The Shroud of Turin: A Mystery Across the Ages

Pravoslavie ^ | 08-29-2015 | Fr. Alexey Young

[oh8eleven]

Makes no difference who the man is on the shroud, or even if the shroud is fake. No one will ever be able to prove the image is Jesus, so all the hoopla is moot.

[calico_thompson]

bump

[Ransomed]

No matter who it is, the hoopla about how it was made is pretty interesting seeing as how we supposedly have yet to be able to figure it out.

FReegards

[Petrosius]

The scriptures clearly state that the handkerchief that had been around his head was separate from the strips of linen cloths. Therefore the Shroud of Turin, being one piece, can not be Jesus' burial cloth.

The Sudarium of Oviedo:

3: Coincidence with the Shroud

The sudarium alone has revealed sufficient information to suggest that it was in contact with the face of Jesus after the crucifixion. However, the really fascinating evidence comes to light when this cloth is compared to the Shroud of Turin.

The first and most obvious coincidence is that the blood on both cloths belongs to the same group, namely AB.

The length of the nose through which the pleural oedema fluid came onto the sudarium has been calculated at eight centimetres, just over three inches. This is exactly the same length as the nose on the image of the Shroud.

If the face of the image on the Shroud is placed over the stains on the sudarium, perhaps the most obvious coincidence is the exact fit of the stains with the beard on the face. As the sudarium was used to clean the man's face, it appears that it was simply placed on the face to absorb all the blood, but not used in any kind of wiping movement.

A small stain is also visible proceeding from the right hand side of the man's mouth. This stain is hardly visible on the Shroud, but Dr. John Jackson, using the VP-8 and photo enhancements has confirmed its presence.

The thorn wounds on the nape of the neck also coincide perfectly with the bloodstains on the Shroud.

Dr. Alan Whanger applied the Polarized Image Overlay Technique to the sudarium, comparing it to the image and bloodstains on the Shroud. The frontal stains on the sudarium show seventy points of coincidence with the Shroud, and the rear side shows fifty. The only possible conclusion is that the Oviedo sudarium covered the same face as the Turin Shroud.

The facecloth was in addition to the shroud, not instead of it.

[M Kehoe]

Bttt.

5.56mm

[oh8eleven]

Agree.

[onedoug]

Very convenient. Let’s get to the actual cloth.

The fact that the thing has been floating around for 1000+ years before its ever noted is very suspicious to my mind.

IMHO, of course.

[dp0622]

Thank you. That’s a book I REALLY need to start reading again.

[dp0622]

Fascinating facts. I am going to read the whole article on that post today.

Like I said, I believe in Jesus either way, but it is a beautiful image and I would love to see it in person.

[Oatka]

IMO, the Shroud is like Greek Fire or Damascus Steel. Ancient marvels that we can't replicate, except we just found out about the latter.

In regards to that last, no one could recreate Damascus Steel until one guy made and error and Voila! we had it. It seems everybody else was using modern metals which were a lot purer than those in the old days. This guy used impure iron, and everything fell into place.

So it is with the Shroud. It's the world's first photograph, 400 years before Daguerreotype. Some guy figured out how to fix an image, which was unknown then. Capturing an image on sensitive fabric was known since Roman times but it soon faded. After the Shroud, the technique was lost until the 1830's.

There's enough anomalies to make one question it's authenticity - a burial shroud would have left a gap or an image of the top of the head instead of the hinged effect. The head appears anatomically smaller than usual, plus it looks like it was added on separately (neck cut).

There's even a claim that the front and back differ in length (for example).

I can't find the specifics that even agree that the length was the same, but if not, then we have a true miracle - Christ was longer in the back than he was on the front.

[To Hell With Poverty]

Bump!

[SubMareener]

I’ve just looked at the ARAMAIC and it says the same thing: John 20:7 “ and a grave cloth that bound had been about His head not with the linens but as it was wrapped and set on the side in one side”

[Alberta's Child]

The reason for that is simple: the Shroud itself did not seem to be all that spectacular -- it was an ancient piece of fabric with what appeared to be the image of a man on it. What changed all of this was the advent of photography. When the Shroud was first photographed at the end of the 19th century, the photographer developing the film produced a negative that had far more detail than the original image (the dark image of the Shroud that you often see in pictures is the negative, not the original).

The implication of this was immediately clear: The "negative" he was looking at was actually the real image, and the "original" image on the Shroud was actually the negative -- which meant that whatever process was used to produce that image was identical to a photographic process that the world had only discovered recently. This is what has generated so much interest in the Shroud since the 1880s.

[Swordmaker]

Welcome to the Shroud of Turin Ping list, Sneakers.

Swordmaker

[Swordmaker]

I have looked at the Greek and the NKJV is a reasonable representation of the Greek. There was a separate covering for the head that was set aside from the cloths that had been wrapped around the body.

The head cloth, the Sudarium, exists. It is kept in the Cathedral at Oviedo Spain. The blood stains on the Sudarium of Oviedo match the blood stains on the Shroud of Turin. Patterns of other stains also match the Shroud. The provenance of the Sudarium is known all the way back to 600AD or there about. There is a distinct handprint matching a semi-faceprint (not an image) on the Sudarium where someone placed a hand seemingly carrying a body in a prone, face-down position with the hand reaching to support the head, covering the face, from the top toward the mouth and over the nose.

The Sudarium of Oviedo

The Sudarium shows signs of then being twirled from opposite corners into a kerchief to form a long binding, then used to perhaps tie the jaws closed, passing under the chin and beard, behind the ears, then over the crown of the head, where it was tied to keep the jaw closed in death—a known requirement of Jewish burial practices.

In other words a cloth that was wrapped "about" or "around" the "head"/"face" (also words that are proper translations for the Greek word being translated), both of which are alternative meanings of the Greek word being translated. . . and would have been pulled off and discarded in a separate place as a resurrected Jesus walks away from the Shroud and other cloths, left lying in place.

The ONLY cloth that meets the Jewish traditional burial practice would be the kerchief rolled cloth for the binding of the JAW, not a separate face covering. . . which was only used if there were no other body covering according to the writings of the period. The other othonia, plural for burial cloths, would be other bindings used to keep the arms and legs from flopping out from the body, tied at the wrists and ankles, as the rigor mortis passed, and also as the processes of decomposition progressed. It was important to keep the bones as compact as possible for later collection, either to be placed in a separate bone box, an ossuary, if the family could afford one, or to be "gathered unto one's ancestors" by being tossed into a central ossuary in the middle of a family tomb with all of the previous ancestors' bones.

There is a huge gap between "reasonable representation of the Greek" and an accurate translation of the actual meaning of the Greek words with subtle understanding of what they meant in context of cultural usage.

For example, consider the following sentence:

"Thousands of Robin Williams' fans were slain in the aisles with his rapid fire improvisational ripostès to the quick jabs of the straight lines that came at him from left and right."

A future translator would be hard pressed to come to a proper interpretation without knowing

• Who Robin Williams was,
• That hyperbole could exaggerate numbers in news reports or reviews of performances for effect
• That it was from a review of a performance.
• What the slang term "fan" meant in the milieu,
• The idiom of "slaying in the aisles" was not meant to be taken literally, but was a tongue and cheek reference to the hysterical swooning reaction of teenage girls popular performers from period approximately forty years earlier,
• That "jabs" could refer to verbal assaults as well as fisticuffs,
• That ripostès could also be used in the translation of English phrases as well as French, and were not necessarily limited to the archaic sport of fencing, or the more serious art of swordplay,
• And, finally, that "straight lines" do not necessarily have to do with geometry, but were the lead-in set-ups for verbal humor.

All of this would have been culturally NECESSARY for our hypothetical future translator to even begin to attempt to decipher that sentence into anything culturally comprehensible to his future society.

[Flag_This]

"The fact that the thing has been floating around for 1000+ years before its ever noted is very suspicious to my mind."

The article discusses this. If the shroud is a 14th century forgery, the forger had abilities that make da Vinci's look chimp-like in comparison.

[Swordmaker]

Could the carbon dating be fallible? I know nothing about the process.

The carbon dating done in 1988 was quite accurate on what they dated. . . the problem was NOT with the carbon dating technique of the theory of carbon dating.

The problem in 1988 started right at the beginning. The original sampling protocols called for eight samples to be cut from eight different areas of the Shroud. This would have guaranteed getting good representative samples of the original Shroud. The samples would have been taken from image and non-image areas including some with blood and some without. One area of the Shroud was to be excluded from these samples because in the 1978 STURP examination it reacted chemically and physically differently than the main-body of the Shroud and the scientists decided it should be avoided for those reasons. This was the lower left corner which fluoresced under ultra-violet light and appeared to be chemically different. It was thought to be somewhat different than the main-body. . . and may have undergone some treatment in the past.

At the literally the last minute, the protocol was changed unilaterally by person taking the samples. He decided on his own to take only ONE single sample and took that sample from the lower, left hand corner that all the STURP scientists had said should be avoided because it was NOT representative of the main-body of the Shroud. The corner was NOT damaged in any fire, but rather a corner that had been handled too much and probably used to tie the Shroud to ropes and frayed. It was also a corner in which other pieces had been cut in the past and patched before, poorly. These cut outs were made to give small pieces of the Shroud to friends of the Savoys and others. It is the most repaired corner of the Shroud, by means of visible patches and otherwise. It should have been avoided at all costs and was NOT. The sample was cut from an area of that corner that appeared to be main-body, but it was a critical mistake, a breaking of the agreed protocols.

From that single sample five sub-samples were cut with four being sent to three C-14 labs with one from the center, between two on either side, being retained for later study. It was these four sub-samples cut from the one single main sample, that were burned in the 1988 C-14 tests that when averaged resulted in the infamous date of 1350 AD!

However, it has been proved, by three independent scientists, in three separate independent peer-reviewed studies, published in peer-reviewed independent scientific journals, that although the C-14 aging tests were done accurately on what was tested, the samples tested were compromised by being polluted with NEWER material from the 16th Century, to wit, a very skillfully woven in COTTON PATCH, intermixed in part with the original FLAX threads of the main-body cloth of the Shroud, using a technique called French Invisible Reweaving.

Dr. Harry Gove, the inventor of the C-14 testing process used on the Shroud materials, when asked how old the original material would have to have been when mixed with 60% 16th Century material to report a result date of 1350. . . did some calculations and came up with FIRST CENTURY. That was the approximate mix of the COTTON mixed in the C-14 tested materials in 1988. The Main-body of the Shroud is 100% linen made of FLAX with no cotton at all. . . yet what was tested ranged from 40% - 60% COTTON. . . and the tested sub-samples varied in age according to the percentage of newer cotton material mixed with the older original material.

This should have been a HUGE red flag for the scientists coordinating the test result from the three labs. . . and especially for the Arizona lab who got the sub-samples with the least and most original material. . . because not a single sub-sample's test's range of confidence overlapped the next closest sub-sample's range of confidence! And Arizona's two samples, the one's that were cut farthest apart from one another were dated 1390AD and 1140AD, both with ranges of confidence of +/-25 years. Statistically, they could NOT have come from the same sample at all. In fact, NONE of the four tested samples statistically could have come from the same sample, they were so far out of compliance. . . so the scientists in charge at Arizona AVERAGED their results—they fudged their results—they lied. To compound this scientific fraud, the scientists at Oxford, in charge of the whole fiasco took the non-compliant results from all three labs and did the SAME THING!

Because of the breaking of the sampling protocols, the experimental bias of the C-14 referees, and the averaging of data that should have instead raised red flags that something was drastically wrong with their samples, and the now proof that there WAS something wrong with their samples in that they were NOT representative of what they thought they were testing, the fact is that the Shroud itself has NOT been C-14 tested. . . officially.

[Swordmaker]

Unscientific: Original agreement was to take cloth samples from multiple places, tested by 7 labs using 2 different methods. After political maneuvering, the Church changed it to only 3 labs, with the 3 samples to be taken from only one small area. Only AMS dating was used.

Sorry, no. AMS was the only protocol considered as the others would have consumed too much of the Shroud in testing. The Church did not do any politicking about this. The choice of sampling change was done at the last minute, literally, and was made by one person, the person making the cuts, and was done unilaterally. These facts are well documented.

The AMS method is quite accurate. The problem was on WHAT was tested. Not on the accuracy of the tests. In fact, the accuracy of the tests is part of the proof that the sampling was completely flawed in that each of the tested sub-samples reported differing dates that were proportional to the percentages of contaminating 16th Century French Cotton they contained in relation to the original Linen Flax of the Shroud material, with the more original material reporting an older provenance, and with less original material reporting a younger provenance. Thus the sample closest to the main-body, sub-sample E, tested by the Arizona Lab, reported an origination date of 1260AD with a mix of 60% old, 40% new, while the same lab, testing sub-sample A, with a mix of 40% old, 60% new, reported an origin date of 1390AD, 130 years later. Adding in the spread of the plus or minus 25 years range of confidence, that could have been as much as 180 years difference.

The other tested samples, B and D, tested by Oxford and Zurich, ranged between the two extremes tested by Arizona, yet neither of those two sample overlapped the others. Their percentages of contamination correlate linearly to their age dating.

[Swordmaker]

They tested a piece that had been seared in a fire and had been repaired.

No, it had not been seared by the fire, Ann. This was a corner that had been frayed, cut away, and patched. It was actually quite some distance from the fire damaged portion of the Shroud. Merely searing carbon does not change the Carbon in a sample doesn't change the ratio of C-14 to C-12 and C-15 in the sample. Searing is a chemical change, not a nuclear change. ADDING contaminants, like a more patch, changes that mix.

[AllAmericanGirl44]

bkmk