[BertWheeler]

I’m not taking sides here and I’m not advocating one side or the other.

But...

A big but!

I’m a little disappointed in the knee jerk reaction of “some scientists” who immediately declare it a medieval forgery.

Here’s why.

Let’s assume that you have a piece of furniture that was handed down to you from your Great (x5) Grandfather. It’s a nice wooden table and, as family legend goes, the table is 225 years old. Ok. So far so good.

Fifty years from now, your own grandson decides to have the table professionally restored. So some high end, true mastercraftsman comes and takes the table to his shop and spends six months really doing a kick butt job on restoring the table. This was done in 2048.

Your family gets its precious heirloom back and the thing looks great and is guaranteed to last a couple hundred more years before another restoration job is done on it.

Your grandson’s great great grandson tells his son that this table is 400 years old but the great (x3) grandson is the sneering type and will put that to the test by using “science”.

He talks to a “scientist” who tells him to scrape the wood somewhere inconspicuous and bring it to him. The “scientist” then tests it and - wala - the table was built in 2048 and not sometime in the late 1700’s.

The great(x3) grandson goes home and boisterously calls everyone a liar and that the table is a fake!

Lucky for the family and the family heirloom, there was a great (x3) granddaughter who wasn’t a jackazz and she passed the table on to her sons and daughters and the revered tradition was sustained.

As for the foolish great (x3) grandson, well, he started using drugs and hanging around democrats and decided to have himself neutered because of his fears of global warming and, in the end, he blew his brains out but nobody really missed him.

My point? People who are caretakers of priceless heirlooms sometimes have them restored and repaired over and over and over again. So, through the decades and centuries, the actual original material is largely replaced. The object remains the same and is kept in good condition because the caretakers have reverence for it.

[jwparkerjr]

My family had a living room table that was made sometime around 1910. In 1955 they decided to have it refinished. The refinisher told them they should have its original date of manufacture on it and a note that it was refinished by the our family 1955. So it's not uncommon for those with really old artifacts to make a note on them to let others years and years later know of the history.

I would not find it hard to believe that at some time someone felt it necessary to make a notation on the shroud as to its origin.

Turns out the guy who had ‘duplicated’ it recently had produced a crude replica, lacking many of the mysterious qualities the true Shroud displays.

[NYer]

People who are caretakers of priceless heirlooms sometimes have them restored and repaired over and over and over again. So, through the decades and centuries, the actual original material is largely replaced. The object remains the same and is kept in good condition because the caretakers have reverence for it.

:-) And that is precisely how a snippet of the shroud, sent for analysis, came back with a medieval date. As you pointed out, it was a caretaker who approached the task centuries ago to reweave frayed fabric and did such an excellent job that it was not visible to the naked eye.

You can read more here.

[Alberta's Child]

Good points.

I would also point out that many skeptics point out all this alleged "evidence" that the Shroud is a medieval forgery . . . but can't ever explain how someone in medieval times could possibly have created it.

This would be the equivalent of finding bones of some unknown creature buried in a shallow grave that dates back to the 1400s -- and then determining that the only rational explanation based on "evidence" we have today was that it was created through a genetic modification process in a Merck or Johnson & Johnson labratory.

[TXnMA]

So.

What?

Veneration of an object is still a pagan act.

[Hegewisch Dupa]

The classic “We have George Washington’s hatchet he used to chop down the cherry tree. The blade had rusted out already when it was found, so we reforged one using a blacksmith knowledgeable in the techniques of the period. Later the handle rotted, so a heirloom carpenter made one from the oldest tree of the same type of wood we could find....”

[TXnMA]

Get out your Funk and Wagnalls and look up "wala".

After you've wasted all that time, look up, "voilà!"...

~~~~~~~~~~

Phony sophistication destroys credibility....