Purgatory: The Shroud of Turin
undead_rat
Shipmate
Perhaps this subject has been discussed before and now belongs in the Dead Horses category, but I searched through many "discussions" and did not notice it.
According to the newspaper headlines of 1989 the Shroud was proved by carbon fourteen dating to be a fake, a medieval creation. I find that most people today still believe those reports. A recent book, The Shroud of Turin, First Century After Christ!,by Professor Malfi has proven that the facial image found on the Shroud was the model for the images of Jesus engraved on the sixth century gold coins of Byzantium. He developed three alternative dating methods which put the date of the Shroud's linen at 35 B.C. +/- 250 years with a 95% certainty.
Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain why the Shroud has a greater ration of carbon fourteen than would be expected of 2000 year old linen fabric. All of these, with one exception, has been falsified including the "invisible reweaving" idea. In 1988 Prof. Phillips of Harvard University wrote a letter to the British Museum in which he warned that the Shroud might have been subjected to a neutron radiation event and that this would have increased the C-14 content of the Shroud's linen. Prof. Hedges replied that, in analyzing the Shroud's C-14 data, the Museum would not consider that possibility.
In 2017 Christian Casabianca managed to retrieve the Shroud's original C-14 data through a freedom of information request. He subjected that data to statistical analysis and found that it did not pass the normal tests. He concluded that the Shroud's C-14 data was "heterogeneous," meaning that it was not a scientifically legitimate act to average the disparate readings into a single date. That means that the sub-sample of the Shroud that dated to 1448 must have originated at that date. Since we know that the Shroud made its first European public appearance in 1354, we have a problem. Something is very wrong here.
Robert Rucker is a nuclear engineer of thirty years experience and runs a website, shroudresearch.net, were he has published many papers dealing with the hypothesis that the disappearance of Jesus' corpse from the sealed tomb caused a neutron flux. I find that his work is credible and recommend a visit there.
According to the newspaper headlines of 1989 the Shroud was proved by carbon fourteen dating to be a fake, a medieval creation. I find that most people today still believe those reports. A recent book, The Shroud of Turin, First Century After Christ!,by Professor Malfi has proven that the facial image found on the Shroud was the model for the images of Jesus engraved on the sixth century gold coins of Byzantium. He developed three alternative dating methods which put the date of the Shroud's linen at 35 B.C. +/- 250 years with a 95% certainty.
Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain why the Shroud has a greater ration of carbon fourteen than would be expected of 2000 year old linen fabric. All of these, with one exception, has been falsified including the "invisible reweaving" idea. In 1988 Prof. Phillips of Harvard University wrote a letter to the British Museum in which he warned that the Shroud might have been subjected to a neutron radiation event and that this would have increased the C-14 content of the Shroud's linen. Prof. Hedges replied that, in analyzing the Shroud's C-14 data, the Museum would not consider that possibility.
In 2017 Christian Casabianca managed to retrieve the Shroud's original C-14 data through a freedom of information request. He subjected that data to statistical analysis and found that it did not pass the normal tests. He concluded that the Shroud's C-14 data was "heterogeneous," meaning that it was not a scientifically legitimate act to average the disparate readings into a single date. That means that the sub-sample of the Shroud that dated to 1448 must have originated at that date. Since we know that the Shroud made its first European public appearance in 1354, we have a problem. Something is very wrong here.
Robert Rucker is a nuclear engineer of thirty years experience and runs a website, shroudresearch.net, were he has published many papers dealing with the hypothesis that the disappearance of Jesus' corpse from the sealed tomb caused a neutron flux. I find that his work is credible and recommend a visit there.
Comments
You say he has many papers on this topic? Priceless.
For the record, my views are that the 14C dating was an imperfect job, conducted on a section of the Shroud that isn't ideal to answer the question of when the cloth was made. The main issues being whether the sample was contaminated by more recent material - threads from a repair or mould being possible, giving a younger age than the real age of the cloth. But, though this does put a question mark over the date, the balance of probability is that it's a later artefact (but could still be a few centuries earlier than the date reported).
* does that trump an engineer?
In any case the Shroud goes in my "probably fake but can't entirely rule out the possibility that it isn't" pile. It's a big pile.
More or less what I was thinking...
What would happen to a winding sheet soused in oils, unguents and spices; spikenard, olibanum, myrrh when 65l of pure vacuum happens inside it?
Not a lightning strike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Prepuce
The only two I remember are that the woven style of the cloth is typical of ancient Palestine and unknown in medieval Europe. The other is that the cloth has pollen imbedded in it from plants that were common in ancient Palestine and unknown in medieval Europe.
The shroud came to light in medieval France. I seriously doubt that anyone back then knew about the cloth weave commonly used in ancient Palestine or about pollen embedded in cloth.
Proven how? And where was the shroud (1) in the sixth century, and (2) in the centuries before that?
Well, this too. Saying that the shroud has the image of Jesus merely proves that Jesus was buried in a shroud. This is hardly earth-shattering stuff.
Similarly, the idea that an image of a body was imprinted on a shroud is quite interesting no matter whose image it is - though I suppose that if it's Jesus every body can shout "miracle!" instead of "unusual process!". It's a bit like how a really nice drawing suddenly becomes 100 times more valuable when it turns out to have been drawn by Renoir.
It rather demonstrates a flaw in the thinking. In the absence of actual pictures of Jesus, of course artists would use an image based on how men in that time and place typically looked like.
And then of course, whenever the Shroud comes into being, what are the odds of the image on the Shroud being similar to how men in that time and place typically look? Quite high.
I am not convinced that the shroud is genuine. but I have a problem with all the specific arguments that it is a fake.
I might also add that it has nothing to do with my religious faith. I see it as a fascinating intellectual problem. My interest is whetted by the fact that I knew two of the people involved in the hands-on research.
A crusader bought it in Jerusalem and brought it home. So? The original fraudster lived in Jerusalem. No French fraudster with class needed.
Oh, that's easy. Here you go!
The rest of Gramps' sentence, in which he said it looked like "a Northern European Jesus", led me to conclude he didn't really think the image looked like Jesus.
Or, as an art historian might term it, from the Workshop of the Unknown (Unknowable?) Master.
Aside from the cloth weave and the pollen, there are other problems. Here is a quote from the STURP summary
Another weird feature is that the image is a negative image. Until photography was invented in the nineteenth century, the concept of a negative image was unknown. If the image on the shroud were positive, it would be much clearer. Why would anyone go to the trouble of making a negative image when a positive one would have been clearer.?
Why are you interested in the provenance of the Shroud of Turin? Does it impact upon the strength of your faith? If it could be proved that the Shroud of Turin was genuine, do you think that would convince the world to become Christians?
The Shroud of Turin and other relics are interesting to me because they say something about how people interacted with God and the story of Jesus Christ in the past. It is likely that there are many people today who interact with the sacred in the same or similar ways. I don't. I don't need further proof to bolster my faith. My faith is experiential, a continuing experience of salvific love in my life, a sense of personal redemption through Christ. Relics like the Shroud are irrelevant to me, an Irish Catholic Australian returnee to the fold.
I dismissed and ridiculed your post on the last of the Popes, but the responses of some shipmates who I respect showed me that it needed to be taken seriously, at least as a phenomenon, an aspect of Christian belief.
I also remembered a book of my Grandmother's that I intend to have re-bound one day. Its title is: Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God with the History of the Devotion to Her completed by the Traditions of the East by the Abbe M. Orsini, Vicar General of Gap, Member of the Historic Institutes of France and Brazil, Knight of the Legion of Honor. It is missing the publication date, sadly, but was printed here in Melbourne.
People in general find "relics" of all sorts to be very interesting because of their putative associations with important persons or events or places ... So lots of them end up in museums and people pay fees to see them -- Abe Lincoln's top hat, Neil Armstrong's moonwalk space suit, etc. ...
I'm in roughly the same place as Moo. There are lots of unanswered (unanswerable?) questions about the Shroud. The curious part of me would love to have some of these questions addressed using up to date technologies. But even if it WERE proven to be genuinely 1st C and from Palestine, I doubt that it would affect my faith much.
I think the Shroud is interesting. I don't have a problem with it maybe being real. I'm not sure how it could be used to prove Jesus and the resurrection, and I think that's the reason for much of the interest.
If I knew for sure, or nearly sure, that it's real, I think I'd be interested in it. I'd probably want to touch it, the way you touch something connected to an absent person you care about. But I wouldn't be able to do that.
There are no 'problems' at all.
The quote is insignificant.
No paint was involved. That's it.
'the image has unique, three-dimensional information encoded in it', aka a human facsimile done once. This reads like an ID claim.
The claim of weirdness is followed by fallacy. Like an ID or other unparsimonious creationist claim.
The only valid part of the conclusion is 'We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form'.
That's it.
Statistically thorough DNA and C14 tests would account for mould, pollen and handling sweat affecting the C14 dating, which I very much doubt is significant. The ultimate, multiple repeat experiments need to be done involving scourged, crucified corpses or living volunteers (not that any could survive what was done to Jesus, no one survived Roman scourging), in Syrian cloth, in Jerusalem, thoroughly contaminated with mould spores, dusted with local pollen, with and without corona discharge. The shrouds would have to be kept in a cool dry place and sampled as above for a century at a time for a thousand years, to cover the most of the age range, and then treated like the shroud from the C14th for another 500.
That would give a nice data set no? Please critique my experimental 'design' @Alan Cresswell
The first sentence in the major paragraph would suffice of course, but of course that will never be done.
Funny that.
Experiments with C14 dated cloth from C1th onwards, treated similarly in the lab with human blood and sweat, and above all subject to the same mould contamination would help no?
Which, for some people is insufficient evidence that America went to the moon.
Never mind God, some people can’t find their butt with both hands.
So you need to take 'prophecy' of the last Pope seriously? And or the shroud? They speak of the psychology of religion, not Christianity distinctively.
I think this is my view on it too, broadly. It is probably fake. It might be real. But even if it is real, so what? What effect does it have on my own faith? None.
And, for the record, I am a firm believer that Jesus was real, did live and die according to the testimony of the Gospels. The shroud, however, does nothing to alter that faith, whether real or fake.
A shroud wrapped bloodied person. What else? Nothing else is necessary to be postulated. That has to be empirically eliminated. Like evolution and all other 100% explanatory physicalism.
Now that's a relic that you can believe there'd be many pieces of, because every time it gets rubbed....
Slightly more seriously, I don't care whether the Shroud of Turin is 1st century AD or not, whatever it is, it is very, very unusual, and fascinating for that. I can't say that I'm hugely surprised at a claim that the carbon dating data does not match standards as they have changed dramatically in the 30 years since it was dated, but given the scientific content of the final sentence of the OP I'd need a quantity of sodium chloride somewhere about the size of Mrs Lot just to start me believing any of it.
I don't see how DNA or C14 analyses could clarify the question of how the image was made.
As far as DNA is concerned, it's probably impossible to get any from the shroud The researchers did well to establish the fact that the blood was primate blood--human or ape.
Nothing can be done about C14 analysis unless someone invents a non-destructive test.
Seems a little...materialist? Something in the vicinity of "a conjuring trick with bones"?
How much and what mouldy inoculum would have had to be applied in 1250 to utterly overwhelm the 30 AD C14?
Here is a much more refined image of the head of Jesus from the Shroud of Turan.
This is the likely image of Jesus (see figure #4).
Judge for yourself.
The thing is, EVERYTHING God does in this world is materialist in some way. If our science were far enough along, you could have wired up Elijah or Isaiah and seen the visions happening in their brain cells real-time. Mary's pregnancy doubtless produced a certain amount of mess afterward (amniotic fluid etc.) Jesus' blood certainly got trampled into the mud around the cross. Why shouldn't his resurrection produce random detectable effects on the universe it became a part of?
I think maybe the real problem is that our cartoons etc. have taught us to think of "energy bursts" and the like as woo-woo foolishness--as cartoonish, in fact. It's our aesthetic sense that is offended, not our logic. One feels that Jesus should have been minimalist about his resurrection--the whole thing should have gone off without so much as scaring a sparrow, leaving no trace behind. And perhaps it did.
Or perhaps not.
But aesthetics do not a theology make. They may reflect one, but as often they reflect the culture in which the onlooker has been raised.