Until about 3 years after I submitted to Christ in 2009 I had always treated the Shroud of Turin as some kind of medieval forgery and not the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. Circa 1988 it had been announced that the radioactive carbon 14 dating put the origin of the Shroud to around the 14th century and this more less settled it for me.
Before becoming a Christian I had been skeptical
about the reality of the Resurrection. Even
after looking at the evidence for the Resurrection, which I found wiped out the objections
of the skeptics , and coming to believe in the historical reality of a supernatural Resurrection (as supernatural as the Big Bang, in which space-time-energy emerged from a fraction of a pinpoint to give us life, the universe and everything) I still dismissed the Shroud as a hoax or a
confidence trick, as many Christians do today. In fact I was concerned that if
it was a fraud it would only help to discredit the overall case for a
Resurrection in the public mind, given the natural skepticism of some scientists
who tend to be treated as guardians of truth, which they should indeed be as regards the logically accessible aspects of reality.
Recent YouTube presentations by respected scholarly teams (sindonologists) are making it difficult to ignore that this cloth defies natural laws by virtue of the unprecedented and unequalled nature of the image. It is most definitely not a forgery and I even saw a BBC article by Philip Ball, the ex-editor of Nature, confessing to its extraordinary properties.
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation24.html
http://www.historian.net/shroud.htm
This could be world shattering for many and force those denying the resurrection on the grounds of conspiracy theories - which start from the erroneous assumption that the resurrection could not have happened- to reconsider their position.
see also
The Shroud of Turin, Authenticated Again
RADIOMETRIC DATING CORRECTED
The initial carbon dating exercise in the 1980s gave dates
around 1400 years after the Crucifixion (33 AD), which led most people to
dismiss the Shroud as a medieval fake. The dating had been carried out by a
reputable international team; but since then the date has been thrown into doubt because the dating process used a sample containing threads used by medieval nuns to repair the cloth.
In recent years it has been proposed that an earthquake which is fairly reliably known to have taken place in 33 AD, could have generated a neutron flux which would have affected the dating results by increasing the amount of C14 due to neutron bombardment of the C12 nucleus (the more C14 in the sample the younger it would appear to be). The latest date estimate puts the time of the cloth centrally within an error bar of several hundred years spanning the 33 AD date. Pollen analysis also backs this up. By itself this would not prove that the Shroud was the one that en-wrapped Jesus but the date is certainly much earlier than medieval and the Crucifixion date lies well within the error spread.
In recent years it has been proposed that an earthquake which is fairly reliably known to have taken place in 33 AD, could have generated a neutron flux which would have affected the dating results by increasing the amount of C14 due to neutron bombardment of the C12 nucleus (the more C14 in the sample the younger it would appear to be). The latest date estimate puts the time of the cloth centrally within an error bar of several hundred years spanning the 33 AD date. Pollen analysis also backs this up. By itself this would not prove that the Shroud was the one that en-wrapped Jesus but the date is certainly much earlier than medieval and the Crucifixion date lies well within the error spread.
BLOOD
The trauma caused by the Crucifixion as described in the
Gospels would have affected the physical nature of the blood emanating from the
wounds caused. This is confirmed by analysis of the blood stains on the cloth.
Moreover, the positions of the stains clearly correspond to the Crucifixion
accounts. The evidence for this is startling in its detail. E.g. the spear wound indicated on the cloth is in forensic agreement with the John 19:34 account; the bloodstains on the head are clearly from a cap or crown of thorns as described in John 19:2.; 120 scourge marks on the body, front and back indicate about 40 lashes from a three-thronged whip, which was the standard whipping procedure adopted by the Romans at the time.
The colour of the blood stains is red. Normally one would expect it to be black after such a long period but in fact a body having undergone the trauma to which Jesus was subject would have chemically altered blood that would stay red , and containing bilirubin, and this is precisely what the Shroud stains exhibit. The elevated levels of the bilirubin actually indicate the traumatic process of the Crucifixion as described in the Bible.
The colour of the blood stains is red. Normally one would expect it to be black after such a long period but in fact a body having undergone the trauma to which Jesus was subject would have chemically altered blood that would stay red , and containing bilirubin, and this is precisely what the Shroud stains exhibit. The elevated levels of the bilirubin actually indicate the traumatic process of the Crucifixion as described in the Bible.
WRISTS NOT PALMS NAILED
Biomechanical science indicates that a body pinned to a cross by nails through the palms could not bear the weight of the body – it must have been through the wrists, which is just what the image shows. The traditional belief was that the nails had been hammered through the palms, so any attempt at forgery would have tried to simulate this. All the iconography of the time indicated nails through the palms.CHEEK BRUISES
The image shows marks indicating a blow to the cheek as described in John 18:22: "And when he had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand." As with most of the image features discussed these were invisible before the technology of the 20th century and there is no way anyone would have any motive for forging them, even if someone in medieval Europe had technology more advanced than any known or even envisaged today.
IMAGE FORMATION
The image was formed by a process which no team of
scientists has been able to reproduce over the last several decades, possibly one involving high energy
radiation. It was not produced by any kind of pigmentation. One singular
characteristic of the image is that it was in the form of a negative which comes out as a
positive on a photographic negative, much to the astonishment of Secundo Pia when he
developed his two glass plates in 1898 when the Shroud was first photographed. In fact as photography advanced the
image became increasingly clear. Without the invention of photography no one
would ever have seen the image at all.
[ In addition to the evidence above there is a close correspondence to the results emerging from an investigation of what is probably the tomb of Christ and the head cloth used after the Crucifixion. New evidence on this subject is available and I hope to insert a link to it later.]
Very advanced technology has been applied to the Shroud,
including the VP-8 Image Analyzer which NASA used to construct three
dimensional images from ordinary photographs of, for instance, the moon’s
surface taken from two different angles. When applied to the Turin Shroud image
this has somehow yielded a 3D image of Jesus Christ that does not distort as it
rotates. At this time I do not know the physics and mathematics behind this and believe there are aspects to this process which nobody understands.
The information extraction power of the VP-8 enabled experts
to interpolate the presence of a lepton, a coin used at the time of Pontius
Pilate, placed in each eye socket. It had been customary to do this. Even part of the
inscription round the edge of the coin was determined and found to correspond to that used on the lepton at the time of Pilate.
Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the image is that the markings penetrate barely a fibre's thickness down into the cloth, on both sides. Nobody has been able to produce such an image using any technology known to man. For reasons that at this time I do not understand it has been seriously proposed that the only possible explanation of this and other aspects of the image lies in the same theoretical domain as black holes and event horizons.
The proposal is that information from Christ at the moment of death passed into the entire universe instantaneously and that a new universe and a new humanity is in the process of being created. (NB: modern physics posits that any particle in the universe can instantaneously interact by quantum entanglement with any other particle in the universe, since at the start of the Big Bang every particle was confined to the same quantum space .)
A whole team of scientists is involved at both a theoretical and an experimental level. See this video by a particle physicist Dr Isabel Piczec
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbl4EmoH_jg
QUANTUM COSMIC POSSIBILITIES
There is one aspect of the Shroud image which is so enormous in its implication for the human race and the entire universe that I am almost hesitant to mention it for fear that it will immediately label me as a crank in many people's eyes.Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the image is that the markings penetrate barely a fibre's thickness down into the cloth, on both sides. Nobody has been able to produce such an image using any technology known to man. For reasons that at this time I do not understand it has been seriously proposed that the only possible explanation of this and other aspects of the image lies in the same theoretical domain as black holes and event horizons.
The proposal is that information from Christ at the moment of death passed into the entire universe instantaneously and that a new universe and a new humanity is in the process of being created. (NB: modern physics posits that any particle in the universe can instantaneously interact by quantum entanglement with any other particle in the universe, since at the start of the Big Bang every particle was confined to the same quantum space .)
A whole team of scientists is involved at both a theoretical and an experimental level. See this video by a particle physicist Dr Isabel Piczec
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbl4EmoH_jg
PRE-MEDIEVAL HISTORY
How did the Shroud
get from Jerusalem
to Turin, in Italy?
Christian relics were frequently transported for safety because of
Islamic and other
attacks prior to the Crusades. The Moslem conquerors had reached Spain,
having violently subjugated 2/3 of the Christian world (hence the
Crusades),
by the time of the Shroud’s final resting place in Turin,
Italy. Before the Moslems there were still many enemies of
Christianity, such as the Romans before Constantine, the non-Messianic
Jews and the Vandals. So it is not
surprising that the cloth did not begin to be openly talked or written
about
until it was safe.
I am in no way an expert on all this so let me refer you to
some of the sites I came across in putting together the above:
There is also an iPhone app called Shroud 2.0 which pulls
together a lot of evidence, as well as innumerable books.
Apart from online sources such as the above I used this book
Apart from online sources such as the above I used this book
So what if the shroud is indeed genuine, as looks
increasingly likely?
It will add to the already substantial evidence for the
reality of the Resurrection event which changed history and the meaning of which is still being hotly discussed
and argued about 2000 years later after huge moral, social, artistic, scientific and technological upheavals made in its wake.
There is no doubt in the mind of any genuine believer that
the Resurrection is as real as the other supernatural event which came to light
only a few decades ago: the creation of space and time from existential
nothingness 13.8 billion years ago, from behind an event horizon, i.e. the Big Bang, an occurrence for which the
evidence has been steadily mounting since the 1920s.
The argument must at some point shift from whether there was a Resurrection to its deep significance for humanity. Forget religion. The implications could totally shatter our view of reality if the quantum aspects become widely accepted since it casts light on every aspect of life of every person on the planet as well as all of life and every particle in the universe.
So watch this space.
J.LSears
cosmik.jo@gmail.com
cosmik.jo@gmail.com
