Posted on 07/28/2026 6:12:32 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The forensic evidence was bloody and grim. Thick clotted blood scored the bruised face of the corpse, from a multitude of deep, needle-sharp wounds.
More dried blood could be seen on the arms, feet and ankles, blood that had oozed from brutal injuries that punched through the bones.
These details, pieced together by successive teams of experts in criminal pathology, are captured in the oldest piece of murder evidence in the world: the Shroud of Turin.
The dead man, powerfully built and naked, must have suffered intense agonies... but he did not bleed to death.
Neither was he killed by the deep stab wound in his left side, close to his heart.
There were other wounds too, savage but not fatal – signs of a beating that began at his shoulders and left welts across his back and thighs.
All of these injuries contributed to his death, but the murder weapon was more gruesome still... gravity itself.
The victim was killed by his own body weight. His name, of course, was Jesus of Nazareth.
In his new book, The Shroud Rises, Australian researcher William West reaches a provocative conclusion: that the Shroud of Turin (pictured) does, beyond question, depict the face and body of Jesus Christ.
West (pictured) believes there to be ten irrefutable proofs that the Shroud is not a fake.
His death, by crucifixion at a public execution in Jerusalem around 33AD, must have been slow and unspeakably painful.
Slumped forward and suspended by his arms, he suffocated on the blood and pleural fluid that accumulated around his lungs.
After his body was taken down from the cross, it was wrapped in a linen cloth.
His blood, still wet, stained the cloth and then, so the faithful believe, the likeness of Christ's corpse was miraculously transferred onto the linen.
The earliest definite historical records show a cloth claiming to...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.com ...
No. It’s a valid discussion. Saying it is a waste of time to discuss evidence related to the Shroud is like saying it is a waste.of time.to discuss a new book I read or a new movie I saw. Tbere is room in life and faith that you deny in your comments.
Sorry. An important point you made...
Who said *anything* about putting faith in a relic? No one (from what I see in the discussion here) is putting *faith* in the Shroud. Just discussing evidence. There’s a difference. Don’t force your assumptions on others. It unfair to both sides of the assumption.
Ummm because I studied the sign gifts, and hermeneutics, and have a very good understanding why the Pentecostal churches can’t come to grips with the Book of Acts.
Which leads to female pastors, handling snakes, rolling in the aisles, speaking gibberish, and all sorts of shit show shenanigans that do nothing but harm the gospel witness for Christ.
I highly recommend “Charismatic Chaos” by John MacArthur. Then I would do some reading by Calvin and his treatise on relics from the 1540s.
Seriously? A church that has a long history of venerating relics? Many of which had no foundational authenticity.
Maybe I have a different perspective because I live in the 3rd world and see the damage US missionary efforts have been promoting bullshit instead of the gospel.
Spent 20 years in Reformed Churches and am familiar with everything you mention. I also have experience in charismatic churches. There are certainly issues in parts of the charismatic world. But, seriously, are you gonna try to flaunt your CV? Then do it right. Give me a couple of paragraphs on why the Shroud *can’t* be real. Why it *can’t* be a sign.
And 500 fakes doesn’t prove this is one. Seriously, that’s a lame argument against the Shroud. A good argument to he skeptical in general, but a lame argument against the Shroud.
I visited the shroud museum. I believe the actual shroud is in the cathedral.
I was told the body was about six feet tall.
The best evidence for the shroud seems to be the Middle Eastern pollen. I was told there was about 45 varieties as I recollect.
I asked about blood tests, but I didn’t get an answer.
“all the money being made from the tourists going to see it”
I was the only person on the tour I got.
I am skeptical of claims related to blood tests. But the evidence of blood on the cloth is clear.
I obviously don’t knkw the truth of the cloth. And I certainly started out as skeptical at best in the 70s. But that skepticism caused me to examine the evidence and the evidence is clear that if it *is* a fake we have no idea how it was done. And the most recent and best evidence says it originated 2000 years ago in the Middle East.
If some Medieval monks got their hands on 1500 year old cloth from the Middle East impregnated with period pollen and used that as the canvas for their forgery I am even more mystified.
Abd you obviously didnt understand or refuse tk get ky point. And I gave it to you. Grow up.
There are two expansions, one scientific and the other divine. It is up to each of us to choose which we believe and stand!
There was an article about the healing of the blind man in National Review that I can’t find now, but it describes how the man had to be healed twice and why, and how science didn’t discover the reason why it took a second time, until recent times.
SCRATCH THAT- Here is the article.
The Bethsaida miracle - Jesus healing a blind man
D. Keith Mano
GETTING rid of blindness, I’m told, is not such a bargain after all. Human eyes, you see — even when healed physically — still need training and rigorous practice before they can transmit what is “real” and “not real” back to the brain. It doesn’t much matter how long you’ve been sightless, either: a decade or so of blindness and your cerebral cortex has to be completely reprogrammed, as if from infanthood. On opening his eyes, the healed seer confronts a nonsensical, frightful, and, well, Cubist landscape. Over that shattered universe he must stubbornly impose the familiar 3D grid we live in.
Oliver Sacks has written about the new seer in An Anthropologist on Mars. Virgil, age fifty and blind since childhood, has had “successful” eye surgery. Five weeks later “he often felt more disabled than he had felt when he was blind. . . . Steps . . . posed a special hazard, because all he could see was a confusion, a flat surface of parallel and crisscrossing lines; he could not see them (although he knew them) as solid objects going up or coming down in three-dimensional space.”
Furthermore, Virgil “would pick up details incessantly — an angle, an edge, a color, a movement — but he would not be able to synthesize them, to form a complex perception at a glance. This was one reason the cat, visually, was so puzzling: he would see a paw, the nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together, see the cat as a whole.” And, as his wife noted, “Virgil finally put a tree together — he now knows that the trunk and leaves go together to form a complete unit.”
This word-picture of an unmade tree set off associations in my mind. Particularly I remembered Jesus and the Bethsaida blind man. (Told in St. Mark 8:22 - 25. St. Mark’s is the least adorned and oldest Gospel, dating roughly from 45 to 60 A.D.) “And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.”
And the blind man (in what I had always considered a poetic image) replied to Jesus, “I see men as trees, walking.”
That is not a poetic image. It is a clinical description. Like Virgil, the Bethsaida blind man can now see, but he cannot yet make sense of what he is seeing. Tree and man run together, as did trunk and tree-top for Virgil. (Both men could see movement because, according to Sacks, motion and color are inherent in the brain; they need not be learned or relearned.) All this, moreover, is not surprising to Jesus. He knows, it would seem, that a newly healed blind man has neither depth perception nor the ability to synthesize shape and form. The blind man’s brain must first be recalibrated: must be taught (in one miraculous instant) what you and I have known since childhood — how to see.
So Jesus heals the blind man for a second time. “After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.”
As far as I can judge, this is irrefutable evidence that a miracle did occur at Bethsaida. Back in 30 A.D. the blind did not often receive sight: there were few, if any, eye surgeons and seldom a decent miracle-worker. No shill in the crowd could have faked it all by pretending to be blind — because only someone recently given his sight would see “men as trees, walking,” would see the Cubist jumble that Virgil told Oliver Sacks about. A faker, not knowing about post-blind syndrome, would have reported that Jesus had given him perfect vision.
The most astonishing aspect of this miracle is its double nature: you get not one cure but two. Often even devout Christians downplay the wonder-working Jesus — lest they seem naive or over-credulous in a scientific age. We are somewhat embarrassed by New Testament miracles, as if God were cheating in the competition for our belief. We rationalize as an atheist might: “So what if Jesus cured people who were halt and blind? He was a charismatic faith healer. Some of his clientele, no doubt, had come down with stress-induced psychosomatic conditions. Jesus healed them through positive thought or Essene hypnosis, whatever. Rasputin did the same: nothing supernatural about it.”
That explanation might still hold for Part One of the Bethsaida event. So let us suppose a man like Virgil, blind since childhood because of traumatic shock. Let us also suppose that Jesus, Messiah-as-therapist, came along and healed Virgil in a non-miraculous way. That does not (and cannot) explain Part Two. Whether Virgil’s blindness was physical or psychosomatic, still his brain would have been deprived of the visual exercise and constant drill essential to clear three-dimensional sight. Only by a miracle could Jesus provide that necessary crash course in visual recognition. Charismatic therapists may be able to unblock sight —but they cannot infuse a human brain with that lifetime of visual experience necessary for normal sight.
Both Positivist and Christian are stalemated on the subject of New Testament miracles. Positivist thought is certain that no miracle could ever have taken place — because such an event would fatally contravene natural law. Your traditional Christian, by contrast, will accept the Gospel accounts on faith. Until now, these two categories of thinking were mutually exclusive: science and faith could not collaborate. But, at Bethsaida, something quite different came about: a miracle that depends on science for its proof, that cannot be understood except by adducing modern medical data —quite unknown in 30 A.D. — as evidence. And, when one miracle has been proved, it then at once becomes not just possible, but probable, that another miracle can also be proved true.
D. Keith Mano, “The Bethsaida Miracle,” National Review 49 (April 21, 1997)
https://web.archive.org/web/20050313061356/http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n8_v49/ai_19336556/print
There are two expansions, one scientific and the other divine. It is up to each of us to choose which we believe and stand!
There are two expansions, one scientific and the other divine. It is up to each of us to choose which we believe and stand!
The Bethsaida miracle - Jesus healing a blind man
D. Keith Mano, “The Bethsaida Miracle,” National Review 49 (April 21, 1997)
https://web.archive.org/web/20050313061356/http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n8_v49/ai_19336556/print
Many of the early scientists viewed science as a means to understand the Creator. I recall some physicist that studied the shroud and she likened the image to be caused by a “singularity” IIRC - a mini “Big Bang” that created the energy to cause the image on the shroud.
Theologically that would also make sense perhaps in that Christ said something along the lines of “I make all things new.” (I guess that was in Revelation).
From Paul:
2 Corinthians 5:17”Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
I find the shroud interesting, but it doesn’t matter to my faith.
Just go in reader mode.
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