“What if it is real?”
exactly how would that ever be proven...?
It is a matter of faith
"If I were you, I'd retain a healthy dose of skepticism. If you haven't already done so, you might try reading the Byzantine history of the Mandylion .... Notice that in each of the two separate accounts given of the Mandylion's origin, the cloth was found in proximity to a "tile" (keramion in Greek) upon which an identical copy of the image on the cloth had been inexplicably engraved. To my mind, this suggests that the image supposedly placed above the gates of Edessa by Abgar in the first century was not a cloth, but an image of the crucified Jesus sculpted in stone. That makes much more sense, because (1) a cloth would have quickly deteriorated if openly displayed in the manner suggested by the text; and (2) there is no mention of such a cloth in Eusebius's ecclesiastical history, although pre-sixth-century texts do mention the fact that the sick Abgar was keenly interested in knowing precisely what Jesus looked like and even sent a commission (Ananias) for the purpose of capturing his likeness. When Abgar's son reverted to paganism, threatening the destruction of the icon, it seems hardly logical that, had the icon been a piece of cloth, it would have been bricked-up into the niche in which it lay--it would have been far more expedient simply to have removed it to a safe location. If the image, however, had been a cumbersome piece of statuary, incorporated within the city walls, the best way of removing it from sight might well have been simply to brick over the place in which it reposed. The Byzantine account (number 2) states that the "tile" was probably placed in front of the cloth for protection. Under the most logical scenario, the exact opposite would have been the case, i.e., a piece of plain cloth was probably placed in front of the stone image for the purpose of covering and protection. If, as the legend suggests, this piece of cloth and work of statuary stood undisturbed in close proximity (albeit not necessarily in contact) over the course of four or five centuries, it's neither illogical nor presumptuous to hypothesize that somehow the image of the statue transferred itself to the cloth. I don't profess to know exactly what agency might have been involved in such a transferral; however, it is a well known fact that many rocks, especially of the sedimentary variety, contain varying amounts of natural radioactive substances, notably thorium and uranium. Over the course of five centuries the slow but steady emanation of radiation from the statuary might well have caused the effect seen on the cloth we know as the Shroud of Turin, that is to say, a very light and superficial dehydration of the outermost fibrils of the linen threads. To the ancients who discovered the cloth, its accompanying statuary would not have appeared as miraculously wrought as the cloth itself, which contained an image formed through an agency they were powerless to understand. Since the statue was an exact likeness of the image it must have seemed to them that the cloth image had been transferred to the stone, rather than the opposite."
Whatever the case, the Shroud remains a true enigma, a phenomenon that is not to be taken lightly, nor to be dismissed out-of-hand.
Ping
Odd how the shroud suddenly popped up in Europe after more than a thousand years. Where had it been all that time?
If it’s Catholic it’s fake.
Bump
Medieval hoax?????...So people then could devize a method to do that and people in this age couldn’t figure it out.....please!!!
p
Well; it sure isn't CHRIST's fault!!
Didn’t we just go round and around over the Shroud about a week or two ago?