Posted on 01/21/2004 2:29:31 AM PST by Swordmaker
I made that exact point the last time this subject thread came up.
That's a VERY good point - and absolutely true - I'm surprised I've never heard anyone mention that before.
The only dumb question is the unasked one.
Some broken strands of DNA have been recovered from the blood on the Shroud. Understandably, it is extremely degraded. Your point about "many hands" is good. Who knows who's DNA has been isolated? Is it one person's or many. There was a Science Fiction novel written several years ago about Cloning Jesus from DNA from the Shroud. The key word is "Fiction."
That may be the ultimate test. So far, we have not been able to duplicate it in all of its features.
I made that exact point the last time this subject thread came up. ~ my_pointy_head_is_sharp
Perhaps the cloth tied under the beard and tied at the top of the head held his hair up?
You may have a good idea. Radiologists who have looked at the Shroud state that not only is it a negative photograph, it is also an X-RAY. To the trained eye of a radiologist the bones of the hands, forearms, teeth and skull are visible under the skin and muscle!
From
NUCLEAR MEDICINE AND ITS RELEVANCE TO THE SHROUD OF TURIN (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)
by August D. Accetta MD, Kenneth Lyons MD, John Jackson PhD.
"The Shroud image suggests quite strongly the presence of many skeletal details e.g. carpal and metacarpal bones, some 22 teeth, eye sockets, left femur, left and possibly right thumbs flexed under the palms of the hands, as well as soft tissue and soft tissue injuries; all presumably originating from some form of radiation emitted from the body enshrouded.
Testing done on a human volunteer (a radiologist) injected with a radioactive tracer (technicium99m) and then scanned with a collimated gamma camera exhibited the greatest likeness to the image on the shroud (minus the blood stains) of all attempts to re-create a shroudlike image. The sole exception to this was the head... the scan of the volunteers head turned out to be a caricature with no detail at all.
As I understand it, Scans (which can take up to 30 minutes each) are done at various times after injection of the tracer because the radioactive tracer infuses different parts of the body at different rates. First to be infused are the active, blood filled parts of the body, then more dense structures, and finally, the bones. The image is then constructed from these timed scans by a computer "sophisticated" computer. The head image on the test scans were washed out from too much radiation over too long a period for the scanner.
I had such a radiogram done of my heart on Monday... they did two scans seperated by about an hour... they did not need to see the bones but wanted the tissues of my heart. The "sophisticated computer" used to generate the image from the scanner they used on me was a 14 year old Macintosh IIFX!
Although not detailled in the paper, Dr. Arcetta told me at a Shroud symposium that the lack on the Shroud of some deeper details seen on the radiograms of the test subject (only structures less than ~3/8 inch deep are seen on the Shroud while the radiogram goes all the way to the core), and the inclusion of details that would have come at different infusion times (soft tissue and hard tissue nearly equally represented), lead to a startling conclusion: the varied tissues of the body covered by the shroud became radioactive at the same time... and that the radiation was some how STOPPED before the radiation deeper in the body reached the surface of the shroud.
This would explain the detailed facial image! But how do you stop the deeper radiation from radiating and exposing the deeper structures? The only answer they could come up with was to either remove the shroud from the body or REMOVE THE BODY FROM THE SHROUD . . . ALMOST INSTANTLY.
How fast does Gamma Radiation travel 3/8 of an inch????
Incidentally, the production of such an image requires a COLLIMATED CAMERA that only accepts radiation in the Z axis... how did this occur in a 1st (or 13th) Century piece of linen? The image on the Shroud is vertically collimated. There is no image of the sides, no distortion that would be caused by gamma radiation from other angles hitting the shroud in the same spot as a gamma particle in the Z axis. The Gamma Cameras cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What does "bound about" mean, Race. Think about it. It does not mean that the face was covered by the binding... it means that the face was bound around the circumference, under the jaw and over the top fo the head. Why was it bound? To keep the mouth closed in death. Ergo, this biblcal description (in Old English translation, the Greek does not have a problem with this lack of specific words for these purposes that are missing in English) is not inconsistent with the Shroud.
About 30 pico seconds.
BTW, Jonas, of course, records an actual event (Christ "As Jonas was in the belly of the whale for three days")and traditionally 38 hours constitute the amount of time (I'm going from memory here) Jonas was in the whale.
As to the Crucifixion NOT occuring on Friday, you are still two days off.
It may mean that to you, but it doesn't mean that to many biblical and historical scholars. To BIND means to tie up... Why would anyone tie something around the face, Race? The bible does NOT say "wrapped around the entire head. It says in your King James Version (using imprecise translations from the Greek) "And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself."
As you can see it says "about his head" not "around his head" which just as easily could have been said had that been the meaning. We also see that the napkin was seen "wrapped." Why was that important, Race? Think about how you would make a large cloth into something you can bind under the jaw and over the top of the head to be tied to keep the jaw closed (we know the jaw has not gaped open because the mouth of the man on the Shroud is closed). A person making a binding would roll (or wrap) the cloth to make a thin strap-like roll of cloth to pass under the beard and over the top of the head to BIND the head and jaw together. There is no purpose in having a seperate cloth covering (or wrapping) the face when the shroud will do that quite nicely.
This binding of the jaw happens to be a fairly COMMON funeral practice in many cultures. Today, our embalmers WIRE the jaw shut and sew the eyes shut. Many ancient bodies have been found with just such an over the top binding.
Now, think of a resurrected man, climbing off of the stone shelf where he had been laying reaching up and pulling the binding holding his mouth shut off and tossing it aside. Someone who is merely stealing the body would not have to do this (although they might) but a living person wanting to open his mouth would.
Also, if Jesus' head was wrapped like you describe, then His beard would have been TUCKED UP TIGHT against His face.
No, Race, the rolled up cloth would have probably been only an inch or so in diamter and would have fit UNDER the beard and BEHIND the forelocks of hair. It would have pushed both a bit upward (from the supine positon) and pressed them more strongly against the covering shroud.
See?
First of all, Graymatter, the shroud, for all its similarities to a photograph, IS NOT A PHOTOGRAPH! It was not made with light... so it carries no light related color information.
There is no color information in the shroud except the rusty brown of the blood stains. The image itself is monochromatic... ALL portions of the image (skin, hair, beard, etc,) are the exact same tone. In fact, they are literally like little tiny dots. The areas that appear darker are merely denser areas of dots.
One other factor is that there is a correlation of shroud to body part distance with image density (This is what gives the shroud the "encoded" information for 3-dimensions to a VP8 image analyzer); the closer the body part, the denser the image. After a certain distance, there is no image.
On the negative (which is actually the positive print) the hair appears light because it was very close to the shroud and its image is dense.
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