Posted on 04/05/2009 12:20:47 PM PDT by BuckeyeTexan
Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said today in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.
The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.
The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.
Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.
However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Why would the grail be kept under the Temple? Do you mean the Jewish Temple? Why would they keep the grail there?
I don't remember the details. That's the one relic that plain and simply disappeared in the Middle Ages. The legend is that the Knights Templar found it and kept it in a secret room in Jerusalem under the temple. Whether it was the Jewish temple or their own I'm not sure. The records are very spotty.
Unless you're in Hawaii though you probably missed it - if you're on the other side of the intenational dateline you missed it before you even posted. Sorry I was busy cleaning the pool and shopping earlier. ;-)
Assuming that this is true, that they did the carbon dating on a patch, I am amazed at the incompetence of the scientists.
They had a one-time opportunity to do this, and they got the sample from the wrong spot. I've seen pictures of the Shroud and it looks like it should be pretty obvious where the patches are.
Here's a hint, much like whackypedia, one should take whatever they view on either Discovery or History with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Public school?
I’m watching this (on DVR. Mom took us out for dinner) and a word from my youth is being used - reweaving. My grandmother had an aunt who used to do it as a business - and yes, it is hard to tell when cloth is rewoven. It’s interesting as the samples got closer to the inside of the shroud, the dates got older. Aside from that, the variation in dates was awfully wide. They should have been very close to the same and they weren’t. There is a progression.
I was a history major.
Swordmaker, have you read “Born in Blood”? If you did, what is your opinion of the author and the premise of the book?
This patch is not an obvious patch. It was done using a very sophisticated technique developed in France in the 16th Century to repair wall hangings, tapestries and arras, called French Invisible Reweaving. It involved making a yarn as close as possible to the original in color, size, etc., and then carefully splicing the new yarn to the old and then reweaving to match the extant weave. On the Shroud, the area under discussion is on the lower left corner, a corner that was often used to hold or mount the Shroud when it was displayed horizontally and would be a corner that experienced wear and stress tearing. What is now known, that was unknown to the scientists who cut the sample from the Shroud in 1988, is that the repair yarn is COTTON... while the original Shroud material is LINEN, derived from Flax. The new yarn has also been dyed to match and contains Aluminum (in the form of Alum) which was added as a mordant in the preparation of the yarn while the main body of the cloth contains no Aluminum at all. What the scientists cut as a sample to be Carbon tested in 1988 is a mixture of original Linen and more modern Cotton.
The other tidbit I picked up from the program is that the sample was selected not by the scientists or the photographers who knew that corner was contaminated.
The original agreed protocol for the sampling involved taking eight samples from eight different locations on the Shroud including image and non-image areas. Those samples would be unwoven into threads and then control threads from other old cloths, as well as the actual samples from the Shroud, would be sent to SIX different C14 labs. Instead, the protocols were changed literally at the last hour to only take ONE sample from ONE area and that was taken from the one area that the scientists who had prepared the original protocol had agreed to avoid because of anomalies. Four sub-samples plus a retained sample were cut from that one master sample and sent to only THREE labs. The Arizona lab got two while London and Zurich got one each. The samples were sent fully woven and easily identified as the Shroud as it was the only one that was herringbone weave (three over one) while the control samples were simple one on one weave. In other words, the whole thing was a botched job from the moment the protocols were discarded in favor of something simpler... and poorly thought out.
Yes. I think it is a very scholarly book with good research. It has been many years since I read it, though. A good friend of mine who is a high degree Mason recommended it to me and he thinks it's fairly accurate.
Thanks for the ping!
Except aruanan insists that was not a crown of thorns, but rather a phylactery (a bloody phylactery?), which arunan says proves that even though he doesn't look so Jewish, he must have been, right?
The image on the shroud looks to me like your average six foot tall 12th century Knight Templar from northern Europe, not the average five-foot four inch first century Jewish-Semite from Judea.
Hmmm.
“of course carbon-dating is more conclusive then actual documentation...”
Only, if done properly...which the Shroud of Turin was not done. The carbon testing is invalid because they did not test the actual original linen...there was “contamination” from medieval era cotton fibers which were used to repair a damaged section of the shroud.
Ask you favorite scientist to duplicate the image...
“Discovery Channel or History Channel did a special a few years back on the Shroud of Turin. Apparently, for political reasons and fear of power of the Knights Templar brought their downfall by the King & the Pope. And yes, the carbon dating of the Shroud indicated that it was of later date, and therefore a fake. The sample taken was just a few threads from a corner. I seriously doubt that any samples will ever be taken again. And the story will grow.”
You have missed out on newer information. Indeed, the carbon dating has been proved to be inaccurate. Evidently, there were cotton threads from the medieval era interwoven with the original linen from the corner they took the fabric sample from. This has been proven both by photographic images taken utilizing ultra violet light and by microscopic inspection and chemical testing. The cotton fibers also had been dyed to match the linen, which was not dyed.
If the scientist were aware that the sample was not indicative of the whole, why would they then form an opinion of the whole based upon information of the sample? Seems like quite a con job by the scientists here.
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