Godless Wonder

They claimed the blood on the shroud was type AB (If I remember right) and said only 3% of people have that blood type. They also said this matched the blood type found on a hanky they had stowed away in for supposedly 2000 years .... somethin' like that. They had a special word for the hanky that I forget right now, but supposedly had blood from Christ's nose on it (not kidding.)

My question... what's needed to tell the type of blood? If they can tell the type of blood from some 2000 year old blood stains (can they?) does that mean they've got DNA?

I'm skeptical that they can tell the blood type. Doesn't that mean they have to look for certain antibodies? Wouldn't all the antibodies break down in a period of 1000 years? Especially as they think the shroud was stored in a silver chest that was involved in a fire so hot that it was melting and dripping hot silver onto parts of the shroud....?

Clete

Apparently (at least according to this show), the testing done on the shroud back in the 70s pretty much proved that there was no iron-based paint present. There was a guy on the show though who had a theory that the shroud was created using a primitive silver emulsion (sp?) and a lens. This would make the shroud something of a precursor to photography.

Clete

What did he find?

gilly54

I caught the last half hour.

There was no definite conclusion in order to placate the Chri$tian PB$ donor$.

IMO, the "radiation guy" was an embarassment to science. Technecium-99m is a radioactive colloid commonly used in bone scans to detect metastatic bone lesions. It is common for the colloid to collect in the joints, especially in patients who have arthritis. There is no way you can see teeth and 'folded under thumbs' clearly, as this guy was asserting. Secondly, to x-rays, blood is the same density as water and would not show up so brilliantly as the "blood" tracks on the x-rays of the shroud, suggesting a material more dense (higher Z) than water was used to paint the 'blood'. Vermilion (mercuric sulfide) has the higher atomic number that would absorb or block the x-rays from reaching the x-ray film, resulting in bright white "blood" areas.

As a long time supporter of PBS, I was surprised they showed a program of this low calibre.

Postcard73

There are some links to other sites about the Shroud of Turin in the SecWeb Library here.

Godless Wonder

So, if the blood was fake, the claims that the bloodstains had been tested and was blood type AB were completely fabricated? They sink that low?

gilly54

Quote:

So, if the blood was fake, the claims that the bloodstains had been tested and was blood type AB were completely fabricated? They sink that low?

Whoever went to all the trouble of producing this image could very well have added some real blood to the cloth. I read a history book about the reign of Henry VIII, where priests were putting duck blood into reliqueries, saying it was the blood of Christ.

As soon as that "radiation guy" proposed his hypothesis that the image was caused by some sort of radiation that occurred during the resurrection, however, I put this program in the schlock/tabloid category. In order to see blood /arteries, say during an angiogram or cardiac catheterization, a contrast medium more dense than water is injected into the arteries. If that guy was saying the image on the shroud was produced by some sort x-ray, there is no way those "blood" stains could be blood. They imaged as dense as, or more dense than bone.

But then, maybe rather than x-rays, the image was produced by "God-rays", outside the EM spectrum...

Principia

Yeah, the radiation hypothesis was a joke. For one thing, I thought he was trying to claim that the image developed as the shroud collapsed over the "dematerializing" corpse, presumably in some sort of beam-me-up-to-heaven process. And that this dematerialization revealed details of inner anatomy on the Shroud. . .

http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/accett2.pdf

The only thing that I agreed with about the show was the final conclusion of Schwarz: redo the freaking C dating. Redo it to their hearts' content. I don't understand why Xians prefer ignorance over hard facts.

spamandham

There is no need to redo a destructive test on a treasured historical artifact. It was done properly the first time, multiple times by independent labs, with conclusive results. The cloth was cleaned meticulously prior to the dating. The business about contaminants is a bogus red herring, as 2/3 of the sample would have had to have been contaminant, with only 1/3 being cloth in order to yield a 1350 date for a first century artifact. It's a rediculous grasp at straws. People making such an outlandish claim would not be satisfied even if thousands of tests were made and the entire artifact completely destroyed in the process. The results show a date of 1350, which is consistent with other historical records surrounding the shroud. The question has been sufficiently answered.

nermal

Is it just me, or does the face on the shroud look very European? Startling resemblence to all the paintings done of Jesus in Europe. Is it a miracle?

Ed