The Shroud of Turin: What's Your Opinion?

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I think that’s a good point. There were sporadic exhibitions of the Shroud from 1350 or so onwards, and the later ones, while it has been in Turin, seem to have attracted large local crowds, but its insignificance as a major Christian icon is demonstrated by the fact that not single depiction of it, in any biblical scene or collection of the arma Christi, shows any indication of any image. Serious attention, and serious belief, as opposed to the willing suspension of disbelief, only arose after the Pia photographs.
 
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I also think this is a good point. So the Shroud has become more famous in history as human technology has increased. As human made technology has increased mankind has created solutions to reverse all of the physical problems stemming from the original fall, except for the spiritual problem. And as technology has progressed we see mankind thinking it does not need God, so atheism/agnosticism has increased. As a kind of inverse correlation to this trend the Shroud becomes more famous/infamous as technology advances. By now, technology should have proved it was a forgery, but the opposite seems to be happening. Has God left mankind a sign that defies technological explanation, the very thing that is causing unbelief? And if God was to leave a sign for a wicked and adulterous generation, what better than the sign of the son of man, as the Shroud represents at the same time both the cross and the resurrection.
 
Has anyone seen the computer-generated images obtained by “cleaning” the image on the Shroud? I mean getting rid of the swelling, the bruises, etc.? It gives us a hint of what Jesus may have looked like at the moment of his Resurrection. I say “hint” because no one knows what a glorified body looks like, at least no one today, and I don’r feel the image is exact. This is one of them:

 
This is one, too. I find it interesting that there is 3D information in the Shroud. How would a Medieval painter know how to do that?

 
It is easy to get carried away by catchphrases. There is 3D information in almost any picture, from the Mona Lisa to the Simpsons. So what do we actually mean that there is 3D information in the Shroud? I’ll have a go…

The intensity of the image at any place is proportional to the distance from that place on a hypothetical body to a hypothetical cloth laid over it.

The hypothetical body and cloth could, by this definition, be real ones, but not necessarily. I hope that therefore the definition could be acceptable to both authenticists and non-authenticists alike.

When the image is converted to 3D by software, the intensity of the image at any spot is related to the distance between a hypothetical body and a horizontal plane beneath it, the darker the image, the higher the spot off the plane. The resulting shape does not resemble a real body. It is very flat, and looks much more like a bas-relief. In order to make it look ‘real’ a whole series of rather subjective manipulations has to be applied to the model, both as a whole and in selected spots, in order to produce a more realistic looking actual body.

Another way of determining an intensity/distance relationship is possible. Scan a real body, measuring the distance between the body and a hypothetical plane above it, and then cover it with a sheet and scan it again. Various cloth body distances can be derived from this data, which could then be reverse engineered into pixel-image intensity, and hypothetical ‘shrouds’ produced, with a view to comparing them to the Shroud itself.

This has never been comprehensively attempted, and is subject to any number of arbitrary factors, but would be extremely interesting.

I myself think that the image was caused by an artist deliberately attempting to simulate that, imagining some kind of sudorific exudation could explain it. He could have applied his pseudo-exudation directly, or covered a bas-relief with it and laid the cloth on top. Although his particular one - the smoking gun - has not been found, several similar statues from the fourteenth century are extant.

The art of modelling statues from pictures does not rely on photographic realism, and there is a flourishing trade in supplying 3D models to art galleries so that blind people can feel what they look like. Being able to make a 3D model of the man in the Shroud says nothing about its authenticity.
 
JimG said:
I don’t think that the Shroud was particularly well known or celebrated until after Secundo Pia, followed by others, took the first photographs of it.
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This statement assumes that the Shroud is a 14th century creation which it definitely is not. Known as the Image of Edessa and later as the Holy Mandylion, the Shroud’s facial image has been known all over the East and the West since the 6th century. Why you think that we have such a definite idea of what Jesus looked like? In the 5th century, and before the Image of Edessa was recovered from its sanctuary, St. Augustine wrote that Christendom had no idea as to Jesus’ appearance. He was usually portrayed as a clean shaven short haired man similar to Apollo.

Icons of the Mandylion are still being made in the Orthodox Church and August 16th is celebrated as the day that the Image of Edessa entered Constantinople in 944 AD.
One of the many legends about the creation of the Mandylion is that of a woman offering Jesus a cloth as he walked carrying His cross, and we find this story as station VI in our Churches.

So. far form being unknown, the Shroud’s divine Image is, in reality, vastly pervasive in Christianity.
 
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Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that t he shroud was a 14th century creation, although I was thinking of more recent times with respect to its becoming more well known after the Pia photographs. The photographs seem to me to argue for the authenticity of the shroud, since it would be unlikely for a 14th century artist to choose to make an image similar to a photographic negative at a time when photography was unknown.

In one of Ian Wilson’s books he does make the point that after the Edessa image became known, artistic renderings of Jesus became more consistent.

Here is an article about, not the Mandylion, but the cloth of Oviedo, which is thought to have been the “facecloth” for the burial of Jesus.

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2015/04/01/the-other-shroud-of-christ/
 
Undead_rat is entitled to his opinion, but there is no definitive evidence that the Shroud is older than the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Ian Wilson drew on earlier suggestions and championed the case for the Shroud and the Mandylion being the same, and some of his arguments seemed quite reasonable, but subsequent research has largely discredited the idea, even among authenticist scholars, and no Art Historian has rallied to his cause. There are several reasons.
  1. The Shroud and the Mandylion look nothing like each other, even allowing for the Shroud being folded up and encased in a case. Apart from the fact that the two faces look nothing like each other, which I appreciate is a matter of opinion, Mandylions are always shown with the face of Christ alive, awake and with his eyes open, and with no dripping blood. I do not accept the idea that none of the artists depicting the Mandylion actually saw it or was told about it, or that every one agreed to follow a convention of showing it alive when it wasn’t.
  2. The burial cloths of Jesus and the Mandylion are often described as being in Constantinople or France at the same time, sometimes on the same list, and at others in different places, suggesting they were two different objects.
  3. The idea that pre-Mandylion faces of Jesus were largely beardless and post-Mandylion ones were largely bearded has not been borne out by further exploration of contemporary art. The famous Pray manuscript, which is supposed to be derived directly from the Shroud, shows no beard to speak of at all.
You are quite correct that “it would be unlikely for a 14th century artist to choose to make an image similar to a photographic negative.” I don’t think an artist chose any such thing. I think he did choose to show what a dead body covered in bloody sweat might leave on a shroud. The photographic negative effect was a coincidental but inevitable consequence.
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
I myself think that the image was caused by an artist deliberately attempting to simulate that, imagining some kind of sudorific exudation could explain it. He could have applied his pseudo-exudation directly, or covered a bas-relief with it and laid the cloth on top. Although his particular one - the smoking gun - has not been found, several similar statues from the fourteenth century are extant.
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I can buy that most things can be 3D, but (1) how did the image get onto the choth, (2) how did the artist know to make the image like a photo negative, and (3) how would an artist know to place the nail wounds in the wrist area and not in the palms?

Thanks!
 
Hi ConstantLearner,

I guess you missed my earlier posts:
  1. See post 214. … The image on the Shroud appears to be made of the degraded cellulose of the Shroud itself, possibly augmented by an iron based pigment, of which very little remains. We do not know whether the Shroud as we see it today is the same as it was when it was made. Some earlier commenters said it had been washed and boiled in oil. A realistic possibility is that it was painted or dabbed with an iron based pigment in a slightly acidic medium, from which most of the pigment has been washed away.
Another possibility, as I explain immediately above, is that a bas-relief was covered with paint and the Shroud laid on top.
  1. I explain this immediately above: “[It is] quite correct that ‘it would be unlikely for a 14th century artist to choose to make an image similar to a photographic negative.’ I don’t think an artist chose any such thing. I think he did choose to show what a dead body covered in bloody sweat might leave on a shroud. The photographic negative effect was a coincidental but inevitable consequence.”
  2. See post 201. "The blood marks on the Shroud are not in the palms because the palms are not shown on the Shroud. You have to extrapolate backwards, from the exit wound to the entry wound. Even some authenticists think that doing so gives an entry wound in the palm.
Why not look at the bloodstain yourself. (Try Shroud Scope: it’s a really useful online resource)

P(name removed by moderator)oint exactly where you think the centre of the exit wound is. Not as easy as it looks, is it?
P(name removed by moderator)oint the knuckles of the first and fourth fingers. A little easier, maybe.
Connect the three points in a triangle, and measure Angle A (Knuckle - Wound - Knuckle).
Reconstruct that same angle on your own hand. (Or a photo of your hand, which is much easier).
Much to your surprise, the exit wound is much closer to your fingers than you think, and therefore much more likely to have been depicted as being the result of an entry wound through the palm, just where artists traditionally put it,
It is true that the 19th century physician Pierre Barbet calculated, with the assistance of some dead people, that the nail had passed through the space of Destot, damaging the median nerve. However, Fred Zugibe, a 20th century forensic pathologist, ridiculed Barbet’s ignorance, and declared that the nail had gone through a quite different space, and had not damaged the median nerve, and that the median nerve doesn’t go anywhere near the space of Destot anyway. In the 21st century Matteo Bevilacqua, an Italian pathologist, has discovered that the nail didn’t go anywhere near either of the earlier suggestions, but at the base of the armbones. Other pathologists, all highly qualified and experienced, have identified two further possible sites. That’s five in all.

Some people have claimed that the nails had to go through the wrists or they would have torn through the flesh. This assumes, of course, that the victim wasn’t standing on a platform. Some of the earliest depictions of a crucifixion show the victim standing on a platform."
 
Hugh_Farey said:
  1. The Shroud and the Mandylion look nothing like each other … .
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This is an incredible statement! In order to believe it, one would have to assume that its maker had seen both the Holy Mandylion and Shroud. Since the Mandylion vanished from Constantinople in 1204 AD, one would have to assume that Mr. Farey is “old” as in the ancient biblical sense. This seems unlikely.
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
  1. The burial cloths of Jesus and the Mandylion are often described as being in Constantinople or France at the same time, sometimes on the same list, and at others in different places, suggesting they were two different objects.
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You are confusing “icons” of the Mandylion with the actual cloth which never left Constantinople after its entry on 8/16/0944 AD until its confiscation by the leaders of the French 4th Crusade in 1204 AD.
Your suggestion that a burial shroud of Jesus was in Constantinople (prior to 1204 AD) is correct. This “sindon” was the Mandylion in its partially unfolded state so that one could see the full frontal view of the image of Jesus’ corpse. And this is very well described by a 4th Crusade officer.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
  1. The idea that pre-Mandylion faces of Jesus were largely beardless and post-Mandylion ones were largely bearded has not been borne out by further exploration of contemporary art.
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"Contemporay Art ? ?"

Yikes! Is this a deliberate attempt to obfuscate this issue? As I mentioned, it was the recovery of the Image of Edessa from its sanctuary in the 6th century that led to the depictions of Jesus changing completely from what had been painted in the 5th, 4th, 3rd, and 2nd centuries. The famous 6th century icon of Christ Procrator in St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai being a prime example.
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
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undead_rat:
I am not looking at the passage right now, but I seem to remember that His disciples had been rowing for hours.
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They were fishing. Their distance from the shore cannot be determined from the time they spent in their boat.
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As Mr. Farey well knows, this statement was made in the context of the debate about Jesus walking on water. Another poster had suggested that this “walking on water” was just a magician’s trick, and had posted a video in this regard.
Still another poster asked if that could be true, leading to my reply saying that the boat being rowed by His disciples was too far offshore for such a “magician’s trick” to be viable.

Then Mr. Farey jumped into this conversation with his incredible “observation” that Jesus disciples were “fishing” and, therefore, might have been quite close to shore. With all due respect, I must conclude that this incident about sums up the gist of all of Mr. Farey’s arguments which are based on a gross misrepresentation or obfuscation or “statistical analysis” of the facts.
 
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Well, no, obviously.
  1. It is true that I have not seen the Mandylion. However, there are depictions of it dating from the tenth century to the present day, and the face on the Mandylion looks nothing like the face on the Shroud. Apart from the fact that it shows Jesus as alive and well, with his eyes open and no blood, the shape of the head is more oval than rectangular, whereas the Shroud shows a very rectangular head, and the moustache is thin and droopy, rather than full and bushy.
  2. No, I’m not confusing copies of the Mandylion with the original, although you are correct that there were copies in places other than Constantinople. However, Robert de Clari, for example, saw the Mandylion in the chapels attached to the Palace of the Lion’s Mouth, and the shroud in the Blachernae chapel. Both shroud and Mandylion are listed separately in various lists of relics sent to France. Almost every ‘eye-witness’ description of the Mandylion is worded in a way that cannot apply to the Shroud.
  3. Contemporary to the time under discussion, of course, not to the present day! It is simply and demonstrably not true that depictions of Jesus changed completely after the sixth century. They carried on being as various as before.The iconic style of the Christ Pantocrator is indeed ubiquitous, but it is by far the only depiction of Christ, and there are dozens of others showing the same variety of depiction, and for the same reason, as before.
 
They weren’t fishing! I’m so sorry I confused the walking on water incident with the 153 fish incident. What’s more John says that they had actually rowed three or four miles. Nevertheless, this information is still not enough to determine how far they were from shore or how far Jesus walked.

But enough already - what has come over you? You’ve suddenly changed from being a fellow seeker after truth to a rather mean-spirited mud-slinger. If you can point out any gross misrepresentation, obfuscation or incorrect statistical analysis I shall be happy to clarify, or even retract (as I do about the fishing).
 
Thank you. I did miss that in your post when I looked at them. Apologies.

How then, do you explain the similarities of the Shroud and the Sudarium?
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
  1. It is true that I have not seen the Mandylion. However, there are depictions of it dating from the tenth century to the present day, and the face on the Mandylion looks nothing like the face on the Shroud. Apart from the fact that it shows Jesus as alive and well, with his eyes open and no blood, the shape of the head is more oval than rectangular, whereas the Shroud shows a very rectangular head, and the moustache is thin and droopy, rather than full and bushy.
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One has to remember that the Byzantine iconographers had only the positive image in the Shroud’s face to work from. A well known 11th century Mandylion icon bears a remarkable similarity to the Shroud’s face with long hair, a thin and long nose, a short beard, eyes wide open (as they appear to be on the positive image), etc. After the Mandylion was lost to the Orthodox Church, Mandylion icons became more stylized with the more oval face that you mention. Many of these icons were made in Russia, and they are still being made today without the presence of the Mandylion’s image for guidance.
 
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