Never take brittle believer theists’ pointless rhetoric. Especially when they conspire together.
Claiming not to have enough time or expertise to evaluate something is not an excuse for posting unsolicited links to articles you haven’t read.
1 Like
And whoever it is, it’s not Jesus.
Was Jesus buried according to the custom of his day? Probably.
Does the description above accurately describe the burial customs of Jesus’ day?
Probably
Does the Shroud of Turin fit the description of the burial customs of Jesus’ day and likely of Jesus’ burial?
No.
The Shroud has been studied for centuries. I doubt that it is what it is purported to be. But it has made a lot of money as an interesting curiosity for a long time. Religion takes another Capitalistic turn.
The more important question for me is whether it helps me with my faith at all - even if it can be shown to have been Jesus’ shroud. No. It doesn’t. It’s a diversion like so many other things.
A shroud doesn’t help me do the much harder work of obedience and faith. In fact the Shroud, or any other such artifact, just adds to lingering doubt. What if this thing I’ve relied on is eventually shown to be a fraud? Then what?
We don’t need it.
1 Like
I don’t think Calvin was an expert on ancient Jewish burial practices but I don’t think those who accept the shroud of Turin have any issues with what John narrates. The linens described in John 20:7 could have simply overlapped. The synoptics suggest a large cloth, Or the strips could be used to secure a larger fabric. That one was carefully folded (John20:7) implies the empty tomb wasn’t a hasty retreat but a planned event. And when the disciples see the body of their Lord is missing, is their first action going to be taking a microscope to the shroud and linens that wrapped his body looking for a face-print?
I would question Nicodemus and his kingly 75lb of spices used to anoint the body of Jesus in John 19: “Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs.”
Normal Jews were wrapped with 75lbs of myrrh and aloes? This was not the custom of the day. Maybe for kings.
Not to mention this does not show up in the other gospels (Calvin likes arguing from silence) In Mark, Joseph also is only recorded as doing the bare minimum for the corpse of Jesus (tying up his body in the linen) and placing it in a tomb. Nothing about washing the body, annointing, etc. We could surmise the account is abbreviated or time constraints didn’t allow (like a good concordant inerrancy advocate) but this may be better explained by an earlier scene in Mark. Raymond Brown writes:
At Bethany Mark 14:8 had Jesus’ body anointed by a woman beforehand for burial, and this was proleptic precisely because Mark had no tradition of an anointing (or of other kind acts) done for Jesus’ body after his death. The anointing at Bethany before the passion was the only item appropriate to an honorable burial that the Marcan Jesus is said to have received; and Mark’s audience would have been expected to remember it since ‘’'Wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her."
Mark has solved Jesus’s lack of proper anointing.
Brown also writes: By the little they narrate about Joseph’s actions, the evangelists (even those who make him a disciple of Jesus) give an impression of an expeditious burial without frills. Joseph requests the body of Jesus from Pilate; the request is granted; Joseph takes the body, wraps it with cloth(s), and places it in a tomb (nearby). No mention is made of washing the body or anointing it immediately before burial. Only as the basic account is modified in the later Gospels under the impact of the increasing ennoblement of Joseph is it stated that the cloth was clean white, that the body was washed (GPet), that there were spices (John: but even then, no anointing), and that the tomb was new and even Joseph’s own. While the need for haste was certainly a motive for the frugality of the burial in the basic account, such a burial also matches the account’s portrait of Joseph: one who was motivated by God’s rule (kingdom) expressed in the law that the crucified should be taken down and buried before sunset, but one who at this stage had no reason to honor the condemned criminal.
John knows Mary had company with her (we) but he only mentions her and nothing about spices with the women like the synoptics.
It seems that like the guards at the tomb, John’s 75lbs of spice may be a creative addition to the basic passion narrative. Calvin takes the four gospels largely at their word here as far as I am aware–guards at the tomb and all. I’m not sure I would call Jesus’s burial normal – at least not for custom Jews who lost a family member in normal circumstances. Jesus was crucified near Passover in a city bustling with millions of visitors overr the event, with other criminals who have to be buried as well to satisfy jewish sensibilities. Most likely this was in a common tomb–with the Sabbath looming and was done in a rapid fashion.
The very sober NT scholar Mark Goodacre (How Empty Was the Tomb? [JSNT 2022]) has argued Jesus would have been buried in a tomb that held multiple chambers for bodies. It seems the author of Mark knows this: “See the place where they laid him.” That is a weird comment if the tomb was single occupancy. Most people miss it because they think the gospel accounts are what a documentary crew with a video camera following the events would have seen. Here is what Goodacre writes:
The difficulty with standard approaches to these narratives is that scholars seldom discipline their imaginations by looking at real first-century tombs in Jerusalem. It is in some ways unsurprising given that the majority of excavations of tombs in Jerusalem have happened since 1945, many over the last 30 to 40 years, and a good number of these are simply accidental discoveries that have resulted from new building projects, like the discovery of the Talpiot Tombs in 1980 and 1981. Moreover, the indispensable study of Jerusalem’s necropolis by Amos Kloner and Boaz Zissu appeared as recently as 2007 (Kloner and Zissu 2007), and Rachel Hachlilia’s definitive work on Jewish funerary customs, practices and rites was published just two years earlier (Hachlili 2005), and New Testament scholars are still catching up. . . .The key point that emerges from the study of Jerusalem’s necropolis is that rock-cut tombs of the kind mentioned in the gospels are always multi-person tombs. The tombs house families. They contain multiple bodies and multiple ossuaries. They never appear to have been built to contain just one body.
And this is where apologetical additions to Mark (who wrote first and was copied by the others) probably comes in: Goodacre says, “Apologetic anxiety leads to the characterization of the tomb as “new” (Matthew and John), “in which no one had been laid” (Luke and John), but it is possible that the appearance of Mark’s young man on the right is significant.” We wouldn’t want Jesus’s body confused with somone elses and hence the “newness” of the tomb being introduced to Mark’s version. This angel on the right in Mark may also be a subtle hint to the newness of the tomb since that is where burial would have started from. But a great deal of mental gymnastics would be needed to reconcile all these accounts.
For me, multiple pieces of linen are not inconsistent with the shroud since they can overlap and there really is no reason to presume the disciples would have been thinking about anything else but where is the body of Jesus.
If I were a literalist I would have no issue with Jesus being wrapped in a large cloth, his head was wrapped with a separate piece of cloth and then strips secured it all together. And I am guessing many shroud proponents might also believe the Sudarium of Oviedo is authentic as well.
I wouldn’t use the shroud as evidence to base my faith on. But if God has led people to salvation through it, who am I to disagree? Your “we don’t need it” is very shortsighted. I agree, Christianity doesn’t fall if the shroud is a medieval forgery but it has monumental importance to many people and it has changed lives.
But if the Shroud is what its proponents claim, what you call “a source of lingering doubt,” is a supernatural miracle from God and a deeply spiritual physical relic connecting people to their Lord and savior at the penultimate moment of human history.
As an example, for someone it might be just dirt on the ground, but I greatly desire one day to take a trip and walk in the same places Jesus did. That would be a remarkably spiritual experience for me. I get flooded with emotions just thinking about sharing the same physical space as my Lord and savior. To be in the same room with the burial cloth his body was wrapped in would be flooring to me. I’d love to believe the Shroud was authentic.
And I suppose we could just look at the resurrection narratives as stories that “adds to lingering doubt.” Sure, the shroud isn’t as basic to Christianity as the resurrection, but we can and do doubt all aspect of our faith. The Shroud isn’t special on this front and both Calvin’s literalism and @rsewell fallacious thinking do not demonstrate that history alone rules out the shroud. They demonstrate such individuals hav already chosen to reject the shroud and are bending history to their favor after the fact.
Vinnie
The claim that this image was put on the cloth by a magical resurrection event seems rather far fetched to me. The finding of The forensic expert Walter McCrone (Wikipedia) looks more believable to me.
The microscopist and forensic expert Walter McCrone found, based on his examination of samples taken in 1978 from the surface of the shroud using adhesive tape, that the image on the shroud had been painted with a dilute solution of red ochre pigment in a gelatin medium. McCrone also found that the apparent bloodstains were painted with vermilion pigment, also in a gelatin medium
I do NOT think that this necessarily means the shroud was a fraud or scam. Sometimes what begins as a mere artistic endeavor gets miscarried as the original intentions get swept away by the enthusiasm of other people with different motivations. Which is not to say that the outright fraud hypothesis is without merit.
1 Like
But for what purpose?
There seems little benefit to the perpetrator other than a “gotcha”
Richard
What is the shroud of Turin? It’s an artifact whose provenance could probably be much better clarified if the Vatican would bother to release more samples for testing.
Yet even if further, definitive testing on the cloth was performed there will always be a cottage industry of people speculating about ‘neutron bombardment’ and other miraculous physicochemical events that are alleged byproducts of the resurrection event and which could affect the measurement.
1 Like
……..
A lot of people appeal to McCrone:
I find the comments here from BAR worth reading. In one of the comments quoted more extensively below, this show up:
>McCrone’s chief claim to notoriety, his discovery that Yale University’s “Vinland Map” is a late forgery, has now been refuted; and another of his discoveries, relating to a Rembrandt painting, has been seriously challenged. In all three of these controversies, McCrone has maintained that he alone in confrontation with teams of scientists is right.
McCrone is a primary proponent of the shroud being a late painting. But he is only one expert, far from fallible and challenged by many others. Here is a snippet from him in the BAR comments linked above:
And here is a response to McCrone by an archaeological chemist and professor:
And here is Dr Mattingly, professor of microbiology who person questions the radiocarbon dating (he is not a “shroudie”)
It seems a lot of people in shroud debates just jump on the first piece of evidence that tells them what they want to hear (pro or con). I’m guilty in the past of dismissing it hastily on such grounds (just another BS relic). On this forum I suspect viewing it as a forgery or medieval painting is just serving as internal and emotional validation of their normal skepticism of anything supernatural–as opposed to doing tens if not hundreds of hours of reading, research and careful investigation. I’d guess the certain tone of some here is probably vastly disproportionate to the amount of time they have spent studying this.
Vinnie
I remember someone saying that the shroud image was most compatible with a medieval European statue, not a typical Jewish man of 30 AD. and I agree.
2 Likes
Ever heard the phrase “lying for Jesus?” Some people in the past have convinced themselves that the end justifies the means, and in service to God something not quite honest is nevertheless justified.
I am reminded of Joseph Smith and his claims about golden plates, which nobody has seen. Was this some real spiritual experience denied any objective evidence to demonstrate the truth of it, or was this another example of fraud (whether using religion for power or religiously motivated deception)?
For another example… there is L Ron Hubbard’s rather frank demonstration of how you can create a religion based on just about anything. While an atheist tends to see this as an example of human naivety, I would see it as an example profound human need.
2 Likes
Prompt to ChatGPT: “Name one person, other than Walter McCrone, who claims that his or her analysis of the Shroud or anything taken from the Shroud of Turin was, in fact, a paint or paint-like medium?”
ChatGPT response: “Short answer: as far as the people who actually analyzed Shroud material, you can’t name one. It really is just McCrone.
-
McCrone is the only scientist on record who both
-
examined actual Shroud fibers/tape samples himself and
-
personally claimed the image and “blood” are made of artist’s pigments in a collagen/tempera medium (red ochre and vermilion). (Wikipedia)
-
-
Everyone else who talks about “paint” either
-
is just repeating McCrone’s claim (often with that boilerplate line about “further proved the image was painted twice”), (McCrone Research Institute)
-
or proposes some artistic or bas-relief mechanism without having tested Shroud samples chemically (e.g., Nickell’s rubbing experiments, Garlaschelli’s replica, Moraes’ 3-D modeling). (Wikipedia)
-
-
The people who did run independent chemical tests on the same STURP tapes (Heller & Adler, Rogers, etc.) all explicitly rejected a pigment/paint explanation for the body image, and in Heller/Adler’s case, argued affirmatively for real blood. (Wikipedia)
So if the requirement is:
“someone who, based on their own analysis of Shroud material, concluded ‘this is paint or a paint-like medium’,”
the honest answer is: no one besides Walter McCrone.”
Followup prompt to ChatGPT: “And exactly where did McCrone get his Shroud fibers/tape samples?”
ChatGPT response: “McCrone never took samples from the cloth himself.
He got STURP’s sticky-tape samples, and only because Ray Rogers (STURP chemist) sent them to him.
Here is the exact chain:
1. The samples were taken from the Shroud on 8 October 1978
-
Max Frei and STURP used 3M “Magic” Scotch sticky tape pressed onto the cloth, then lifted off with surface fibers, particles, and debris embedded in the adhesive.
-
These were sealed, labeled, and placed under STURP custody.
2. Rogers gave a subset to McCrone
-
Ray Rogers (STURP’s lead thermochemist) was the custodian of the tapes after 1978.
-
He sent McCrone a selection of the lifted-fiber tapes so that McCrone, as an early consultant, could perform microscopy and chemical tests.
3. McCrone’s access was entirely dependent on STURP
-
McCrone never had direct access to the Shroud in Turin.
-
His entire analysis was done on tiny particles and surface fibers captured on Rogers’ 1978 sticky tapes.
4. STURP later removed him from the team
- When McCrone concluded “paint,” STURP scientists reviewed his methods, rejected his interpretation, and revoked his access to further material.
Summary (one sentence):
Walter McCrone’s Shroud fibers came only from the 1978 STURP sticky-tape samples that Ray Rogers physically sent to him.”
And finally, my prompt to ChatGPT: “How many and who actually examined the Shroud, Shroud fibers, and tape samples and then reported that their analysis was that no known paint or paint-like medium was on the Shroud?”
ChatGPT response: “Short version:
At least four named scientists who directly worked on the Shroud or the STURP tape samples explicitly reported “no pigments/paints/dyes” as the cause of the image, and their work underlies the entire STURP team’s official 1981 “no paint” conclusion.
The four clearest individual voices
All of these actually examined the cloth and/or STURP sticky-tape fibers and then explicitly ruled out paint/pigment as the image mechanism:
-
John H. Heller (M.D.)
Co-author of “A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin.”“There is no chemical evidence for the application of any pigments, stains, or dyes on the cloth to produce the image found thereon.” (shroud.com)
-
Alan D. Adler (chemist, porphyrin specialist)
Co-author with Heller on the same paper and on “Blood on the Shroud of Turin,” concluding the image is not produced by pigments, but by a chemical modification of the linen surface. (shroud.com) -
Raymond N. Rogers (Los Alamos chemist, STURP member)
Examined the STURP tapes and additional fibers; in his FAQ and later work he states that no inorganic pigment at appropriate concentration is present and that the image was not painted with pigments or binders. (shroud.com) -
Samuel F. Pellicori (optical physicist, STURP)
In “Spectral Properties of the Shroud of Turin” he reports UV–visible measurements on the cloth and concludes:“The observations eliminate the possibility that the body image is due to pigments or dyes applied to the linen.” (shroud.com)
The group conclusion (STURP as a whole)
On top of these individual papers, the STURP team as a whole (roughly 2–3 dozen scientists) issued its 1981 summary after examining the cloth and the tape-lifted fibers:
“No pigments, paints, dyes or stains have been found on the fibrils. X-ray, fluorescence and microchemistry on the fibrils preclude the possibility of paint being used as a method for creating the image.” (shroud.com)
That statement is attributed to the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) itself, i.e., the full scientific team that examined the cloth in 1978. (Wikipedia)
So, contrasted with one analyst (McCrone) who claimed “it’s paint,” you have:
-
At least four named scientists (Heller, Adler, Rogers, Pellicori) who directly handled/analyzed Shroud fibers or cloth and published explicit “no-paint/no-pigment” conclusions, plus
-
The entire STURP team formally stating “no pigments, paints, dyes or stains” are responsible for the image.”
1 Like
One wonders if the juice is worth the squeeze, given that all the juice remains hypothetical at this point.
2 Likes
Don’t you have to squeeze first and examine what comes out to know if it’s hypothetical (non liquet), well evidenced or most likely false? Defaulting to skepticism might be part of the problem.
Vinnie
While I’m on the topic of “Paint on the Shroud”, Cicero Moraes, is a Brazilian 3D designer specializing in forensic facial reconstruction, which he uses to recreate faces of historical figures, saints, and archaeological remains.
According too Moraes’ FaceBook page:
Moraes’ article, Image Formation on the Holy Shroud—A Digital 3D Approach, “investigates the origin of the image imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, a linen artifact displaying the frontal and dorsal figures of an adult man with marks of physical violence, using 3D digital simulations. Through free and open-source software, parametric modeling of a human body, fabric dynamics simulation, and contact area mapping were performed. Two scenarios were compared: the projection of a three-dimensional human model and that of a low-relief model. The results demonstrate that the contact pattern generated by the low-relief model is more compatible with the Shroud’s image, showing less anatomical distortion and greater fidelity to the observed contours, while the projection of a 3D body results in a significantly distorted image. The accessible and replicable methodology suggests that the Shroud’s image is more consistent with an artistic low-relief representation than with the direct imprint of a real human body, supporting hypotheses of its origin as a medieval work of art.”
Moraes study concludes that “the image is more consistent with an artistic low-relef representation than with the direct imprint of a real human body, …” Great work, Cicero. Now tell us how you think that artistic low-relief representation was accomplished with no paint or paint-like medium.
1 Like
Seems a bit vague. We can then invoke a person lying for anything at any time we want since it happened other times? Maybe McCrone is being fraudulent and thinks the ends justify the means? You could ask to what end? And I could just be vague and not really give one or make one up within the realm of logical possibility and say others have lied or tried to desperately deny the supernatural. This line of thinking doesn’t seem profitable.
I think Richard’s question comes from the idea that the first known owner did not publicly disclose its existence or try to profit from it. According to Wiki:
Whatever may have been the true story behind the Shroud’s acquisition, evidently during his lifetime Charny chose not to say anything about this, nor even publicly disclose its existence, let alone try to profit from it. It really doesn’t seem to fit here.
Vinnie
Great! May not be long before the folks over at PeacefulScience.org are linking to Biologos’ juice for more entertaining results.
Meanwhile, watch how anti-Shroudies take on a neo-atheistic tone and ferver: i.e. “I don’t believe in the authenticity of the Shroud and I don’t want you to, either.”