leonarde

Partial post:No. I don't claim to be able to evaluate articles sent into Applied Optics. But Applied Optics has its own standards: that why it's called peer-reviewed ! Hello, Principia! Anyone Home??!?!? As to links and "spamming" and cutting and pasting, so far the anti-authencity side is WAAAY ahead on this thread.

Cheers!

mfaber

"Shroudies" like Dr. L. A. Garza-Valdes started this nonsense with his book The DNA of God? Newly Discovered Secrets. They have claimed NOT to have just found mitochondrial DNA (mt-DNA), but to have found nuclear DNA on the Shroud (the claim of finding that the DNA was male, only possible from nuclear DNA).

I have heard all sorts of preposterous talk about someone trying to "clone" Jesus from this "DNA". The problem here is that none of the researchers will let anyone DNA type them and compare it to their "DNA" that they claim is from the Shroud. This sort of testing would need to be done to simply rule out contamination, for no other reason that many people have handled the Shroud. How could one really "know" that ANY DNA found on the Shroud actually belonged to Jesus in the first place?

Where Shanks and Witherington plan to get mt-DNA that is beyond a doubt that from Jesus from material that is not only 600 years old, BUT has also gone through a fire is beyond me.

They face an additional problem with defining "brother". Not all Christians believe James to be a genetic relative of Jesus.

With respect to the "James, the brother of Jesus, the Christ" ...

James (the one mentioned by Paul as the bishop of Jerusalem) NEVER acknowledged Jesus as his "brother". Jesus NEVER acknowledged James as his "brother". The Gospel of Thomas, one of the gospels rejected by the framers of the Bible, says that Jesus DID NOT recognise James as his brother. One can see why they didn't consided the GofT to be "inspired by God"!

The question is who was James? This is not a cut and dried issue among Christians. Was he a half-brother of Jesus? A cousin?, A "brother in spirit"? Jesus never claimed James as his "brother" nor did James ever claim to be Jesus's brother. So who the hell was "James", Christians don't agree!!!

Which James?

There is a dirty little secret that Christians doesn't bother to tell you is that there are various theories about James and the brothers of Jesus, who they were , who their mother was , who their father was , what relation might they have had to the Twelve, and what sense one can make of the multiple persons named "James" in the N.T. In other words, some Christians have hinged their"proof" on a person whose identity and parentage are much disputed!!!! You might say that the Bible's cup"runneth over with Jameses"(60 of them!)

What Christians have neglected to tell us is that there are many different theories exist pertaining to the brother of Jesus. Let's ignore the minor theories and go for the two major theories that dominate the Christian culture........

The Eastern Theory vs The Western Theory

The eastern view maintains that Mary was a virgin not only at the time of the birth of Jesus, but remained so throughout her entire life. The bottom-line is that Joseph had the 4 alleged brothers with another woman prior to Mary and brought them to the marriage.

The western view is stricter because it claims that BOTH Mary and Joseph remained virgins throughout their entire lives. "These 'brothers' are merely cousins that seem to come onto the scene."

Naming the Jameses
Let's keep it simple and concentrate on just 4 of these "Jameses" and use their "common" names to keep them straight. If you explore the literature you will come across the appellations for James:

• 1) James the Great
• 2) James the Lesser (Little)
• 3) Jame the Just
• 4) James, son of Alphaeus

Now the plethora of James is just one problem (I've only listed a minimum ) The second one is that the Christians (based on the virginity of Mary issue, Joseph's prior marriage?) can't agree on "who" the "Jameses" are!!! Now if you really want to know just how contentious the "James' situation is go here and read more scenarios of how Jesus came by a half-brother (a true blood-brother because Mary is hypothesized to have been married to or inpregnated out of wedlock by a number of different candidates for the father of "James"):

Essays on James the Brother of Jesus

more James info

The real truth is that James, the alleged brother of Jesus is a shadowy figure of unknown and highly disputed parentage==>is he a cousin, a step-brother, a true half-brother? "spiritual" brother? none of the above?. How this lot plans to prove that James was the "brother" of JC is beyond me, especially in light of the FACT that Christians can't agree on the pedigree of James to start with. :banghead:

leonarde

Partial post:What "studies" are you talking about that Heller "bought"????
He never heard of the Shroud of Turin in the mid-1970s when he was invited to become a member of STURP: he had read no studies that he could "buy". He and his colleagues eventually wrote up their findings in journals. And I presume they believed what they said that they had found. So in that sense they "bought" it. But in that sense only. You certainly have a talent for misstating everything and/or getting the chronology all balled up.

Cheers!

keyser_soze

Why are you so focused on blood on the shroud?

I should think the mountain of evidence against the shroud strictly from the bible's perspective, plus the OBVIOUS fact that it's a european(and a tall one at that) would give you some hesitation. That and the fact that the poster was right, blood doesn't age like that...I'm curious as to why you are so invested in a topic that has been refuted so effectively, that the church won't even take a position on it, and the majority of christians have begged off so as to avoid being connected with it? Exactly what is your belief, and why do you wish to base proof of origin with something as mundane as the elementary signals of blood on the shroud(you must admit, they did not do more than rudimentary tests when any lab would have gone further). Hell, I'll give you blood on the shroud if it'll let you get to your point. Where is the evidence that this is the shroud of yeshua bin yosef? I mean, the evidence provided easily refutes your cut and paste, and even the application of logic shows that in all likelihood that this was a forgery, which the church knew long before anyone else. So what's your angle?

leonarde

Another howler from page 1:No. It was Zacchaeus who was "little of stature". So much for your 'brilliant career as a Biblical scholar'.

Cheers!

leonarde

Partial post:1) The blood: probably a medieval forger wouldn't bother using real blood: there were no tests for blood (ie scientific ones) in the 14th Century. Or the 15th Century. Or the 16th Century.
Or the 17th Century. Or the 18th Century. A 14th Century forger would probably opt for a red dye that looked like blood. So it is of enormous probative value.

2) I've seen on TV and in documentaries literally hundreds perhaps thousands (in crowd scenes) of Israeli Jews: some looked "European", some didn't. It's a non-starter: we just don't know what Jesus looked like. So no comparison is possible.

3) Height. It's a myth that over the centuries people have been getting taller and taller; all things being equal (there's a genetic component to height as well) people with good nutrition grow taller. We don't know enough about nutrition in 1st Century Gallilee/Judea to say "this individual is too tall". As in all societies there are enormous differences in height: Chinese are not normally considered to be terribly tall but there's a pro basketball player from China (Yao) well over 7 foot tall. Good player too: evidently not a "pituitary case".

Cheers!

mfaber

"Probably" isn't evidence of ANYTHING except that you have no PROOF that the Mandylion relic is the Shroud.

When will you learn that "probablies", "maybes", "perhaps" ("perhaps the full body was not always exhibited out of a sense of respect/modesty") are NOT evidence of anything but SPECULATION.

leonarde

You yourself seem to revel in people's speculation: by bringing in the idea of comparing (unestablished) DNA evidence from the Ossuary of James and comparing it to DNA from the Shroud of Turin.

The question is: what sort of 'evidence' would establish that the Mandylion was the S of Turin??? If someone found an evidently very old document from Constantinople/Istanbul which said in effect 'the Mandylion is the Shroud of Turin' , it would be evidence of a ........forgery and a pretty dumb one at that. The people of 1204 Constantinople had no way of knowing where the Mandylion would be taken to, what it would be called in later centuries. But we know------it's speculation but speculation built on knowledge of religious tendencies and human psychology-----that a Christian taking a purportedly genuine likeness of Christ would.....preserve it as best he could. And if he were returning home to France......that's where the Shroud would end up.

Cheers!

ChrisW

i say we just let garza get a sample (of his choosing from the shroud) and under strict supervision let him and his team clean it with his method, then send it off to be tested by a lab. if results come back with a medieval date, then it's a fraud, bottom line. if it comes back with a 1st century date, then much more investigating would need to be done on the shroud.

Principia

<knocks on leonard(e)'s head> Hello??? Anything inside?!

leonard(e) like so many of his fellow science-illiterate friends thinks that peer-review is a one-time shot, done by those before an article is published in a journal. This is far from the truth.

Peer-review continues to be done WAAAY after publication, and the state of scientific knowledge is judged on its merits according to the latest information (not when the most amount of articles was published). (But leonard(e)'s faith in the scientific literature is duly noted -- it will make good props to use against in the Intelligent Design debates he's engaged in).

So as the quote I cited reviewed (and by more of "a peer" than Adler and Heller were) -- Adler and Heller did not conduct sound scientific experiments. This is why the blood "evidence" is not engaging. This is why focus naturally shifts to the C14 evidence. This is why leonard(e) continues to evade the issue.

So keyser_soze was right to note what leonard(e)'s angle is? He's on an atheist site, spamming people with quotes from another site, and offering no attempts to evaluate the evidence. Well, I'll tell you what leonard(e)'s angle is. It is so that he can go back to his friends and report on how close-minded atheists are, about how young we all are, and inexperienced in the ways of knowledge and the Truth.

If you want examples, just PM me.

<turns off the lights>