Shroud of Turin

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otseng
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Shroud of Turin

Post #1

Post by otseng »

The Shroud of Turin to me is the most compelling evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.

But first, a little background on the Shroud:

- It is a cloth that measures 14' 3" by 3' 7".
- There is full frontal and rear image of a crucified man.
- The first known public display of the shroud was in 1357 by Geoffrey II de Charny first in Lirey, France.
- It was damaged by a fire in 1532, but the central image was not greatly affected.
- Here is an image of the shroud.

The question to debate: is the Shroud of Turin the actual burial cloth of Jesus or is it a hoax?
Last edited by otseng on Mon Mar 15, 2004 8:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Post #21

Post by Dilettante »

Regarding Dr Rogers' alleged discovery (posted by otseng), we should also read Nickell's rebuttal, posted by Robert Carroll in his "Skeptical dictionary" website:

Dr. Raymond Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, claims that the part of the cloth tested and dated at around 1350 was not part of the original shroud. According to Rogers, the labs that dated the cloth to the 14th century tested a patch made to repair damage done by fire. How does he know this, since the patch was destroyed in the testing? According to shroud investigator Joe Nickell, Rogers "relied on two little threads allegedly left over from the sampling" and the word of "pro-authenticity researchers who guessed that the carbon-14 sample came from a 'rewoven area' of repair." According to Nickell, P.E. Damon's 1989 article published in Nature claims that "textile experts specifically made efforts to select a site for taking the radiocarbon sample that was away from patches and seams."
Says Nickell,
Rogers compared the threads with some small samples from elsewhere on the Shroud, claiming to find differences between the two sets of threads that “prove” the radiocarbon sample “was not part of the original cloth” of the Turin shroud.
The reported differences include the presence—allegedly only on the “radiocarbon sample”—of cotton fibers and a coating of madder root dye in a binding medium that his tests “suggest” is gum Arabic....However, Rogers’ assertions to the contrary, both the cotton and the madder have been found elsewhere on the shroud. Both were specifically reported by famed microanalyst Walter McCrone.
Dr. Rogers estimates the actual date of the shroud to be between about 1,000 BCE. and 1700 CE. Still, all the evidence points toward the medieval forgery hypothesis. As Nickell notes, "no examples of its complex herringbone weave are known from the time of Jesus when, in any case, burial cloths tended to be of plain weave" (1998: 35). "In addition, Jewish burial practice utilized—and the Gospel of John specifically describes for Jesus—multiple burial wrappings with a separate cloth over the face."*
Other evidence of medieval fakery includes the shroud’s lack of historical record prior to the mid-fourteenth century—when a bishop reported the artist’s confession—as well as serious anatomical problems, the lack of wraparound distortions, the resemblance of the figure to medieval depictions of Jesus, and suspiciously bright red and picturelike “blood” stains which failed a battery of sophisticated tests by forensic serologists, among many other indicators. (Nickell 2005).
Of course, the cloth might be 3,000 or 2,000 years old, as Rogers speculates, but the image on the cloth could date from a much later period. No matter what date is correct for either the cloth or the image, the date cannot prove to any degree of reasonable probability that the cloth is the shroud Jesus was wrapped in and that the image is somehow miraculous. To believe that will always be a matter of faith, not scientific proof. (http://www.skepdic.com/shroud.html)
Now we know both sides of the story.

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