I had forgotten that while radiocarbon dating in 1988 from three separate labs showed that the Shroud of Turin likely dated to between 1260 and 1390 A.D., the results were criticized by other workers because the bit used for dating may have been contaminated by bacteria, candle smoke, or a fire that damaged the Shroud. It’s even been suggested that the labs fed each other secret information, so that the dates weren’t independent, or that the piece of the shroud sampled was from a later repair.
I haven’t followed the debates about whether the weave of the shroud was not characteristic of first-century cloth, and wasn’t developed till later, but it does make one skeptical. And that’s on top of the way the image appears, which isn’t what one expects from a shroud wrapped around a body, and of the distorted proportions of the body.
But all this can be settled. Just take a piece of the cloth from an area that all experts agree is original (perhaps the Vatican won’t allow it, though), and subject it to completely independent testing in different labs, with strict quality control. If the Shroud dates from anything after the first century, it’s a fake.
. . .or so I thought. It turns out that there’s a loophole. As The Vatican Insider states (their emphasis):
This seems to be the core of the so-called “mystery of the Shroud”: regardless of the age the Shroud, whether it is medieval (1260 – 1390) as shown by the controversial dating by radiocarbon, or older as indicated by other investigations, and regardless of the actual importance of controversial historical documents on the existence of the Shroud in the years preceding 1260, the most important question, the “question of questions” remains the same: how did that body image appear on the Shroud?”.
In other words, even if the date of the cloth is wildly off, it still shows the genuine, miraculously imprinted image of Jesus, which appeared on the shroud as it regularly does on toast, pancakes, and tortillas.
And dogs’s hindquarters! Jesus likes showing up there, too.
Is there no scam too transparent for the Christians to fall for? I mean, y’all do know that millions upon millions of dollars have changed hands over the Shroud alone, right?
Cheers,
b&
But they hate doing it, because it’s the love of money that’s a sin.
…and I seem to hate clicking that bloody checkbox….
<sigh />
b&
An interesting paper came out in 1994 that demonstates how the image was done and that the methods were available in the middle ages. Image Formation and the Shroud of Turin by Emily A. Craig and Randall R. Bresee
Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, Volume 34, Number 1, 1994.
+1
Never mind that, according to at least one of the gospels, there should have been two cloths, one for the body and one for the head or face. Also, never mind that the Vatican investigator (the local Bishop IIRC) looked into it, and we apparently even have his report – that they had the forger in custody and he admitted to making it. Never mind that someone (well, several if memory serves – Joe Nickell among them, I think) have duplicated the paint and the process.
Nah, must have been Jeebus!
This is another cloth floating around somewhere.
The same way the Blessed Mother appears on office building windows! Magic!
Is that the one in St Petersburg? Because if so, I’ve seen it IRL, and it looks like a big dong…
Mmm, pancakes! Breakfast and Communion at the same time.
Fuck’s sake, it’s a fucking drawing, and not a very good one at that. The only marvel here is that people have spent centuries actually debating this ridiculous thing.
so, now it doesn’t matter if it’s the burial shroud, it’s just okay if the image is there like a toasted cheese sandwich? Love how Christians will do anything to “prove” their religion, including ignore it.
Emily Craig’s paper, which she presented to the Association of Medical Illustrators years ago was totally believable. She spoke of a technique all medical illustrators know called carbon dust in which fine layers of carbon dust or dry pigment are laid down on a surface with a brush. The shroud images could have easily been done with this technique without much difficulty. The figure on the shroud portrays a frontal image, not a distorted wrap around image which should be the case. The frontal image of the face should gradually wrap around into the lateral image on both sides. Ears would be seen from a later view not a frontal view as the shroud shows. Do your own experiment with a small figurine or manikin head.
Joe Nickell, in several books including “Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings” (Prometheus Books, 1999), has thoroughly debunked the religious claims for its authenticity. At the time it first appeared in the mid-14th century, the Bishop of the region conducted a full investigation and determined it to be a painting. The evidence included the testimony of the painter! The Pope then issued a bull that it could be displayed only as a “representation”, not as an actual relic. This did not stop the local church and noble families from profiting from its display as a relic for the next seven centuries, right up to the present.
The techniques used for the Carbon-14 dating have been shown to perfectly reliable. The nature of the image is totally different than what would be predicted if the shroud had ever enclosed a real body. There is no provenance prior to 1355. In short, a full investigation has already been done and has shown that it is a medieval effort to forge a relic for profit.
+1
This is pretty much what I was going to say. I’ve seen plenty of possible ways it could have been done using the mthods of the time. It’s a very good example of a fake relic.
I should have added in my last comment that the image on the shroud is a terrible illustration with distorted anatomical proportions. The average hight of people living in that area at that time, was about 5’3″, yet the image on the shroud was over six feet. There is no mention in the bible that Jesus was of large stature. Also, is it not strange that only religious folk believe the shroud is authentic?
Were I christian, I would vehemently argue against the shroud not (merely) on evidentiary grounds, but on theological grounds too.
If God is perfectly happy leaving direct evidence of himself around, that whole free will excuse for not intervening to save little children kinda disappears. He’ll miracle a cloth, but not a cancer baby? Its not exactly a ringing endorsement of love and caring.
+1
Point of order:
We should stop calling it a ‘shroud’.
A shroud is a piece of cloth defined by its use, intended or actual, as a winding or burial sheet.
In the case of the Turin Sheet, its use in the context of a burial is not factually proved. Therefore, not a shoud.
As to the intended use of the Turin Sheet, it’s everybody’s guess.
No need to guess. It’s serving its intended purposes excellently: a half a millennium later, it’s still raking in the dough!
Cheers,
b&
No, Ben, I mean the use of the sheet, literally: the piece of cloth.
There is in archaeology a very useful and well-established distinction between functional artefacts with clearly defined purposes, and contingent use of artefacts.
The sheet may, for all we know, have indeed been woven for use as a shroud at some time in the Middle Ages. That would have been its intentional function. Or it may have been just a large piece of cloth, and its subsequent use only a contingency independent of its production. Based on available data, we can’t tell either way yet.
However, once the sheet was turned into a canvas, its intentional use was changed: its secondary function as a pictorial support became primordial. Whether the pictorial intent was deceit or fraud, or initially less sinister (as presumed by Shuggy below) cannot be decided with available data.
Anyhow, it is essential to mind the distinction between material support, intentional use, and secondary additions.
As exemplified by my favourite among the works of Ai Weiwei, his Coca-Cola urn:
http://www.artnet.com/artwork_images_367_629623_-aiweiwei.jpg
The urn allegedly is a genuine Han Dynasty vessel. The Coke logo — well, that’s the Catholic add-on…
I tried to argue with Dennis Dutton that the cloth might have been intended as a visual aid in an illiterate age (hence the seam for a supporting rod along one side), which would explain as well as fraud why it has ALL the marks indicated by the bible stories and NONE of the somewhat unseemly marks a real corpse would have left. Only later might its original purpose have been forgotten and claims of authenticity arisen.
Dennis would have none of it, and argued firmly that it had been intended as a fraud from the very beginning, that it belonged in the huge class of fraudelent relics made for money.
Are you implying that the holey (spelled correctly : hole-y) Jesus would have not pissed and shat himself in his death struggles? Miracle!
Let’s just remind ourselves of one thing : crucifixion was intended as a way of causing death under torture, just like hanging, drawing and quartering or being broken on the wheel. Screaming, flailing, then more screaming caused by the failed flailing, would have been expected by the audience, most of whom were along for a good laugh. The spear in the side was just a metaphorical flogging of an almost dead horse to try to get it to dance a bit more.
Do any contemporaneous accounts of crucifixions include the types of bets that the bookies were taking, because the absence of bookies from such a party would have been truly miraculous.
Do you remember that magazine which was sued for blasphemy (“blasphemous libel”?) a few years ago over the publication of a poem about the homosexual feelings of one of the guards for the strung up heretic? Again, in the real world, he’d have been encouraged to shove that spear where the sun didn’t shine. If he restricted himself to the spear – the Romans weren’t terribly prudish about that sort of thing.
It was The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name by James Kirkup, published in Gay News in December 1976, according to Pink News.
Mary Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, (NVLA) sued.
Denis Lemon was sentenced to nine months suspended imprisonment and fined £500.
Publisher Gay News Limited was fined £1,000.
They were represented by creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, John Mortimer QC, at the Old Bailey.
An appeal against the conviction was rejected by the House of Lords.
It still ‘illegal’ to publish the poem in the UK but you can read it here illustrated with an equally blasphemous photophpping of Mantegna.
I think it’s confusing to compare the image on the cloth (the banner?) of Turin to pareidoliac images on toast, etc. The image on the cloth looks like Jesus because somebody (or – woowoo – Somebody) intended it to.
The late Dennis Dutton co-founded the NZ Skeptics Society following his studies of the cloth. As an art historian, he was annoyed by its lack of provenance, and of course its similarity to gothic images of Jesus. We had fun at more than one Skeptics conference making our own Shrouds of Akaroa by rubbing something (ferric oxide?) over cloths draped on a bas relief. The image was quite convincing (though local believers were unconvinced).
What got Dennis going was a touring exhibition of photos of the Turin cloth. I went and was quietly hoho-ing the claim that a mark on the cheek had been made by a sponge on the end of a stick, when a woman with a thick Irish accent said
“What are you loffing at?”
I explained and she said “This is a religious exhibition!”
I said “I thought it was a scientific exhibition.” (Many of the captions had the trappings of science.)
“I have faith!”
“Well if you have faith, you don’t need this.”
(And I really did say it then and there, not just wish I had afterwards, as is usually the case.)
Not only, as cgosling points out, is the Jesus of the Shroud abnormally tall, but his cranium is pathologically small, so he would have stood out as one weird looking dude in Galilee. Through Pharyngula I refound this article by Gregory S. Paul about the anatomical impossibilities of the Shroud image.
http://www.infidels.org/kiosk/article815.html
Someone seriously tried to argue backward from the cloth that Jesus must have had Marfan’s Syndrome. Funny that none of the bible writers ever thought to mention it.
How in the world would anyone know what Jesus looked like???
Why, the same way somebody would know what other Classical-era individuals looked like — though sculptures, paintings, bas-relief, coins, literary descriptions.
Curious, innit, that none of that exists for Jesus until the iconography started to pick up a century or three later, and then Jesus looked exactly like the favorite local death / rebirth / salvation god of the artist’s hometown….
Cheers,
b&
Surely the fact it looks exactly like other medieval European artwork is a bit of a giveaway? Google image search “york minster quire statues” if you have any remaining doubts…
What a coincidence that Jesus’ freakishly long hands just happen to cover his genitals, in precisely the artistic style of the middle ages.
🙂 !
Yep! I guess the artist who created the image of Jesus on the cloth didn’t feel comfortable speculating on the proper proportions of the Son of God’s “package”!
So, on the one hand, God is timeless and immaterial; on the other hand the truth of one-third of God is to be determined by timing a piece of material. Or not.
I can’t remember who posted the link to an article in the other post, but one of the folks actually involved with studying the shroud made the exact same point I made in a post on some other shroud hubbub a few years ago: contamination is not at all likely since you would need almost 50% 20th century material added to a 1st century fabric to bring the 14C ratio high enough to make such a huge mistake in the date. It’s remarkable how the people who know nothing assume that the experts must be such idiots.
Richard Dawkins has a post over on his website about this article. There, he talks about the carbon dating of the shroud and its accuracy.
I’m still trying to figure out why anyone thinks it’s an image of Jesus. What evidence tells us it is Jesus and not Mordecai Schultz or John Doe? Even if it could be proven to be from the time of Jesus, who’s to say it isn’t a piece of very early poster art, albeit done on cloth? I tells you, it’s a mystery, to be sure!