The symbol isn't the thing, the map is not the territory.
Posted on 06/22/2005 9:55:20 AM PDT by aculeus
A FRENCH magazine has said it had carried out experiments that proved the Shroud of Turin, believed by some Christians to be their religion's holiest relic, was a fraud.
"A mediaeval technique helped us to make a Shroud," Science & Vie (Science and Life) said in its July issue.
The Shroud is claimed by its defenders to be the cloth in which the body of Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion.
It bears the faint image of a blood-covered man with holes in his hand and wounds in his body and head, the apparent result of being crucified, stabbed by a Roman spear and forced to wear a crown of thorns.
In 1988, scientists carried out carbon-14 dating of the delicate linen cloth and concluded that the material was made some time between 1260 and 1390. Their study prompted the then archbishop of Turin, where the Shroud is stored, to admit that the garment was a hoax. But the debate sharply revived in January this year.
Drawing on a method previously used by sceptics to attack authenticity claims about the Shroud, the magazine got an artist to do a bas-relief - a sculpture that stands out from the surrounding background - of a Christ-like face.
A scientist then laid out a damp linen sheet over the bas-relief and let it dry, so that the thin cloth was moulded onto the face.
Using cotton wool, he then carefully dabbed ferric oxide, mixed with gelatine, onto the cloth to make blood-like marks. When the cloth was turned inside-out, the reversed marks resulted in the famous image of the crucified Christ.
Gelatine, an animal by-product rich in collagen, was frequently used by Middle Age painters as a fixative to bind pigments to canvas or wood.
The imprinted image turned out to be wash-resistant, impervious to temperatures of 250 C (482 F) and was undamaged by exposure to a range of harsh chemicals, including bisulphite which, without the help of the gelatine, would normally have degraded ferric oxide to the compound ferrous oxide.
The experiments, said the magazine, answer several claims made by the pro-Shroud camp, which says the marks could not have been painted onto the cloth.
AFP
I think the Vatican is a little leery about sampling after the last radiocarbon screw-up.
>Well, hate to say it, but it's NOT. The gospel of Jesus
And what do you base this on? Your Gospel, or the Gospel of Christ?
>>Christ in believers is the true church. It's not a building, it's a relationship with the one true God.
Nobody claims it's just the building.
>>I'm just tired of people who think their church is the only TRUE one.
And I'm tired of people who erroneously think they belong to the Church Christ left us.
>>God knows who the true church is. It's Jesus dwelling in the believer and that believer doing His will. Doesn't matter what denomination s/he is either.
Really? Think so? When did Christ say that? Seems to me the authority he left was specific. And how do you account for the contradicting denominational doctrines?
>>So you tell me, 1stFreedom, which is the Faith of Christ? The one preached by Martin Luther or the one SOLD by Pope Leo X?
Hmmm The one preached by Martin Luthor? You mean, the one where he added the word "alone" to scripture? You mean the faith in which he rejected books of the NT since they contradicted his system of theology?
Think about it...
If you drew a mustache on a copy of a picture of my mom it wouldn't really bother me all that so long as it wasn't the only one. If you'd like I'll email a scan and you can knock your self out. I love my mom, but I don't worship her.
ACtually, the samples have been taken and done. There are archaeological tissue experts who have looked at the cloth, and it is indeed the cloth dating, by looking at the vanillin content in the flax, that gives a much, much earlier date.
Vanillin is a natural substance occurring in linen. It gradually deteriorates and disappears. In the patched areas of the Shroud, where it was burnt in a fire in the Renaissance, the patch has vanillin that dates from that time. But the original parts of the Shroud have none life. It's all broken down and is gone. It is the tissue experts who discovered this, and who concluded that the Shroud is AT LEAST 1300 years old (which would place it in the 600s) and potentially much older than that.
The fact that there is NO other work of art that depicts Jesus crucified through the wrists, nor any other work of art using the amazing technique that was used to "produce" the Shroud ought to itself tell us something quite important.
The thing is uncanny in its detail, not painted on, and there's not anything else, forgery or otherwise, remotely like it. Tissue experts have determined it's older than 1300 years. Pollen tells us that it came from Palestine.
The image tells us that it wasn't painted on.
And the fact that it was preserved, and we don't have anybody else's burial shroud from back then tells us that there was something terribly, terribly important about THIS cloth in ancient Palestine that made people save IT, and the sudarium, and hide it in a wall in Edessa, and protect it for hundreds of years before Constantinople was sacked, the Edessa Cloth disappeared from history...to reappear in France 100 years later as what we now call "the Shroud of Turin".
This is the Holy Grail. It bears the blood of Christ. Rare type AB...just like the Sudarium.
Maybe we should clone whoever is on it from the blood and ask the clone?
The problem with explanation A is that the image is simply not painted onto the sheet.
Remember, it appears on BOTH sides of the cloth, in perfect alignment, but without the staining image having gone all the way through. In other words, if you look longitudinally at a single threat bearing the image, you will discover that there is the carmelized substance which forms the image at one end of the thread, and faintly at the other end of the thread, but that the middle of the thread, between those two points, is not stained at all.
Even today, without the use of a computer, we cannot PERFECTLY align two images, point for point, on opposite sides of the same cloth or piece of paper without going THROUGH the intervening material. But that is PRECISELY what the image on the Shroud of Turin is, forensically speaking. And that fact alone makes the "painted on" hypothesis impossible. Whatever the Shroud is, it is NOT a painted on fake.
Probably, the image was formed by a natural Maillard reaction, but of the most incredibly extraordinary type, which went on just long enough to create this incredible detailed image...but not long enough to saturate the image.
Moreover, there is one little detail that is very perplexing. The inscriptions of the coins on the eyes of the dead man are legible under heavy magnification. They are minor coins bearing the misspelt name and title of Pontius Pilate. Interestingly, recent archaelogical finds in the Middle East have found a Roman coin of the correct size with the misspelling that appears on the Shroud.
How does a COIN inscription get included in a Maillard reaction? A coin does not putrefy.
There is something extremely disturbing about the Shroud of Turin. It has been studied now, the evidence, by CSI-type forensic pathologists. So has the Sudarium that goes with it. The coin inscriptions being on the cloth, visible under extremely heavy magnification, throws a nasty curve ball into both the natural decay explanation (coins don't decay) and certainly the forgery theory is really ruined by it.
Of course the simplest approach to the problem of the coins is simply to deny that the images are there. This has been done, so you will find assertions from those who discovered and described (and present) the images of the coins and inscriptions, and those who say that they have studied these things and that there are no coins or inscriptions. All that I can say about this is that the finely detailed photos I have seen sure look like inscriptions to ME, and that the coincidence of the original discoverer seeing a misspelt Roman inscription, and the later discovery in Palestine of coins of the correct size, bearing that very misspelt inscription of Pontius Pilate is powerfully persuasive to me anyway.
(b) does not seem likely, given what we know about Jewish burial practices. But, of course, if the body was not flat, but the head was elevated (say, by having the facecloth shoved under it like a pillow) it could be that the elongation of the images on the sheet actually produced the image we see. Obviously the natural processes that produced the image did not know what "normal" was, so they would elongate naturally. It could be that the foreshortening effect that would normally happen was itself elongated by the angle of the head, with the result an image that is about normal.
Now, if that's the case, we practically end up at (c), at least if we apply Occam's Razor. Because we end up with a balance of foreshortening and elongation so uncannily perfect as to have created a normal image, not to mention a body that was there and then taken out at the perfect moment.
Also see my (D) at 213.
Regarding (A), I know that it is not a possibility for many reasons: the carbon dating, the hyperrealism of the painting if painting it is, the unknown method of transfer, the coins, the blood, the psychology of the faker. I simply listed (A) because the foreshortening conundrum alone logically allows for it.
(B) is indeed contrary to the burial practices as far as I know.
(C) -- divine desire to satisfy our doubting nature - is present under any scenario.
(D) can also be ...
E) The body was placed on its back onto the cloth. The transfer occured by parallel rays of unknown origin that went through the body, so that the foreshortened facial features, and the antire frontal image tranferred onto the flat cloth spread on the slab under the back.
The symbol isn't the thing, the map is not the territory.
This could all be avoided if everyone would just become Lutheran.
Beyond taking offense, what you failed to do is recognize the truth of the statement. It IS the catholic faith that collects relics, not protestant churches. You may find the truth insulting, but it is inaccurate to extrapolate your problem with the truth into some issue you perceive me to have with catholics.
Striking out at someone stating the truth is not an appropriate response.
One problem is that during the years quoted the common assumption was that the nails were driven through the palm of the hand. Contemporary physilogy tells us that bones of the hand are too delicate to suport the dead weight of a body handing on a cross and the hands would be torn out of the nail unless some other support were used. It's the common belief that the nail was driven through the wrist instead, which is what you see on the Shroud. People in those centuries simply did not have the physiological knowledge to perpetrate such a fraud. Many other interesting details leave the queston wide open, in my opinion. One scientist has claimed to have identified the blood type as AB.
it is a scriptural fact that the head covering is described as a seperate piece...this is not consistant with the shroud of turin.
To "science" the whole notion of the Risen Christ, can be "proven fake". But, then, that's not the basis for my faith.
An honest scientist would not claim that science could prove fake the Risen Christ because supernatural events are outside the scope of consideration of science. To consider science can address something it can not by definition is not good "science".
There's a nice straw man argument. I wouldn't argue in favor of those activities as a true reflection of Christianity either.
"Also see my (D) at 213."
Well, sure. But once one moves to the supernatural explanations, the "How" simply becomes a matter of "Poof! Because God made it happen like that."
If, for example, the walking on water ascribed to Jesus is true, it's the fact of the walking on water that establishes the supernatural, at least as far as I am concerned. Assuming it actually happened at all, I am not very curious about the actual mechanics of Jesus' walking on the water. And the reason I am not is because the command of an intelligence over nature, than can simply do whatever it pleases, and cause nature to do whatever it pleases it to do, without process, is the interesting part. Perhaps Jesus was his full weight, and simply walked on water because God changed the laws of physics and made the water underneath him denser than he. Or perhaps Jesus became lighter than a feather.
Or perhaps the water was just water, and Jesus was his full weight, and he walked on the water anyway, an impossibility, because he simply willed the natural laws to cease for him to do as he pleased.
All three of those things end up in the same place for me. An intelligence that commands nature has no rules binding it.
The really interesting question for me is the intersection of the natural processes which could produce the Shroud without beams of energy, coupled with the incredible unlikelihood that (a) they would all line up to produce such a perfect image, and (b) they would happen to do so for the guy who was crucified for saying he was God. What are the odds? Nonexistent. Something that requires nature to bend the odds past the breaking point is a miracle. And faced with a miracle, what does one do but believe?
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