Miracle of the Shroud II: The Second Coming

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Ask Hugh....

Right, Huru the Guru speaketh.

Riani and Atkinson demonstrated a statistical probability of some chronological gradient across the radiocarbon sample. They further demonstrated that the further you go from the end of the Shroud, the older the sample. Various authenticists have claimed to see stains, discolouration or variability in fluorescence on the radiocarbon corner, lessening towards the middle of the Shroud. When I pointed out a little while ago that if this interpolation had any effect on the radiocarbon date, then the more the contamination, the older the Shroud would appear (not the other way about), then they all quickly agreed that any surface contamination would have been completely removed and had no effect on the radiocarbon date at all. So everybody, authenticists and non-authenticists, are now agreed that surface contamination has had no effect on the radiocarbon date. In any case, none of it could be called 'repair' or 'mending' or 'patch,' even if, as I suspect, the observed discolouration is the effect of an attempt to make the Holland cloth conform more closely to the colour of the Shroud by smearing it with dye.

So what are we left with? Contaminant, patch or mending advocates suggest that the threads of the Shroud itself must have been replaced by more modern ones, to repair or patch the Shroud. However, if this had been accomplished by any process of interweaving, even by the celebrated 'French invisible weaving' then it would still be easily visible under a microscope. So that's out.

But! Just suppose that the radiocarbon corner was gently pulled apart into its constituent threads, all sticking out of the Shroud to a length of a couple of centimetres, and that those threads were then unravelled into wispy fibres, and that new threads, similarly unravelled, were twisted into the old threads, and maybe smeared with a bit of glue for reinforcement, and then the whole thing was carefully rewoven in exactly the same way, then might we end up with a repair that was truly invisible, and the only thing showing that one thread had been twisted into a new one would be that the new one has flecks of cotton in it. Do I accept that this has been done? No I don't. Given the shoddy handling of the Shroud from 1355 to 1978, I can't think that anyone would be bothered to repair one minute corner fragment and leave all the clumsy stitching of the 1532 fire patches untouched. Furthermore, the absence of cotton elsewhere on the shroud is amply contradicted by John Heller in his book Report on the Shroud of Turin, and the selective way in which Roger's picks and chooses which of Walter McCrone and Heller & Adler's experiments are acceptable leaves much to be desired.

In short, Jabba, and anybody else who cares to read this, I do not accept that any repair has been carried out on the radiocarbon corner of the sample, and believe that any contamination of the radiocarbon corner made the Shroud appear older, not younger, than it really is.
 
And.
Just to clear the 'patch' thing up.

A patch is an area of new material inserted into a hole in old material (no doubt with a bit of overlap for stitching it on or interweaving its threads. I believe Ray Rogers agreed with Benford and Marino on this, although I'm pretty sure Joe Marino has changed his mind. The other two, of course, are no longer with us.

Now if the radiocarbon corner contained a patch, the 12 separate dates derived from 12 separate snippets of the sample would not group neatly around 1400 AD. Snippets of pure 'patch' would date from say 1600 or 1700, snippets of pure Shroud would date from 30 AD, and only snippets which happened to catch a bit of both would provide an intermediate date. This is not what we find, so a 'patch' is ruled out. Approximately two thirds of every sample would have to be modern to produce the set of dates actually produced, which takes us back to the invisible splicing, for which there is not one shred of evidence.
 
'Invisible' mending uses threads from the original cloth, so such a repair (if it existed) would not affect the carbon dating results.

'Invisible' mending is, in reality, not invisible, yet Jabba would have us believe nobody noticed it after hours of inspecting the cloth.

All the repairs to the shroud have been documented, and all of them are highly visible.

The repairs done by the Poor Clare nuns, for example, look like this:
 

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I think whether or not the shroud has an image of Jesus and whether it was made in the 14th century or the 1st or the 16th, it is an interesting object. It's particularly interesting for me how the object was made.

First, I think that the shroud held a real person and that the image is his. It looks very real, the attempted recreations I have seen using non-human objects like a "mask" or embossed clay plate are not as good, and besides the idea that a real corpse was used is not something supernatural or hardly unbelievable. Even if someone wanted to make a convincing fake it would be easier to use an actual corpse. So the frequent talk on TV and by some "shroud scholars" that it was just some non-human art object that impressed the image is not something I agree with.

Second, to me the shroud image seems unique. Were there any other cases in history where a body was put in a cloth and it left this kind of image? Do any of the attempted reproductions match the level of detail and realisticity that the shroud has?
 
rakovsky said:
I think whether or not the shroud has an image of Jesus and whether it was made in the 14th century or the 1st or the 16th, it is an interesting object. It's particularly interesting for me how the object was made.

First, I think that the shroud held a real person and that the image is his. It looks very real, the attempted recreations I have seen using non-human objects like a "mask" or embossed clay plate are not as good, and besides the idea that a real corpse was used is not something supernatural or hardly unbelievable. Even if someone wanted to make a convincing fake it would be easier to use an actual corpse. So the frequent talk on TV and by some "shroud scholars" that it was just some non-human art object that impressed the image is not something I agree with.

Second, to me the shroud image seems unique. Were there any other cases in history where a body was put in a cloth and it left this kind of image? Do any of the attempted reproductions match the level of detail and realisticity that the shroud has?
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Shroud scholars may or may not say something like you have said here, but not relevant experts. They claim it is the faded remnant of a painting. And they have evidence to support that claim. There is not, however, that it was created by an imprint from a body.

ETA: It does not possess the level of realism or historical ism that you suggest.
 
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rakovsky said:
I think whether or not the shroud has an image of Jesus and whether it was made in the 14th century or the 1st or the 16th, it is an interesting object. It's particularly interesting for me how the object was made.

First, I think that the shroud held a real person and that the image is his. It looks very real, the attempted recreations I have seen using non-human objects like a "mask" or embossed clay plate are not as good, and besides the idea that a real corpse was used is not something supernatural or hardly unbelievable. Even if someone wanted to make a convincing fake it would be easier to use an actual corpse. So the frequent talk on TV and by some "shroud scholars" that it was just some non-human art object that impressed the image is not something I agree with.

Second, to me the shroud image seems unique. Were there any other cases in history where a body was put in a cloth and it left this kind of image? Do any of the attempted reproductions match the level of detail and realisticity that the shroud has?
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1. The anatomy of the figure on the CIQ is, simply, not human anatomy. The head come to a wedge point, the arms are impossible long, the hair-images behave in ways hair does not, and so on.

2. The "blood" and other fluids represented in the image on the CIQ are depicted as behaving in ways that simply ignore the effects of gravity and hydrodynamics.

3. The posture in which the poor, wedge-headed figure is depicted is a posture that cannot be assumed by a normal human being (you are welcome to try it--lie flat on the floor and assume the "Shroud SlouchTM).

4. The image on the CIQ shows none of the distortion that would be seen if the cloth had been wound around, or draped over, a three-dimensional figure.

...and so on.
 
Slowvehicle said:
1. The anatomy of the figure on the CIQ is, simply, not human anatomy. The head come to a wedge point, the arms are impossible long, the hair-images behave in ways hair does not, and so on.

2. The "blood" and other fluids represented in the image on the CIQ are depicted as behaving in ways that simply ignore the effects of gravity and hydrodynamics.

3. The posture in which the poor, wedge-headed figure is depicted is a posture that cannot be assumed by a normal human being (you are welcome to try it--lie flat on the floor and assume the "Shroud SlouchTM).

4. The image on the CIQ shows none of the distortion that would be seen if the cloth had been wound around, or draped over, a three-dimensional figure.

...and so on.
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Didn't someone, back in the 16th century, post pics of a cloth that had been wrapped around their head to demonstrate #4? Or is my memory playing tricks?
 
While I'm at it, there was a typo in my previous post. Riani and Atkinson demonstrated that the further away the sample was from the end of the cloth, the younger the date, not the older as stated. The corollary was accurate though: the more contamination, the older the Shroud appears.
 
Slowvehicle said:
1. The anatomy of the figure on the CIQ is, simply, not human anatomy. The head come to a wedge point, the arms are impossible long, the hair-images behave in ways hair does not, and so on.
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This puzzles me. If one were to somehow imprint upon a cloth at the moment of ressurection, why would on choose to do so in the manner of a physiological impossibility? After all, no actual human has had Byzantine features, nor unfeasible limbs nor whichever feature you care to mention.

Slowvehicle said:
2. The "blood" and other fluids represented in the image on the CIQ are depicted as behaving in ways that simply ignore the effects of gravity and hydrodynamics.
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Simple physics matters not a whit. Why? because the holy shroud.

Slowvehicle said:
3. The posture in which the poor, wedge-headed figure is depicted is a posture that cannot be assumed by a normal human being (you are welcome to try it--lie flat on the floor and assume the "Shroud SlouchTM).
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Anatomically impossible poses are de riguer for shrouies.

Slowvehicle said:
4. The image on the CIQ shows none of the distortion that would be seen if the cloth had been wound around, or draped over, a three-dimensional figure.
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3-d spatial reasoning is beyond the shroudie ken.

Slowvehicle said:
...and so on.
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And on and on and on. Go figure.
 
Thanks! And well discovered. This is possibly one of the alleged thousands of photos which were taken of the whole Shroud in 1978, and which have never been released. I think this photo is of one of the burn holes on the very end of the Shroud, about 10cm from the site of the radiocarbon sample area. At this magnification, the photo of the radiocarbon area would be very indicative indeed.
 
Just by looking at it I can tell that it was not a mere painting because of the detail involved. I could see it more likely being an impression of statue, but the image is so clearly defined that it is apparently a real person's body.

Here is a list of photographs of shrouds intentionally made to look like the Turin shroud. Some of them are good fakes, but they are still clearly just paintings:
http://greatshroudofturinfaq.com/History/Western-European/manycopies.html

One of the most telling signs is that the image becomes even more clear and more realistic when it's put under negative photography, something that came about in the modern era. In other words, if it was a painting it would not be so much clearer when viewed in the negative with technology they didn't have. Besides that, you don't have to believe in miracles or something so unusual to think they used a real body. It's quite believable that somebody in the 1st to 14th centuries wrapped a real body in a shroud, perhaps with paint on it, to make a convincing image. What is much more curious is how exactly such an image was created from that body.

That's why I asked- are there other cases in nature or history when a body left that kind of impression on a shroud?
 
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rakovsky said:
Just by looking at it I can tell that it was not a mere painting because of the detail involved.

--snip--
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No. Your online analysis of pictures using an inadequate knowledge of history and of painting does not trump fact, particularly not the viewpoints of those who have actually handled it and those who have matched up the style with that of Byzantine art.

"The detail involved?" What, precisely, do you propose is in there that could not be painted?
 
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