Posted on 03/26/2013 8:14:48 PM PDT by NYer
Professor Giulio Fanti and journalist Saverio Gaeta have published a book with the results of some chemical and mechanical tests which confirm that the Shroud dates back to the 1st century
ANDREA TORNIELLI
ROME
New scientific experiments carried out at the University of Padua have apparently confirmed that the Shroud Turin can be dated back to the 1st century AD. This makes its compatible with the tradition which claims that the cloth with the image of the crucified man imprinted on it is the very one Jesus’ body was wrapped in when he was taken off the cross. The news will be published in a book by Giulio Fanti, professor of mechanical and thermal measurement at the University of Padua’s Engineering Faculty, and journalist Saverio Gaeta, out tomorrow. “Il Mistero della Sindone” (The Mystery of the Shroud) is edited by Rizzoli (240 pp, 18 Euro).
What’s new about this book are Fanti’s recent findings, which are also about to be published in a specialist magazine and assessed by a scientific committee. The research includes three new tests, two chemical ones and one mechanical one. The first two were carried out with an FT-IR system, so using infra-red light, and the other using Raman spectroscopy. The third was a multi-parametric mechanical test based on five different mechanical parameters linked to the voltage of the wire. The machine used to examine the Shroud’s fibres and test traction, allowed researchers to examine tiny fibres alongside about twenty samples of cloth dated between 3000 BC and 2000 AD.
The new tests carried out in the University of Padua labs were carried out by a number of university professors from various Italian universities and agree that the Shroud dates back to the period when Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem. Final results show that the Shroud fibres examined produced the following dates, all of which are 95% certain and centuries away from the medieval dating obtained with Carbon-14 testing in 1988: the dates given to the Shroud after FT-IR testing, is 300 BC ±400, 200 BC ±500 after Raman testing and 400 AD ±400 after multi-parametric mechanical testing. The average of all three dates is 33 BC ±250 years. The book’s authors observed that the uncertainty of this date is less than the single uncertainties and the date is compatible with the historic date of Jesus’ death on the cross, which historians claim occurred in 30 AD.
The tests were carried out using tiny fibres of material extracted from the Shroud by micro-analyst Giovanni Riggi di Numana who passed away in 2008 but had participated in the1988 research project and gave the material to Fanti through the cultural institute Fondazione 3M.
The shroud is either the authentic burial shroud of Christ, or it is not.
If it is not, it is singularly unique as a forgery or artifact created hundreds, if not over a thousand years ago, that modern technology can not replicate or explain.
If it is the authentic burial shroud of Christ, well, God does nothing without his reasons.
In either case, it merits my attention and a bit of contemplation, but my faith is certainly not contingent upon it.
Wow! My head exploded when I saw your name. How long have you been MNGal?
And to build on a point “God will take you any way He can.”
As C.S. Lewis noted in “The Screwtape Letters”, so will Satan.
With regard to capturing your soul, he informed his nephew, Wormwood:
“Cards are as good as murder, if cards do the trick”.
Easy you two.
I could imagine a sophisticated computer, manifesting human-like artificial intelligence and reason, concluding based on evidence and syllogisms that there is, in fact, a God. But it would never get the faith.
Thank you.
/johnny
Well it can get you close enough. C.S. Lewis reasoned most of the way, but his final conversion happened when he rode in his brother’s sidecar...lol! When I first became a Christian I believed it in my heart but my mind still rejected it as a silly story. It took years of studying Christian apologetics ( mostly Lewis and Chesterton) to bring the two into harmony.
He did what He had to do before the Kodak camera was invented.
embrace Jesus
I think close to five years.
My two cents here. I think the shroud is interesting, especially from an historic perspective. That said...
If one places too much faith in the shroud, and I am not saying anyone here is, if the shroud is shown later to be a fraud then that person’s faith could be shattered.
Keep it all in perspective.
Best to put one’s faith in Jesus.
2010... just click on her name.
This study should be interesting. Hopefully it is well done. The previous dating was clearly wrong. Maybe this one will be right.
Thanks for a wonderful post, Joe. In regard to relics, we should maybe lighten up just a bit. No one, no pope, no bishop, etc. ever said that they were a necessary part of faith.
As you allude, they are ex voto... just a little something to bring the mind back to the deeds of a saint, or in the case of this shroud, that God became man and needed one for a while.
the Christian faith dates back to times when these mementos were taken a little more seriously ... even in the wrong way. No need for us modern johnnies to go batcrap about it. As much as I sniggered in the duplicate-relic laden churches of Europe, they served their purpose by causing me to reflect (OK fleetingly) upon some aspect of the faith. The Sola Scriptura gang is probably right ... we don't "need" relics. But it is a gift to have them, a gift from Christians who went before us.
The material of the shroud may well date back to Roman times, and be from the Holy Land. Either way, it's a wonderful and gentle reminder of the truth of the Resurrection.
“I don’t get it...bleeding out after a fall explained everything I ever needed to know, and told me how strong my faith was.”
Yes, sir, Johnny, and I understand that. My God and my Lord and Savior have delivered me/us from inescapable circumstances in several instances that we know of, and likely many, many more. These are faith building experiences. I do not need the Shroud to know who my Lord and Savior is...on the other hand I find it interesting that this just might be something preserved to affirm to us in our generation what those who stood at the foot of the cross, gazing upward, and those who encountered Him after the Resurection saw and believed first hand.
He is all powerful, all loving, all caring, all giving. He is God. He, though God, as man died so that we might live. I came to know Him in a very personal way before I knew anything about a Shroud, or any other kind of ‘relics’ that might bear some testimony to what God tells us in His Word. I do not need that. My faith is what I have because He gave me my faith. And that faith grows, by the day.
Again, I thank you for sharing your faith. God is Good. God brings people, events, circumstances into our lives to teach us and to enlighten us. He obviously is doing that with you. We too know that nurturing. Blessings.
But only if the person's faith was based on or contingent upon the Shroud or some other piece of apparently confirming physical evidence. For me, The Shroud is almost a bonus, a joy-inspiring historical confirmation. Were it to be found fake, it would certainly cause disappointment but no effect on faith, per se.
That said, a good Christian should always view claims initially with skepticism (unless already approved by The Church), as there are, of course, many blatant fakes and hoaxes such as certain purported "Dead Sea Scrolls". Those are meant to weaken your faith.
Interesting comments regarding a “Big Bang” event (a new Creation) in the tomb:
http://www.nigelkerner.com/Articles/Brighter_than_the_Sun.html
Distinguished particle physicist, Dame Isabel Piczek, has identified the remarkable fact that there seems to be no distortion in the image on the cloth, a distortion that should have resulted from the pressure of the body on the stone floor of the tomb and the inevitable irregularities that would have occurred due to the folds and wrinkles of the wrapping:
“There is a strange dividing element, an interface from which the image is projected up and the image is projected down. The muscles of the body are absolutely not crushed against the stone of the tomb. They are perfect. It means that the body is hovering between the two sides of the shroud. What does that mean? It means that there is absolutely no gravity. The image is absolutely undistorted. Now if you imagine that the cloth was wrinkled, tied, wrapped around the body and all of a sudden you see a perfect image, which is impossible unless the shroud was made absolutely taut, rigidly taut. A heretofore unknown interface acted as an event horizon. The straight, taut linen of the shroud simply was forced to parallel the shape of this powerful interface. The projection, an action at a distance, happens from the surface and limit of this, taking with itself the bas-relief image of the upper and, separately, the underside of the body.”
This, “heretofore unknown interface” she says, would have been the result of a “collapsed event horizon,” in the center of which, “there is something which science knows as a singularity. This is exactly what started the universe in the Big Bang.” Thus, she goes on to say: “We have nothing less in the tomb of Christ than the beginning of a new universe.”
From a modern perspective the veneration of icons, relics, etc., may seem a bit silly, but when placed in the context of widespread illiteracy, the visual vocabulary of Christian iconography can be recognized for the prominent role it played in illustrating, transmitting and communicating Christian beliefs.
Because of the reliance on iconography as a visual vocabulary to communicate specific thoughts, stories and traditions, an artist's value was largely gauged in terms of consistency and conformity, not creativity or innovation.
What's unique aout the shroud springing forth in this environment is precisely its lack of precedence.
Dame Piczek has offered some interesting observations and analysis but is way too keen to explain it in terms of her cosmological training.
We were in Italy last time the Shroud was shown in Turin. The exhibition was announced after we’d bought tickets, and it overlapped our trip by a few days. It was very moving, and beautifully displayed. Traffic in Turin was ... excting, to say the least.
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