leonarde

Partial post by Koy: I agree that blindappeals to authority can be mistaken but:
1)the forensic pathologists and archaeologist I
cited are persons who have looked in detail
at these matters, seen the Shroud in person, and
examined many particulars via enhanced photography and other, in some cases, highly technical means.
2)the main forensics man had 50 years experience in the field as a medical examiner. The
other had, I believe, 25 years.
3) the archaeologist had many years experience
with carbon dating and other matters.

In sum their authority is based on:
1)high academic credentials.
2)personal involvement over many years in Shroud
research.
3)backgrounds pertinent to the fields of forensic
medicine and archaeology.

Your "milk jug theory" is very creative but you
seem to lack the background (I don't mean the dairy industry)to evaluate how a dying man/corpse
bleeds/doesn't bleed. But perhaps I am blind to
your wisdom.

Thanks again for your participation.
Cheers!

Koyaanisqatsi

No, you already conceded Bucklin's bias, so you're not blind, just programmed.

leonarde

Another very good source on the history of the
blood vs. paint controversy is available here:
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/ford1.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/ford1.pdf</a>

The author is David Ford.

The format is such that I cannot copy and paste
any of the text but it is very detailed (32 total
pages: 19 of text and the rest bibliography and
footnotes). It includes pro- and anti-authenticity
sources.

Cheers!

leonarde

Spin's claims that a certain koine Greek word in
the Gospel of John in and of itself excluded the
Shroud of Turin reminded me of the end of an
eventually multi-sided e-mail discussion of the
Shroud's history particularly as it relates to
1)the coin(s) over the eye(s) controversy and
2)the use of certain Greek, French and Syriac(?)
words to characterize:
1)the Gospel of John funereal cloth.
2)the Mandylion (in Constaninople until 1204).
3)the Shroud itself.
The interlocutors are a certain linguist in Italy
named Lombatti and another person with a good background in classical languages, Marc Guscin:

The full text of the e-mail exchange is at:
<a href="http://www.shroud.com/lombatti.htm" target="_blank">http://www.shroud.com/lombatti.htm</a>

Cheers!

Datheron

Leonarde,

Alright; I make no guarantee to be completely accurate on this account, but I will quote as I see fit. Koy can, of course, reprimand me afterwards for ommissions.


The "agenda" is serious and a priori and it destroys the credibility of both of these men precisely because they have both made such a claim of objectivity contingent!

Think of it as making twenty disclaimers before uttering a claim - this makes your claim suspicious (for why else would you need so many disclaimers?).

In the case with Meacham, however, it is even more detrimental, since he is not a forensic pathologist! He is not just basing his paper on the biased conclusions of others, but also basing his own conclusions on the historical guidelines justification of others, taking us even further from the truth and destroying his credibility.

Speaks for itself - Meacham is not a forensic pathologist, hence his authority is in question.

Do you see how the bias warps and twists the analysis? There was no water and no water stains or even "water like stains" on the shroud, yet we have two of your sources going to great lengths to repeatedly make links to just one gospel account through this non-existent, imaginary, biased evidence.

Koy makes his case in how Meacham deliberately makes his states imply (although he knows this is a false claim) that there is water on the shroud, which is an act of dishonesty.


....and I believe that is the end of the destruction of Meacham's authority, which I have re-read and seems solid. As such, this is only as I'll go in summarizing Koy; you seem to have already made posts in counter to his other points, and after all, it is his war.

A bit of personal commentary: any reliance on authority is problematic, and right so a fallacy. In analysis of the shroud and of the foundings by these supposed "unbiased" forensic experts, Koy has shown that if he is not a scientist himself, he can also apply a fair amount of logic to come to an obvious and powerful conclusion. Just because he doesn't hold the creditials does not mean that his reasoning is flawed.

And that is precisely what I see you objecting to; the fact that Koy hasn't conducted the studies himself, that he separates the useful facts from redirective writing (albeit a bit roughly)...that somehow makes him incapable of producing a good argument on the matter without having an obscene amount of sources for backup. IMO, this is a horrible way to debate - if we're just hurling what "experts say" at each other and don't actually stop and think about what they're saying, then we're just trying to overwhelm each other by numbers, not by any substance. Obviously, since the shroud is a Christian relic, it will have more supporters and thus "official studies" on it by Christians than otherwise - you will therefore always find more sources to quote from (as evident here). That, however, does not mean anything.

leonarde

Datherton,
Thank you for your response. It is very late in
my part of the country and so I will give only
a very short reply as regards one point I totally
ignored up till now: archaeology and what it deals
with.
Archaeologists are scholars concerned with all
sorts of man-made objects: ruins, artifacts, and
even structures which are man-made but of indeterminate purpose. They try to determine: age,
function, origin, method of manufacture and a whole myriad of other questions for the artifacts
in question.
For the layman the image of the archaeologist
is fixed by silly Indiana Jones type
exploits on one hand and Discovery Channel depictions of "digs" on the other. The latter is
NOT off the mark but it gives only a very limited
picture of the full range of activities by archaeologists: they look at far more than ancient
pottery and ruins.
ALL funereal shrouds are artifacts: they are
products of human beings. That means that the CENTRAL professional involved in evaluating the
date, authenticity etc. of a shroud is....an archaeologist. Archaeologists frequently become
mini-experts in all sorts of OTHER specialties.
If they are dealing with a textile which apparently has the image of a dead man on it, then
the archaeologist must become VERY familiar with
the particulars of forensic science: at LEAST well
enough familiar with those particulars to be able
to understand what the forensic pathologist involved is saying.
If you followed this thread carefully, you know that earlier Koy complained that Meacham was spouting off on a subject outside his range of
expertise (ie spouting off on forensic matters).
Quite a bit later Koy condemned Meacham for merely
parroting the interpretations of Bucklin (ie the
forensic specialist on the STURP).
No doubt Koy believes he is being consistent.
Nonetheless an archaeologist's primary task is the
compilation and evaluation(interpretation) of data. He must weigh different skeins of evidence,
sometimes conflicting ones, and try to make interpretations.
Because of limited space and time I haven't gone
through the WHOLE history of the last CENTURY or
so of Shroud research. But if one did, one would
find that Bucklin and Meacham and the others I cited are building on what went on before: the
consensus going back MANY decades (ie before Meacham and Bucklin were involved)was: this is the
shroud of a true crucifixion victim. That fact, in
and of itself, has certain historical implications: crucifixion as a standard method
of execution ended along with the Roman Empire
in the 5th Century. That alone makes it rather
unlikely that the victim died any time after the
5th Century.
Ooops! Very late!
Cheers!

Jack the Bodiless

leonarde:
You seem to have mised my point. I'm not saying that the shroud WAS pristine: I'm saying that calculations of the amount of modern carbon required to produce the proposed "skew" do not take the age of the contaminants into account. To produce the observed result, you need more old contaminants. In fact, the mass of old contaminants would greatly exceed the mass of the shroud. You seem to be suggesting that the Shroud of Turin is a slab of sooty cheese with linen fibers embedded within it. I think that would have been noticed.
Again you seem to have missed my point. I was pointing out that even if the image on the shroud was indeed produced by a dead (even apparently crucified) body, this would not mean that the shroud isn't a forgery. All it takes is a forger who doesn't mind working with a dead body.

MortalWombat

That line pretty much sums things up.

leonarde

Jack,
Hi! And thanks for responding in a courteous
manner: I appreciate it.
No, I wouldn't characterize the Shroud as a slab of sooty cheese: but it has accumulated much
residue since at leastthe 1350s: if you
know anything about the renovation work on the
Sistine Chapel done a few years ago you know that
the mere residue of burnt candles, incense, and the gases emitted by worshippers over the centuries had a profound impact on what
the ceiling of the Chapel looked like. Similar
changes----not of an artistic sort but influencing
via organic contamination----could have
skewed the results of the C-14 test.
All such tests give an average reading
of the item being tested: a 2000 year old artifact
contaminated by LIVING 20th Century microorganisms
is surely going to give a reading somewhere comfortably between the 1st and 20th Centuries(ie in the Middle Ages).
The Garza-Valdes article I posted here (4th post
page 8) goes into the nature and results of such
contamination. There is no doubt that there WAS
such contamination involved in the Shroud; the
ONLY question is whether such contamination could
have thrown the dating off by 1200 years or so.
[note: the Sudarium's apparent connection to the
Shroud, mentioned by me a few times in this thread
, makes the C-14 date range all but impossible: the Sudarium has been in Spain since at least the 8th Century and it is held by tradition to be a burial cloth of Jesus.]
Posted by Jack: An excellent point: I couldn't agree more.
However, as with all things: the devil is in the
details. You are a clever religious artifact forger of the 13th or 14th Century and you want to
create a false Shroud that LOOKS like what a real
burial cloth of Jesus MIGHT look like. What do you do?

1)Scour the Gospels for details about the Crucifixion.(John's Gospel is best for this)

2)Get a cloth (a very old one, dating many centuries before the 13th/14th Century)of the best
size.

3)Get a crucified corpse. (THIS will be very very
difficult in 13th/14th Century Europe: crucifixion
ended as a standard execution method in the 5th
Century with the fall of the Roman Empire).

The above is just for starters. However you will
STILL be in a very bad position:

1)the 3 to 1 herringbone weave cloth of Syrian
manufacture of about the 1st Century would have been difficult to impossible to obtain in 13th/
14th Century Europe(this is the type of cloth the
S of Turin is made of).
Furthermore the poor peasant, and even noble,
Christian worshipers of the time (13-14th Century)
wouldn't have noticed/known about the "correct"
cloth type so accuracy here would be unnecessary
in the 14th Century: this is another of many, many
small but accumulating details which point to authenticity.

2)Even if you WERE to find the corpse of a crucified man that man would hardly have been crucified to specification: there are facets of
the Shroud which bespeak not only an intimate familiarity with the minutest detail of Roman
style execution, but details which are less
common, rare, and even unique:
1)the scourge marks (match up with the ROMAN flagellum(whip).
2)the pectoral/side wound from a lance/spear.
Most crucified corpses of even the Roman era would not have had this wound.
3)the crown of thorns (in the super-rare to unique
category of details): Jesus' crowning was part of
the mockery of him as "the King of the Jews" and
how many real crucifixion victims would have had
the mockery/crowning happen to them?
[For brevity's sake I will skip other tell-tale
details which a Medieval forger wouldn't know about and/or couldn't duplicate]

Given then the above, the only way I could see the possibility of a forgery is if, in the forger's hand, the Shroud was the equivalent of a "snuff film" (ie a man was actually killed with a crown of thorns/scourging/lance-through-the-side type of crucifixion) to produce the needed verisimilitude.

Let's assume the "snuff Shroud" scenario:

1) would the forger think to include in the Shroud pollen from the Near East when the microscope hadn't yet been invented in the 13th/14th Century? What would be his motivation?
To fool 20th Century investigators????How could
he anticipate a science (the study of pollen)
which was centuries away from developing?

2) would the forger have thought to include blood
stains on the shroud which were of the very type
as the Sudarium of Oviedo has (AB negative)? If
so, why? Blood typing would be unknown for several
centuries. Again, why fool 20th Century investigators if you are a 14th Century forger? And how can you do it without knowing about
differing blood types?

Let's turn a blind eye for the moment to the above
details and then ask the question: How was the
body image put on the cloth?
The image is the result of the oxidation and premature decay of the uppermost fibrils of the
Shroud. This is compatible with NO know method of
depiction: ancient, medieval, modern.
No artist, no scientist, no GROUPS of such today
can create a Shroud like that at Turin. Yet somehow a relatively scientifically naive 14th
Century man (they were still practicing alchemy
in the 14th Century)did this, never created any
other image---Shroud or otherwise---using the
same technique. Why?

Cheers!

Koyaanisqatsi

Although I wholeheartedly agree with Mortalwombat, I had edited my earlier post while leonarde had been posting other responses, so I'll post the edited section here in sequence.

So, let's do a little recap of our own.

We have Jesus, an allegedly 33 year old male with at least 34 arterial wounds hanging on a cross. He is evidently still breathing well enough at his last moments to speak, then dies, which means that for however long he was up there (three hours was it), he was not asphyxiating. Supposedly he turned down all offers of drinks, so he wasn't poisoned.

That leaves the only logical conclusion. Ten pints of blood gushing out of 34 arterial wounds all with the help of apparently working lungs and pumping heart for at least three hours.

According to "John," a soldier then pierces his side (not his chest, but merely his side), out of which "miraculous" flows of blood and water are seen, implying, quite logically from a forensics standpoint, that this would be from something like his liver, stomach or gall bladder.

He hangs there dead for another two hours (that we've both granted) while Joseph (unbelievably) goes to petition Pilate.

He is taken down from the cross and, according to you, his head is wrapped for thirty to forty minutes with some sort of "absorption shroud" that is also used to wipe his face. This is the same "napkin" that John refers to as being on the floor of the tomb separate from Jesus' burial linens (note the plural), because Joseph just decided that the tomb would also double quite nicely as a biomedical refuge disposal area.

The body is apparently washed with something else (a sponge would be logical, since they didn't mention taking Jesus down to the river for a quick bath and no hoses had been invented yet) so the body of Jesus is wiped clean of the two hours long dried blood and "watery type" stains, which Zugibe (or whatever his name is) claims caused the bloodless, two-hours-rotting-dead-on-a-wooden-meat-hook-in-the-afternoon-desert-sun corpse to suddenly start oozing more blood and watery type stains, which Joseph didn't wipe away because the body was now "unclean" as a result of the "oozings."

It apparently makes no difference to this (or any other christian forensic pathologist who allegedly "studied" the shroud apparently) to consider the fact that after two hours of hanging pierced and dead from blood loss on a cross, any remaining post mortem blood would have collected entirely in Jesus' ankles and feet and therefore would not be anywhere near the head, chest and wrist wounds in order to "ooze" after being wiped by (presumably) a sponge if not a dry linen "napkin" would it?

No, of course not, because these carefully, deliberately "objective" experts let nothing whatsoever bias their thinking in order to force a reconciliation of shroud to a story of Jesus, right?

Of course right.

[ March 26, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi ]</p>