Baidarka

Leonarde
On the Judas did NOT fall headlong thread Leonarde tried to use the shroud of Turin as evidence for the Historical reality of Jesus. Now I’m not sure about Jesus but I am sure that the shroud is a fake. The Shroud does not display the Alfred E Neuman effect (the display of the front and sides of head in the same image) as it would have to if it was real.
I don’t know what possessed you to bring the shroud of Turin into this discussion and I don’t want to beat a dead horse( yes I do) but the shroud is a proven fake which can’t be used as evidence for anything except as evidence of the extreme gullibility of some Christians.


THE SHROUD OF TURIN
RESEARCH AT McCRONE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

The Shroud of Turin
According to Dr. Walter McCrone and his colleagues at McCrone Associates, the 3+ by 14+ foot cloth depicting Christ's crucified body is an inspired painting produced by a Medieval artist just before its first appearance in recorded history in 1356. The faint sepia image is made up of billions of submicron pigment particles (red ochre and vermilion) in a collagen tempera medium. Dr. McCrone determined this by polarized light microscopy in 1979. This included careful inspection of thousands of linen fibers from 32 different areas (Shroud and sample points), characterization of the only colored image-forming particles by color, refractive indices, polarized light microscopy, size, shape, and microchemical tests for iron, mercury, and body fluids. The paint pigments were dispersed in a collagen tempera (produced in medieval times, perhaps, from parchment). It is chemically distinctly different in composition from blood but readily detected and identified microscopically by microchemical staining reactions. Forensic tests for blood were uniformly negative on fibers from the blood-image tapes.
There is no blood in any image area, only red ochre and vermilion in a collagen tempera medium. The red ochre is present on 20 of both body- and blood-image tapes; the vermilion only on 11 blood-image tapes. Both pigments are absent on the 12 non-image tape fibers.
The Electron Optics Group at McCrone Associates (John Gavrilovic, Anna Teetsov, Mark Andersen, Ralph Hinsch, Howard Humecki, Betty Majewski, and Deborah Piper) in 1980 used electron and x-ray diffraction and found red ochre (iron oxide, hematite) and vermilion (mercuric sulfide); their electron microprobe analyzer found iron, mercury, and sulfur on a dozen of the blood-image area samples. The results fully confirmed Dr. McCrone's results and further proved the image was painted twice-once with red ochre, followed by vermilion to enhance the blood-image areas.
The carbon-dating results from three different internationally known laboratories agreed well with his date: 1355 by microscopy and 1325 by C-14 dating. The suggestion that the 1532 Chambery fire changed the date of the cloth is ludicrous. Samples for C-dating are routinely and completely burned to CO2 as part of a well-tested purification procedure. The suggestions that modern biological contaminants were sufficient to modernize the date are also ridiculous. A weight of 20th century carbon equaling nearly two times the weight of the Shroud carbon itself would be required to change a 1st century date to the 14th century (see Carbon 14 graph). Besides this, the linen cloth samples were very carefully cleaned before analysis at each of the C-dating laboratories.
Experimental details on the tests carried out at McCrone Associates or the McCrone Research Institute are available in five papers published in three different peer-reviewed journal articles: Microscope 1980, 28, 105, 115; 1981, 29, 19; Wiener Berichte uber Naturwissenschaft in der Kunst 1987/1988, 4/5, 50 and Acc. Chem. Res. 1990, 23, 77-83.
Conclusion:
The "Shroud" is a beautiful painting created about 1355 for a new church in need of a pilgrim-attracting relic.
<a href="http://www.mcri.org/Shroud.html" target="_blank">http://www.mcri.org/Shroud.html</a>

Vanderzyden

"...The tests show clearly that the Shroud images are not any kind of artistic production but are the result of physical/chemical changes in the linen fibers themselves. However, they fail to explain how this occurred."

--The Council for the Study of the Shroud of Turin, Duke University

<a href="http://www.duke.edu/~adw2/shroud/findings.htm" target="_blank">http://www.duke.edu/~adw2/shroud/findings.htm</a>


"...[The 1988 Carbon-14 Dating] In 1988, the single sample removed from the Shroud for Carbon-14 dating indicated 13th or 14th century origin, and it was widely reported that the Shroud is a medieval artistic fake. Although subsequent extensive examinations have shown clearly that the Carbon-14 dating results were in serious error for several reasons, most people are still unaware of these findings because of severely restricted coverage by the media. In 1990, the Vatican repudiated the 1988 Carbon-14 dating conclusions, citing them as "strange" and called or further testing. This, too, was met with restricted media coverage."

<a href="http://www.duke.edu/~adw2/shroud/carbon.htm" target="_blank">http://www.duke.edu/~adw2/shroud/carbon.htm</a>

"On closer examination, the Whangers have found that there are images of many objects in addition to those of the body, and that these images show evidence of electron coronal discharge radiation. These additional objects include a crucifixion nail, a Roman spear, a sponge on a stick, a crown of thorns, two scourges, a large hammer, a pair of pliers, and two desecrated Jewish phylacteries or prayer boxes. All are consistent with 1st Century objects, with Roman crucifixions of Jews, with Jewish burial practices, and/or with Biblical accounts of the Crucifixion of Jesus."

"Several findings of the Whangers show the origin of the Shroud images to be from Israel in the spring of AD 30. Evidence for this includes the images of large numbers of flowers banked around the body. The Whangers have identified 28 species, 20 of which grow in Jerusalem and the other 8 within 12 miles of Jerusalem, with a common blooming time of March and April. The pollens of 25 of these have been independently identified by Dr. Max Frei, a Swiss criminalist and botanist, as being present on the Shroud from sticky tape samples that he took in 1973 and 1978. Visible over each eye are detailed images of two different lepton coins (widows mites) of Pontius Pilate, each dated AD 29. Some statues in the Middle East are based on the Shroud face image, the earliest dated AD 31."

<a href="http://www.duke.edu/~adw2/shroud/whanger.htm" target="_blank">http://www.duke.edu/~adw2/shroud/whanger.htm</a>

Baidarka

Vanderzyden

How do you explain the lack of the Alfred E Newman effect? Where are the sides of his face? Where is the top of his head? Why is the blood red (old blood turns black)?

Baidarka

Bumble Bee Tuna

Oh, that conclusion is real scientific. There are statues built in 31 AD that look like the shroud? Let's just assume the statues were based on the image of the shroud (even though, AFAIK, the history of the shroud is not one in which it was known until much much later). Of course, it could just as easily be that the shroud image was based on the statues, or even more likely based on some other rendering of Jesus...But that would be evidence for it being a piece of artwork created by someone after the fact. And we certainly can't have that. Better to warp the truth knowing fully that Christians will accept this kind of shoddy evidence.

Oh and I love this conspiracy theory about the media, despite Christians being the majority...

-B

Answerer

My lecturer is one of those scientists that are responsible for discovering the falsehood of the shroud. Somehow, he doesn't want to talk about it much.

leonarde

Posted by Baikarka: Well, my interlocutor at
that point in the thread stated that there were NO
archaeological artifacts related to Jesus Christ/
of Nazareth extant (ie none that were even purported to be such). Yet there are at least two such items in the world with a significant claim to authenticity: the Sudarium of Oviedo in Spain,
and the Shroud of Turin in Italy. It was not my
intention to start a disputation about whether people HERE should look at it (I found back in March that indifference to/ignorance of the Shroud
at this MB was rife and that it wasn't open to even civil discussion).
Cheers!

Amen-Moses

The Divine Deception is a new book about the shroud, it is a follow on from The Head of God and makes some interesting claims such as that the body and head on the shroud are not from the same individual and that the "neck" in the image is actually a plinth upon which the head is resting.

It is a good read btw and pulls together many bits of the puzzle and for the first time not only explains who made the shroud but why they did it.

btw it won't spoil the plot too much to give away one conclusion, that the shroud is actually a photograph or more accurately a solargraph.

Amen-Moses

leonarde

Thanks for the tip on the book. Found this review/
summary:
The DIVINE DECEPTION, The Church, the Shroud and the Creation of a Holy Fraud
PRICE : £ 18.99
by KEITH LAIDLER
"In this fascinating investigation into the shroud, Keith Laidler uncovers its astonishing hidden secrets, providing persuasive answers to all its greatest mysteries. Dissatisfied with the standard explanations of both believers and sceptics, Laidler looks anew at the Holy Relic and discovers that both sides are wrong. He uncovers information that has long been suppressed and reveals the remarkable nature of what the Turin Shroud really is.

"Laidler's extensive research into the true identity of the Templar 'idol' - the head known as the Baphomet - has allowed him to answer the questions that have baffled experts for centuries, for the key to the whole mystery lies in the face and body shown on the Shroud.

"The Divine Deception is a fascinating story of historical detection. It reveals an extraordinary chain of events and opens a window onto a forgotten and forbidden past. It encompasses the long-forgotten original Christian beliefs, the lost history of the disciples, a crucified 'Arabic Jesus', the story of vanished technologies, and ends with state-of-the-art computer analysis of the Shroud that uncovers details that could not have been revealed until now. Whether you are a believer or a non-believer, you will be astounded by Laidler's conclusions."
Above from: <a href="http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~thought/book9.html" target="_blank">http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~thought/book9.html</a>

penumbra

Another, earlier book on the shroud worth looking at (especially if you can find a cheap, used copy) is "The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection" by Holger Kersten and Elmar R. Gruber.

Take it with a LARGE grain of salt, though, as the authors tend to really stretch to reach the conclusions they obviously already had in mind.