Posted on 04/03/2010 10:13:43 AM PDT by NYer
April 3, 2010. Turin will play host to the Holy Shroud between April 10th and May 23rd. More than one million people have made reservations to visit. More than 4 thousand volunteers are helping with artistic exhibitions, movies and informative panels.
The Bible tells us that Joseph of Aramethea bought a fine Linen Sindon... by definition, a large linen sheet. Yes, there were other cloths used, and Jewish writings tell us exactly how they were used... to bind the wrists and ankles to keep them from flopping akimbo in death, and another to wrap AROUND the face to keep the mouth closed.., in other words under the jaw, behind the ears and over the crown of the head. Two years ago, a collapsed tomb was discovered with an uncollected 1st century burial was found... with a shroud, tied at the wrists and ankles and with the face cloth around the skull in just such a manner.
You don’t make much of a case except to just say its a fraud. Those who claim it is authentic have a great abundance of evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines to support their claim.
If it is a fraud after all, it is a doozy. The fraudster would have had to put actual blood on the shroud where the scars are. He would have had to duplicate all of the scars in exact detail front and back, knowing exactly what type of whip the romans used in that day and then knowing how to duplicate the type of scar the whip would leave. He would have had to have known the exact size of Roman spears in that day so he could duplicate the spear wound in Jesus’s torso. He would have had to collect pollen and flowers from jerusalem and put them on the Shroud. He would have had to paint the image in such a way that it contained three dimensional holographic information. He would have had to have known of the concept of a negative image hundreds of years before the invention of photography and then, just for fun, have decided to paint in a negative image because it would make the image seem more real. He would have had to have painted the image in such a way that only the outermost fibres contained the pigment. He would have had to have rejected the common belief that Jesus was nailed through the hands and decided he was nailed through the wrists instead. He would have had to have applied the real blood stains in such a pattern that they exactly matched the blood stain pattern on the suderium (face cloth) AND he would have had to have known to use the exact same blood type as the blood on the suderium.
The Jewish burial customs are known... and described in Jewish writings of the period. They are prescriptive as was much of Jewish customs. Multiple pieces of cloth were used... but not like mummy wrappings. A shroud was used, if it could be afforded by the family. If not, the face was at least covered. However, bindings to keep the body in position were required and another binding to keep the mouth closed was required. This binding would be placed around the head, under the chin, to keep the mouth from dropping open. That makes for at least four cloths... and a modesty cloth over the genitals... making five. Plural. Wealthy families used large sindons... sheets or shrouds. Two years ago a collapsed tomb was found with an intact, uncollected skeleton was found with a full length shroud, no face cloth, but with a jaw binding, and wrist and ankle bindings... exactly what was prescribed in the Jewish writings. But that meets the plural description the Gospel has... and the Shroud meets it as well as being ONE of the several pieces of the grave clothes.
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
Vermillion is Mercuric Sulfide... and there is no Mercury in sufficient quantities on the Shroud to be used as a pigment of any kind. If you doubt that determination take it up with the multiple scientists who have done the X-ray Fluorescent Spectrometry, Micro-Elcectronscpectrometry, Pyro-spectrometry, and a host of other tests... that showed there was none. . . as well as other chemical tests that show that the image is composed of a melanoidin chemical substance similar to caramel... and has absolutely no pigment to it at all? Not with Walter C. McCrone who claimed he saw scads of it under his optical Microscope but refused to submit his work for peer-review. McCrone also claimed the blood stains were Red Ocher (Iron Oxide Fe3O2) and Vermillion - yet world class experts in blood and blood derivatives and haemoglobins have stated categorically that it is blood...
Drs. John Heller and Alan Adler concluded that is was actual blood material on the basis of physics-based and chemistry-based testing, specifically the following: detection of higher-than-elsewhere levels of iron in "blood" areas via X-ray fluorescence, indicative spectra obtained by microspectrophotometry, generation with chemicals and ultraviolet light characteristic porphyrin fluorescence, positive tests for hemochromagen using hydrazine, positive tests for cyanmethemoglobin using a neutralized cyanide solution, positive tests for the bile pigment bilirubin, positive tests for protein, and use of proteolytic enzymes on 'blood' material, leaving no residues. Also tests for reflection spectra indicative of bilirubin;s and blood's presence, chemical detection of the specific protein albumin, the presence of serum halos around various 'blood' marks when viewed under ultraviolet light, immunological determination that the 'blood' is of primate origin.Drs. Adler's and Heller's conclusions were confirmed by Dr. Bruce Cameron, whose double doctorate is specialized in Haemoglobin and all of its derivatives... and is the world's foremost expert in that study. The bloodstains on the Shroud... are not paint. They are blood. This is all peer-reviewed, un-refuted, published science.
You are assuming a usage for the face cloth that was not how it was used. With a Shroud, a separate face cloth would have been superfluous. Instead the cloth that had covered his head after death on the cross, was rolled into a kerchief like form and used to bind his jaw AROUND the face... not over the face. The Greek word works either way... but the Jewish instruction for burial works only one way and the mouth needs to be kept shut.
Dan Brown is innocent of this calumny... blame Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett to idiots who saw a chance to milk the Shroud with another conspiracy book. They also came to the conclusion that the Shroud image is Six feet ten inches tall... by concluding you multiply head height by NINE to get total body height... instead of Eight...
And he would have to arrange that the carbon 14 date would match the 12th Century.
Name another that has been studied more.
I might give you the Bible... and possibly the Koran... but they are NOT single objects. The Mona Lisa is not studied at all with the depth that the Shroud has been. Nor would I put Shakespeare's plays in that category because we don't have any of the original manuscripts, so they are not single objects. The Dead Sea Scrolls? Nope. There is no question of their provenance... and they are limited as to who gets to even see the originals. The rest are just frivolous... except for the Great Pyramid... where you might have a point... but I would point out that there are three of them that are studied... ;^)>... not to pick nits.
No... that is something else entirely... and there are two candidates... or possibly three for that piece of cloth.
There is plenty of room... you are mis-interpreting a water stain for the top of the dorsal image's head. . . as do many of the skeptics.
The actual crown of the dorsal image is about even with the line of four scorch holes across the center line of the shroud between the two images. You will notice there is about four or five inches of space between that and the crown of the head of the frontal image. Plenty of room.
No it isn't... unless you have evidence of that that is later than that of the micro-spectrographic studies that were done under electron microscopes that found no pigments, no red ochre (Iron Oxide FE3O2) and no Vermillion (Mercuric Sulfide HgS) in visible quantities... There was some randomly distributed on the shroud from environmental contamination or from paintings pressed to the shroud to impute its qualities to copies, but it was not statistically concentrated in image or blood areas any differently from non-image areas. What Iron Oxide found in the blood areas was identified as a different form of iron Oxide associated with Organic Blood residue and haemoglobin.
And exactly WHAT records are those of which we are in possession? I love it when skeptics start making things up... it makes it so easy to shoot them down. You are probably referring to the draft letter that the Bishop of Troyes was planning on sending, but never did send... as there are no records of it ever being received in either the Vatican records or the records of the Avignon pope. It couldn't be the recently discovered Sermon of Gregorius Referendarius, Deacon of the Hagia Sophia, delivered on August 14, 944, in which he describes the Shroud as having a full figured image of the Christ with blood stains... on the arrival of the image of Odessa in Constantinople? That record??? Or how about the 1204AD letters of Sir Robert de Clary in which he describes the lifting of the Shroud of Our Savior on each Friday in which the naked body of our Lord could be seen . . . Those records???? Nah, didn't think you were referring to those records...
As of 2005 peer-reviewed science published in Thermochimica Acta and confirmed by two other independent, and different approaches, also published and peer-reviewed, the 1988 Carbon14 tests have been invalidated. What they tested has been proved to be non-homogonous with the main body of the shroud.
The Shroud of Turin is made of pure 100% Flax originated Linen. The sample cut from the corner of the Shroud, has been shown beyond doubt to contain DYED EUROPEAN COTTON interwoven into original Shroud Linen material in an approximate 60% cotton to 40% original linen to 40% to 60% linen mix along a diagonal area across the sample. Microscopic examination shows a clear interweaving of the two different threads. The cotton threads have been dyed with a alum containing mordant dye to match the color of the aged linen and then butt end to butt end re-twist spliced into the original linen threads... then the weave re-done to match the original weave pattern using the newly added threads in both the woof and warp directions until the material becomes 100% cotton all the way to the edge of the shroud as an invisible repair. This technique, developed in the 14th Century is known as French invisible reweaving and is done only by very skillful artisans to repair very valuable cloths and there are practitioners even today.
The patch cotton material is dyed, fullered, bleached and spun differently than the material the rest of the Shroud composed of. The Shroud body itself contains absolutely no cotton. The patch contains 2% aluminum bound in the alum in the mordant used to fix the Madder Root dye... the main body of the Shroud has less than .002% aluminum... consistent with environmental soil exposure. The patch area contains significant amount of vanillin while the Shroud body itself, and the shroud threads in the patch no vanillin at all.
An examination of the surviving sub-sample C of the five sub-samples cut from the sample taken for the 1988 C14 tests clearly shows, under microscopic examination, the change from linen on the shroud side to cotton on the patch side. One of the labs in the 1988 test reported the anomalous cotton in the sample they received and it is footnoted in the Nature report on the test but ignored.
Finally, another scientist working with threads taken from the sample had one separate spontaneously at the splice... one side was cotton... the other linen. He was able to identify the species of cotton as a European form grown in France.
Chemical and physical and biological testing have conclusively proved that the sample that underwent C14 testing is NOT THE SAME MATERIAL as the material that makes up the main portion of the Shroud of Turin. It is a melange, a mixture, of older original shroud cloth and newer patch material.
Statistical specialists started questioning the results when it was learned that both the Arizona lab, who did EIGHT tests on their two samples (from the two extreme ends of the main sample) and got datings that were too far out to have come from a homogenous sample, so decided to average their results to get them closer for their report... and then Oxford who did the SAME THING to the overall data to also cover up datings from all three labs that were too far apart to have come from a homogenous sample. The Chi Squared tests were way too far off... and peer-reviewed papers appearing after the tests challenged the results. One stated categorically that looking at the raw data from the tests, that the data could NOT have come from a homogenous sample.
Ergo, the sample tested in 1988 is irrelevant as the age of the main body of the Shroud. They did not test the shroud. They tested a patch of unknown provenance... because they broke the sampling protocols.
However, Harry Gove, the inventor of the technique used by all three labs in the 1988 test, when asked how old the original material would have to be that, when mixed with the 16th century patch material in the observed percentages, would give the 1988 test result dates, did some quick calculations... and said "First Century, give or take 100 years."
|
Thanks, as always.
Happy Easter.
Several “facts” in this are quite wrong, but.....
He is risen. This is a great day.
There were two flagrums; two men whipping Him. Each flagrum had three leather thongs, each thong terminating in a "tortillum", a dumbbell-shaped piece of metal. About 120 tortilla marks have been found, indicating ~40 lashes (each lash leaving 3 marks).
There are aspects to the shroud that prove its existence before Da Vinci was even born. Watch the History Channel special. You'll see.
Well, if THAT'S the biggest point of contention with you - it shows you have studied NOTHING about the Shroud. that is the easiest debunker of all the debunk. Good grief.
Even the carbon dating - even though proven way off and myriad scientific tests prove the Shroud much older than the early carbon dating - puts the Shroud to hundreds of years BEFORE Leonardo (da Vinci) was even born.
Now, granted, Leonardo was a genius, but even HE was not THAT clever.
Might I humbly suggest that you might find it interesting to actually do some research on the decades of research that has been done? You might even learn something.
If I sound a little brittle, it's just that I've been studying and researching and corresponding with those who are experts on the Shroud, for 50 years. It's irritating to have people make such uninformed remarks, based not on even one of the thousands of pieces of scientific evidence - but on one - particularly the flimsiest - deliberate fallacy.
It puzzles me that so many who purport belief in Our Lord, are so disinterested that they don't bestir themselves to do any studying on the Shroud and then remark on the www, casting doubt that could affect countless others.You obviously have access to the Internet. No excuse for ignorance on the Shroud.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
