Posted on 03/29/2013 1:24:39 PM PDT by marshmallow
A viewing of the The Shroud of Turin, thought by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, will reportedly be televised Saturday on Italian State TV in what is said to be former Pope Benedict XVI's parting gift to the Catholic Church.
The televised viewing of the shroud on Holy Saturday will be the first in 40 years, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.
The centuries-old linen cloth - one of the world's most famous relics - contains a faint impression of the front and back of a human body, along with blood, dirt and water stains from age. Many Roman Catholics believe the impressions were left by the body of Jesus after his crucifixion.
"There was no portrait made of Jesus so, really, the shroud still remains the best single thing that we have," said Russ Breault, president of the Shroud of Turin Education Project Inc., an organization "dedicated to raising awareness and understanding" of the shroud, according to its website.
The shroud's authenticity, however, has long been a subject of deep debate.
Skeptics believe the 14-foot cloth was faked during medieval times. Scientists have used various methods, including carbon dating, to test the authenticity of the fabric, and some results have supported the belief that the cloth is a medieval forgery. But there might be new evidence to support the view that the shroud is real.
Scientists at the University of Padua in Northern Italy have conducted experiments that show the shroud dates back to around the time of Christ's life, according to an article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
(Excerpt) Read more at gma.yahoo.com ...
It's worth noting that the Shroud of Turin did not attract much attention around the world until the end of the 19th century. The reason for this is simple: the Shroud itself did not seem to be all that spectacular -- it was an ancient piece of fabric with what appeared to be the image of a man on it. What changed all of this was the advent of photography. An Italian photographer named Secondo Pia received permission to photograph the Shroud during one of its rare public displays, and while he was developing the film he produced a negative that had far more detail than the original image (the dark image of the Shroud that you often see in pictures is the negative, not the original).
The implication of this was immediately clear to Pia: The "negative" he was looking at was actually the real image, and the "original" image on the Shroud was actually the negative -- which meant that whatever process was used to produce that image was identical to a photographic process that the world had only discovered recently.
Certainly there were artists in the days of Jesus ... no one thought to draw a sketch?
Granted, there are a lot of things we don't know, but there are a lot of things we DO know, and no longer look through a glass darkly.
That does not prove it is the burial shroud of Christ. But until someone can reproduce the image and the same negative test results on a similar first century material with demonstrable origins in the then Roman province of Judea it is the best explanation which fits all the facts. That happens to be by definition "incredible" so your skepticism is understandable. The team of scientists who examined it, and probably the Vatican, assumed they would find it to be an easily explained painted fraud. Didn't happen.
It remains at the least a fascinating enigma and at the most a photograph of the moment of Christ's resurrection.
Well good for you.
I gave my observation and opinion. You could have done likewise without involving me.
Next time try instead of making the baseless accusation of slur.
You'll find here on FreeRepublic that when a topic is posted, there are quite a few people with a lot of knowledge about it.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence in favor of the Shroud's authenticity is the evidence surrounding what is known as the "four-finger" phenomenon on the image. While most artwork from the Middle Ages depicting the Crucifixion shows Christ nailed to a cross with nails driven through his hands, the image on the Shroud does not show this. Instead, it clearly shows nail wounds in the wrists, which is exactly how a person would have been nailed to a cross -- because nails driven through the middle of the hand would not support the weight of a human body without tearing through the hand. If someone in the 12th century was intent on making a realistic forgery of Christ's burial shroud, then why would he depict the crucifixion in a manner that did not match the prevailing view of how the crucifixion occurred?
More importantly, the hands shown on the image appear to only have four fingers -- leading to speculation that perhaps the person whose image was on the Shroud had his thumbs cut off before "burial." The reality is that the image is anatomically correct, because driving a nail through the wrist between the two bones of the forearm (the radius and the ulna) damages one of the key nerves in the wrist and produces a reflexive reaction in which the thumb is drawn across the palm in such a way that it is not visible from the back of the hand. I find it extremely unlikely that a forger in the Middle Ages would have known such minute detail about human anatomy that he would have been able to replicate the results of this reflexive action.
I took this;
"It is always amusing to see people get desperate about what they don’t believe .. "
as a slur
No one knows what he looks like
Go around the world and look at the crucifixi ... black, white, yellow and red men on crosses with varying degrees of garments, vestments and stories.
MY comment was to say .. simply .. no one knows what Jesus looks like, but The Shroud is supposed to be Him.
If so, he looks amazingly like Renaiasance artists depict him
Not a slur.
You have posted at least 6 times in a thread about a shroud you don’t believe in. That’s turmoil!
But no problem. Peace to you.
bump
It may seem unspectacular to us here in the U.S. in 2013, but one of the remarkable attributes of the image on the Shroud of Turin is that it is the image of a man who is nearly six feet tall. That probably would have been at least 6-8 inches taller than the average male of the Middle Ages, and taller than average men in ancient times by a wider margin. Some of the Gospel passages make a little more sense in this context if you think of Jesus Christ as a physically imposing figure compared to other men at the time.
I suggest that all who have questions about the Shroud should read one of the many books about the evidence. “The Blood and the Shroud” by Ian Wilson is my favorite because he uses the detective method look at the evidence. He left me with no doubt that is is the real deal.
I saw a show once where some bozo in Italy proved to show how the Shroud was made by taking a sheet and putting it over a bronze bust of a man and sticking it in a pizza oven for 25 minutes at 375 degrees. The result looked like a burned sheet to me but he swore it was a replica of the Shroud.
You are implying with those statements that the Shroud is a 13th century fake. It has already been proven not to be as has been posted to you above and without any specific response on your part to the cited evidence. If you want to have some credibility you would respond to the cited evidence by either debunking it, or coming up with a plausible alternative explanation for it.
The Shroud is either a fake; real and the image of Christ; or real and the image of someone else. Scientific studies of the Shroud have already eliminated, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is fake. So we are left with the other two options. Its either Christ or someone else. The likelyhood of it being someone else is extremely small.
Global warming is a scientific fact and the discussion is closed
If the Shroud was made in such a way as that, it would easily be debunked with minimal analysis. Besides, whoever may have faked the Shroud would have had to have had access to the suderium (separate cloth that was wrapped around the head) to make sure they replicated the blood stains on the head to match the blood stains on the suderium. In addition to this extreme unlikelyhood (The Shroud and the Suderium took two different paths through history) the faker would also have had to have had access to microscopic pollen native and local to Jerusalem and implanted it on the Shroud. Plus have the ability to irradiate the image onto the cloth.
Now that is quite a task, and would require incredible forethought, ingenuity, planning, and perfect execution. I think it is pretty safe to say that Shroud Fake = LOL!
WTH does that mean? LOL! Forget it, I know what it means. You have no response to the evidence and therefore in an act of desperation you somehow compare believing the Shroud is real to believing that Global Warming is real. LOL! But what you are actually doing is exactly what the Global Warmers do by ignoring the evidence, or cherrypicking it.
But there might be new evidence to support the view that the shroud is real.Of course the Shroud isn't imaginary and is real, but there is no conceivable way to show that it served as the burial shroud of Christ. "Journalism" strikes again.
Well said.
Do you have an opinion about the Sudarium of Oviedo?
link to links sent to me today from one of the original STURPA Team members -
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