A Shrouded Mystery

Earlier, as I was channel surfing, I ran across the last half hour of a presentation on some Christian channel. They were talking about the Shroud of Turin.

This historical and controversial artifact has always fascinated me. The facts presented on the show certainly make a good case for the shroud being an authentic mystery as yet unexplained by science. Even the Carbon-14 dating that they performed in the 1988 scientific study of the shroud, which dated it only to Medieval times, has now been proven to be inaccurate.

A website I just found, The Shroud of Turin Story, appears to contain a great deal of objective information about the shroud and regarding this Carbon-14 dating, it says:

Then in 2005, two scientists, working independently with different technologies, showed that those tests were wrong. Both found that the radiocarbon dating was performed on a repaired section of the cloth: a mixture of older and newer threads. There was enough newer material to skew the results by a dozen or so centuries. Moreover, micro-chemical findings clearly showed that the shroud is much, much older. The Shroud of Turin could be 2000 years old.

Also, according to a forensic pathologist, the image on the shroud is consistent with a man who suffered all that what we know our Lord Jesus suffered. Here is a site which has a report similar to that which the pathologist on the show presented: An Autopsy on the Man of the Shroud.

Here's something new to me that I learned from The Shroud of Turin Story site. The face on the shroud is not actually as gaunt as it appears. This is an optical illusion caused by "random plaid patterns in the cloth". The illusion is explained here. The images below show the face without filtering and with filtering to remove the plaid.

Non-Christians will write off The Shroud of Turin as a hoax, of course (but we ALL know that the pyramids had to have been built by aliens from outer space ). And Christians don't need any such object as proof of our risen Lord. Yet, it does lead one to wonder. Did God leave behind one last piece of evidence of His Son's first visit to Earth?

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Billy D ~

All about faith, isn't it? What you choose to believe. You'll never get a non-believer to accept it as authentic, and those Christians who do take it to be authentic will never recant.
And I do not believe you'll ever see any scientist prove this out, as their community would not look kindly on it.

Apr 04, 2007 10:28

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Taylor ~

The thought that the shroud evidences a supernatural event, possibly an imprint caused by a release of energy as our Lord was resurrected, is interesting in both a religious and scientific aspect to me. I have to admit that I would be slightly disappointed to learn that the shroud is indisputably a hoax. But I would want to know, nevertheless.

I don't think one's decision to believe in the authenticity of the shroud is a matter of faith. We have the article in our hands. Scientific research has been conducted on it. But, as in many things requiring one to form a conclusion based on the available evidence, the biases one holds will determine what that conclusion will be.

Apr 04, 2007 20:05

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Wonder Woman ~

Very neat!

I concure, it IS about choosing to believe. Believers know ;)

Apr 04, 2007 22:17

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