Coincidentally, the important development this week has been Charles Freeman’s History Today article, which places the original form of the Shroud image in the context of iconography newly popular in, ahem, the 14th century.
Freeman is also arguing that the claims made in Lirey that it was the actual shroud of Christ, leading to the official investigation and determination that it wasn’t, should be seen as an exception. It shouldn’t even necessarily be seen as having been created as a fake, but as something far more akin to a regular religious painting. In this instance, a painting on cloth that would come to be held up to - and, importantly, clearly visible to - large crowds as part of a specific Easter week ritual. The crowd would be appropriately reflective, but his suggestion is that not even the dumbest medieval peasant in the throng would mistake this for the actual shroud of Christ. They could see that it was a painting on a big bit of cloth.
On this argument, the Turin Shroud may even only happen to be the only one to have survived out of many such cloths, albeit in a particularly wrecked, faded and diminished form.
There is an even bigger problem. The Gospels were written many years after the events, by people who were not present. We can tell from things like the contradictory accounts of the empty tomb that they didn’t get it right at best. So a real shroud is unlikely to be an exact match with the story. A fake shroud on the other hand would be an exact match, since the maker would certainly know the story and not expect anyone to believe in the shroud unless there was a match. (Not much historical skepticism back then.) So, the shroud matching the Bible exactly is evidence against it, not for it.
The crown of thorns is a perfect symbol for what Jesus was supposed to represent, the suffering king. Odd that the Romans would supply such a perfect metaphor.
I think Jesus existed because I don’t see a lot of evidence that people back then could construct fictional characters out of whole cloth.
However, it is interesting that the population with direct exposure to the supposedly miraculous events were not interested in Christianity in the slightest. You’d think more would have been given the turmoil and evidence that someone rose from the dead. Christianity spread among those far from the scene who could be convinced that the events actually happened.
Sorry, Voyager, but by that argument every character in mythology and legends should be considered actual history. Oh, well of course you “know” that mere humans could not create stories and details about people that never really existed, except that they did it countless thousands of times in other religions.
There are many. many more people who were raised in a culture demanding that Jesus was unquestionably real than there are people who actually take the time to read anything more than modern children’s stories about Odin, Dionysus, Orpheus, Ishtar, Osiris, Mithra and other death and rebirth figures. All of those, and many more, were thought to be real and thought to have returned from the dead. But people today fight all over themselves twisting a couple of ridiculous fragments of text into “proof” that Jesus existed while ignoring all the other equally valid and allegedly true stories of religions they don’t follow and don’t know much about.
The people ignorant about these other stories are also woefully ignorant of just how much information exists about what it takes to prove historicity. Anyone claiming, for example, that there’s more evidence for Jesus than Alexander the Great is just completely lacking in real information. That’s something someone whose exposure to history is limited to the five versus of the Bible he actually reads and nothing else would say. We know Alexander the Great existed because there are thousands of pieces of evidence – solid documents, historical artifacts, and countless accounts – showing it. Jesus has nothing like that, not even close. Claiming otherwise shows only bumper sticker slogan level knowledge of the real world. Believing Jesus was a real person is just blind faith, not history.
…Sensationalist? Three independent labs tested three independent samples and all came out with dates nowhere near what would be needed for this to even fit the same century as Jesus.
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of this. So we may have some reason to believe the radiocarbon dating may have been flawed. So let’s find a section of the cloth that isn’t contaminated by this later repair, and date that. What you again didn’t really offer me is an answer to my main question: what reason do we have to believe that this shroud is 2000 years old? At best, Rogers has shown that the date we have is not representative. So… how old is the shroud, and who was wearing it? We don’t have an answer to that.
Yeah, funny story about that - later results reject Rogers’ analysis.
Again, I have yet to see any reasonable evidence that shows that this cloth is as old as it is claimed to be and it doesn’t seem to fit in the time we’ve found it according to the only scientific tests we’ve found. The discussion over whether or not it’s the burial cloth of Christ should be saved until we have good reason to believe that it’s actually as old as it is claimed to be.
…Which was also dated at centuries after the death of Christ.
Given that you haven’t offered me any links, I ended up looking all of these up… They are phenomenally weak sauce. The mandylion is virtually a legend with little backing evidence, and given the descriptions I’ve read, I find it hard to believe that the shroud would even come close to what they’re talking about. Christ pantocrator is almost hilarious. Oh, you’ve found a medieval painting of Christ (which makes no sense given the ethnic breakdown of 1st-century Jerusalem - Jesus would not have been caucasian) which seems to fit almost perfectly to the shroud. Cute. How many distinct, unique paintings of Jesus were there? Even throwing out ahead of time the possibility that forgers crafting the shroud used that picture as a reference, what’s the likelihood of finding a painting that fits to the shroud? I’d argue really, really high.
The hungarian manuscript I have nothing to say about. Again, highly circumstantial, potentially a coincidence. Hardly “hard evidence”. I mean, come on, let’s scale this back for a moment. We’re talking about a piece of cloth which is allegedly the burial shroud of a figure whose very existence has been called into question on numerous occasions, and for whom the strongest corroborating evidence is a book that claims he was able to do magic. You need to do better than that.
Fair enough, my error. I’m not an expert on the subject nor have I spent a lot of time looking into it. It just seems somewhat bizarre to me. What reason do we have to believe that this was the burial shroud of Christ? Given what you’ve told me, it’s a handful of extremely circumstantial accounts that provide virtually no hard evidence one way or the other (now where have I heard that before…). Meanwhile, the hardest evidence we have points in the other direction, and ever since that came out, people have been making weak justifications and trying to lead the evidence to their favored conclusion. I’m sorry, it’s just not impressive. If you were presented with the evidence surrounding the shroud and didn’t have to do with Jesus, would you even give it a second thought? I doubt it.
…what!!!
What in the holy…
I mean just what?
Well maybe I should clarify . What do you mean by “back then”? Maybe that’ll help me.
That’s one of the worst puns I’ve ever heard. Shame on you. Took me a while, too. 
I still don’t get it.
“whole cloth” == shroud of evidence == shroud of turin.
I’d just like to point out that even if the shroud is accurately dated to the time of Jesus, that doesn’t mean that the image on the shroud is also from that time.
Many antique forgeries are made using old materials. The image could have been made at a later time using ancient fabric so it would appear more authentic.
(I don’t believe this is what was done, for other reasons, many of which have been already stated I’m just saying. Dating the shroud really proves nothing by itself without other information so I’m very skeptical of those who stop there)
If being verified as having a veridical experience 2.5 minutes after the deep brain surge where he heard 2 bleeps from machine that bleeped every 3 minutes to confirm that this was happening after his heart failed is a failure then maybe your in denial my friend , but if you want to ignore that ,mthats yoir FREE will choice to so it 
Hey if you want to believe that that’s ur choice . If you also want to deny all of the other evidences for the image in history that’s fine too, if you want to deny the sudarium connection with it that pushes it way back in history you can so that also.
There is more then sufficient evidence that pushes the shroud back in history and with the mandylion the image back to the time if Christ.
You can always choose to ignore these evidences and the evidence that even 21st century science can’t replicate it but ask urself if you are being reasonable in doing so or hyper biased .
Budget ray Rogers research is in line with the historical evidence. As far as c14’s dating , I suggest you read some of professor Meacham’s articles published in archeological journals which talks about the importance of c14 dating as just one if many tools to help an archeologist date a relic . It’s not THE tool!to so it but still an important tool.
You call the Hungarian pray codex a coincidence ?
Anyone who studied it wouldn’t find that rational to say .
Remember that it has the reverse L poker holes that are found on the shroud . To call this coincidence is beyond amazing .
The hardest evidence ? Are u saying that the perfect blood stain congruence between it and the sudarium isnt good evidence ? I also find this amazing my friend . What are chances that one cloth would have 125 congruent matching blood stain points with another ?
What part of ""when researching the shroud , try doing it from a completely neutral,standpoint “” did you not get ?
I know its tough because it can be a world view changer for atheists , but try this .
Forget about what atheists and theists would say .
Research only what agnostic experts have said .
People like Thomas de Wesselow the Cambridge educated art historian who believes in the shrouds authenticity (but believes that Jesus’s body somehow produced the image naturally ), and Rogers and others agnostics .
Wesselow who is a true art historian correctly states that this image confirms to no known art style from any time in history.
Or you can get mark Antonacci’s book the resurrection of the shroud.
Antonacci was on a mission to prove to his Christian girlfriend that Christianity was a fairy tale . His big mistake was choosing the shroud to debunk first.
25 years later nit only could be not debunk it but he himself was convinced if it and later converted from agnostic to Christian.
I think using the agnostic approach will wipe away the emotions associates with this relic for honest , I
Unbiased atheists .
Throw the emotions aside and do some really hard core research
Take care folks and have a great weekend 
It’s not about emotion (unless you desperately need this Shroud as evidence that Jesus was the Son of God.)
It would be interesting if the Shroud was genuine - and scientists base their conclusion that it’s not purely on the evidence.
You should consider this:
- every single person on the planet believes completely in gravity
- if Jesus was the Son of God, it should be trivial for Him to achieve the same result
Rogers’ research is widely contested, in particular among experts on the shroud. And you’re right - carbon dating isn’t the end-all, be-all. But here’s the thing - when carbon dating tells us “this comes from time X” and we can find no strong reason to show why those results would be flawed, it’s certainly not a good idea to place the date a full thousand years off from those results.
I don’t know what to think about the codex. What do we even know about it? We have an approximate date (I don’t know how they came to that conclusion) and a picture which vaguely resembles the shroud. I’m not sure what conclusions can reasonably be drawn from this. But more to the point, it’s exceedingly weak sauce, and I’ll get to this in a moment.
This is the same Sudarium that was dated to something like 700 years after Christ’s supposed death, right? At that point I sort of stopped caring. I suppose it’s completely impossible that whoever forged the shroud knew of the Sudarium?
The part where this claim is supposedly ordinary.
This is something you seem to miss. If this were an ordinary historical artifact, we might have a case to be made. But this artifact is being held up as evidence that an extremely contested historical figure was real. There is a massive motivation to create a fake, there’s all sorts of confounding variables, and the issue of the burden of proof looms large. You need to offer some very convincing evidence that this is actually the case. But what do we see? We carbon-date the thing to the 13th century AD. The cloth used is completely incongruous to anything we’ve found in Jerusalem at that time. There’s no mention of the shroud before the 13th century. The actual relic contradicts the bible! Yeah, that’s the funniest thing. If this is Jesus’s burial cloth, then the Bible has got some artistic liberties to answer for.
So what evidence do we have that implies that this is Jesus’s burial cloth? Circumstantial evidence from one relic dated around the same time period. A painting of Christ’s burial, made centuries after the fact by unknown authors. I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this could possibly convince anyone.
Yes, it was a failure.
For the NDE phenomenon, we have lots of stories, but nothing that I’ve ever seen that couldn’t be explained by the malfunctioning of a dying brain - nothing supernatural/paranormal. So Parnia set out to prove the supernaturalness of NDEs by finding a person who was viewing the room from above, by placing a card high in the room that couldn’t be seen unless a person really was up there looking down.
After years of waiting, what did he find? Nothing.
So he gave us another crappy anecdote from someone who had an NDE.
I do call that a failure.
Quick question- Assuming that the shroud really is the burial cloth of Jesus, so what?
I believe Buddha existed. If I recall correctly, he was a prince and so there are records of his life. But, I am not Buddhist.
I believe Mohammed (PBUH) existed. But I’m no Muslim.
I believe Joseph Smith existed. But I’m no Mormon.
IF the burial cloth were to prove that Jesus existed, how does that prove that he was the One Begotten Son? How would it prove he wasn’t just some guy?
Having read Rogers paper, there are several major issues with it. Not only is his sample 3rd hand (so we can’t be sure where it came from), but the vanillin tests he uses are for given temperatures and durations. The shroud was in a fire in 1532, yet Rogers gives us the temperature as ‘cool’, nor does he tell us how long the shroud was in the hot environment. How cool is ‘cool’? 20 C? 90 C? 120 C?
In 1503, it was reported that “Lalaing adds that the Shroud’s authenticity has been confirmed by its having been tried by fire, boiled in oil, laundered many times ‘but it was not possible to efface or remove the imprint and image’”. Rogers omits these from his data. So in essence, we have several unknown temperatures for unknown durations, all of which would have aged Rogers results, all omitted from his paper.
The experiment itself is also not accurate, and is subjective. So the key evidence for a medieval patch is not very good science at all.
We also have a fellow shroud advocate, John P. Jackson, Ph.D., of the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado, who discounts ‘that the linen sample used in the radiocarbon dating actually came from a medieval “re-weave”. While this hypothesis has been argued on the basis of indirect chemistry, it can be discounted on the basis of evident bandings in the 1978 radiographs and transmitted light images of STURP. These data photographs show clearly that the banding structures (which are in the Shroud) propagate in an uninterrupted fashion through the region that would, ten years later, be where the sample was taken for radiocarbon dating’.
The Hungarian Pray codex shows what appears to be a shroud with crosses on 1 side, and 4 step pyramids on the other. There is also no image of Jesus on it. The text of the codex also does not mention a miraculous image of Jesus.
We can therefore safely dismiss the Hungarian Pray codex as evidence for the shroud.
There was no need to do a microchemical analysis for a C14 test, this is not a required protocol, especially as the sample was observed to come from the shroud material, and not a patch. You can even go here, select a Durante 2002 image, and zoom in on the area where the patch was removed, you can clearly see the herring bone weave at the boundary.
The Radiocarbon dating team could not do an initial blind test because “the distinctive three-to-one herringbone twill weave of the shroud could not be matched in the controls, however, it was possible for a laboratory to identify the shroud sample”.
To argue that an invisible patch was made in an out of place section of the cloth, while more important damage nearer the face were either repaired with visible patches or left unpatched; and by a strange quirk of fate the ‘invisible’ repair was in exactly the same place the RC sample came from, even though no patch shows up in UV light prior to the sample being taken is just making excuses up.