Posted on 08/07/2008 6:25:36 AM PDT by NYer
These are fanciful attempts at explaining the Edessan image following its discovery, and none of them need to taken at face value. But it's obvious that the Byzantines were trying to explain two phenomena with which they were familiar, namely, the cloth image itself, and the tile that accompanied it.
Wilson has provided us with a very good explanation as to why those two artifacts would have been described as a face only, and not as a full-length figure. I can't add anything to his observations, and we're all probably familiar with them.
I've highlighted the parts which I feel are relevant to my musings regarding low-dose ionizing radiation.
I seem to recall reading somewhere a theory that the Mandylion was stored in a jar in the city wall of Edessa and that some of the markings on the shroud are consistent with the bottom of a folded up cloth getting wet from water collecting at the bottom of the jar.
New radio carbon tests are now to be carried out on the TS at Oxford.This is not exactly true. The Oxford Lab is NOT going to do new tests on samples from the Shroud of Turin. They are going to do new tests on samples from other old linens that may have been exposed to fire. The test WILL NOT be definitive on the age of the Shroud of Turin as they do not even recognize the peer-reviewed discoveries of Ray N. Rogers that the sample taken for the 1988 C-14 tests was polluted by being interwoven with patching material from the 16th Century. The theory that Oxford will be testing is John Jackson's theory that fire can induce an exchange of newly radiated Carbon atoms with the old Carbon atoms that already exist in the molecules of the linen. To test this, they intend to expose samples of linen with a known age to fires from very modern woods and then date both the exposed sample and a control sample from the same material to see if the dating is skewed. I doubt it will.
The entire article is poorly researched and poorly written. It ignores the current state of the science on the Shroud which has already falsified the 1988 C-14 testing.
Contrary to what this article infers, Oxford is NOT retesting any Shroud material. The test results will have no bearing on the age of the Shroud of Turin.
They are testing other old Linens that have been exposed to fires. The reason the 1988 C-14 tests reported the dates they did is now known and has been peer-reviewed and the results duplicated: the sample taken from the Shroud for the 1988 tests violated protocols and contained approximately 40-60% newer linen threads that had been expertly rewoven into the older linen of the shroud to patch a damaged area.
Your surmise is wrong. We now know what the image is made of.
It is the result of a chemical reaction between the starch and polysaccharide fractions of an extremely fine coating of glucose, fucose, galactose, arabinose, xylose, rhamnose, and glucuronic acid, left over from the retting and fullering of the yarn that was spun and then woven to make the Shroud cloth with gases, cadaverine and putracine, that exude from a dead body forming a light brown caramel like substance. No ionizing radiation is required.
August 16, 944 is the year the Mandylion was brought from Edessa to Constantinople. There is documentation that survives of the sermon given by Gregorius Refandarius in which he describes the cloth as having the entire image of Christ on it.
However, Dr. Accetta's entire head was blurred out because of over-exposure from the radiation. I have talked with Dr. Accetta and seen his presentation of his experiments. Accetta's body image looked very similar to body image on the Shroud, but his face and head were merely a dark, oval blob that showed absolutely no detail.
You and I have never discussed this particular topic, but since you have a theological bent, I thought it might interest.
For this hypothesis to work, the irradiating stone "tile" would have to be a 14 foot monolithic bas relief of the scourged and crucified Christ carved to extreme anatomical detail. Were you aware that under computer enhancement, the Shroud image shows the very faint image of the circumcised penis of the Man on the Shroud? (per Barrie Schwortz, principal light photographer for STURP) How did the forger accomplish that feat. It cannot be seen without enhancement by a computer.
Further, we have the problem if collimation. Radiation radiates in a globe around the radioactive item... any radiation impacting a cloth hung at any distance from the source would receive radiation from every thing that was radioactive at every angle, blurring the image into non-existence. Unless you can describe a phenomenon of radiation that allows a radioactive particle to only travel perpendicular from its source, say a portion of a carved eye, to a parallel, perpendicular target, then radiation is out of the question.
But I've never been convinced that the bloodstains weren't deliberately placed there at some later date to lend authenticity to the image.
There is a problem with that hypothesis as well. The image does not exist UNDER the blood stains. In other words, where ever there is blood, under the blood, there are no image forming substance—either the image formation process did not penetrate the pre-existing blood stains or the image was left blank where ever a blood stain was to be "added" later. If the image did not exist before the blood stains were "placed," how did the forger or enhancer know exactly where to place them? And vice verse if the blood stains were placed first by a forger.
In addition, there are far more blood stains on the Shroud than photographs or the naked eye can detect. There are microscopic spatters and contact transfers of blood that do not rise to visibility without using modern microscopes and ultraviolet light spectrometry. Did our ancient forger anticipate this technology and oh so carefully place minute amounts of blood in the scourge wound images and in the hair? Doubtful.
The current scientific evidence suggests that the image was caused by an intense burst of radiation emanating from a human body (or facsimile) onto a flat cloth suspended a short distance from the body.
No, that is not the current scientific evidence. As published in several peer-reviewed scientific journals, the image is made of a very thin (1/100th the thickness of a human hair) coating of starches and polysaccharides of which some that make up the image have formed a caramel like substance when the residue reacted in a melanoidin chemical reaction with the gases, cadaverine and putracine, that exude from a dead body.
There are over 70 points of congruity of the blood stains on the Sudarium and the image of the head on the Shroud of Turin. The likelyhood is that the Sudarium covered the head of the dead Jesus on the Cross and for a short time while his body was being carried (There is a bloody handprint over a nose print as though someone were carrying the body supporting the covered head).
For the bishop of the region, perceiving this beforehand, showed as much fore-thought as possible, and, since the place where the image lay had the appearance of a semispherical cylinder, he lit a lamp in front of the image, and placed a tile on top. Then he blocked the approach from the outside with mortar and baked bricks and reduced the wall to a level in appearance...For the following reason, I think the priest decided to place the tile in front of the image namely that there might be no rot from the dampness of the building or the wetness of the mortar in the receptacle of the image which might increase the damage done by lapse of time... Then the apparition in woman’s form said that such an image lay hidden in the place above the city gates in a way which she described. The bishop was convinced by the clearness of the vision which appeared to him, and therefore at dawn he went prayerfully to the spot, made a thorough search, and found this Sacred image intact, and the lamp which had not been put out over so many years. On the piece of tile which had been placed in front of the lamp to protect it he found that there had been engraved another likeness of the image which has by chance been kept safe at Edessa up to the present time.
So it seems to suggest that the Mandylion was kept in a "semispherical cylinder" (I'm picturing a half cylinder niche above a city gate where a statue would be placed), with a lamp in front and a tile "on top" (it later says the tile was "in front" of the lamp. I'm not quite picturing what is being described. It seems interesting that the writer mentions "the wetness of the mortar in the receptacle of the image", which suggests that perhaps it was in a receptacle, although elsewhere his language seems to suggest that the image was open with just a tile over it. I'm skeptical about a lamp remaining lit for four centuries in a bricked up niche...
Excuse the question, as I don't have a good grasp on this yet. What makes you believe the Shroud would be hung, or held in a parallel manner, but not touching the figure it was against?
Also, maybe shroudie can point me to this, but I believe there was a wire-frame composite created showing the physical terrain of the face and head from both front and rear in a 3D projection that utilized all ot the points of both sides of the Shroud. Anyone remember that?
Thanks for the interesting dissertations.
Thank you for the clarification! When those results are given, we can anticipate how the media will skew them to fit the shroud thus generating more misleading news reports. Before posting anything, I will show them to you. This is your field of expertise and the best person to moderate such a thread.
Interesting
Thanks for posting it.
I will admit that the Shroud is the only Catholic relic that has ever interested me.
Fake or not, it does cause one to wonder....
Click the link above labeled ‘Shroud Story’. Absolutely fascinating scientific research on what has been found on the shroud.
lol
As a protective covering, or as a drapery for concealment, perhaps.
Another take on this is that, had the object been a cloth, and not an unwieldy piece of statuary, it could have been just as easily folded up and secreted away somewhere where it could still be accessed and venerated. Only if it were a large object, incorporated into the city walls, would there have been a need to "brick it up" inside those walls to remove it from the public gaze. Given the Byzantine history, I think it much more likely that Abgar's successor, Ma'nu, was content simply to have it covered up, since he was not sympathetic to its origins.
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