Sorry, the Shroud of Turin Is Definitely a Hoax

http://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/02/24/sorry-the-shroud-of-turin-is-definitely-a-hoax ^ | Spencer Alexander McDaniel

[Albion Wilde]

I have no opinion either way. However, his side-by-side comparisons of the facial proportions and the front and back of the shroud are graphically inaccurate and not aligned correctly; thus they are inadequate as rebuttals.

[HandyDandy]

The “forger” painted a negative image? Not likely......

[GingisK]

Nicely stated excellent doctrine; good for Jews and Christians alike. I am glad you weighed in on this.

[SunkenCiv]

[GreyFriar]

Annalex,

I think that the Shroud of Turin is authentic.

That said, I’m in total agreement with you. True or fake, it does NOT change my faith one iota.

[GingisK]

We could replicate the pyramids if we wanted to do so. Absolutely nothing stand in the way of that except the will to do so and the money to fund the project.

[william clark]

The second bullet point is why I’ve never leaned towards its authenticity.

[Deo volente]

Exactly. Picture speaks volumes.

[higgmeister]

Remember: it is not a matter of Christian faith nor theology.

That cannot be true. Why would anyone care one way or the other about it then, if it is not a matter of Christian faith nor theology? It would not exist without the faith that caused it to be kept and preserved.

[ADSUM]

I wonder why you do do not believe that Jesus was both divine and human?

How can Jesus who died on the cross was buried in a tomb and rose from the Dead on Easter Sunday be explained and then ascended into Heaven by HIS own power and witnessed by many observers?

Jesus claimed to be God as Jesus said “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12) and “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

Jesus acted as God as He forgave sins, which is something that only God has the authority to do.

God’s love is so unending that he desires to share it with each of us, as Jesus tells us “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23)

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1) “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; beheld his glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father.” (John 1:14)

Many of prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled by Christ in the New Testament. Jesus came as our Savior to restore us from our sins so that we could enter eternal life with God.

May you fully understand God’s Truth and accept Jesus as God.

[Vermont Lt]

Of course the blood flow is wrong.

I mean, if you are not going to commit to the art...by stabbing someone in the hands and duplicating it...well then, you deserve to be called a fake.

[ebb tide]

No article date. Yet you decide to post two days before Lent.

Typical.

[Rockingham]

In the long history of the Catholic Church, there have been hundreds of artifacts claimed to be associated with Christ, the Holy family, or the Apostles. As Martin Luther famously joked, it was a marvel to him that 26 of the 12 Apostles were buried in Germany. Almost all such supposed artifacts were proven over the centuries to be frauds of various sorts.

Nevertheless, the Shroud and several other early Christian artifacts remain in dispute, with enough stubbornly unrefuted evidence of authenticity that a final judgment cannot be rendered against them.

Notably, the image on the Shroud does not seem to have been painted but to have been scorched into the cloth in some manner by radiative energy. No one has yet been able to replicate the photo-like process, let alone do so using materials and methods of the era to produce an image similar to that of the Shroud. And the combination of pollen grains embedded on the cloth is uniquely consistent with Palestine in the era of Christ.

The case for the Shroud as a fraud thus requires assuming that no later than the early Renaissance, someone not identified, using a so far unknown process, created an image similar to a photo negative centuries before photography was invented -- and did so on cloth that was dusted with historically and geographically correct pollen grains from Palestine.

Despite the ingenuity of forgers in the Holy Land, on balance, there are some things that are so hard to believe that it becomes easier to think that early Christians may have managed to preserve a treasured artifact of Christ's passion and death. Christian faith though requires not belief in one or another artifact but faith in Christ and adherence to His teachings. There is no reward for belief in an artifact, but Christian Faith offers immense rewards -- a point that debate over the Shroud ought not to be permitted to obscure.

[Swordmaker]

Uh, no, the “evidence” set out in the article are not factual, and easily refuted:

1. Assertion: The forger who made the Shroud of Turin confessed and the earliest definitive mention of the shroud in any historical source is a record of his confession.

   This assertion is false on several levels. First of all, there is no record of an artists “confession.”

   There is actually no evidence this “painter’s” claim is true. Pierre de Arcis, the Bishop of Trois, claimed that 25 years earlier,/ his predecessor, Bishop Henri, had written a letter where he claimed he had found the “artist who painted the Shroud”. But, turning this assertion on its head is the fact that Bishop Henri of Trois apparently did not follow through by sending his letter to either the Pope in Rome, or to the Anti-Pope in Avignon, as there is no copy of the letter in the Vatican Archives, and only a rough draft of the letter exists in the archives in Trois. It is possible that Henri may have decided not to send the letter after he had learned the “artist” had perjured himself when an investigation was made. After such a long period of time, there is no way of telling now. Bishop Pierre was, however, placed under perpetual silence on the subject by the Pope in Rome from ever making such a claim, and the Pope allowed the Widow of Geofrey De Charney to continue to display the Shroud at Lirey but she could not claim it to be the true Shroud of Jesus.

   However, we now know as a fact of science, by multiple approaches, there was no paint applied on the Shroud to create the image, and never has been, and this has been proved down to the electron microscopic level, including tests at the electron-microspectrographic level which could even discern the type and specific manufacturer of the vinyl baggies the samples were placed in after they were sampled. And, no, it could never have been cleaned of pigments to the extent that such tests would not find them. That is what would be referred to as definitive proof there were never any pigments, ever, on the Shroud for any such artist to have painted the Shroud. It is therefore not a painting of any kind.

   As for this skeptics’ claim that Pierre’s finding of the letter being the first documentary mention of the Shroud, that’s also not true. There is lots of documentary evidence for the Shroud’s existance prior to its appearance in Lirey, France, and Bishop Pierre’s finding of that draft letter.

   One such piece of documentary evidence is the 13th Century Hungarian Pray Codex in which the Shroud is pictured with its distinctive three-over-one twill weave pattern, an obvious double Christ image, but most importantly the pattern of the burnt “poker holes” which exist on the Shroud. The Hungarian Pray Codex has a reliably known provenance and age.

   Another is the 10th Century Sermon of Archdeacon of the Hagia Sofia, Gregory Referendarius, presented on August 15, 944, in the Hagia Sofia in Constantinople, in which a cloth, arguably the Shroud of Turin, the Image of Edessa, was first displayed. Gregory described the image on it, although in very flowery language.

2. Assertion: The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings used in Judaea in the time of Jesus or the description of Jesus’s own funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John.

   Also false. The only funerary cloth ever excavated from a first century Jerusalem Jewish cemetery actually was the remnants of a full cloth shroud found in a funeral niche that had collapsed shortly after the body had been placed in it after burial, but before the bones could have been collected to be placed wither in an ossuary box or ossuary pit.

   The assumption that the Jews of the period wrapped their dead in bandages similar to Egyptian mummies came from English mis-translations of the original Greek words had alternative meanings of bindings were also bandages. The Jewish Mishnah, the authoritative written exegetical record of Jewish oral tradition outlines the proper methods of a Jewish burial and it does not include wrapping a body up in many layers of bandages, but does include binding the arms, wrists, ankles and jaw to with cloth or rope, the “bindings” in Greek, and covering the body. The covering, depending on the family’s ability could be a whole body or just the face and private parts. The Jews would not have wanted the bones to be bound up with unclean wrappings when, a year later, the bones of the deceased would be collected and “gathered” to their ancestors’ bones in a central pit of a family tomb, or a shared ossuary box. This is quite clear in the Mishnah.

3. Assertion: The linen of the Shroud of Turin has been securely dated using radiocarbon dating to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD—well over a millennium after Jesus’s death.

   Try to keep up with the latest research. The 1988 C-14 test has be falsified, multiple times, by multiple means, by multiple scientists, in multiple peer-reviewed scientific papers published in multiple journals.

   • Firstly, the scientists who conducted the ‘88 test failed to follow their own agreed protocols and instead of taking eight samples from eight different locations on the Shroud, instead tested just four sub-samples taken from a single location taken from an area that the scientists who had examined the Shroud first-hand in the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project had all agreed should be avoided for such tests because it was chemically, photographically, and physically not similar to the main body of the Shroud.
   • Secondly, the sub-samples and control samples were supposed to be sent to the three testing laboratories in a condition of anonymity—i.e. reduced to mere threads or fibers so the source could not be determined by the testing labs. Instead the sub-samples were sent as pieces of woven cloth, easily determinable as to Shroud and control as they were different weave pattern, tainting the blind nature of the testing.
   • Thirdly, the results of each of the tested sub-samples were completely outside of the range of statistical probability of even being related to each other in age—exceeding the normal statistical test for C-14 testing to be considered to have been from the same sample, even though they were cut from the same master sample—red flags should have told the testers something was wrong from the results.
   • Fourthly, the results, instead of being reported for each labs separate sub-sample test, were averaged, which resulted in spurious dates when samples did not agree. This was especially damaging to the results in the case of the University of Arizona testing where their two sub-samples were completely divergent in dating.
   • Fifthly, Oxford University, the project managing lab, impermissibly averaged ALL three labs results, and averaged all FOUR sub-sample results, despite all four sub-sample having degrees’ of confidence NEVER overlapping the next closest date’s degree of confidence at all, to come up with an averaged dating, despite that averaged date completely failing the Chi-Squared Test for C-14 testing which showed that the samples HAD A BETTER THAN 90% CHANCE OF NOT EVEN RELATED TO EACH OTHER, DESPITE BEING CUT FROM THE SAME PIECE OF CLOTH!
   • Sixthly, it has been shown that what was accurately and very scientifically tested was a melange, a mixture, of original Shroud Linen made of Flax, and a 16th Century Cotton Patch material expertly interwoven into the original material across the sampled area by expert French or Italian weavers to repair a frayed corner, using a technique called “French Invisible Reweaving”. This technique was developed on the 13-14th Centuries to invisibly repair expensive wall hanging by dyeing and skillfully Reweaving threads into the original cloths so that they exactly match the original weave patterns and styles in damaged areas.
     The corner where the 1988 C-14 test was just such an area, having been used to hold the Shroud up for display and carrying over centuries. It had gotten frayed and apparently needed mending. A fifth sub-sample was retained and not destroyed in C-14 testing. Upon examination it was discovered that one side of that sample was made of original undyed linen made of flax, while the other side was dyed COTTON fiber threads. the threads on the Cotton side were of an S twist, while the threads on the Linen side had a Z twist. The Cotton was dyed with a Alum Mordant which did not exist on the Linen side. The two sides of the retained sub-sample cut from the main sample were biologically, microscopically, physically, chemically, and chronologically different from each other. This was definitive proof the sub-samples were hopelessly contaminated with non-original dated material, thus falsifying the 1988 C-14 testing in its entirety.
   • Seventhly, the observed bifurcation between the two differing materials changed from one edge to the other such that the amount of older material to younger material would account for the proportional differing tested ages of the other sub-samples if the amounts were continuously extended such that the differences are completely explained if the observed angle across the sub-sample were extended across each adjacent sub-sample and the resultant proportions were calculated to adjust ages. The discrepancies in the Chi-Squared test of the samples is resolved by the resultant adjusted calculations using the proportionate material ages is accounted by the observed mixtures of Cotton to Linen.
   • Finally, Dr. Harry Gove, the inventor of the C-14 test technique used on the Shroud of Turin on 1988, when told about the screwed up sampling protocols and the proportions of the mixture, did some back-of-the-envelope calculations when asked how old the original material had to be if the contaminating material was 15th Century in those proportions. When finished, he said “Give or take 100 years, First Century,”

   
   Again, the C-14 accurately test a bad sample and gave a date for a mixture of different aged material resulting in a falsified, worthless test.

4. Assertion: The figure on the Shroud of Turin does not have anatomically correct proportions and much more closely resembles figures in fourteenth-century Gothic art than a real human being.

   This claim was made by one artist who has been completely debunked by multiple forensic pathologists, anthropologists, and computerized actual reconstruction of the body on the Shroud, not just a human-eye opinion of some no-body skeptic with an atheistic axe to grind.

   The skeptics do their measuring incorrectly, not understanding the nature of the image and the draping of the cloth, nor the distance of image to cloth, the bend of the legs and body in rigor. When all of these are accounted for, the body is proportional, not the in-proportionate distortions they claim. Every scientific expert, working in their fields of expertise, who has looked at it and measured it has come to that conclusion.

5. Assertion: The bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are not consistent with how blood actually flows naturally and they instead appear to have been painted on.

   Again, the skeptics have ONE scientist, working outside of his field of expertise, using non-blood, instead using a blood substitute, is making this claims, while the actual science established by multiple experts working IN their fields of expertise which is blood, hemoglobin, and its descendent compounds, and also blood that has undergone trauma and how it flows. These scientists worked with both living human volunteers and cadavers in multiple positions, using real human blood and tracked how it flowed. Sorry, it matched what was seen on the Shroud, not what this guy claimed in his article “debunking” the Shroud using a “blood analogue” used in Hollywood movies.

   The bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are actual blood. Not paint. Not Vermilion (Mercury Sulfide) as the skeptics claim. This has been tested by multiple scientists, who are experts in the field, using multiple tests for human blood, including tests that are definitive for blood proteins, blood not a geologist and a failed stage magician with a degree in English Literature.

6. Assertion: The fabric of the Shroud of Turin is made with a kind of weave that is known to have been commonly used during the Late Middle Ages, but does not seem to have been used for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.

   Does the logical disconnect between this argument and his first argument strike anyone here as it does me?

   First of all, the actual argument the skeptics use is the absurd position that no one in the First Century ever figured out how to use three-over-one weaving, which apparently, they say, was a 12th Century innovation without providing any evidence that is true. Uh, no, it wasn’t. There are multiple examples from multiple cultures of varying patterns of weaving, including two-over-one, three-over-one, two-over-two, and variations as weavers made various patterns in cloth from throughout history, even into a thousand years BC. The problems is that cloth is rare from two thousand years ago, with most only surviving in tombs in Egypt and elsewhere. But examples DO survive.

   The idea that three-over-one twill weave is a common weave in the late Middle Ages is a Strawman argument for the Skeptics. It was a weave that was used, but was not as common as they want you to believe. One paid extra anytime one would buy that weave because it required the weaver to use extra time to do it. It was a more complex weave, requiring more expertise and set-up time involvement than a simple one-over-one. One thing they do not tell you about the cloth on the Shroud of Turin is that it is a distinctive Wall Loom, something NOT used in the Middle Ages as frame looms had already been invented by then, but not in the first century. The Flax Linen shows it was hank fullered and bleached. . . Again, something not done in Europe in the Middle Ages but done in the Middle East.

General Observation: Finally, how would a Middle French hoaxer know to imbed Travertine Aragonite dust of the exact type only found just outside the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem into the feet, buttocks, shoulders, and back of the head of the image on the Shroud???

The other question one must ask is: if the Shroud of Turin is a hoax, what would be the greater miracle: that a known miracle worker, the Son of God would leave behind a miraculous image of Himself at the moment of His resurrection from the dead to everlasting life; or, that an unknown, heretofor unknown artist of the 14th Century using unknown techniques, with an amazing ability, utilizing an encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy, physics, chemistry, history, Jewish burial practices, optics, photography, and many other disciplines, created a work of art that has every scholar and scientist in multiple disciplines across almost every known scientific and scholarly pursuit you can name completely baffled as to how he did it six to seven hundred years later, anticipating that they could bring to bear scientific tests, instruments, techniques, and even disciplines he cannot even conceive would be invented? So, which is the greater miracle? Or harder to believe?

[cloudmountain]

I went to a three day seminar on the Shroud and the consensus of all the scientists there concluded the Shroud real. The carbon dating was taken from a repair done in the 13th cent. and there is no way the technology of the 13th. cent could have produced it; one example is you can’t see any image unless you’re 18ft from it whereas the closer you get to a painting the more detail you see. You see no detail whatsoever the closer you get. Another thing. The image is on the fibers rather than IN the fiber as if it was painted. There’s more.

Yes, it's real.
One of the facts from the Shroud is that, judging by the size of His face, Jesus was about 5'11". That was TALL back then.

Others will insist that He was 5'5", the general height of men in those days.
I go with the Shroud.

[SkyDancer]

Ditto. I have more on the subject. I came away with three DVD’s on the conference as well as pages of notes and the seminar brochure (nice 8x10 booklet). There is no way you can convince me it’s a MA fraud; the technical expertise and physiology were not known at that time. Plus the big give away is the nail prints are through the wrist not palms as depicted in all MA prints/paintings/icons.

[cloudmountain]

Ditto. I have more on the subject. I came away with three DVD’s on the conference as well as pages of notes and the seminar brochure (nice 8x10 booklet). There is no way you can convince me it’s a MA fraud; the technical expertise and physiology were not known at that time. Plus the big give away is the nail prints are through the wrist not palms as depicted in all MA prints/paintings/icons.

The sad fact is that there are those who can't BEAR the idea of the Suffering Christ. The Shroud PERSONIFIES that horrible suffering.

[LukeL]

The shroud shows wounds consistent with flogging, it shows swelling around the forehead consistent with the wounds from a crown of thorns. The nail marks are in the wrists and not the palms. The shroud shows a bent knee consistent with rigor along with the correct anatomical positioning of the foot. It possibly shows the effects of an ulnar nerve injury. The shroud tests positive for bilirubin. The image is a negative and is only one fiber layer thick. Further despite hundreds of attempts no one has been able to reproduce the image.

[Swordmaker]

“The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the Dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore.”

First of all, one needs to know who Geoffrey de Charney was to understand why he would NOT be party to a fraud of this nature. Sir Geoffrey was the Standard Bearer of the King of France, the most favored knight in all of the Kingdom. As the Standard Bearer, he fought by the King’s side in all battles, bearing the Flag of the King, was expected to DIE for the King in the King’s defense. Geoffrey WROTE the Code of Chivalry for the Honor of all Knights in France, which became the Code Chivalric for all Christendom. . . Outlining how to live a Godly Life and Honorable Life as a Knight. The Code of the Knights of the Round Table grew from Geoffrey’s Code.

The Chapel Church at Lirey was built to house the Shroud. It was not acquired as Pierre and Henri assert to draw pilgrims there to extract their penitent sous as donations. The writings of its patron, Geoffrey de Charney make this clear. It is a historical fact that Geoffrey de Charney funded the Chapel at Lirey to house the Shroud and funded its operation from his own coffers, and would NOT accept donations from pilgrims who came there to view the Shroud. He, in fact, almost bankrupted his family doing it. By the time he died, his widow, Margaret De Charney was faced with that bankruptcy and had to sell the Shroud to survive. It was purchased by the Savoy family of Italy, later to become the ruling family of Italy, and the Shroud was moved to Turin, where it resides today. Margaret received a lifetime rente in exchange for the Shroud so she could continue living in the style she was accustomed to living.

Perhaps you can see why Bishop Pierre De Arcys of Trois (or Troyes) claim just does not hold water when he says that Geoffrey was displaying the Shroud to defraud penitents of their donations? The real reason might more likely be that he feared they would go to Lirey for veneration of the Shroud rather than venerating the relics at the Cathedral at Trois and leaving their donations there.

Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.”

. . . They, seeing their wickedness discovered, hid away the said cloth so that the Ordinary could not find it, and they kept it hidden afterwards for thirty-four years or thereabouts down to the present year.”

The “Ordinary” (Bishop Henri acting as an investigator) claimed to have found the “artist” in a letter he never sent, but did not name him. But today we have no additional works of this unsung genius who has succeeded in baffling every scientist who has looked at what has been called “the most researched and studied object in the last 100 years of modern science,” all without being able to come to a conclusion about how it was created.

Bishop Pierre wanted to stop the Widow Charney from displaying the Shroud and funding her family with it, but Bishop Henri had intended to have it destroyed had he found it, with being his intention to “root it out and stop it being shown.” This was right at the height of the Inquisition. While not as Rabid as the Spanish Inquisition, the French Inquisitors were also powerful. Henri and his ilk were just as committed to rooting out iniquity. Naturally, to protect it from destruction, Geoffrey brought it back to his manorhouse/castle to prevent what he knew was genuine considering where his Great Grandfather had acquired it in Constantinople—looted it during the Fourth Crusade.

[SkyDancer]

They had a full scale replica of the shroud (a photographic image) and up close all you see are smudges but when you stand back about 18 feet you see the negative image; you can see the wounds on the back vividly.