. He apparently doesn’t take any of the liquid.

The body of Jesus is now in extremes, and He can feel the chill of death creeping through His tissues. This realization brings out His sixth words, possibly little more than a tortured whisper, “It is finished.” His mission of atonement has completed. Finally He can allow his body to die.

With one last surge of strength, he once again presses His torn feet against the nail, straightens His legs, takes a deeper breath, and utters His seventh and last cry, “Father! Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

The rest you know. In order that the Sabbath not be profaned, the Jews asked that the condemned men be dispatched and removed from the crosses. The common method of ending a crucifixion was by crurifracture, the breaking of the bones of the legs. This prevented the victim from pushing himself upward; thus the tension could not be relieved from the muscles of the chest and rapid suffocation occurred. The legs of the two thieves were broken, but when the soldiers came to Jesus they saw that this was unnecessary.

Apparently, to make doubly sure of death, the legionnaire drove his lance through the fifth interspace between the ribs, upward through the pericardium and into the heart. The 34th verse of the 19th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John reports: “And immediately there came out blood and water.” That is, there was an escape of water fluid from the sac surrounding the heart, giving postmortem evidence that Our Lord died not the usual crucifixion death by suffocation, but of heart failure (a broken heart) due to shock and constriction of the heart by fluid in the pericardium.

Thus we have had our glimpse — including the medical evidence — of that epitome of evil which man has exhibited toward Man and toward God. It has been a terrible sight, and more than enough to leave us despondent and depressed. How grateful we can be that we have the great sequel in the infinite mercy of God toward man — at once the miracle of the atonement (at one ment) and the resurrection on Easter Sunday morning.

http://www.insearchofjesus.org/graphics/faces/faceofjesus8.jpg

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you

I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment…

“Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.”
 
Points to Consider

By David Sunfellow
  • The body that appears on the Shroud is naked. Under Roman law, criminals were whipped and executed in the nude. (These are facts that most medieval artists would not have known, or if they had known, would not have dared to publicly reproduce.)
  • The man that appears on the Shroud was crucified with nails driven through his wrists. Although artists throughout the centuries (and even stigmatists) have traditionally thought that Christ was nailed to the cross through his palms, it is now known that crucifixion victims were nailed to crosses through their wrists. This is supported both by archeological digs that discovered crucifixion victims with spike marks on their wrists (not palms) and also by studies that were conducted on corpses which proved that nails in palms will not support the weight of a body.
  • The life-size image on the cloth is NOT the result of pigment, stain, acid, dye, or any applied material. The image itself is confined to the top-most fibrils of the cloth's fibers. Whatever made the image did not penetrate the fibers of the cloth as all known artistic materials would.
  • The image on the Shroud is uniquely three-dimensional. Although most scientists believe that the image was made by the body emitting a burst of energy of some kind (which caused the body's image to be lightly burned onto the Shroud), they have no idea how this could have been done. Efforts to lightly burn images into shroud-like fabrics have all failed to reproduce the extraordinarily delicate, detailed, three-dimensional effect found on the Shroud. The way the image was burned onto the Shroud is also flawlessly accurate in terms of how a body emitting energy would imprint itself on a cloth that was covering it.
  • The image of the Shroud is absolutely accurate in both anatomical and physiological details.
  • The anatomical and physiological details of the Shroud accurately record what would happen to a man who experienced a Roman-style crucifixion (see Robert Bucklin's pathological report at the end of this summary).
 
  • The Shroud is stained by human blood that has run out of the image's wounds. The way the blood flowed, puddled and stained the Shroud are perfectly correct. Unlike the Shroud's image which only appears on the topmost fibrils of fabric, the blood on the Shroud soaked deeply into the fabric.
  • The exact way the man was crucified closely matches biblical accounts of Jesus's crucifixion. Among other things, there are 120 lesions, the shape of dumbbells, distributed over the back and running around the front of the body--probably caused by a Roman whip called a flagrum whose thongs were tipped with bits of lead or bone. There is a deep wound on the right side of the body between the ribs which bled profusely (which is what Biblical records indicate happened when a spear was thrust into Christ's side). There are thorn-like marks on the victim's head (possibly from a crown of thorns). And the victim's legs were not broken (which is significant both because Roman-style crucifixions ended with their victim's legs being broken and because the New Testament account of Christ's death indicates that this was a Roman custom which Jesus was spared from).
  • The beard and hair style of the crucified man were not common anywhere in the Roman Empire except Palestine. The image has semitic features, including sidelocks and a unplaited ponytail.
  • The Shroud itself was woven with techniques common to the first century. The Shroud's distinctive weave is so rare that researchers seeking to find a control sample could not find one anywhere in the world.
  • A dirt sample taken from near the Shroud image's feet was identified as a relatively rare form of calcium carbonate. Samples of dirt taken from Jerusalem revealed an unusually close match. This strongly suggests the man pictured on the Shroud was crucified in Palestine.
  • 58 varieties of pollen were discovered on the Shroud. 11 of the pollen samples were from plants that do not exist in Europe, but which do exist in the Near East. The pollen samples also indicated that the fabric of the Shroud had to have been made in Palestine before circulating in Europe. Pollen samples also helped trace the Shroud's route from Palestine through Anatolia and Constantinople into Europe. Furthermore, two of the pollen samples that were discovered on the Shroud coincided with highly distinctive plants found in the region surrounding Jerusalem. The pollen study concluded that the Shroud itself was probably made near Jerusalem and that it had been in the vicinity of the Holy City for some time before being transported out of the area.
  • Images of 28 different types of flowers, small bushes, and thorns have been detected in bunches around the Shroud image. All 28 grow in Israel, either in Jerusalem or in the nearby desert or Dead Sea area. Most of them are not found in Europe. 25 of the 28 flowers matched the pollen samples found on the Shroud. 27 of the 28 plants bloom during March and April, which corresponds to the time of the crucifixion.
 
  • An image of a coin appears over the right eye of the Shroud image. This coin, a very rare Pontius Pilate lepton struck in 29 to 32 A.D., was not found until 1977.
  • Tests which were conducted in 1993 on a piece of first century fabric similar to the Shroud's now indicate that a fire the Shroud passed through in 1532 corrupted the October 1988 Carbon-14 dates that concluded the Shroud was not authentic. According to these recent tests, which were conducted by scientists at the University of Arizona and Russian scientists in Moscow, the 1988 Carbon-14 dates were some 1200 years in error. This dates the Shroud back to the first or second century.
  • Some historians believe the Shroud of Turin may be The Mandylion, or Edessa Portrait, a holy relic mentioned in some accounts as early as the first century. If this is so, then the Shroud can be traced, through various legends and stories, all the way back to first century Jerusalem.
  • And finally, Robert Bucklin, deputy coroner of Los Angeles and a member of The Shroud of Turin Research Team, compiled the following pathological report concerning the Shroud:
    "There is no problem in diagnosing what happened to this individual. The pathology and physiology are unquestionable and represent medical knowledge unknown 150 years ago.

    "This is a -6 foot tall male- Caucasian - The lesions are as follows: Beginning at the head, there are blood flows from numerous puncture wounds on the top and back of the scalp and forehead. The man has been beaten about the face. There is a swelling over one cheek, and he undoubtedly has a black eye. His nose tip is abraded, as would occur from a fall, and it appears that the nasal cartilage may have separated from the bone.

    "There is a wound in the left wrist, the right one being covered by the left hand. This is the typical lesion of a crucifixion. There is a stream of blood down both arms. Here and there, there are blood drips at an angle from the main blood flow in response to gravity. These angles represent the only ones that can occur from the only two positions which can be taken by a body during crucifixion.

    "On the back and front there are lesions which appear to be scourge marks. The victim was whipped from both sides by two men, one of whom was taller than the other, as demonstrated by the angle of the thongs.

    "There is a rough swelling of both shoulders, with abrasions indicating that something heavy and rough had been carried across the man’s shoulders within hours of death.

    "On the right flank, a long, narrow blade of some type entered in an upward direction, pierced the diaphragm, penetrated the thoracic cavity through the lung into the heart. This was a post-mortem event (it happened after the man was already dead), because separate components of red blood cells and clear serum drained from the lesion. Later, after the corpse was laid out horizontally and face up on the cloth, blood dribbled out of the side wound and puddled along the small of the back.

    "There is an abrasion of one knee, commensurate with a fall; and finally, a spike had been driven through both feet, and blood had leaked from both wounds onto the cloth.

    “The evidence of a scourged man who was crucified and died from cardiopulmonary failure typical of crucifixion is clear-cut.”

    More
 
Questions and Answers

Q: How tall is the man in the image on the Shroud of Turin?
I have approached the question of height from the design point of view - an image which describes a 3D object and vice-versa, including the problem of foreshortening. I have also analyzed body type, muscle structure and proportion. I determined the height to be 5’11½" to 6’1", give or take 1" for linen stretch and shrinking, both of which are possible. Because of the body type, even with shrinkage, the man cannot be under 5’11½". I lean more towards 6’0". Whether Jews in Jesus’s time were smaller or larger is not relevant here. Jews were not small to start with, judging by the finds in the 1st century cemetery excavated near the wall of the Temple in the sixties…

Isabel Piczek
**Q: I was wondering, since there are so many people interested in the shroud, why it is not exhibited more frequently?. Is it because of security reasons or is it just because displaying it is so difficult to organize? Thanks for your time. **

**A: **Great question! Since arriving in Turin in 1578, the Shroud has only been displayed a few times each century (see the Shroud History page). Both reasons you stated are probably correct. Security is always a problem with the Shroud. For example, there is strong belief by the authorities in Turin that the April 1997 fire in the Chapel, Cathedral and Royal Palace was intentionally set by an arsonist. In 1978, during a 5 week exhibition, 3.5 million visitors flocked to the city to view the cloth. Organizing such events is always a problem. Most importantly however, exposing the cloth to polluted air and UV light during an exhibition can damage the cloth and the image as well. Even though the Shroud is now stored in a specially designed container to protect and preserve it, too much exhibiting may create serious long term conservation and preservation problems. The next public exhibition is scheduled This year 2025.

Could you give some insight as to the length of the hair the men wore during the time of Christ? This question came up in light of the scripture reference found in I Corinthians 11: 14, 15, where it indicates that nature itself teaches us that it is a shame for a man to have long hair. The image on the Shroud appears to have shoulder length or longer hair… Therefore, it does not seem feasible that Jesus would do something that he did not want his followers to do and give them instruction on how to appear in regards to the grooming of their hair if he wore his hair in direct opposition of the instructions he gave to them.

Once again I asked Rev. Albert “Kim” Dreisbach, a biblical scholar, theologian and Shroud historian to draft the response to this question. Here is his reply:

**A: **Recently I had a very similar question posed by a young man from Indiana. My response was as follows:
I’m afraid that your “Jewish authority” is mistaken with regard to the length of hair for Jewish males in the first century C.E. (i.e. Common Era).

According to R.C. Dentan in an article written for The Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary:

"HAIR. The hair’s capacity for constant growth has always made it seem an important seat of life and, therefore, religiously significant. The most notable example of this in the Bible is in the case of the NAZIRITE VOW (Num. 6:12 1; Judg. 13:5; 16:17; 1 Sam. 1: I 1), one aspect of which was to allow the hair to grow long so that it might be presented to God as an offering (Num. 6: 18; Acts 18:18; 21:23-24). Samson’s hair, in the final form of the story (Judg. 13:5), appears to have been left long in fulfillment of such a vow, although originally it had a more primitive significance as the repository of his strength Judg. 16:19, 22). The shaving of the head in mourning (Job 1:20; Isa. 15:2; Jer. 41:5; 47:5; 48:37; Ezek. 7:18) and the offering of the hair to the dead were part of ancient religious practice, but forbidden to the Hebrews (Deut. 14: 1).

​
 
Indeed, the complete shaving of the head was forbidden to them for any purpose (Lev. 19:27; cf. Jer. 9:26; Ezek. 44:20). In the OT, long hair on men was greatly admired (II Sam. 14:25-26; cf. Song of S. 5:2, 1 1), but in the NT it is frowned upon as contrary to nature (I Cor. II: 14). Although women wore their hair long (I Cor. 11:15), the biblical writers deplore the excessive ornamentation of it (Isa. 3:24; 1 Pet. 3:3). The hair is a symbol of the fine (Judg. 20:16), the small (Luke 21:18),and the numerous (Matt. 10:30)."

When it comes to the passage from I Cor. 11:14-15, one must remember that it was written at least 20 years after the death of Jesus. Closer study will reveal that it is simply Paul’s personal opinion and certainly not a regulation which would have applied to Jesus during his lifetime. Once again a quote from The Interpreter’s Bible volume devoted to I Corinthians may prove useful in this case:
“[Today it would be] considered folly to argue, as Paul implies, that men are likely to be less spiritually sensitive or alert because their hair is worn long, or that a woman loses spiritual and social standing because her hair is short, or because she appears in public with her head uncovered. The argument would have been unconvincing, in some respects at least, even in Paul’s day; for Greek heroes often wore long hair, and many ancient philosophers, as well as their modern counterparts, followed the same practice. Paul is entitled to his opinion and to his adherence to social custom. He is not entitled to make his personal opinion, or the prevalent social customs of his time, the basis of a moral law or of a categorical imperative of the Kantian order. What is permanent in all this discussion is that the conduct of church affairs, and public worship in particular, should be marked by reverence and order, by dignity and decency. Nothing should be permitted that attracts undue attention to itself.” Emphasis added.]

insearchofjesus.org/graphics/faces/shroudvideocover.jpginsearchofjesus.org/graphics/faces/faceofjesus13.jpg
 
A careful study of the Shroud of Turin will reveal that not only did this man have shoulder length hair and a beard, but if you study the dorsal or back side you can also detect an unplaited ponytail - a hairstyle favored by young men at that time. Logic alone would seem to indicate that one wouldn’t have enough hair for a ponytail unless at least that hair on the back of the head was long.

Though Jesus was not a Nazarite, this group is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church as:

A body of Israelites specially consecrated to the service of God who were under vows to abstain from drinking the produce of the vine, to let their hair grow and to avoid defilement by contact with the dead (Num. 6).

Once again we have evidence that at least some Jewish males wore long hair.

If you study art from the Byzantine to Western European, Jesus is traditionally portrayed with long (i.e. shoulder length) hair. The objection to this style is relatively modern and is probably based on a bias to its making the wearer appear too feminine
Code: 
                     The Rev. Albert R. Dreisbach, Jr.
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“…if we assume that the Shroud is a clever medieval forgery, we must assume that it was made by an artist whose grasp of negative-positive properties of photograph was five centuries in advance of that of all his medieval contemporaries. Such a theory, however, falls apart after a careful look at Pia’s negative. Every artist, especially one as facile as the Shroud artist would have to have been, is identifiable by his style, which is as characteristic of him as his signature or thumbprint. The negative image has no style whatever; there is no hand in it…A medieval forger would also need to have been the only human being between the time of emperor Constantine and our own to have been completely conversant with the details of Roman crucifixion.”
 
Why the Shroud of Turin is not a Fake Relic

**John A. T. Robinson, always creatively challenging conventional wisdom about New Testament interpretations and provenance, doubted that the Shroud was the work of a forger. On the basis of what would have been medieval understanding of scripture, he argued: “This . . . is not, I suggest, how any forger would have thought. He would have imagined it the sudarion, the other cloth, understood to be a face cloth] lying over the face, rather like the bogus St. Veronica’s handkerchief, and incorporated its image on a separate piece of material.” **

Like a playful Georges Seurat painting, the images on the Shroud emerge from discrete little bits of color in all the right places on the cloth. But unlike a cheerful and colorful Seurat, there is only one color in the Shroud’s images. It is a single shade of caramel yellow. And unlike Seurat’s pointillism, the bits of color are microscopically tiny.

Pixels, a word that means picture elements, is one way to describe the bits of color. The image on the Shroud is like a halftone photograph printed in a newspaper or a grayscale photograph printed in microscopic-size droplets of black ink on an ink-jet printer.

The image was not painted. Many tests including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and direct microscopic viewing of the Shroud confirm that the images were not painted despite the fact that Walter McCrone, a noted microscopic analyst found iron oxide and mercuric sulfide, both used in paint pigments.

Nowhere on the Shroud are there sufficient concentrations of paints or dyes to form a visible image. Iron oxide might have formed by retting flax in iron rich water in the production of linen. And just as one finds minuscule particles of iron oxide (rust) in airborne dust, so too might mercuric sulphide be present in dust that settled on the Shroud, once kept in churches and cathedrals with frescoed walls and ceilings. There is another possibility that might well explain the presence of trace amounts of paint particles on the Shroud. Many painted copies of the Shroud were produced. It was, after all, a revered relic. We know from history of a practice whereby artists would touch or rub their paintings on the Shroud for sanctification.

Chemists now know the coloration for the images is superficial at the topmost fiber surfaces of the cloth. The fibers are coated with a thin film of impurities made up mostly of starch. It is in this coating that the image resides. The visible image is the result of a chemical change, in certain places, that results in an observable change of color.

The coating can be physically removed from the fibers with adhesive tape. In fact, flakes of color can be seen where it separated from the fiber and stuck to tape used to collect particulate samples from the Shroud. You can see the thin coat of color through a microscope and it is hard to imagine how an artist could have accomplished this.

The images on the Shroud look ghostlike. They look scorched into the cloth. But chemically they don’t resemble scorches. They don’t contain the chemical byproducts produced by scorching.

It’s possible to imagine that this appearance is what a crafter of fake relics wanted to create; perhaps to portray some imagined idea of what the Resurrection was like. But the reason they look ghostlike is that they are continuous tone negative images. When photographed, the negative of what is already a negative become the extraordinarily photographic like image we commonly see. Could the image on the Shroud, in fact, be a photograph?
 
Near the end of the fifteenth century, about 130 years after the Shroud’s first public exhibition in Europe, Leonardo da Vinci described a camera obscura (a pinhole camera) in his notebooks. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) understood the principle and so did a tenth century Arabian scholar, Alhazen of Basra, who used a tent-sized camera obscura for observing the cosmos. In Alhazen’s tent images were projected onto a wall where they could be traced or copied by hand. It wasn’t until 1727 when Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver mixed with nitric acid created a photosensitive compound that turned dark when exposed to light. And, it wasn’t until 1816 when Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura with a sensitized paper to create an image. In 1834, Henry Fox Talbot created the first stable photographic negative on paper soaked in silver chloride.

Had someone, perhaps, invented photography several centuries earlier even though there is no written evidence or samples of photographic experiments or works? Is the Shroud the work of a scientific genius whose accomplishments are lost to history? While some people have opined that it might be, there is ample evidence the Shroud is not a photograph.

When we look at the Shroud we see what looks like a picture. What to our eyes seems like the highlights, lowlights, and cast shadows of reflected light on a human form is not light at all. It is certainly not light as a camera would detect it or an artist would see it and translate it to canvas. Technical image analysis reveals no directionality to the implied light of the highlights and shadows. The brightness does not come from any angle. It is not from above or below, nor from the right or the left, nor from the front. Furthermore, if the image was produced using photosensitive materials, the gradations of brightness would produce different shades of color, not discrete densities of pixels.

So what does the tonality of the image—made up of pixels—represent if not reflected light? With computer software we can plot the relative lighter and darker areas seen in the images and produce a three-dimensional isometric drawing of the body. With computerized virtual reality we can view the body from different angles. We can see the slope of the nose, the recesses of the eye sockets and the shape of the torso. It seems that the image is a graphic representation of the distance between any part of the body and the cloth. This is startling. You cannot do this with a regular photograph or a painting or any known type of pictorial art. There is nothing at all like this imagery in the history of art.

In 1898, an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia, photographed the Shroud for the first time in history. On his glass plate negative (Talbot’s invention) an extraordinarily positive image likeness of a man emerged. Pia’s negative of a negative revealed the details of the ghost-like images. But the image is not really a negative. It just happens, serendipitously, to act like one. It is a topographic datagram in microscopic, monotonal pixels. However the image was formed, it was recorded chemically. The privilege of modern technology lets us see that it looks like a painting or a photograph of a naked man crucified with nails through his wrists. This same modern technology tells us it is not a painting or a photograph.

Despite many attempts to do so, no one has found or invented an artistic or crafty technique that can reproduce even a few of the characteristics of the images. But that does not mean, that in the future, someone will not find a method to create such images. But if someone does so, a tenacious question will remain:
 
How likely is it that there would be such a one-of-a-kind work of art for which there are no known precedents; created by methods that were never again exploited?

Any method that might be devised must be scientifically credulous, fit into the history of art and conform to the cultural expectations in which the technology was supposedly employed. If not, it will be seen as newly invented art designed to mimic an otherwise unexplained natural process or a supernatural event. The skeptic has a dilemma. To believe that the Shroud is fakery he or she must rely on an underlying belief that transcends scientific fact.

New Chemical Testing Points to Ancient Origin for Burial Shroud of Jesus;

Los Alamos Scientist Proves 1988 Carbon-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin Used Invalid Rewoven Sample

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Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” --John 20

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Our feeling is that Christians shouldn’t need any “proof” and that Atheists would largely remain Atheists. This is because the proof that God exists can be seen from the “things that have been made”, i.e. the universe itself.

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Wednesday January 19, 8:32 am ET

http://www.s8int.com/images/shroud.jpgDALLAS, Jan. 19 /PRNewswire/ – The American Shroud of Turin Association for Research (AMSTAR), a scientific organization dedicated to research on the enigmatic Shroud of Turin, thought by many to be the burial cloth of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, announced today that the 1988 Carbon-14 test was not done on the original burial cloth, but rather on a rewoven shroud patch creating an erroneous date for the actual age of the Shroud.

The Shroud of Turin is a large piece of linen cloth that shows the faint full-body image of a blood-covered man on its surface.

Because many believe it to be the burial cloth of Jesus, researchers have tried to determine its origin though numerous modern scientific methods, including Carbon-14 tests done at three radiocarbon labs which set the age of the artifact at between AD 1260 and 1390.

“Now conclusive evidence, gathered over the past two years, proves that the sample used to date the Shroud was actually taken from an expertly-done rewoven patch,” says AMSTAR President, Tom D’Muhala.
 
I had this on a different thread, I am placing here assuming it goes better here. I am not sure if someone covered this since I ddn’t get a chance to read all the excellent information.

I was recently re-reading parts of the excellent series, A History of Christendom, Vol. 1, The Founding of Christendom, by Warren Carroll. In the book he states that, “The latest dramatic development…is the discovery of an imprint on the cloth , over one of the eyes of the dead Jesus, of six clearly identifiable Greek letters from a Roman coin minted by Pontius Pilate–minted only by him, only in Palestine, and only in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth years of the Emperor Tiberius (October 28-October 31 A.D.).” This would seem to put to rest all the stories on the History Channel, etc, that seem to prove that the shroud is a clever hoax by some known or unknown artist. Sort of like the iris image on the image of Guadalupe.
 
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preyoflove:
Why do I have this idea that the Shroud of Turin, the Shroud of Oviedo and all the Relics of the Passion would somehow play a role in marking the nearness of His Second Coming?

Peace, so be it.
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All I asked was a question! I just thought they were interesting!
 
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preyoflove:
Why do I have this idea that the Shroud of Turin, the Shroud of Oviedo and all the Relics of the Passion would somehow play a role in marking the nearness of His Second Coming?/QUOTE]

Because they are such powerful proofs of Christ’s Resurrection that if news about them spread (as they should) many people would convert to Catholicism, including Jewish people, which is one of the signs that the Second Coming is near.

:amen:

Alma
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