There is very little scholarship in this article, Sontagged. When someone uses his opinion as fact such as "It should be noted that Jews, like Egyptians, were very particular about how they prepared human corpses for burial. Jews likely wrapped such bodies with several strips of cloth, thus not a single cloth." he is spouting misinformation based on myth. Jews did not bury their with "several strips of cloth". Conflating Jewish burial customs to Egyptian burials is wrong-headed as you can get. Jews were religiously required to bury their dead by sundown, the Egyptians took months to inter their dead. Jews treated dead bodies as ritually unclean, Egyptians exactly the opposite.
Othonion is actually translated in Strong’s Concordance as "a fine linen sheet". Add the binding strip for the ankles, wrists, and around the face, you have grave clothes, "othonia", the plural form. Several cloths, one large two or three smaller cloths. Plural. Do you know how hard Linen is to tear? It’s almost impossible.
That sweat cloth still exist to this day. It’s called "The Sudarium of Oviedo" and is kept in a Cathedral in Oviedo Spain. It has approximately 110 points of congruence in blood stains with the blood stains on the Shroud. It show a staining pattern of having been rolled diagonally into a long roll that is sufficiently length to tie around a man’s face to keep his jaw closed in death. It also has a bloody handprint on it from where someone carried the head of a body face down, while this cloth covered the head and face in death, perhaps from a cross to a tomb. The blood type matches that on the Shroud.
By-the-way, the Synoptic Gospels use the word the Greek word sindon in the singular to designate the grave clothes. (Matt. 27:59; Mk. 15:46 (twice); Lk. 23:53). Sindon in Greek means large cloth, singular. It literally means a sail, and used sails were frequently used as shrouds. Incidentally, vs. l2 ("But Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths (plural) by themselves; and he went home wondering what happened.") does not appear in the most ancient manuscripts, but is added by later ancient authorities.
Also as an aside, the Hungarian Pray manuscript shows the Shroud with the distinctive poker hole, herring bone weave, and Jesus with his hands folded minus thumbs. . . It’s provenance is late twelfth centuriy.
