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“Jesus wounds persisted after resurrection; he tells Thomas to put his finger into the holes in his hands. Therefore, once his heart began beating again, it’s entirely reasonable to expect his wounds to resume bleeding.”

That may be, but if that’s the case, then either he would not have been wearing the shroud, or it would have moved as he moved, smearing blood and other fluids all over the shroud and ruining the image. So, again, we are back to the issue of how a dead body with no blood being pumped through it, and which had been severely dehydrated and which bled out a lot before death, and which was washed prior to the shroud being put on it, could have so much blood leaking from it that it produced a detailed image. Bottom line: I simply do not believe that the Shroud of Turin is what it is claimed to be.

My conclusion above does not even attempt to pass judgement on whether Jesus was divine or not. It is simply a discussion about whether a particular piece of cloth can be linked to him. I am sorry that you seem to feel insulted, but it is a simple observation (mine, and others’) that so many people who so passionately defend the claim that the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus seem to be basing their faith in Jesus on the validity of this claim. If you don’t, then good for you, you are a thinking person, as well as a person of faith. If someone does tie together those two factors, then I have to question their faith. Frankly, anytime I see people so passionately defending the shroud, I am immediately on notice that they are placing enormous faith in a material object. While I cannot speak for Him, I think that God would be disappointed that many people don’t place their faith in Him.

>> That may be, but if that’s the case, then either he would not have been wearing the shroud, or it would have moved as he moved, <<

Seriously? My point wasn’t that he was wearing the shroud when he met Thomas! The point was only that the wounds persisted after the resurrection. He resurrected, he bled, he put aside his clothes, he appeared to his disciples.

>> Frankly, anytime I see people so passionately defending the shroud, I am immediately on notice that they are placing enormous faith in a material object. While I cannot speak for Him, I think that God would be disappointed that many people don’t place their faith in Him. <<

Your own base presumptions are evidence of nothing but your own biases. I could just as easily write, “Frankly, it’s astonishing to me that God would leave us a physical testament of the historical nature of the resurrection, and so-called ‘Christians’ would be so hateful of the Church which He established on Earth, that they would attack the evidence like a pack of rabid dogs.” Are there ‘Christians’ that argue against the historicity of the Resurrections? Yes. Am I one of them? Heavens, no. And how dare you assume I would be?