Here's what you are having a problem with ~ the sheer mass and volume of representative works from the First Century AD.
Ain't much there.
In fact, there's so little of it they are now reduced to scouring the bottom of an Egyptian public latrine because it was found to contain parchment text from an ancient Torah.
Going back much futher, to 3000 years, our manuscript remains are really, really slim.
It's possible such an item (an ancient Torah of an unknown Jewish sect) served as a source for much of the Koran. You'd have to have special conditions to keep it in shape for early Medieval Damascene scribes to work with it ~ e.g. a very dry cave near Mecca ~ kind of what Mohammad said ~
Other than that everything is carved in stone or mud.
Ancient cloth is also in short supply.
This latest item, pulling apart a thread of hand twilled cloth and finding it separate into both cotton and linen, is interesting. Tell you a lot about how impoverished it was in the Middle Ages ~ lot of folks around knew how to do invisible reweaving to repair cloth. We, currently, are in short supply of such skilled folks. Almost a forgotten art. However, I'm old enough to remember dry cleaners with the sign "invisible reweaving" ~ but barely.
BTW, you can read this little discovery as two things ~ 1) as a repair, and 2) something done by someone willing to ignore ancient Jewish prohibitions on mixing two types of cloth.
That, at least, dates the repair to long after Jesus' day.
This is the book that changed my mind. Wilson takes a different tact on the search for evidence. He uses the detective method and traces the shroud through historical clues from Jerusalem to Constantinople where the Templars found it and brought it to Turin. New bio-tech finds are very interesting also. Pollens, etc. found only in the area of Jerusalem. As someone mentioned, the relic does not affect faith either way. Faith is faith and does not depend on anything but God’s Word. But isn’t it exciting to think that you are looking at the face and body of Jesus?
WILSON, Ian - The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World’s Most Sacred Relic is Real - Simon & Schuster New York 1998 (English) (Available from Amazon.com) In this book, Wilson presents new scientific evidence that challenges the 1988 carbon dating and other arguments against the authenticity of the Shroud. Current studies, presented here by Wilson, have reversed the views of many people in the scientific and religious communities.
There is no such thing. The goofballs who suggested it referred directly to "French Re-Weaving". I had a suit done in the 80's. It uses a matching peice of excess cloth from a hem that is then spliced in to match. In other words, if Benford and Marino were right, the patch would have had the same date as the original because it would have been original cloth.
The cloth that was actually c-14 tested was completely consumed in the process. These critics have NO basis for saying the sample was corrupted. (Here is a picture http://nvl.nist.gov/pub/nistpubs/jres/109/2/j92cur.pdf (go to page 17) of one of the samples. It is clearly the 3:1 herringbone twill of the rest of the shroud and no threads are missing. No patch is visible. The Vatican fabric experts there during the sampling certified it as original.)
Benford and Marino who came up with the invisible patch are absolute crackpots. See: http://www.gizapyramid.com/BIO-Benford-Marino.htm
I was vaguely under the impression that this prohibition was against *wearing* of clothes of "mixed parentage" ;-)
Did the rabbinical authorities hold that the prohibition was against the *weaving* of such cloth, or just the wearing of it (dead bodies aren't sinning, I guess, since they don't have much say in the matter).
Cheers!