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
If someone chooses to believe the shroud is a fake, they will. If they choose to believe it is genuine, they will. No amount of evidence either way will make them change their minds.
Forgive the crass comparison, but I wonder if the same people with a healthy skepticism about the Shroud have the same skepticism about the "Downing Street Memo."
Do the same initial assumptions apply in both cases?
In these types of controversies, what someone wants to believe can be a powerful "thumb on the scale" affecting what they ultimately decide.
"Religion" is not an entity, but a category. I agree with you that a category is not "the true path to God," for the simple reason that a category is not an entity, but a class of entities, while a path is an entity.
But the claim of some fundamentalists that they "don't have a religion, but a relationship with Jesus" is a lot like me saying "I don't have a marriage, I have a relationship with my wife".
Do we know the provenance of the Shroud? My impression is that it first surfaced around 1350 AD.
Exactly. As my late, great, Dad used to respond to my question of : "What's it all mean, Dad"? He would reply: "What ever you want it to mean, Buck"!
In this case it means that people tend to believe what they want to believe. Fake or real. As long as they don't kill each other over it, either way is OK.
So if we use non-ferrous oxide would this guy reverse his findings? LOL!
This just in... American scientists have proven that croissants are fattening and will kill you!
I think what 1stFreedom is saying is "don't allow "religion" to get in the way of a "relationship" with God.....
Who are you to judge?
Next time I spot an image of Mary in my bowl of chili, I'll ask her.
Ping!
This only shows at most that the Turin shroud can be mimicked, not that the original is in fact a fake and was produced the same way.
Not having seen the French 'fake', I suspect it doesn't have the detail of the Turin shroud.
I'm sure they were able to produce the same three-dimensional/negative image found on the shroud too...
/sarcasm
Care to swat this one?
Yeah. Everyone knows that plastic hair, snakefondling, overuse of cosmetics and hairspray and toll-free donation numbers are the true path to salvation.
True. We all have a religion, and the fundies need to understand they have one just as much as everybody else.
The distinction that is made is the institution vs. more of an individual trust in God.
They need to explain that better.
LOL!
I'm curious about how the medieval forger matched the blood type (AB, occurring in 3% of the population) with the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano and the Sudarium of Oviedo. That's a pretty cool trick.
Also, the image-bearing fibers of the Shroud were scorched, not painted.
There is a facial shroud in the Holy Roman Archives at Vienna, that is far more likely to be real than the Turin one ever was. The facial features capatured by the Holy Roman shroud are very, very Jewish. The features match a few of the more obscure Christ images I've seen which were painted by Christians native to the Levant, during the very early Middle Ages.
Well, that idea crossed my mind too - followed immediately by an enormous sarcasm tag.
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