Posted on 02/16/2009 10:55:31 PM PST by Coleus
Benedict XVI’s announcement will allow millions of people to see the linen cloth that according to tradition was wrapped around the body of Jesus after his death, showing that “mysterious Face, which silently speaks to the hearts of men, inviting them to see in it the face of God.”
Vatican City (AsiaNews) – For 40 days in the spring of 2010 it will be possible to see the Shroud of Turin which, according to tradition, is the cloth in which the body of Jesus was wrapped after his death and which shows the marks of the Passion and Crucifixion as told by the Gospels.
Benedict XVI, who owns the Shroud, made the announcement yesterday when he met the participants to the pilgrimage organised by the Archdiocese of Turin led by the local archbishop, Card Severino Poletto, who is the custodian of the Shroud. The Pope spoke about to the display in relation to the diocese’s pastoral journey, which in 2010 will be devoted to a “closer contemplation of the mystery of the Passion of Christ.”
“In such a context I am happy to fulfill your great expectations and accept your bishop’s wish, allowing the Shroud to be solemnly put on display in the spring of 2010,” said the Pope. “It will be a most propitious occasion, I am certain, to contemplate that mysterious Face, which silently speaks to the hearts of men, inviting them to see in it the face of God.” For the Church the Shroud is not a “relic” since it has never actually said whether it is the linen cloth in which the body of the dead Christ was wrapped or not.
At the time of the last display in 2000 (previous ones took place in 1973 and 1998) John Paul II referred to it as “icon”. At the same time though, the Church has never denied that the linen cloth might be the one the Evangelists talk about in the Gospels. On several occasions the Church has allowed the Shroud to undergo scientific tests, with contradictory results that are still source of great debate among scholars around the world.
Thanks for the links. However, at best the research you link dates the Shroud to be somewhere between 1300 and 3000 years old.
Perhaps more research is needed to better date the Shroud to determine if it is authentic or a hoax.
We now know exactly what the image is composed of. It is a caramel like substance that is the result of a melanoidin reaction. The Shroud fibers are coated with a very fine coating (less than 1/100 the thickness of a human hair) of starch fractions (sugars) deposited on the fibers by the washing of the flax in Soapwort before it was woven into a cloth. This coating exists on both image and non-image areas. However, where there is image, the starch fractions have been chemically changed to a caramel like substance: a melanoidin.
Melanoidins are brown, high molecular weight heterogeneous polymers that are formed when sugars and amino acids combine through a Maillard reaction. Normally melanoidins are created in Maillard reactions with high temperatures in a low-water condition, such as cooking. It is what turns baked goods brown.
High heat cannot be the modality on the Shroud because the temperature required would have converted some of the starches existing INSIDE the Flax itself. The Shroud melanoidins had to have been created with a low-temperature reaction.
One possible, and observed, method of creating low temperature melanoidins, such as are seen on the Shroud although it does not result in such high-resolution images, is the interaction of the starch fractions and certain gases, Putrecine and Cadaverine, that exude from a recently dead body. There are still real problems with the outgassing theory... the images on the Shroud are vertically collimated, both upwards and downwards... something gases just do not do.
Your theory of low level radioactivity, although not seen to produce melanoidins, may be a possible other modality of changing the Starch fractions to the caramel like substance of the image.
The experimenter was succeeding in converting the natural starches and sugars in the material of his cloth to a melanoidin... caramel. It smells sweet.
Sorry, Zulu, but these hypothesis have been disproved. There is no "Bioplastic coating" on the fibers... and the chemical process of fire cannot change the atomic molecular composition of the Carbon. IF either of these were true, to distort the date from the first century to the 14th, would require that the polluting factor whether bioplastic or Carbon soot, would have to outweigh the original material by 60%. It's simply not there.
There was sampling error... but the reason for the dating error is that the C14 labs tested a sample that was a mixture of older and newer material that was deliberately added to the Shroud sometime in the 16th Century.
Statistical analysis of the C14 test results of the samples—which were all taken from the same piece—shows that sub-sample from one end of the sample are NOT statistically the same as the sub-sample from the other end, a distance less than 1 inch apart, and that the two sub-samples could not have come from the same piece of cloth!!! Yet it is obvious that they were from the same sample. This should have been a red-flag for the testers. They ignored it... and in fact fudged their results to obscure the data.
The reason for this inexplicable statistical aberration is that the damaged original FLAXEN cloth was very skillfully, invisibly interwoven with a COTTON reweaving to repair the damaged corner where the C14 test sample was taken. The percentage of new to old material varied with distance from the center of the Shroud toward the bottom edge. The more new material found in a sub-sample the younger it tested... the more old material, the older it tested.
False. It dated a flawed SAMPLE, composed of original Shroud Material and a medieval patch from approximatelly 1500-1600 AD woven into the Shroud. This flawed sample invalidates any scientific conclusion about the age of the main body of the Shroud. All it shows is what the mixture dates to. This is a common problem with C14 testing. One MUST be sure your sample is exemplar of the thing to be tested. In this case, they did not. The question of the age of the Shroud is back in the area of undetermined.
That being said, there was an unauthorized C14 test done on a thread taken from an image area... it tested to First Century +/-50 years. The inventor of the C14 test technique used on the Shroud samples, Harry Gove, agrees the tests results are now invalid. When asked how old the original material would have to be IF it were mixed with a 50% pollutant from 1532AD—the most likely date for the patch work to have been done—to return a test date of 1350AD, Gove did some calculations and said "First Century."
Perhaps more research is needed to better date the Shroud to determine if it is authentic or a hoax.
True.
Most of it is based on the Byzantine account of the origin of the Mandylion, which was supposedly discovered bricked-up in a wall of the city of Edessa, along with a "tile" bearing an exact duplicate of the image on the cloth. (A second history gives us both the tile and cloth, but depicts a much more fanciful account of their discovery.) The belief has always been that in the first century, the survivors of Abgar V sealed the image in the city's walls to protect it from his pagan successors, and that it stood there, undisturbed, for 500 years or so, until its discovery. So far as the tile was concerned, the belief was that the cloth image had miraculously transferred itself to the tile.
I'm not prepared to think that a soft image on cloth could produce an image on a piece of stone, but it's easier to think that the reverse might have been the case, particularly if the stone prototype contained significant amounts of radioactive elements, such as uranium and thorium. Given 400 or 500 years of undisturbed proximity, the relief image on the stone might well have "cooked" itself onto the cloth.
The most likely scenario is that Abgar V or someone else commissioned the statuary in remembrance of Jesus. The legend claims that Abgar had the cloth image placed above the city gates to be venerated by those entering the city. But a cloth image, exposed to the elements would quickly have deteriorated. It's more likely that the actual image was in stone, and this was the image that Abgar's successors bricked up into the walls to keep it from the sight of Abgar's pagan successors. This wouldn't have been necessary with a cloth image, which could simply have been folded up and removed.
The cloth itself, which ended up bearing a copy of the prototype, was probably intended as a drapery or covering for the statuary.
At least that's how I perceive it, and I'm not at all trying to push the notion that this is exactly how it would have happened. But I think there needs to be more of an attempt to explain the Shroud of Turin image as something other than either a miracle or a forgery.
The formation of the image, except for the vertical collimation, is explicable through natural processes of chemistry. Radiation, unless it is constrained by complicated technology, expands in a globular wave front from its sources. It has the same problem as a vertical collimated gas. What could have collimated the radiation so that the image is sufficiently resolved and not blurred out by radiation coming from other vectors???
“The formation of the image, except for the vertical collimation . . .”
But doesn’t the nagging vertical collimation issue, in fact, render Rogers’ “natural” scenario DOA?
John 20:6
Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie,
20:7 And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself
Here comes the anti-Catholic crapola.....
The Bible tells you it’s REAL....the Shroud covered Jesus’s head also, not just the napkin....so of course the Shroud would have His image on it.
The skeptics love to masturbate over the emotional investment "believers" have in the Shroud; neglecting to note that some of the members of STURP were initially skeptics and/or non-Christians; and completely running away from the emotional investment many skeptics and atheists have in needing to discredit the Shroud.
If the image were of a Roman Centurion picking his nose, the skeptics wouldn't be all over it with attempts to prove how it was faked; they'd be in the forefront of investigating the mechanics of how the image was formed. But the fact that the image happens to be of a dead man, and appears to corroborate the historicity of the gospels, and (possibly?) the Resurrection, sends them into paroxysms.
There is such a thing as just saying "we don't know for sure"; there is such a thing as saying "the image is there, but that need not indicate it is there by 'miraculous' means"--and if one does that, the 'need' to 'debunk' the Shroud goes away. Prompt, soothing, relief.
Cheers! Cheers!
bttt for later
The comments about the Shroud of Turin are varied, interesting, and informative about the writers. I, for one, have been in awe about the image, its history, its scientific studies, and the range of conclusions about its authenticity. What one makes of all the studies depends upon his or her preconceived beliefs on its relevance and on their ability to take in and digest all the studies and scientific theories about the Shroud. And whether your faith depends upon its authenticity. I find it all absolutely fascinating, with due reverence to the possibility that it is really a window for us to see the past and the future, and get a glimpse of our very own soul.
Oh, please!
The issue of proof here misses the point in my opinion.
If it is not the burial cloth of Christ, then it is a master work of religious art. Something on the order of “The Last Supper”.
If it is in fact the Shroud of Christ... words escape me.
It seems to me however, that the team of artisans that would have been needed to create this in the middle centuries would have been so big that there would remain some historical record of the effort. And the patron would have wanted some credit. Also, I am not convinced that this image can be created with today's technology, let alone those of the middle centuries.
Behold : This day which has been put before you.
Children often cannot understand that which is placed before their very face from time to time.
Do you seek Fact or Faith....
I show you things which Mankind only dreams of:
A. You cannot modulate the frequency of the human voice and make it sound as a “Babbling Brook”.
B. You can not harness the Suns power.
C. You can not create a light which does not burn.
D. you can not cause a woman to go into a deep sleep.
E. You can not create an artificial star that can maintain a geostationary orbit above a little town.
F. You can not impregnate a Virgin.
G. You can not defy gravity.
H. You can not find hidden water in a desert.
I. You can not create a device which changes the molecular structure of a human.
J. You can not pass a Camels DNA through the eye of a needle.
K. You can not store all know life forms aboard a small vessel in their present form.
L. You can not separate the female genes from a mans rib.
M. You can not go to church on Sunday and witness the “Alteration of Mass” etc,etc,etc.
There are in fact many things upon your world that can not be proven false...as there is truly nothing hidden before your eyes,the clarity therefor rests within your heart,mind and faith...do not be afraid of that which cannot be understood but rather understand that you are Gods most precious of all things created , and know that His Work has never stopped but is continued by His Son Jesus,that is likened unto a farmer gone on a far away journey spreading His Seed amongst the stars.
I am not allowed to call any man a fool...indeed...why should I. Peace and love too ALL of you...
You must have gone to public school.
Sounds like you’ve already decided beyond a shadow of a doubt that the shroud is a hoax.
You've obviously never heard of the Sudarium.
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