Does the Shroud of Turin Show Expected Elongation of the Head in 2D?"

[catsmate]

Plus of course it doesn't account for its subsequent disappearance for about a thousand years.

The shroudies tend to mutter about the Edessa Image, ignoring all contrary evidence, and relying on its convenient disappearance.

 

[Darat]

I do wonder why such a need for this relic to be "true"- there doesn't seem much attention to all the other claimed relics.

 

[mikegriffith1]

I'm not sure what planet you're currently living on, but most of us have responded substantively to the posts you have provided recently—including the ones that simply repeat prior claims, e.g., the excimer laser article—with zero subsequent answers from you. You have earned the reputation as a seagull poster. Hence people know not to waste their time trying to engage you, because you refuse to participate. And predictably, as soon as people properly ignore you, you wax rhetorical about how people supposedly don't want to debate you. You're being childish and non-serious, and people are treating you accordingly.

Asked and answered, with zero subsequent discussion from you.

No, the standard of scholarship is not agreement with some foisted opinion. No, you're not the smartest person in the room.

Blah blah blah. As if a physics degree qualifies you in art history.

Address the rebuttals you've received to your posts of the past few weeks and then maybe someone will decide to take you seriously.

IOW, you're not going to address the facts Rivera presents.

Objective people who read the articles and then read your rebuttals will see that your rebuttals ignore considerable evidence and engage in lots of special pleading and faulty assumptions, not to mention the naked bias or arguing that scientists who believe in God aren't really scientists.

You continue to act like science is on your side and to ignore the fact that the substantial majority of the scientists who have actually studied the Shroud reject your position.

catsmate said:

The shroudies tend to mutter about the Edessa Image, ignoring all contrary evidence, and relying on its convenient disappearance.

Bollocks!

 

[JayUtah]

IOW, you're not going to address the facts Rivera presents.

No, not for you; not until you demonstrate you are worthy of the attention you seek.

Objective people who read the articles and then read your rebuttals will see that your rebuttals ignore considerable evidence and engage in lots of special pleading and faulty assumptions...

Cool, show me one of those objective people. Are these people in the room with us?

...not to mention the naked bias or arguing that scientists who believe in God aren't really scientists.

Not only is that an argument I've never made, it's an argument I specifically repudiate at considerable length in my posts. Thank you for confirming that you aren't really reading what I write, and therefore that it's a waste of time to try to engage you.

You continue to act like science is on your side and to ignore the fact that the substantial majority of the scientists who have actually studied the Shroud reject your position.

Science is on my side. However, the shroud of Turin isn't especially interesting to the vast majority of scientists, most of whom consider it a settled matter. Therefore the "substantial majority" of scientists (and people who want to call themselves scientists) who study the shroud are those still trying very hard to build a scientific case for its authenticity, not necessarily because science points that direction but because they have other reasons to want to believe it's real. As much as they want to believe it's a very important artifact to continue to study, their efforts seem more consistent with groveling for attention from disinterested mainstream scholars.

 

[JayUtah]

First the background. Modern xianity of whichever flavour has accepted certain writings from the dim and distant past (i.e. the scribblings of the camp-fire stories of a bunch of illiterate goat herders from the arse-end of nowhere) as being The One True Canon. Which set of writings depends on the franchise.

When I was studying Christianity I read a couple of books by Elaine Pagels and thereafter the Gospel of Thomas and a smattering of the other apocalypses besides John's. I don't think I ever read the Acts of Thomas. The Gospel was fairly straightforward, but some of the apocalypses were downright weird. You could tell they had been written—as you say—as fan fiction that tried to combine the early Christian mythos with some sort of pagan tradition.

You can certainly point to problems with scribal integrity. Keeping an authoritative text seems to be something the ancient Hebrews thought was important, but not the early Christians. So citing a text purportedly from the 1st century CE but transmitted through a scribal tradition is problematic for that reason.

But the bigger problem is that exegesis from texts obviously meant to be read as allegories, symbolism, and poetry is a losing battle. Even a phrase such as, "splinter of the mind's eye" in a non-religious setting can have many readings. What does the splinter represent? What does the eye represent? And if you're obsessed with a piece of cloth, you're more likely to go back and try to imagine that every former mention of any kind of cloth is a foreshadow reference. It's no different than the postdiction from all the Nostradamians who can tell you in retrospect how Nostradamus saw the 9/11 attacks or the rise of Hitler. Those commentators can never foretell anything. It's confirmation bias practiced to an absurd degree of fault. I can say that a splinter represents an airliner, and that the mind of America was New York City and that the eye of that mind was the place from which you had the broadest view—the Twin Towers. And I came up with all all before breakfast.

That's why I'm just so flabbergasted that anyone can seriously suggest that all this textual navel-gazing trumps actual science where you actually measure a thing with reliable tools and methods. I can measure my house driveway at just under 3 meters wide. I can't image that I would ever question that on the basis of, say, someone's interpretation of an ancient Paiute stone carving (which we have a lot of where I live).

 

[catsmate]

IOW, you're not going to address the facts Rivera presents.

Because they were covered previously, as you know.

Objective people who read the articles and then read your rebuttals will see that your rebuttals ignore considerable evidence and engage in lots of special pleading and faulty assumptions, not to mention the naked bias or arguing that scientists who believe in God aren't really scientists.

Your usual drivel again I see.

You continue to act like science is on your side

It is.

and to ignore the fact that the substantial majority of the scientists who have actually studied the Shroud reject your position.

As I covered in my post regarding STURP and the investigation of 1978, this is a lie.

Bollocks!

So you don't be responding to my rebuttal of Rivera then?

 

[catsmate]

When I was studying Christianity I read a couple of books by Elaine Pagels and thereafter the Gospel of Thomas and a smattering of the other apocalypses besides John's. I don't think I ever read the Acts of Thomas.

The Acts of Thomas are at least one step lower in canonicity than the Gospel.

The Gospel was fairly straightforward, but some of the apocalypses were downright weird. You could tell they had been written—as you say—as fan fiction that tried to combine the early Christian mythos with some sort of pagan tradition.

Exactly. Mixing Xian Mythos elements into local heroic epic traditions. A fascinating mixture.

You can certainly point to problems with scribal integrity. Keeping an authoritative text seems to be something the ancient Hebrews thought was important, but not the early Christians. So citing a text purportedly from the 1st century CE but transmitted through a scribal tradition is problematic for that reason.

Especially, rather like the Xian favourite the Testimonium Flavianum, the lines show distinct signs of later insertion.

But the bigger problem is that exegesis from texts obviously meant to be read as allegories, symbolism, and poetry is a losing battle. Even a phrase such as, "splinter of the mind's eye" in a non-religious setting can have many readings. What does the splinter represent? What does the eye represent?

One point, wrt Splinter of the MInd's Eye, I was referring to this book, and it's position as a once canonical element of a mythos that was later de-canonised for what might be called political reasons....

And if you're obsessed with a piece of cloth, you're more likely to go back and try to imagine that every former mention of any kind of cloth is a foreshadow reference.

Like the Pray Manuscript.

It's no different than the postdiction from all the Nostradamians who can tell you in retrospect how Nostradamus saw the 9/11 attacks or the rise of Hitler. Those commentators can never foretell anything. It's confirmation bias practiced to an absurd degree of fault. I can say that a splinter represents an airliner, and that the mind of America was New York City and that the eye of that mind was the place from which you had the broadest view—the Twin Towers. And I came up with all all before breakfast.

My favourite example is the Prophecies of Malachy....

That's why I'm just so flabbergasted that anyone can seriously suggest that all this textual navel-gazing trumps actual science where you actually measure a thing with reliable tools and methods. I can measure my house driveway at just under 3 meters wide. I can't image that I would ever question that on the basis of, say, someone's interpretation of an ancient Paiute stone carving (which we have a lot of where I live).

Absolutely.

 

[JayUtah]

Especially, rather like the Xian favourite the Testimonium Flavianum, the lines show distinct signs of later insertion.

As do some of the canonical texts. The point is that unlike the Hebrew Masorah, the early Christians seemed to consider their writings more of a living text than a historical record. This goes for the canonical works (in which there is evidence of late alterations) as well as the apocryphal ones.

One point, wrt Splinter of the MInd's Eye, I was referring to this book, and it's position as a once canonical element of a mythos that was later de-canonised for what might be called political reasons....

Indeed, I read the book when it first came out and when we were all hungry for more Star Wars. And of course Foster ghost-wrote the original Star Wars novelization, so he got tapped to write the sequel. I always thought Foster did better at novelizations than original stories. Not that I like Disney a lot, but I think they were right to cut it loose.

But because I like to tie things together where possible, the phrase from the title also works as an example of a text that is so squishy it can be confirmationally made to fit any number of desired "interpretations."

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

Indeed, this is being presented as if it's some kind of smoking gun. There's no smoke. There's not even a gun.

Students usually can't give you a full soup-to-nuts account of their line of reasoning that got them to an erroneous conclusion, complete with all their hidden assumptions. Occasionally you can deduce what the wrong assumption is, just because the wrong answer can only come from a small set of assumptions or premises. But other times you just have to admit you can't read minds and you can't accurately identify what wrong thing is stuck in a student's head. That's kind of where I find myself now. He's so far off in the weeds—and unwilling to call for help—that I think he might be hopelessly lost. But hope springs eternal.

(snipped for brevity)

Thanks for this Jay. I've often wondered about the results of the carbon 14 testing they did on the supposed shroud, and this explains it. Not that I understood anywhere near all of it, and will remember even less tomorrow, but it's interesting to get an idea of some of the nuts and bolts of the process, and the math used to evaluate the measurements.

 

[catsmate]

Since I have some free time, and it's unlikely that @bobdroege7 will be back to seagull us for a while, let's look at what is known in shroudie circles as the 'Edessa Hypothesis'.

• A good title for a technothriller involving a hidden nazi base?

Loosely the Edessa Hypothesis can be summarised as:
The shroud exhibited in Turin is the same dubious relic exhibited for centuries in Edessa as the Mandylion or Image of Edessa.

It is claimed that the burial cloth of Jesus meandered around western Asian for a few centuries, in various hands, performing the occasional miracle. And seeming splitting a few times....

The immediate problem is that the Mandylion only showed the face of the supposed crucified person, but the shroudies explain this awkward fact away by claiming the cloth was folded several times was folded to expose only the face. Why this was done is a subject they tend to avoid.
Likewise they tend to avoid addressing the descriptions of Mandylion bearing little resemblance to the Lirey cloth.

Another problem, demonstrating the general historical ignorance of shroudies, is the fact that many believers claim that the magic facecloth was simultaneously in Edessa (send shortly after the "resurrection") while also being touted around Asia Minor by Sts. Peter and Paul, who look it to Antioch (but the 'Antioch Hypothesis' is for another time).

BTW, the story that Paul had the magic cloth is based on a single reference from the fourth century alleging that Pilate (yes, him) and his wife visited the tomb of Jesus and that she acquired the cloth. From her it passed to St. Luke (that's Luke the Evangelist,, not any other saint of that name)
Of course other early xian sources claim that "Joseph the Senator" (him who provided the tomb) took the cloths.

• Interestingly, for those who are interested in historical minutiae anyway, those writings specifically mention multiple cloths, which accords with Jewish burial customs. Unlike the Lirey cloth.

Along it's supposed travels the magic cloth stopped off in Beirut where it bled after being mutilated by some passing Jews, who naturally converted to xianity on the spot.

• Curiously in that case the magic cloth was acquired by an unnamed xian, who nailed it to his bedroom wall but forgot it when moving.....

Now, the xian writings don't mention any interesting burial cloths in Edessa as late as 384CE, but from about 544CE there are mentions of an 'Image of Edessa'. This is where the shrouding favouring the 'Antioch Hypothesis' split from the 'Edessa Hypothesis' followers. The former claim the magic cloth was resident in Anrioch but briefly visited Edessa in the 540s.

Now on to a recap of the 'Hymn of the Pearl'
As I mentioned previously when @bobdroege7 trotted it out, this is an odd but of hero-epic verse, where a prince leaves his parents on a mission to rescue a pearl from a serpent, gets distracted, then reminded, achieves his goal and returns.

• Pretty much straight out of Tylor and von Hahn. Or the fantasy section of any bookstore.

From the hymn it's not exactly clear if the prince is Jesus, an apostle, or (and I rather like this one) a metaphor for some kind of evangelistic mission. The story is oddly filled with references to clothing, starting with the prince's "glittering robe and purple mantle", which is taken away from him at the start of the quest. Later a letter from his parents reminds the prince of his mission.

• Trying to read this as a reference to a burial cloth is rationally impossible. Not that certain shroudies don't try....

Curiously, there re actually very few known depictions of Jesus before the middle of the fourth century. It wasn't until the eighth century that such artworks became remotely commonplace.

• These depictions were discussed at Nicea in 737CE, regarding whether they should be encouraged or not. An earlier church council, the Council of Trullo in 692CE, had decided that Jesus should always be depicted as a human rather than symbolically
• Later over-enthusiasm for the veneration of such images (to the point of breaking the second commandment) led to a period of iconoclasm.
• The attribution of the Santorini earthquake (also eruption and tsunami) to an act of divine anger didn't help. Icons were very much out of favour.

Oops, got to go. I'll leave you with a new idea; what if the Mandylion was genuine but the rest of the cloth is a fake, created in the middle ages, and carefully sewn together....?

 

[Reformed Offlian]

As do some of the canonical texts. The point is that unlike the Hebrew Masorah, the early Christians seemed to consider their writings more of a living text than a historical record. This goes for the canonical works (in which there is evidence of late alterations) as well as the apocryphal ones.

Hey, who *doesn't* add stuff to canonical texts, amirite? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

 

[catsmate]

Hey, who *doesn't* add stuff to canonical texts, amirite? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

Just think of what Spielberg did....

 

[bobdroege7]

That doesn't mean there's something wrong with a calibrated calendar date that might include such a period. As I said, it would be irresponsible and dishonest not to report that the radiocarbon date calibrates out to a distribution with multiple modes. The true value can gravitate to either of those modes, and the fact that other information may help you decide which mode is more likely doesn't mean the other mode constitutes an error in the science, or even anything that requires a second thought. You're trying so very hard to stir up a dilemma where there simply isn't one. You don't seem to understand how multimodal distributions work and you don't seem to have any interested in learning. In fact, you still don't seem to understand what confidence bands represent at a basic level. Statistics is not a black-and-white pastime. It's an entirely different way of thinking about quantitative information that you seem to have no desire to appreciate. Frantically pointing to one knee-jerk slam-dunk after another is not a substitute for understanding the material.


Better according to who?


You're trying very hard to shoehorn the patch theory into what you are trying very hard to characterize as hopelessly botched radiocarbon dating. But you don't know enough about radiocarbon dating to understand what the expectation should be for outliers, where they are understood to come from, nor how they are properly detected and handled by the relevant experts. You have some unevidenced speculation to accommodate what you ignorantly interpret as incontrovertible evidence of contamination in the radiocarbon dating work. Two wrongs don't make a right, and the reasoning here is circular. Not falling for speculation wrapped in circularity doesn’t constitute ignoring some important fact.


No. You don't get to say the radiocarbon date is "somehow" wrong on the order of twelve centuries just because you now want to go back to waving your hands wildly over poorly interpreted historical records.

Since you seem to have abandoned Casabianca and the chi-squared argument after failing to engage the rebuttal, then I trust we'll hear no more about those things from you.

Better according to me, because you can't accurately date a cloth object that has been mended with threads of a different age.
What I said is that radiocarbon dating assumes the object has been sequestered from the carbon cycle, which is better than the date the organism died.

The patch is not a theory, it is an observation, by textile experts.

As for Casabianca et al, you still have provided a rebuttal of him other than he's wrong because he did not have an archaeologist on his team, and that dog don't hunt. I am still waiting.

As for accusing me of posting to a wikipedia article on Pearson's chi^2 test, I did no such thing.

The other thing wrong with Damon et al, is that they did 85 measurements, but only reported twelve, and Oxford combined 5 measurements into 3 dates, sorry not buying into that.

 

[JayUtah]

Better according to me, because you can't accurately date a cloth object that has been mended with threads of a different age.

Irrelevant. The radiocarbon dating of the shroud was not inaccurate.

What I said is that radiocarbon dating assumes the object has been sequestered from the carbon cycle, which is better than the date the organism died.

Irrelevant.

The patch is not a theory, it is an observation, by textile experts.

Asked and answered many times.

Further, the presence of a patch is contradicted by the data and would not produce the results you claimed even if one were there.

As for Casabianca et al, you still have provided a rebuttal of him other than he's wrong because he did not have an archaeologist on his team, and that dog don't hunt. I am still waiting.

No, that is not the basis of my rebuttal of Casabianca.

I provided the rebuttal months ago. You did not understand it. I took it upon myself to try to explain it to you, including considerable effort teaching you remedial statistics. You still did not understand it, and show no further interest in attempting to understand it.

You had your shot, but you've simply confirmed that the rebuttal goes over your head. So be it.

As for accusing me of posting to a wikipedia article on Pearson's chi^2 test, I did no such thing.

Yes, you did.

The other thing wrong with Damon et al, is that they did 85 measurements, but only reported twelve, and Oxford combined 5 measurements into 3 dates, sorry not buying into that.

I'm not interested in your uninformed opinion on data pooling.

 

[JayUtah]

Hey, who *doesn't* add stuff to canonical texts, amirite? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

For purposes of practicing the religion, I'm inclined not to care what people do with their texts. Their canon; their rules. If a religion wants to rely upon a fixed canon and strong scribal traditions, that's fine with me. If they want to have a fluid canon that accommodates new ideas, variant interpretations, or changes of heart, that's fine with me. For example, the Mormons quietly edited the Book of Mormon to change some language that might have seemed racist. That works fine for me. I can understand how Mormons might not want to be seen as racist, and they have a retcon argument for it in the form of ongoing divine dispensation. I don't care, in any case, since I have no plans to practice Mormonism. But if the topic should come up in the context of intellectual interest, it makes sense to me why they think they can treat their canon that way. Similarly if I'm talking to a Christian then I should ask whether they accept the Apocrypha. I don't care either way, but it keeps a discussion cordial.

Now if a religion lies about their canon or how they treat it, I might take issue. But again, unless I'm practicing the religion I tend not to care. A two-faced approach to one's own canon might be an impediment to an intellectual discussion on the religion, but I'll simply decline to participate in that case.

However, if someone is proffering a document as evidence of history, then the only useful way to evaluate its reliability is as a historical document. It doesn't matter if that document also has religious significance. It especially doesn't matter if the religion is okay with a fluid canon. That doesn't affect our assessment of scribal tradition, late additions, or multiple variants or versions. It doesn't matter if the religion has a preferred interpretation of ambiguous passages. We will apply a historiographic hermeneutical standard, not a doctrinal one. Do what you want with your religion's texts, but understand that it may affect its value as secular historical evidence.

 

[catsmate]

Oh look a Fringe Reset/ @bobdroege7 seems to think we've forgotten he posted this nonsense before.

Better according to me, because you can't accurately date a cloth object that has been mended with threads of a different age.

Sigh. Except the repairs portions of the Lirey cloth are easily seen and hence weren't used for the radiocarbon sampling.

What I said is that radiocarbon dating assumes the object has been sequestered from the carbon cycle, which is better than the date the organism died.

The basic premise of radiocarbon dating is that there was no input of
¹⁴C into the material being tested.

The patch is not a theory, it is an observation, by textile experts.

Those would be the experts who state that the area sampled doesn't contain a patch? Those experts?

As for Casabianca et al, you still have provided a rebuttal of him other than he's wrong because he did not have an archaeologist on his team, and that dog don't hunt. I am still waiting.

This is your usual drivel which has been debunked previously. Your inability to understand that rebuttal is your problem. Educate yourself.

The other thing wrong with Damon et al, is that they did 85 measurements, but only reported twelve, and Oxford combined 5 measurements into 3 dates, sorry not buying into that.

That's because you have a desperate need for the Lirey cloth to be real. The analytic techniques have been explained.

 

[catsmate]

Now @bobdroege7, as you're back:
1. What exactly in the "Hymn of the Pearl" shows the existence of a shroud?
2. Have you asked the University of California about your claimed secret radiocarbon test?
3. Will you be addressing the size of the sample of the supposed shroud available for that secret radiocarbon test?
4. Will you be showing us evidence that cloth of a pattern similar to that of the Lirey cloth existed in the first century?
5. And what about the undocumented fire that caused the damage to the cloth that you claim appears in the Pray Codex?

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

It's the same as used by Damon, and who would use less than 95%?

Thanks for admitting that you don't know why one of the most basic rules in statistics exists.

 

[bobdroege7]

Irrelevant. The radiocarbon dating of the shroud was not inaccurate.


Irrelevant.


Asked and answered many times.

Further, the presence of a patch is contradicted by the data and would not produce the results you claimed even if one were there.


No, that is not the basis of my rebuttal of Casabianca.

I provided the rebuttal months ago. You did not understand it. I took it upon myself to try to explain it to you, including considerable effort teaching you remedial statistics. You still did not understand it, and show no further interest in attempting to understand it.

You had your shot, but you've simply confirmed that the rebuttal goes over your head. So be it.


Yes, you did.


I'm not interested in your uninformed opinion on data pooling.

First, every measurement is inaccurate to some extent as the accurate value is unknown, that's freshmen science in any discipline. It is impossible to measure accuracy, you should know that. If you can't keep accuracy and precision separated, how can you discuss scientific measurements?

Second, your irrelevant is not, if a cloth has been patched with modern threads, that will throw off the carbon 14 date.

Thirdly, you never gave an adequate rebuttal to Casabianca et al, because you never have discussed the Chi^2 issue adequately. Nor their exposal of data hiding, and refusal to release their raw data for almost 30 years.

Fourthly, you can check back and see that I linked to a generic wiki post on Chi^2 tests and not to the specific Pearson Chi^2 test.

Data pooling as you call it, but that is not what Damon did, they had five data points and averaged two sets of two to combine the five data points into 3 to get better results. You OK with that? It would be a simple statistical homework problem to show that what they did is wrong.

 

[bobdroege7]

Thanks for admitting that you don't know why one of the most basic rules in statistics exists.

You are wrong, it's not a rule, it's a guideline, and one that Damon et al did not follow.

Or did you not know that was in their paper?