It’s ironic that you are suggesting that the shroud is genuine because it doesn’t look like other pictures of Jesus, but others suggest that the shroud is genuine because it does look like other pictures of Jesus (e.g. the Pray Codex).
Ironic, yes, although I am sceptic about the origin of the shroud.
I am also sceptic about the other pictures. There may be exceptions but my impression is that the pictures reflect the cultural features of the society around the artist rather than the people of the first century in the Middle East. Some pictures may reflect opinions about how Jews looked during the past centuries but even that is a reflection of the prevailing local cultural ideas.
Maybe it is good that there are no credible pictures of Jesus. Otherwise we might have waves of people trying to look like Jesus, or valuing people that look like Jesus - would it not be cool if the pastor of our church would look like the real Jesus…
Having some experience with imaging in a scientific setting, this is the one that sticks out to me. What you should see is a 3d face spread out over a 2d surface, somewhat like a Mercator projection of the globe. In other words, the face should be completely distorted with at least 3 quarters of the head, if not more, visible in the shroud. That’s not what we see. Instead, we see something like a photograph. We only see the figure from the front. You could probably say the same of the rest of the body.
If the image was made using a camera obscura, something that was available in the 14th century, that would make sense. Many people also think the shroud was made using a bas-relief model.
Such jokes have been made throughout history. John Calvin quipped that all of the splinters of the Cross could fill a ship. Erasmus noted that Jesus Christ must have been crucified on a whole forest. Relics of questionable provenance to outright fakes were common place.
The Catholic Herald article, dated October 31, 2024 at 10:00 am was very interesting, citing as its source: the Telegraph, which in turn says this: “A flurry of recent studies into the Shroud of Turin have offered evidence that one of history’s most disputed artefacts does in fact date back 2,000 years, lending support to those who claim it is one of the most astonishing artefacts in existence, and countering previous claims that it is a medieval forgery.”
and “But the new research by Cícero Moraes, reputed to be a world leader in forensic facial reconstruction software, has demonstrated that even if the cloth is 2,000 years old, it could not have covered the actual body of Jesus due to the image on the shroud being, in effect, normal sized.”
Lovely, “even if the cloth is 2,000 years old,” it could not have covered the actual body of Jesus", as Cicero Moraes, a Brazilian 3D designer, claims. Neat! An insufficiently distorted body image on a possibly 2,000 year old cloth. Grist for the debate mill, indeed. The Telegraph article offers Moraes’ opinion:
“People generally fall into two camps in the debates. On one side are those who think it is an authentic shroud of, on the other, those who think it is a forgery.
But I am inclined towards another approach: that it is in fact a work of Christian art, which managed to convey its intended message very successfully. “It seems to me more like a non-verbal iconographic work that has very successfully served the purpose of the religious message contained within.”
Sounds good to me. Even if not a cloth that wrapped the body of Jesus, The Shroud makes a more interesting banner, IMO, than:
Most of us atheists roll our eyes at the idea of wanting or needing a flag. It’s like the non-stamp collectors needing a flag. I will say the FSM and IPU appeal to my basal levels of snark, but feel no need to stick one of them onto the back of my car or anywhere for that matter.
I don’t have anything on my car either, and–despite the fact that I don’t go to church and simply believe in the crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus–a nephew and a niece think I’m “in a cult”. Go figure.
Today being Wednesday, I’m not an advocate of anything.
I got a good laugh when I read that claim by Luther. It misses a point of medieval (Aristotelian) thinking, the concept of “contagion”: in this instance, if a splinter of the True Cross was embedded in a piece of wood, then by contagion that piece of wood qualified as being the True Cross. Calvin also made fun of this without recognizing the principle, saying there was enough wood to build a ship (and/or fill its cargo)
That’s been ruled out since the coloring is not on the fibers but is part of them.
A more pertinent criticism is that in the case of certain Saints if you tallied the relics they had more than one right index finger!
Last I read the pattern conforms to most behavior of known forms of radiation while plainly not being from any known form of radiation – that’s the sort of thing that keeps drawing me back to the item.
I thought there was a strain of Byzantine art where the images are uncannily like that on the Shroud, reaching back to the sixth or seventh century. Most Byzantine art, though, uses common traits associated with emperors in depicting Christ.
July, 1987:
‘As participants in the workshop who devoted considerable effort to
achieve our goal we would be irresponsible if we were not to advise you that this
fundamental modification in the proposed procedures may lead to failure’.
January, 1988:
‘The Archbishop’s plan, disregarding the protocol, does not seem capable of fproducing a result that will meet the test of credibility and scientific rigor’ and that ‘it is probably better to do nothing than to proceed with a scaled-down experiment’.
Nowhere in those quotes does it discuss the possibility that the section of the shroud used for carbon dating was suspected of being a repair. From my reading, those quotes are tied to reducing the number of labs doing the testing from 7 to 3. I have never seen a quote from anyone casting doubt on the authenticity of the section used for carbon dating prior to the results.
Subsequent explanations of contamination from modern carbon also don’t stand up to scrutiny. The contamination would have to be 2 times the original mass of the fabric in order to drag a 2,000 year old fabric to only being 700 years old. In other words, if smoke is given as the reason for the date then 2/3 of the weight of the fabric would have to be smoke residue. The same would apply to bacterial contamination.
"These research papers on the Shroud of Turin were written by the Shroud Research Network (SRN), and are organized as follows:
The papers are listed in the sequence they were originally written with the most recent paper at the top. The listed date is for the most recent revision.
The papers are arranged by topics.
The abstracts of the papers are given.
“If you are new to this page, we recommend you start with paper 33 on carbon dating and paper 34 on image formation.”
Robert A. Rucker (Bob) earned BS and MS degrees in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan, and obtained Professional Engineering (PE) certificates in nuclear engineering and in mechanical engineering. He worked for 38 years in the nuclear industry performing nuclear analysis computer calculations for design of advanced nuclear reactors, criticality safety calculations for nuclear fuel production and storage, and statistical analysis of measurement data. He published 41 documents with US Government agencies. He has been researching the Shroud of Turin since 2013 including application of MCNP nuclear analysis computer calculations to solve the carbon dating problem for the Shroud. He organized a four-day international conference on the Shroud in 2017. His many papers on the Shroud are available on the research page of his website Shroud Research Network - RESEARCH. His videos are on https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rucker+shroud.
++++++++++++++++++++++\
I. Terry Sampson, have emailed Robert A. Rucker, informing him of the Catholic Herald and The Telegraph articles about Cicero Moraes’ interesting research and suggesting that, if he is unaware of it, “enquiring minds want to know” what he and/or other Shroud researchers have to say about it.
Interesting. That paper is perhaps the best confirmation of the reliability of the carbon dating results. Why? Because they are now proposing miracles to explain the results.
This would also appear to be a miracle that is intended to explain the serious problems with the image itself, such as the lack of deformation that would need to be there if this is an image from a cloth that covered Jesus’ face and body. You would have to have vertically collimated process to get that image. In other words, they have to explain why the image looks like a photograph instead of a contact print.
This NY Post article has a great 1:14 long video on what the image in the shroud should look like if it was the result of the shroud touching the body beneath it.
Solving the Carbon Dating Problem for the Shroud of Turin
Robert A. Rucker, MS (nuclear), July 12, 2022, revised October 28, 2023
Reviewed by Michael Kowalski, editor, British Society for the Turin Shroud (BSTS) Newsletter
That’s the article I am referring to.
Rucker’s article seems to have the answers you are looking for. It was a miracle, a sudden burst of vertically collimated neutrinos [neutrons, actually].
That’s fine. I’m trying to keep this as objective and impersonal as possible. I’m hoping there is enough mutual respect that we can agree to disagree while explaining where we are coming from.
I agree. The supernatural neutron burst is an attempt to explain the actual data. The main focus of the paper was on carbon dating where the neutron burst would create 14C directly in the shroud. It also mentions the neutron burst being involved in creating the actual image:
Since they are vertically collimated (i.e. all exiting the body in parallel and exactly vertical from a lying position) that would explain why there aren’t the deformations that would be there if the image was from actual contact. Without the collimation the neutrons would be exiting the body in every direction and we would be back to a deformed image. It also has the supernatural neutron burst pushing clotted blood off of the body and onto the shroud.
Needless to say, there are going to be a wide range of opinions on how convincing this proposal is. I will say the paper gives off some ID/YEC vibes:
“I will say the paper gives off some ID/YEC vibes.” And that’s why there’s little to no profit in discussing the Shroud with nay-sayers. Eventually, the discussion evokes name-calling if someone doesn’t walk away early.
I don’t recall them using the word “supernatural”. The paper tackled several different oddities and noted a single mechanism that would explain them.
If I used that, I’d have to call Einstein’s first papers on relativity non-scientific.
To assume that space is smooth/flat, and then use that assumption to prove relativity wrong, is circular reasoning.
Happily some people ignored the circularity of their colleagues and went ahead to test the idea.
In this case, the question is if there is a way to achieve a vertically collimated burst of protons and neutrons, and if so, to test the hypothesis.
And it doesn’t matter that:
since if such vertical collimation of a radiation burst can be achieved, then this is testable.
Something weird going on with that post addressed to me – I’ve seen it happen before and am hoping to develop a hypothesis about it.
Anyway, yeah – I don’t see the “ID/YEC vibes”, I see a hypothesis that explains several phenomena at once and thus begs to be tested.
Too bad we don’t know where the original burial site is and have access to it – if the hypothesis works, it would be informative to test the rock above and below where the body was.