The question I always have is, if Jesus rose from the dead after three days, which I believe and is the basis of Christianity, would that be enough time for his image to be permanently ingrained in the cloth? Are the markings on the cloth of blood? If not, how could the image be forged so clearly after just three days? And what about a DNA test? Couldn’t that help explain where this person came from, race etc? Thanks.
The image, or certain aspects of the image, were formed miraculously. What our instruments might measure as a “burst of radiation” was part of the process. This happened quite literally in a flash.
Holy blood sweat and tears, Batman!
The problem is the Bible clearly states Jesus’ body was cleaned and annointed prior to being wrapped for burial, as is Jewish law. Even if his wounds continued to ooze some after being wrapped in the linen, they would have shown up as blots on the fabric, not trickles.
The SOT is clearly a fraud. I know this will upset some as the urge to believe in something extraordinary is strong, but all you are doing is allowing yourself to be duped by some middle age priests intent on producing an “artifact” to bring money and notoriety to their Church/congregation.
At that time, hundreds of churches were claiming to have some kind of sacred, religious artifact whether it was part of the true cross or Mary Magdalene’s lap cloth. If you didn’t have anything like this you were going to be left behind as the competition to outdo the other churches was strong.
In other words, it was a marketing gimmick.
There are blood stains on the Shroud... but they do not make up the image. The blood on the Shroud is so degraded with age that any DNA is hopelessly ruined for any tests. The blood has been identified as human blood through human antigen studies. These tests are definitive. The blood itself has been tested to AB, a type that is more common in semitic peoples than any other. It is the same type as the blood found on the Sudarium of Oviedo, which has stains that correspond to the positions of stains on the head of the image on the Shroud. The Sudarium has a provenance of seven hundred years prior to the first showing of the Shroud in 1352AD in Lirey, France.
Drs. John Heller and Allen Adler, both specialists in blood chemistry, concluded that it was actual blood on the Shroud on the basis of physics and chemistry based testing of the blood stain samples taken from the Shroud, including:
Confirmation of Heller's and Adler's findings, was provided by Dr. Bruce Cameron, the World's foremost expert on hemoglobin with a double doctorate dedicated to the study of hemoglobin in all of its forms when he identified samples sent to him as "very old acid Methemoglobin," a final degraded form of blood.
The image itself is formed of starches and polysaccharides that have interacted with Putracine and Cadaverine, gasses that seep from a dead body, to form a caramel coloring in the coating, chemically called Melanoidins, only on the surfaces of certain fibers of the Shroud. The starches and polysaccharides are a very thin layer (1/100 the thickness of a fine human hair) that was a result of the cleaning of the cloth with Soapwort after the retting (softening process) when the Shroud's flax was made into linen.
Cadaverine and Putracine are early exudates of the decomposition process. Had it continued for a time much longer than the three days of the Biblical time line, the Shroud would start showing obvious signs of inclusion in the decomposition. Something interrupted the decomposition before the Shroud could be damaged.
Re: Who is blocking research?
Mostly it is the Custodian of the Shroud.