Forensic Image
Shroud
Posted on 02/12/2005 11:59:27 AM PST by NYer
Rome, Feb. 11, 2005 (CNA) - Forensic scientists in Italy are working on a different kind of investigation—one that dates back 2000 years.
In an astounding announcement, the scientists think they may have re-created an image of Jesus Christ when He was a 12-year old boy.
Using the Shroud of Turin, a centuries-old linen cloth, which many believe bears the face of the crucified Christ, the investigators first created a computer-modeled, composite picture of the Christ’s face.
Dr. Carlo Bui, one of the scientists said that, “the face of the man on the shroud is the face of a suffering man. He has a deeply ruined nose. It was certainly struck."
Then, using techniques usually reserved for investigating missing persons, they back dated the image to create the closest thing many will ever see to a photograph of the young Christ.
“Without a doubt, the eyes... That is, the deepness of the eyes, the central part of the face in its complexity”, said forensic scientist Andrea Amore, one of the chief investigators who made the discovery.
The shroud itself, a 14-foot long by 3.5-foot wide woven cloth believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus, is receiving renewed attention lately.
A Los Alamos, New Mexico scientist has recently cast grave doubt that the carbon dating originally used to date the shroud was valid. This would suggest that the shroud may in fact be 2000 years old after all, placing it precisely in the period of Christ’s crucifixion.
Shroud
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Orthodox Ping!
Ping!
What a beautiful image but the eyes look so sad.
I thought the same thing.
There are hundreds of images of "Christ Pantocrator." It is simply not enough to say that "Christ Pantocrator" is the image of Christ. You have to point to a specific version by that name. I see the one you have posted. What is its orgin and time?
He had a beautiful, lovely face.
Thanks for this post. I find the original recreation from the shroud fascinating, also.
There is no corpse. He's alive.
I believe the image in post #2 is from the Haghia Sofia in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) which used to be the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Haghia Sofia was the HQ for the Eastern Orthodox Church for centuries. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. There were similar mosaics I saw in another church in Istanbul called the Khora church? Anyway, it was 16 years ago and I wasn't paying much attention to churches when I was 19 and in the Army.
His corpse was "reanimated" after 3 days and remains alive and well. Since He's Glorified, He doesn't suffer aging, disease, pain, etc. However, He can still enjoy eating food (reference the fish meal when he revisited the Apostles on the beach).
I'm sure you're just being funny with the humorous picture. Perhaps you should mention "sarcasm" after such a post to avoid the ozone smell.
You are correct.
This one is from the Hagia Sophia.
HIS "corpse" has already been re-animated - and the angels rolled away the stone so he could leave the tomb. If HE had been only a spirit - the stone would not need to be removed.
You are correct!
I like your imagination, but his corpse didn't see corruption. It rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and will return. See Revelation chap. 1 for a scriptural decription of what he will look like (eyes like a flame of fire, etc.)
"5 ft 1 inch"
You have to be kidding me. There are comments in the Bible which say Jesus had a commanding posture - which would indicate HE was quite tall and well built. There is no evidence to support their claim.
But .. a "graven" image is something that is carved with a chisel - not an imprint on a cloth.
I don't know if it's the image of Jesus or not. I don't need that to believe in Jesus. HE lives in my heart and HE's very real to me.
Jesus said, "Blessed are those who believe and have not seen".
When you do see His face I doubt you will like the result. Perhaps you might like to reconsider your post.
Jesus has one message and one message only. God forgives you. He did make the point, however, that you should be good to each other to avoid hurting anyone. Treat others as you would be treated yourself.
Cling to that thought. You'll need to believe in that comfort as you work out your self imposed guilt.
Can't be Jesus because according to Isaiah 53, verse 2, "For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." Plus, in Isaiah 52, verse 14, when the Romans got through with Jesus, "As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men:"
Jesus, according to the Bible, was plain faced person so that no one would desire physically. His goodness came from within. The opposite of true is Satan. Satan has the outward beauty but evil and corruptness within.
There are no descriptions of Jesus' appearance in the New Testament. Nor are there any reputable descriptions in any known early Church sources. St. Augustine of Hippo made a point of this when he wrote his monumental works in the fifth century. Yet, starting in the sixth century a new picture, a new common appearance for Jesus emerged in eastern art. We see it today in all manner of pictures of Jesus: icons, paintings, mosaics and Byzantine coins. This common picture quality seems to have started in the Middle East about the same time that the Image of Edessa was discovered. Prior to this time, pictures of Jesus were mostly of a young, beardless man, often with short hair, often in story-like settings in which he was depicted as a shepherd.
Why No One Can Fully Explain the Pictures on the Shroud of Turin
Abruptly, throughout the Middle East, and eventually throughout eastern Mediterranean Europe, pictures of Jesus became full frontal portraits with distinctive facial characteristics. Jesus now had shoulder length hair, an elongated thin nose, and a forked beard. Numerous other characteristics appeared in these pictures, and some of them were seemingly strange and of no particular artistic merit. Many portraits had two wisps of hair that dropped at an angle from a central parting of the hair. Many pictures showed Jesus with large "owlish" eyes. Paul Vignon, a French scholar, who first categorized these facial attributes in 1930, also described a square cornered U shape between the eyebrows, a downward pointing triangle on the bridge of the nose, a raised right eyebrow, accents on both cheeks with the accent on the right cheek being somewhat lower, an enlarged left nostril, an accent line below the nose, a gap in the beard below the lower lip, and hair on one side of the head that was shorter than on the other side.
Jennifer Speake who wrote a chapter, "Jesus in Art," in J. R. Porter's Jesus Christ: the Jesus of History, the Christ of Faith, observed:
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Christ Pantocrator, an icon at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai (550 C.E.) |
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Byzantine Justinian II solidus, a coin (695) |
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Icon of Christ at St. Ambrose, (now in Milan) (700s) |
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Christ Enthroned, a mosaic in the narthex of Hagia Sophia Cathedral (850 - 900) |
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Christ Pantocrator, a dome mosaic in a church in Daphni (1050 - 1100) |
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Christ the Merciful, a mosaic icon now in a Berlin museum (1000s) |
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Christ Pantocrator, an apse mosaic in Cefalu Cathedral, Sicily (1148) |
In the 1930's, French Shroud scholar Paul Vignon described a series of common characteristics visible in many early artistic pictures of Jesus. The Vignon marking, as they are known, all appear on the Shroud suggesting that it is the source of later pictures of Jesus:
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A square U-shape between the eyebrows. |
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A downward pointing triangle or V-shape just below the U-shape, on the bridge of the nose. |
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Two wisps of hair going downward and then to the right. |
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A raised right eyebrow. |
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Large, seemingly "owlish" eyes. This may be the result of coins placed over the eyes. |
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An accent on the left cheek and an accent on the right cheek that is somewhat lower. |
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A forked beard. This may the result of a chin band tied around the head to keep the mouth closed. |
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An enlarged left nostril. |
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An accent line below the nose and a dark line just below the lower lip. |
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A gap in the beard below the lower lip. |
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Hair on one side of the head that is shorter than on the other side. |
That's a pretty bizarre joke. I rather doubt Christ will return as Old Man Winter or something that resembles a creature from a B-class horror movie.
A tremendous amount of presumptive assumptions, not worth as much as the electricity it took to produce this message and shoot it onto this forum.
If you search the scriptures, (cf. John 5:39), you will find the opposite is true. God forbade the worship of statues, but he did not forbid the religious use of statues. Instead, he actually commanded their use in religious contexts!
There are many passages where the Lord commands the making of statues. For example: "And you shall make two cherubim of gold [i.e., two gold statues of angels]; of hammered work shall you make them, on the two ends of the mercy seat. Make one cherub on the one end, and one cherub on the other end; of one piece of the mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends. The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be" (Ex. 25:18–20).
David gave Solomon the plan "for the altar of incense made of refined gold, and its weight; also his plan for the golden chariot of the cherubim that spread their wings and covered the ark of the covenant of the Lord. All this he made clear by the writing of the hand of the Lord concerning it all, all the work to be done according to the plan" (1 Chr. 28:18–19). David’s plan for the temple, which the biblical author tells us was "by the writing of the hand of the Lord concerning it all," included statues of angels.
Similarly Ezekiel 41:17–18 describes graven (carved) images in the idealized temple he was shown in a vision, for he writes, "On the walls round about in the inner room and [on] the nave were carved likenesses of cherubim."
During a plague of serpents sent to punish the Israelites during the exodus, God told Moses to "make [a statue of] a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it shall live. So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live" (Num. 21:8–9).
One had to look at the bronze statue of the serpent to be healed, which shows that statues could be used ritually, not merely as religious decorations.
Geesh I hope not. Looks like Tuco from The Good , the Bad and the Ugly.
(Isa 50:6 KJV) I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.
(Isa 53:2 KJV) For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
Those are the only two verses that I know of that discuss anything about what Jesus looked like.
He had a beard, and he was not handsome.
What verses are you talkng about???
Shalom
thanks for the post. I do believe that the conjecture is quite amusing. Mere mortals and all, ya know? This is God we're discussing afterall.
Jesus looks alot like the actor from the movie "Real Genius."
These "scientists" are creatively imaginative, or delusional
"There are tons of verses on this in the Bible - that is if what HE says matters to you. It's most unlikely that He would allow a graven image on HIMSELF to be left behind when He is so opposed to it"
Here's some news; the Iconoclast heresy was crushed finally in 843. The First Sunday in Great Lent is called the Sunday of Orthodoxy and commemorates the restoration of the icons to Churches and homes.
I also believe Jesus was a lovely child.
I still contend that the cloth around his head was separate from the grave clothes "shroud".
Lazarus was able to come forth "BOUND hand and foot with grave clothes: and his face was bound with a napkin. Jesus said unto them, "Loose him, and let him go". John 11:44
John 19:40 "Then they took the body of Jesus, and WOUND it in the linen clothes...".
John 20:7 And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but WRAPPED together in a place by itself.
I contend that Jesus' body was buried in the same manner as Lazarus' body. Wound, bound, wrapped, you name it, in such a fashion, that getting free of it was difficult, to say the least (you're not supposed to get free of it, you're supposed to stay dead, but that's another sermon). From the dimensional data I've seen on the "shroud", one thing is most telling: It would have had to have been wrapped perpendicular like wrapping the handle on a baseball bat to succeed in binding someone.
Another thought: We all know that people were just as cunning hundreds of years ago as they are today. I have suspected, as have others, that someone(s) decided to manufacture proof of Jesus existance (The Holy Ghost is ample proof for me). It has probably made some (or a lot of) money for those connected to it through the centuries.
And another thought: I have to wonder if Jesus blood type was not just rare, but one of a kind, never before or since found on this planet.
The story about the "The Light Of The World" image above is really something ...
In his image A 20th Century Religious Icon Had Its Genesis In A Cherubic Rogers Park Boy
Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.; Jul 15, 2001; Patrick T Reardon
Abstract:
Eighty-one years ago, her father, Gilbert DeMille, then a boy of 4, posed for artist Charles Bosseron Chambers for a painting of Jesus and St. Joseph in the newly built St. Ignatius Church in Rogers Park. It was a detail of that painting, the face of Jesus--the face of Gilbert--that became "Light of the World." Between 1920 and 1940, millions of copies of the bare-shouldered, curly-haired, blond Jesus were sold, reflecting a wistful devoutness, a sweet piety, that was a hallmark of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, and of American Christianity in general.
Full Text:
For millions of American Catholics, a painting known as "Light of the World," an image of Jesus as a small boy, recalls a long-gone era of nuns in thick habits, incense-filled sanctuaries and the Baltimore Catechism. Indeed, during the first half of the 20th Century, it was the most popular religious print in America.
Now, after decades of obscurity, the image is making a modest comeback--on the Internet, of all places. Go to the eBay auction Web site and, most days, you'll find several copies of the print, dragged up from basements or found amid a deceased relative's belongings, and offered for sale not so much as religious objects but as "collectibles."
Some buyers want them for their antique frames, while others consider the images investments that may rise in value. Many bid out of nostalgia, hoping to regain a piece of their childhood and the innocence of their early religious belief.
Darlene Baker has a different reason: She has 90 copies of the print hanging on three walls of her living room in Winnetka because, for her, the image isn't just Jesus. It's also her father.
Eighty-one years ago, her father, Gilbert DeMille, then a boy of 4, posed for artist Charles Bosseron Chambers for a painting of Jesus and St. Joseph in the newly built St. Ignatius Church in Rogers Park. It was a detail of that painting, the face of Jesus--the face of Gilbert--that became "Light of the World." Between 1920 and 1940, millions of copies of the bare-shouldered, curly-haired, blond Jesus were sold, reflecting a wistful devoutness, a sweet piety, that was a hallmark of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, and of American Christianity in general.
In that era, "Light of the World" was often found in Catholic schools, churches and rectories. In fact, midway through the 1948 movie "The Miracle of the Bells," the print can be seen above the desk of a priest consulted by Bill Dunnigan (Fred MacMurray). Many a Catholic home also had copies of the image, often hanging over the beds of children.
One of those beds was Darlene Baker's. "It was Daddy, but it was Jesus, but it was Daddy," she says.
It seems somewhat odd, but, for Baker and her three sisters, having a picture of Daddy-Jesus was just part of the landscape at home, no more unreal than their parents' old wedding photos. Well, maybe a little bit more unreal, acknowledges Baker, now 53. "He looked so much like an angel, and my dark-haired, double-chinned dad bore even less resemblance to that boy beneath the halo than he did to the guy in the wedding tux."
DeMille, who died in 1993, was proud of having posed as the child Jesus, but also a bit embarrassed. "He wasn't too happy about having to take his clothes off," his widow, Eleanor, recalls.
His parents were Belgian immigrants. His father, Victor, was custodian at the St. Ignatius parish school. His mother, Alida, took care of Gilbert and his older brother Vic in a two-bedroom apartment that was part of the school. She also ran a penny-candy store on the first floor.
As a toddler and young boy, Gilbert had the run of the school building. "He was the nuns' pet," Eleanor says. So, when Chambers came to St. Ignatius to paint side altars for the church, one of the sisters suggested Gilbert as a model.
Looking at the painting today, it's easy to see why 4-year-old Gilbert might have found posing uncomfortable. In the arms of St. Joseph, Jesus is naked except for a small piece of cloth loosely draped across his middle. It wouldn't have been surprising if Gilbert had squirmed around a lot in irritation or protest.
For whatever reason, Chambers finished the painting using another boy's body--a German boy, according to one source; an Italian one, according to another--while retaining DeMille's face.
In a 1941 interview with Liberty magazine, Chambers said that, after he finished the painting of St. Joseph and the child Jesus, he returned to New York. "But the face of that child haunted me. I had to paint it. I had to paint it for its own sake," he said. The result was "Light of the World," the image that made Chambers' reputation as an artist of religious subjects.
It also gave DeMille a smidgen of status at St. Ignatius--but just a smidgen. "All of us knew he was the one," says Sister Anna Marie Erst, a childhood friend. "We just took it for granted. He looked like the Holy Child. If somebody was visiting the church, you'd say, 'Oh, there's Victor's son up there.' "
After attending nearby Loyola University, DeMille won a scholarship to Harvard Business School but dropped out a year later. Back in Chicago, DeMille got his first job as an accountant, a career he followed for four decades. He and Eleanor married in 1942 and moved to the Jefferson Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side.
The easygoing DeMille was the quintessential mid-century American Catholic layman. At St. Cornelius, his new parish, he was an usher, song leader and lector. He also served as president of the Holy Name Society and was a Grand Knight in the Knights of Columbus.
"We bowled together. We went on retreat together. I played golf with him," says Chester Schwarz, a friend of half a century. "He was a normal kind of a guy. He wasn't one who would tell you that you were this or that, or go preaching."
For many years, the only copy of "Light of the World" in the DeMille home was the one over Darlene's bed. And, although Eleanor often gave the print as a First Communion or Confirmation gift, DeMille didn't tell many people at his new parish about posing as Jesus. But close friends knew. And the DeMille girls used to jokingly refer to themselves as "the daughters of the Christ child."
Meanwhile, on the basis of "Light of the World" and similar works, Chambers was gaining renown. One magazine characterized him as the "Painter of Heaven." And, in 1956, Parade magazine included "Light of the World" along with works by Botticelli and Raphael in a list of what it said were the five most beautiful images of the child Jesus ever produced.
That was rarefied company for Chambers, to be sure. But much of his popularity had to do with how unlike the works of the masters-- and his contemporaries--his images were.
"He's the artist who threw a bucket of paint into the religious art world," wrote Edward Doherty in Liberty magazine in 1941. "He's a rebel. He's a modern. He's the man who revolutionized the whole business. . . . He's given his work a modern touch, a distinctly American touch . . . but the roar that went up from the church crowd, you'd think the poor fellow had committed a sacrilege!" Art experts dismissed his work as insipid and saccharine.
Chambers, a Catholic born in St. Louis in 1883, had studied in Berlin, Dresden, Vienna and Italy before settling in Manhattan with his wife, Anne, the niece of Archbishop Patrick Freehan of Chicago. He painted and drew secular subjects, including the swashbuckling illustrations for a 1935 edition of Sir Walter Scott's novel "Quentin Durward," a series of ads featuring flapper-type women for Mum's deodorant and a 1926 oil of a nude Mercury.
His religious art had much in common with those works. The images were immediate, unambiguous, prettified. Whereas great artists of the past had created religious compositions of intricate complexity, Chambers opted almost always for a single, static, portrait-like pose. At a time when painters such as Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso were bending and twisting visual tradition, or ignoring it altogether, Chambers presented images of Jesus and the saints that looked very much like 1920s movie stars in costume.
The work, says David Morgan, an art professor at Valparaiso University and author of "Visual Piety" (University of California Press), appealed to women, and it appealed to an ethos of innocence, a child-centered piety."
Religious educators of the time stressed the usefulness of art in transmitting religious messages, Morgan says. "You wanted the image to exert a moralizing influence," he says. And, referring to "Light of the World," Morgan adds, "This is the sweet little guy you can't ignore."
Indeed, these images often were displayed as though they were spiritual members of the household. "People would arrange photos of the family around a picture of Jesus or Mary," Morgan notes.
Nonetheless, by 1964, when Chambers died at age 81, his work had suffered a sharp drop in popularity. The Second Vatican Council, with its emphasis on a more grass-roots spirituality, as well as social shifts throughout much of American society, led to an interest in more realistically portrayed saints, warts and all. Later came the still-raging fad for pictures of angels.
Today, of course, the re-imagining of how Jesus appeared has gone so far that the British Broadcasting Corp. recently made public a computer-generated image, based on scientific and archeological findings about the physiognomy of a typical Jewish male of the era. Not surprisingly, the image looks nothing like "Light of the World." Indeed, the face of the swarthy, large-nosed, curly-haired man has unsettled some Christians raised on images like the one from Chambers.
But Baker's mother, Eleanor DeMille, says she has always been a little unsettled about the image of her husband as the infant Jesus. "I don't think of Jesus as blond," she says. "I think of him as dark, maybe very dark."
Ten years after Chambers' death, "Light of the World" had become a figure of kitsch, appearing, along with a child's ukulele, on an inner-sleeve photograph of singer Linda Ronstadt for her album "Heart Like a Wheel."
And it was a decade after that, in the mid-1980s, when Baker and her sisters began discovering copies of the print at rummage sales and flea markets. "I was just astonished to find my dad being sold like an antique," says Baker, who first came across a copy of the painting of St. Joseph and Jesus in a garage during a Lincoln Park antiques fair. She bought the print and gave it to her parents.
"After that, any time I'd go to a rummage sale, I'd look to see if they had Dad. I bought maybe 10 of them, and mostly I was giving them away to my sisters and my nieces and nephews. For the longest time, after I negotiated my price, I'd tell them it was my dad, and I would get chills. It was like a very spiritual feeling."
Then, in October 1999, Darlene found copies of "Light of the World" on eBay for as little as $2. So she began bidding on as many as she could. And, while some cost as much as $75, she figures she has spent an average of $30 each for the 90 copies of "Light of the World" and 30 other Chambers prints she has bought.
She has traded e-mails with other fans of "Light of the World" and of Chambers' work in general, including Mary Popp, head of the Society for the Preservation of Roman Catholic Heritage, based in Dayton, Ohio.
"When Vatican II came along, so much that was beautiful was pitched," says Popp, whose organization seeks to save old religious artifacts from the landfill. Popp, who owns more than 50 Chambers prints, has reprinted several and sells them to raise money for the group.
Baker says she'd also like to start selling off some of her prints, perhaps to raise money for services to victims of Alzheimer's disease. "What I'll keep are the best ones and the worst ones," she says.
Standing in front of a wall covered with dozens of copies of the print, Baker acknowledges, "It is over the top. This is my first and last collection. It has a life of its own."
Thanks so much for this post.
LOL. Excellent. I love that.
You are absolutely correct. If God had left any archeological remnants of Biblical persons or events, men would turn them into idols.
This is why it is totally unprofitable and undesireable to search for them or even engage in discussion about them.
But then, some seem to need holy relics and aids to worship in order to feel something or other about God.
Pity them...
That is correct!
One of the relics held by the cathedral in the town of Oviedo, in the north of Spain, is a piece of cloth measuring approximately 84 x 53 cm. There is no image on this cloth. Only stains are visible to the naked eye, although more is visible under the microscope. The remarkable thing about this cloth is that both tradition and scientific studies claim that the cloth was used to cover and clean the face of Jesus after the crucifixion.
Such a cloth is known to have existed from the gospel of John, chapter 20, verses 6 and 7. These verses read as follows, "Simon Peter, following him, also came up, went into the tomb, saw the linen cloth lying on the ground, and also the cloth that had been over his head; this was not with the linen cloth but rolled up in a place by itself." John clearly differentiates between this smaller face cloth, the sudarium, and the larger linen that had wrapped the body.
How the sudarium was wrapped around the head
The stains on the sudarium show that when the cloth was placed on the dead man's face, it was folded over, although not in the middle. Counting both sides of the cloth, there is therefore a fourfold stain in a logical order of decreasing intensity.
From the composition of the main stains, it is evident that the man whose face the sudarium covered died in an upright position. The stains consist of one part blood and six parts fluid from a pleural oedema. This liquid collects in the lungs when a crucified person dies of asphyxiation, and if the body subsequently suffers jolting movements, can come out through the nostrils. These are in fact the main stains visible on the sudarium.
These stains in the nasal area are also superimposed on each other, with the different outlines clearly visible. This means that the first stain had already dried when the second stain was formed, and so on.
The sudarium alone has revealed sufficient information to suggest that it was in contact with the face of Jesus after the crucifixion. However, the really fascinating evidence comes to light when this cloth is compared to the Shroud of Turin.
The first and most obvious coincidence is that the blood on both cloths belongs to the same group, namely AB.
The length of the nose through which the pleural oedema fluid came onto the sudarium has been calculated at eight centimetres, just over three inches. This is exactly the same length as the nose on the image of the Shroud.
If the face of the image on the Shroud is placed over the stains on the sudarium, perhaps the most obvious coincidence is the exact fit of the stains with the beard on the face. As the sudarium was used to clean the man's face, it appears that it was simply placed on the face to absorb all the blood, but not used in any kind of wiping movement.
A small stain is also visible proceeding from the right hand side of the man's mouth. This stain is hardly visible on the Shroud, but Dr. John Jackson, using the VP-8 and photo enhancements has confirmed its presence.
The thorn wounds on the nape of the neck also coincide perfectly with the bloodstains on the Shroud.
Dr. Alan Whanger applied the Polarized Image Overlay Technique to the sudarium, comparing it to the image and bloodstains on the Shroud. The frontal stains on the sudarium show seventy points of coincidence with the Shroud, and the rear side shows fifty. The only possible conclusion is that the Oviedo sudarium covered the same face as the Turin Shroud.
FULL TEXT
I have to wonder if Jesus blood type was not just rare, but one of a kind, never before or since found on this planet.
Every now and then one reads in the news that some Image of the Madonna is weeping. Sometimes these tears are blood and the news are then much more impressive. The skeptics smile; the ecclesiastical authorities evaluate the event with great prudence, with good reason, and they avoid making definite judgments; science does not get involved, and if it does, it is at the level practiced by amateurs. Then, as time passes, the event becomes less interesting, fades from memory, and is soon forgotten. Only in very rare cases is the event of such importance that it is acknowledged as true and real and is then certified as authentic and of a supernatural origin. An example is the research that was carried out on the "Weeping Madonna of Syracuse." [It was declared authentic and of supernatural origin.]
The event involves two Sacred Icons that shed tears of blood on two separate occasions. The phenomenon lasted thirty minutes and was witnessed by other persons whom Padre Pietro had immediately called. This event was recorded on video tape. Padre Pietro wiped the blood with a handkerchief and sent it to a laboratory to be tested.
This laboratory has Scientific Authority, therefore a verdict released by this laboratory is of indisputable [unquestionable] value.
After carrying out all the tests, the laboratory researchers sent Padre Pietro an official document stating, in resume,
Mother Angelica, of EWTN fame, is an ardent devotee of the "Child Jesus". It wouldn't surprise me in the least if she has one or two copies of this picture hanging up in the Convent ;-D
The world is filled with these 'remnants'. One visit to the Holy Land, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and all the other countries in the Middle East is in order.
This is why it is totally unprofitable and undesireable to search for them or even engage in discussion about them.
There is no profit made from the Shroud of Turin or the Sudarium or any of the other relics left behind by our Lord and His apostles. They serve only to justify what Scripture tells us. Remember St. Thomas? He wasn't in the Cenacle when our Lord appeared to the disciples. He said that unless he placed his hand on the wounds of Christ, he wouldn't believe. Then Christ appeared. The world is filled with "doubting" Thomases.
But then, some seem to need holy relics and aids to worship in order to feel something or other about God.
No one needs relics to believe. A relic is a tangible connection to the holy person. On Good Friday, christians from all around the world stream into Jerusalem and walk the same route that our Lord did on His way to Calvary. These believers don't need the exercise; they do this out of love, affection and great humility. Yes ....it takes great humility to place ourselves on the same path taken by Christ. That is why Catholics pursue a 40 day period of fast and abstinence, to suffer along with our Lord who gave His life for our salvation. He didn't suffer for Himself; He didn't need to. He suffered for you and me, so that we would be saved. What an awesome gift He gave us that day.
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