Posted on 06/01/2008 8:55:11 AM PDT by blam
Will Judean Desert find shed light on Shroud of Turin?
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS Updated May 29, 2008 7:28
Can a 6,000-year-old shroud uncovered in the Judean Desert in 1993 help illuminate the centuries-old debate over the Shroud of Turin?
The Shroud of Turin
Slideshow: Pictures of the week That is the question posed by Olga Negnevitsky, a conservator at the Israel Museum who was involved in the conservation of the lesser-known shroud for the Antiquities Authority after it was discovered inside a small cave near Jericho.
The idea to use the older shroud to learn more about the famous one came to Negnevitsky this week after she listened to an address on the Shroud of Turin at the International Art Conference in Jerusalem on the conservation of cultural and environmental heritage.
"If we reexamine the [Jericho] shroud with all the latest modern technology, then maybe we will find out more information that will help solve the secrets of the Shroud of Turin," Negnevitsky said Wednesday.
The finely-decorated shroud, which is 7 meters by 2 m., was found by Israeli archeologists at the entrance to what has been dubbed the Cave of the Warrior, during a search for additional Dead Sea Scrolls near Wadi el-Makkukah.
Instead of finding biblical scrolls, the archeologists stumbled on the 6,000-year-old tomb of a nobleman whose body was wrapped in an elaborate linen shroud.
The skeleton was accompanied by a long flint blade, wooden bowls, sandals of thick leather, and bows.
The shroud, like the Shroud of Turin, had signs of blood on it, likely from a wound suffered by the bandaged warrior, Negnevitsky said.
After painstaking preservation, the shroud was displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1998 and then at the Israel Museum in 2003 before being placed in the storeroom of the Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, she said.
The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth, about 4.3 m. long and 90 cm. wide, that is kept in a cathedral in Turin, Italy. It bears the faint image of a blood-covered man and is believed by some to be Jesus's burial cloth.
A 1998 radiocarbon test dated the cloth from some time between 1260 and 1390 CE, ruling out any connection with Jesus.
Other studies suggested that the radiocarbon test was flawed and that the shroud was anywhere from 1,300 to 3,000 years old. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have said that pollen and plant images on it put its origins in Jerusalem sometime before the eighth century.
Despite numerous tests carried out over the years, the Shroud of Turin, which was first documented in 1357 in Lirey, France, has remained a puzzle as debate continues over whether it is a major Christian find, a fascinating example of medieval folk art, or a fraud.
The hope is that, provided the Antiquities Authority gives the go-ahead, a comparison with the Jericho-area shroud - found relatively near where scholars believe the Shroud of Turin was discovered - will lead to a more accurate estimate of the latter shroud's age, as well as other information.
"This is another source that could shed light on the mystery of the Shroud of Turin," said Prof. Amos Notea of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who is the Israel chairman of the conservation conference that brought together scholars from around the world.
"It was here the whole time, but no one connected it until now," Notea said.
GGG Ping.
My best guess is that the prototype of the Shroud was a piece of statuary made with rock containing a high percentage of radioactive elements.
I think that it is amazing to think that any piece of cloth has endured 1000, 3000, or 6000 years!
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Thanks Blam.The finely-decorated shroud, which is 7 meters by 2 m., was found by Israeli archeologists at the entrance to what has been dubbed the Cave of the Warrior, during a search for additional Dead Sea Scrolls near Wadi el-Makkukah. Instead of finding biblical scrolls, the archeologists stumbled on the 6,000-year-old tomb of a nobleman whose body was wrapped in an elaborate linen shroud. The skeleton was accompanied by a long flint blade, wooden bowls, sandals of thick leather, and bows... [and] had signs of blood on it, likely from a wound suffered by the bandaged warrior, Negnevitsky said. After painstaking preservation, the shroud was displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1998 and then at the Israel Museum in 2003 before being placed in the storeroom of the Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, she said.I'm pretty sure I'd not previously heard about this find. |
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Shroud ping...
yep... shroud of Jericho... a 6,000 year old shroud found in a tomb may shed some light on the Shroud of Turin debate.
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Wow, just wow!
The trick is not to believe everything we think. ;o)
Research often turns what we think upside down.
For example:
Here's a piece of textile from Peru that dates back to Jesus era = It's 2 ft x 6" = a border fringe...
"Border fragment Paracas culture,
Peru 0 - 100 A.D. 
The Shroud is linen, a cloth known for it's longevity - and the dry, arid climates in which these textiles were, added to their ability to last...in addition, the Shroud has been carefully carded for for hundreds of years - keeping most air and weather well from it.
""This cloth will set the example," Doran said. It is rare that fabric textiles even 1,000 years old are preserved in the United States."
*All told, 87 cloth fragments from an estimated 67 complete items were recovered from the dig. The cloth was made from the leaves of sabal palm. The pieces reveal five different methods of fabric making, all without benefit of a loom. Even so, some fabrics are woven as tightly as a cotton T-shirt. Others are made more loosely twined into blankets, capes, and toga-like garments.
Visit THE TEXTILE MUSEUM 2320 S Street, NW, Washington, DC 20008-4088 (202) 667-0441 . They have a lot of old textiles.
Thanks for the ping!
The question I always have is, if Jesus rose from the dead after three days, which I believe and is the basis of Christianity, would that be enough time for his image to be permanently ingrained in the cloth? Are the markings on the cloth of blood? If not, how could the image be forged so clearly after just three days? And what about a DNA test? Couldn’t that help explain where this person came from, race etc? Thanks.
The image, or certain aspects of the image, were formed miraculously. What our instruments might measure as a “burst of radiation” was part of the process. This happened quite literally in a flash.
Thanks, so other shrouds don’t look the same, the image on the Turin shroud is/was uniquely formed?
Holy blood sweat and tears, Batman!
The problem is the Bible clearly states Jesus’ body was cleaned and annointed prior to being wrapped for burial, as is Jewish law. Even if his wounds continued to ooze some after being wrapped in the linen, they would have shown up as blots on the fabric, not trickles.
The SOT is clearly a fraud. I know this will upset some as the urge to believe in something extraordinary is strong, but all you are doing is allowing yourself to be duped by some middle age priests intent on producing an “artifact” to bring money and notoriety to their Church/congregation.
At that time, hundreds of churches were claiming to have some kind of sacred, religious artifact whether it was part of the true cross or Mary Magdalene’s lap cloth. If you didn’t have anything like this you were going to be left behind as the competition to outdo the other churches was strong.
In other words, it was a marketing gimmick.
There are blood stains on the Shroud... but they do not make up the image. The blood on the Shroud is so degraded with age that any DNA is hopelessly ruined for any tests. The blood has been identified as human blood through human antigen studies. These tests are definitive. The blood itself has been tested to AB, a type that is more common in semitic peoples than any other. It is the same type as the blood found on the Sudarium of Oviedo, which has stains that correspond to the positions of stains on the head of the image on the Shroud. The Sudarium has a provenance of seven hundred years prior to the first showing of the Shroud in 1352AD in Lirey, France.
Drs. John Heller and Allen Adler, both specialists in blood chemistry, concluded that it was actual blood on the Shroud on the basis of physics and chemistry based testing of the blood stain samples taken from the Shroud, including:
Confirmation of Heller's and Adler's findings, was provided by Dr. Bruce Cameron, the World's foremost expert on hemoglobin with a double doctorate dedicated to the study of hemoglobin in all of its forms when he identified samples sent to him as "very old acid Methemoglobin," a final degraded form of blood.
The image itself is formed of starches and polysaccharides that have interacted with Putracine and Cadaverine, gasses that seep from a dead body, to form a caramel coloring in the coating, chemically called Melanoidins, only on the surfaces of certain fibers of the Shroud. The starches and polysaccharides are a very thin layer (1/100 the thickness of a fine human hair) that was a result of the cleaning of the cloth with Soapwort after the retting (softening process) when the Shroud's flax was made into linen.
Cadaverine and Putracine are early exudates of the decomposition process. Had it continued for a time much longer than the three days of the Biblical time line, the Shroud would start showing obvious signs of inclusion in the decomposition. Something interrupted the decomposition before the Shroud could be damaged.
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