Shroud of Turin 'a fake'

News24.com South Africa ^ | 21/06/2005

[Jaded]

All that in 3 days? 36 hours?

[Swordmaker]

Yes but if it isn't a fake, does that mean that the story of Christ's bodily ascension is not true? Surely his bodily effluva being a material part of him would also ascended?

No... unless you believe that every thing shed or excreted by Jesus was still living and attached to him throughout eternity... hair, dead skin cells, etc.

Your theory is interesting, tho... it would give a whole new meaning to the phrase "Holy Sh!t!"

[Swordmaker]

The other interesting thing is that the face in the Shroud is NOT 3D - it is flat. In other words, it does not have the distortion you get when you wrap a cloth around a face - it has a flat 2d face image. In my mind, I believe after reading so much, it is indeed a fake. And it would not surprise me if it was not da Vinci who did it.

If it was da Vinci, then he would have had to have also invented a time machine to do it... the Shroud was first displayed in Lirey, France, 98 years before he was born.

Secondly, the image on the shroud is not a 3D image... it is a vertically collimated, 2 dimensional, terrain map of a 3 dimensional object. The density of the imaging color is directly proportional to the distance the 3 dimensional object was from the 2 dimensional Shroud surface. The 3rd dimension information can therefore be extracted from the 2 dimensional image by plotting the image intensity on the Z axis of a standard plot.

The 3 dimensional information contained in the Shroud is only extractable using modern, sophisticated equipment... and would not have been even conceived of being included by any forger in medieval times.

[Swordmaker]

Was it paid with a Master Card?

No, it was before MC's time... it would have had to have been a BankaRoma Card...

[Siobhan]

A remarkably absurd presentation from the usual French anti-Christian elites. I do give it marks for making me laugh. But the final result was to pull out my French flag with the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart and drape it from the balcony over the front door.

[Mrs. Don-o]

This is rather silly.

Logically, they didn't prove that the Shroud of Turin was a fake. They demonstrated that something like it could have been faked. It's like aging a piece of parchment paper with chemicals, writing on it with a quill pen, and thus "proving" that the original copy of the American Declaration of Independence was a fake.

In a sense, I don't have a god in this fight, since the Catholic Church ~never~ proclaimed this as a true relic. The Church did (and does) treat it as a kind of icon, a representation worthy of respect--- which it would be even if it were made with a paint-brush and acrylic colors, and signed "Giovanni the Artist, 1345."

Assuming he was a genius in terms of inventing acrylics in the 14th century.

Having said all that, I wouldn't be surprised if the controversy goes on. The cloth itself has been patched several times, and apparently the carbon-14 tests were done from samples that mixed original cloth and patched areas; and there were other materials stuck to the image (like pollen grains) which were traced to plants found in the Holy Land ---and not medieval Europe.

Reasonable people are justified to see this either as the real shroud of Christ, or as a reverent representation of the shroud. There's evidence on both sides. If I saw it, I would kiss it --- just as I kissed an icon of St. Nicholas made by my 12-year-old sone. It represents something sacred.

Meanwhile, "Lord, by your cross and resurrection, you have set us free. You are the Savior of the World."

[ninenot]

This comes under "so what?" IMHO.

[Bellflower]

...The 3 dimensional information contained in the Shroud is only extractable using modern, sophisticated equipment... and would not have been even conceived of being included by any forger in medieval times.

Good information and very well put, thank you.