How to account for the polen samples found on it, corroborating the stories told about where it was.
How about the marlbe sample found at the feet. That specific marble is only found in Palestine.
A relative unknown in this equation is the Sudarium of Oviedo. While the shroud goes around the body the sudarium goes around the head. Several analysis show that the cloth used was very similar, that the marking match on both, but we have historical proof of the sudarium eistence at least down to the 6th century and maybe even farther back.
Radiocarbon worls best in uncontaminated samples and the shroud is anything but that and the area where the sample was taken was particularly contaminated.
The tecnhique used by the alleged artist is a one-time deal. Not really convincing.
Why would a “faker” go to the length of putting polen and marble samples,
The nails on the wrists rather than on the hands would’ve made it a “bad fake”. If I’d wanted to make it in order to sell it I’d’ve gone for the logical thing and gone for the palms.
Finally, my belief is in no way connected to the shroud. If it is false I wouldn’t miss beat. On the other hand if we try to rationalise every miracle as impossible or a metaphor the why care about a deity who can’t pull a miracle or two.
Actually research shows if the nails were through the hands they would have torn through the skin, the wrists would be the logical place to put them to try to prove it to be the “real deal.” But in some cases it would not matter because people would believe either way. And about the contamination its something to point out the the shroud was in a fire and was slightly burnt in some spots which could cause the dating to be off by a little or a lot. Correct me if I’m wrong.
What I mean is that if the shroud is a medieval fake sold as the real thing the forger would’ve painted the nails on the hands, like all the drawings that existed.
Let me turn the question round. If the shroud is not a fake, how do you account for the carbon dating, which you acknowledge was properly done? If it is correct, all those things you mention must not really be issues.
If I radio-carbon-dated my Laptop (which I can’t because it is inorganic, but you get my point) and the test showed that it was made in 1776 you’d know there was something wrong, and you’d go for further analyses.
Radiocarbon is a very good technique but science should try to explain (not explain away) inconsistencies. If that carbon-date is true, then the guy (or gal) who made the shroud would make Einstein look like Homer Simpson, becausae he got so many details right, even those who could not be verified in those days that it’b be like finding a TV in Leonardo’s tomb.
The biggest inconsistency is, and I mentioned, the sudarium of Oviedo, which we know existed befor the 1300s and which is almost certainly a amtch with the Shroud.
Even if the date is correct you can’r tely on lonly one source if you’ve got many.
I haven’t really been able to find much about this, but given the weakness of the “pollen evidence”, you will forgive me if I would like to see more data.
See above, at least concerning the “pollen samples”.
If that’s the only argument remaining, I’d say that’s pretty weak.
Everyone says “Of course, if the Shroud were fake, it still wouldn’t shake my faith”–but a lot of people nevertheless go through all sorts of amazing contortions to defend its authenticity. (Some of them are far more remarkable than even the OP’s claims–“The image on the Shroud is uniquely three-dimensional. Although most scientists believe that the image was made by the body emitting a burst of energy of some kind (which caused the body’s image to be lightly burned onto the Shroud), they have no idea how this could have been done.” :rolleyes: )
There is a saying: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. The claim that a particular artifact is the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth is at least a somewhat out-of-the-ordinary claim. The claim that an object is the miraculous burial cloth of Jesus Christ, whose appearance cannot be accounted for by any known method, and whose formation is probably the result of a supernatural and miraculous event, is clearly an extraordinary claim.
On the other hand, the claim that an object is a 1st century Palestinian artifact is not, on the face of it, necessarily an extraordinary claim. There are certainly plenty of Palestinian artifacts that old, and many things which are much older than that. Only if we can establish the relatively ordinary claim–that the Shroud of Turin dates to the 1st century C.E.–can we consider the further somewhat out-of-the-ordinary and the truly extraordinary claims about the shroud.
To begin with, there’s no record of the shroud’s existence before it pops up in the 14th century. Within a generation of its having surfaced, a bishop of the Church pronounced it a fake, “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it” (Encyclopedia Britannica, “Shroud of Turin”). Although disputed by the true believers, the best evidence is that the “blood” on the shroud is red paint. When it was finally scientifically dated, it proved to date back to–surprise, surprise!–the 14th century.
At this point, we have multiple lines of evidence–historical provenance, the official pronouncements of an investigation conducted soon after the time of the shroud’s first appearance, and modern analysis both of the shroud’s age through radiocarbon dating and of the composition of the “blood” on the shroud–indicating a medieval forgery. The ordinary claim–that this sucker is 2,000 years old–has now been refuted. Anyone claiming otherwise bears an extraordinary burden of proof, and hand-waving about alleged marble dust, or whether or not a medieval forger would have known where to put the wounds from Roman crucifixions, is not sufficient.
Thanks, MEBuckner. I’d read all this stuff, but couldn’t remember details enough to dredge it all back up.
The damn thing is paint - vermilion (sp?) and something else, two pigments available in the 1300s. The time frame is shows up is an era when relics were all the rage. Fake bones, icons, blood vials, etc were rampant. Not to mention the 40 other shrouds. It has no history prior to just showing up conveniently when fakes were abundant.
Note that supporters make a big deal out of the image being three dimensional. Actually, the shroud took on extra glamour only after the advent of photography, when the image was viewed in a reverse negative. The normal image is not nearly as spectacular as the negative. However, people complimenting the depth of the image and how it looks like a three dimensional wrap have no real world experience with trying to wrap a two dimensional cloth around a three dimensional surface and make an imprint. Go ahead, try it. Take a doll, wrap a pillowcase around it, then rub chalk or charcoal or some other substance across the face until you get a good covering, then unwrap the doll and look at the image. You’ll find it stretches around the curves all out of proportion, not looking like a face much at all.
As for deities able to perform miracles, how come the only miracles he seems to perform are making stains on walls and windows, and shapes in potatoes and knots of trees? The deity I would consider worshipping would put far more attention into curing cancer and eliminating AIDS and diabetes and far less attention on making a tortilla vaguely resemble himself. Sorry, that’s getting to GD territory.
The carbon-14 doubters point to the fact that the shroud was in a fire. Fire could have distributed fresh carbon throughout the shroud. I seem to remember seeing a TV special (geez maybe Fox) about a new test that was being performed on a ‘deeper’ cut of the shroud. Anyone hear any followup on this?
In order to corrupt the dating of the shroud so drastically (moving its dated age from the first century AD to the 14th century AD) the fire would have to have incorporate over twice the shroud’s weight in fresh carbon into the shroud. That would be pretty tough. Did anybody notice if the shroud’s weight drastically increased after the fire?
I don’t believe crucifixions were particularly common in 14th century Italy. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, crucifixion was abolished as a method of execution in the Roman Empire by the Emperor Constantine in in 337 CE. There’s also the issue of the red paint masquerading as blood, which would seem to indicate deliberate fakery. Finally, the Shroud of Turin has always been represented (since it first popped up in 14th Italy) as the shroud.
A many years ago I considered myself very well read on the subject of the Shroud, and thought of myself as a true believer in its authenticity. When the carbon-dating results were announced, I simply dismissed them, just as any stubborn person dismissed that which conflicts with his world view. In my present stage of enlightenment, I am prepared to accept that the Shroud is not what I thought it to be. But even proving that it is not the burial cloth of JC does not begin to clear up all of the questions.
My main question is this: what on earth is it? Is it the work of a forger centuries ahead of his time? If so, why did said forger go to so much trouble to create something so rich in authentic detail that no one in his own day and age could possibly appreciate?
It’s undeniable that a booming trade in holy relics was widespread in Europe during the Middle Ages. And a great many of the items being peddled off must have been very obvious forgeries. Yet the gullible still flocked to see them. After all, how many people could tell the difference between a twenty year-old skull filched from a cemetary and a thousand year-old skull from Palestine? I’ve heard statments to the effect that enough fragments of the “True Cross” have been sold to churches, clergymen, pilgrims, tourist, etc., to build x number of churches from the ground up. The point is, forgers didn’t have to work very hard to convince people that the relics they were peddling were authentic.
Now look at the Shroud. It bears crucifixion wounds that are anatomically accurate, even though they don’t match the traditional representation. Nails through the wrists, even though anyone who had ever seen a crucifix “knew” that the nails were supposed to be through the hands. But it doesn’t stop there.
If you examine a closeup negative image of the face on the Shroud, you can clearly make out coins placed over the eyes. Furthermore, these coins are identifiable, as bronze coins minted in Palestine during the administration of Pontius Pilatus. See here.
So, again, my question. If this was the work of a forger, why so much attention to detail?
Clearly? For a start, on the page linked to, it’s unclear whether the image on the right at the bottom is an enhanced version of the image of part of the Shroud on the left next to it or if it’s a coin that intended as a comparison. Is the question mark above the final “>” querying the final step of the “enhancement” or is querying an identification with a coin?
In either case, to my eye these images bear little relation to each other.
Furthermore, if one goes to other pages on the subject, one finds very different patterns being read into the “coins”. Though, somehow, they’re still leptons from the reign of Pontius Pilate.
I doubt it’s the forger who’s done any of the hard work in misleading anyone here.
I hate you! But I’m glad I ran a search before posting my realization that anybody who thinks that cloth looks like what you’d get after wrapping a body is fooling himself.
Art History Wife: “And then there’s the matter of it being the perfect rendering of a Northern Gothic saint.”
If the image was painted it would have been the first anatomicaly correct image ever painted. One way to test the validity of the image is to compare it with the actual human body. Apparenty it meets every test of an accurate image of a crucified body. No artist at the time had the ability to produce a correct image and none was ever painted till hundreds of years later. So the unknown forger was a first in more ways than one.
As mentioned above in posts #8 and #9, it is not anatomically correct and does not meet “every test of an accurate image of a crucified body”, whatever such a test might be.
This keeps getting repeated as if it was a self-evident fact and yet, which ever way you look at it, the issue cannot be that simple.
The ‘nails through the wrist’ argument derives from the work of Pierre Barbet. But Barbet’s work has since been heavily criticised by Frederick Zugibe, usually regarded as the leading pathologist currently in favour of the Shroud’s authenticity. But what is significant about this debate is that neither placed the exit wound in the wrist so much as at the base of the back of the hand. Or rather, what they mean by ‘the wrist’ isn’t quite where you probably think it is.
What this means is that the distance between where Zugibe thinks the nail exited and the centre of the back of the hand is actually not that big. And here’s the important point - the ‘blood’ stain is a smudge so the precise spot where the nail exited is open to debate. While its location is certainly consistent with Zugibe’s theory, it is not at obvious that it cannot also be where a medieval artist might have thought it ought to be. The stain is not quite in the centre of the back of the hand but, then again, it’s not that far from it.
But that is assuming that you can identify the centre of the back of the hand, given that where the hand ends and the arm begins is also open to debate. It could be argued that the hands seem unnaturally elongated…just like those in most fourteenth century paintings.
While the only resurrection going on here is that of old, old threads, I’ll take its reappearance to draw attention to a new development on the C14 front.
Mechanisms for changing the isotopic composition of the Shroud are physically implausible for, amongst other reasons, the argument given above by chorpler. Rather than address this, Shroud enthusiasts have tended to tout the work of a Russian by the name of Dimitri Kouznetsov. He published a series of papers claiming that he could alter the C14 composition of Shroud-like samples by various means, including heat. The enthusiasts have cited him, acclaimedhim, recommended his papers and even based a book on his work. In fairness, Ian Wilson has expresseddisquiet about his character in the past.
The new development, reported in this article by Massimo Polidoro in the most recent edition of Skeptical Inquirer, is that everything Kouznetsov reported in the papers has been shown to be completely ficticious. The origin - and hence existence - of the samples, the people who supposedly supplied them, the institutions they were said to work for, several of Kouznetsov’s collaborators, some of the papers cited, even the equipment used. Everything.
But I’m glad I ran a search before posting my realization that anybody who thinks that cloth looks like what you’d get after wrapping a body is fooling himself.