Turin Shroud , reloaded.

[blobrana]

Hum,
i noticed that the Turin Shroud has been put back into the news again, with the discovery of a second ghostly image of a man's face on the back of the linen.

Cheese! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/europe/3621931.stm)

Setting aside the religious meaning, the cloth has been dated from some time between 1260 and 1390AD, and was one of the first photographs (imho).

BTW Leonardo da Vinci was around too late for the work to be ascribed to him (1452-1519).

[bloodline]

People will do anything to try and exhonorate this obvious fake.

The Photo theory is a good one, and is the most likely explaination of it.

I don't even think the image is meant to be of "Christ", but is in fact a family "photo" of a departed relative, in a "christ" like pose as was the fasion at the time.

Carbon dating is rarely wrong, especially when the tests were made 10 years apart.

If anybody stil thinks it is the shroud of Jesus... then I've got one of his fingers, genuine relic, for sale only £100 (hurry, I've only got 20 left).

[Karlos]

@bloodline

Actually all forms of radiological dating have accuracy problems simply based on the nature of exponential decay. If you consider the error in the activity measurement itself and extrapolate that back to time you get quite some variance depending on the isotope you are dating.

For rocks and such, most dating uses long isotope decay which is ideal for dating rocks to billions of years.

Radiocarbon based on C14 has t 1/2 or around 5000 years, which is great for determining the age of undisturbed organic matter upto tens of milennia.

Unfortunately, something like the turin shroud has been exposed to enough fresh carbon 14 during its existance to create errors in it's dating. It was exposed to soot from fires, residues of people handling it etc. etc. This must complicate the estimation of it's true age.

I'm not saying its real or not (personally I don't think its genuine either), just that for the record, radiocarbon dating of objects like this one are a lot tricker to perform than you imply.

[KennyR]

Apparently, the carbon dating cannot be replied upon because the shroud has been handled a great deal, especially in the medieval age. It's a great possibility that skin cells, finger grease, etc. produced a spurious result. There were also some other very interesting scientific revelations about the shroud. I wish I can remember the documentary it was on, I thought Horizon but it's not. Still, it was a fairly reliable one (and not a channel 5 'documentary').

I still don't think it's real, though. The biggest reason is that the shroud portrays a man with long hair. As a hebrew in the first century, long hair on men was a tabboo: a man with long hair might as well have declared himself openly homosexual and get stoned to death. Jesus certainly did not have long hair. He had short, curly, Jewish hair and a beard and looked like the Hebrew he was. Not like our Romanised/Westernised ideal of him, which is inherently racist.

[Karlos]

@Kenny

Yep, thats what I meant - the turin shroud is likely chock a block with "recent" carbon 14 from all the manhandling.

As for the unusual properties, one of them that I can recall is that the "mage is nothing like a photograph. That is, the lighter and darker images do not correspond to a rendering of light hitting a 3D surface.

Instead, the intensity of the markings on the shroud can be mapped (on computer) to a relief, the darker the staining, the higher the elevation relative to the background "unstained" level.

When you do this, what you obtain is a 3D mapping of a human face. More startlingly, the darkness/elevation mapping required to produce this 3D imagerly is fairly linear.

Regardless of it's origins, this is a fascinating property and it raises the question that even if it is a medieval fabrication, how was this effect produced?

[pieter]

If that rag is real I will gladly eat the whole damn thing!!!!

It's as real as Jesus or Satan or The Virgin Birth and Relligion or......... LOL :lol: :-P :-D :-) :lol: 8-)


Christians believe in the Christ.... why not this crap!?

God help us - so to speak.

[MAD]

Hoya!

Yep, I saw this documentary recently. It was quite interesting.

They did lots of experiments to explain the way the shroud has been created. It is considered as the very first "photograph".
Would have been easier to use a Polaroid though... ;-)

Be funky

M A D

[Cymric]

Karlos wrote:
Unfortunately, something like the turin shroud has been exposed to enough fresh carbon 14 during its existance to create errors in it's dating. It was exposed to soot from fires, residues of people handling it etc. etc. This must complicate the estimation of it's true age.
While you are right that there is some uncertainty in the shroud's age because of the handling, this is no way affects the order of magnitude of the error thus made. You have to take into account that the C-14 in the fibres of the shroud is not subject to handling and atmospheric fluctuations. I think I read an article from the man who performed the final and definitive analyses: he concluded that the shroud was late Medieval in origin, and that there was no evidence whatsoever that extensive handling had skewed its age. Not even the fire which partially burnt the shroud could have taken away or introduced enough C-14 to make this happen. In fact, he calculated that in order to make the shroud originate from the first century, it should have been 20 or so times heavier then than it is today. In other words, not possible.

The shroud has been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be a fake; no amount of 'extra images' or 'new insights' will change that. But as far as relics go, it's a beautiful fake.

[cecilia]

But as far as relics go, it's a beautiful fake.as someone who has made props for films and commercials, i can certainly appreciate a well made fake!
:-D

[iamaboringperson]

Not like our Romanised/Westernised ideal of him, which is inherently racist.I basically agree with what you wrote about his most probable appearance. However, I am curious to know why you see the white dude with long hair pics as racist?

:-?

[Karlos]

@Cymric

I wasn't implying that the manhandling totally invalidated the dating, just that it introduced a much wider margin of error than is usually the case for the timespan dated.

Whilst I've seen no verification of the claim, there are also claims that the samples analysed actually came from an area of the cloth later shown to be part of the post-fire restoration and hence would naturally date to that time.

Regardless of this, I'm personally much more interested in the properties of the image other than when it dates to.

There is supposedly no other known image in art history that is rendered in quite the same way. The intensity forms a relief map that can be shown 3 dimensionally on a computer. The best suggestions are that the distance between the cloth of the shround and the surface of who/whatever it covered determined the intensity of the markings.

[pieter]

iamaboringperson wrote:
Not like our Romanised/Westernised ideal of him, which is inherently racist.I basically agree with what you wrote about his most probable appearance. However, I am curious to know why you see the white dude with long hair pics as racist?

:-?

Are you????

Perhaps because it simply ignores what he really must have looked like AND for projecting the white man as the image of the divine.

oops.... sorry - not my place to answer, but {bleep}, wakey wakey!!!!

In any case.... It's {bleep} so it doesn't matter, hey?

[whabang]

blobrana wrote:
Hum,
i noticed that the Turin Shroud has been put back into the news again, with the discovery of a second ghostly image of a man's face on the back of the linen.

Cheese! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/europe/3621931.stm)

Setting aside the religious meaning, the cloth has been dated from some time between 1260 and 1390AD, and was one of the first photographs (imho).

BTW Leonardo da Vinci was around too late for the work to be ascribed to him (1452-1519).


Perhaps they just recycled it! :-D

[mikeymike]

The main reason I can think of about why the turin shroud is a fake is this - since when does a cloth over someone for three days have a detailed imprint of any part of their body? What would cause the marking of the material to last for 2000 years?

Ok, if the guy decomposed in there, then you might possibly get a vague body outline because of all the chemicals that 'get produced' in the process, but no. Allegedly Jesus was dead for three days.

Another example - supposing you were to leave a sweaty, used t-shirt around for archeologists to find 2000 years later, would the sweat patches still be tracable, and a detailed outline of your armpits? Considering that it is bacteria that directly cause sweat to degrade into causing BO, the supposed image would also have degraded.

[Karlos]

@Mikeymike

Very true. But this is probably why those who believe in it's authenticity claim it is miraculous - what sort of process could possibly have made those marks? Especially given the way they are mapped. I've seen the 3D projections made from it and it is quite remarkable. No known natural process would encode this "relief" information into the cloth, but no known artistic process would either (there is no other example in art history). Various attempts to recreate the effect using a wide array of techniques haven't produced anything resembling it.

Furthermore (IIRC), chemical analysis of the material hasn't shown it to be any known paint or dye.

I'm perfectly prepared to accept that it dates back only to the middle ages, but even as a forgery, as Cymric says, it's beautiful and as far as I'm concerned still very mysterious. Who was it and how was the image formed?

[bloodline]

Karlos wrote:
@Mikeymike

Very true. But this is probably why those who believe in it's authenticity claim it is miraculous - what sort of process could possibly have made those marks? Especially given the way they are mapped. I've seen the 3D projections made from it and it is quite remarkable. No known natural process would encode this "relief" information into the cloth, but no known artistic process would either (there is no other example in art history). Various attempts to recreate the effect using a wide array of techniques haven't produced anything resembling it.

Furthermore (IIRC), chemical analysis of the material hasn't shown it to be any known paint or dye.

I'm perfectly prepared to accept that it dates back only to the middle ages, but even as a forgery, as Cymric says, it's beautiful and as far as I'm concerned still very mysterious. Who was it and how was the image formed?

I'm sure if we were allowed a proper analysis of the cloth rather than the ocational, carefully selected inspections that the church allow, we would have a clear understanding of what it is. I think we would be less that impressed if we did actually find out how it was made.


I remember looking at those releif maps, and something struck me about them... It made me smile at the time, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was :-(

[mikeymike]

@Mikeymike

Very true. But this is probably why those who believe in it's authenticity claim it is miraculous

Mixing miracles with science, how scientific. I think the appropriate retort to anyone who seriously claims that is "you are so full of ****" :-)

[Karlos]

@mikey,

Don't shoot, I didn't say *I* thought it was a miracle :-D I am interested in it, however, especially in how it was put together.

As for mixing science and miracles, people will label anything beyond present understanding as miraculous. Show any modern technological artifact/achievement to someone from a pre industrial era and they'd conclude it was miraculous/magic whatever.

[Vincent]

mikeymike wrote:
The main reason I can think of about why the turin shroud is a fake is this - since when does a cloth over someone for three days have a detailed imprint of any part of their body? What would cause the marking of the material to last for 2000 years?
Because it was Jesus - he was a special man. The shroud was conveniently placed over him so he could leave his features on this planet for us to remember what he did for our sins! :-P


I bet it was actually King Arthur -he fainted after getting Excalibur out of the stone, someone put the shroud over him and his image stuck because he was all sweaty :-P

/me goes to make a cuppa and take some tablets

[Cymric]

Karlos wrote:
I wasn't implying that the manhandling totally invalidated the dating, just that it introduced a much wider margin of error than is usually the case for the timespan dated.Ach so... I apologize, I misunderstood your post somewhat.

[KennyR]

Anyway, the documentary also said something about certain marks on the shroud being real blood, and it was even possible to get a rhesus type for it. Apparently, it was a rare blood group found most commonly in those of Semetic race...

Also, I think the final summary was that the Turin shroud had indeed been a shroud, and that whoever was wrapped up in it had left their blood on it. The "face" is another matter, and was possibly added later.

Damn, why can't I find a link to this documentary...

[blobrana]

Hum,
Sounds possible...
Most of the marks are `burn` marks, but it seems possible to find `blood` if it were actually covering a body (rather than an image projected on to a sheet).

[i just thought - a body covered by volitile oils , that caught alight would leave those burn marks on the shroud, perhaps]


But there are a few problems i know about... the front and back images are different heights/sizes (hum, projection)
, and the head is not in proportion to the body. (mutant?)

However the image is not a typical flat projection. (wrapped)...

[So if blood was found
i wounder if we could clone our own palestinian militant?]

[MAD]

Hoya!

/me opens the Sun and see a burning image of Jordan! Let´s C14 it!!!

Disclaimer: I do not read such crap as the Sun and I HATE bimbos!!!

Be funky

M A D

[Wilse]

There is a theory that the shroud is indeed a genuine burial shroud but not that of Jesus. In keeping with the carbon dating and various other 'evidence', it's claimed to be the shroud of the head of the Knights Templar.
I think he was called Jacques de Molay, or something.

[mikeymike]

There is a theory that the shroud is indeed a genuine burial shroud but not that of Jesus.
Yeah, it was the guy next door's to Jesus's tomb :-)

[bloodline]

mikeymike wrote:
There is a theory that the shroud is indeed a genuine burial shroud but not that of Jesus.
Yeah, it was the guy next door's to Jesus's tomb :-)


Brian?

[mikeymike]

bloodline wrote:
mikeymike wrote:
There is a theory that the shroud is indeed a genuine burial shroud but not that of Jesus.
Yeah, it was the guy next door's to Jesus's tomb :-)
Brian?

Ah, I think I worked out how Jesus appeared to have risen from the grave 3 days later! They put Brian in the tomb, thinking it was Jesus, wheras Jesus was the guy who said he was Brian and got let down! The next time he was seen was 3 days later, simple!

:-)

[blobrana]

But wasn`t Brian a giant gastropod?
Jesus had to `borrow` the tomb from Joseph Arimathea...
theory has it he was born in 38 B.C., Bethlehem and died on 27 Jul 82 A.D., Glastonbury, WALES! (no tomb you see)

[Bobsonsirjonny]

There is a ledgend which claims Jesus travelled with Joseph of Amarathea, and came to these isles. Hence William Blake wrote the poem Jerusalem.

[bloodline]

Bobsonsirjonny wrote:
There is a ledgend which claims Jesus travelled with Joseph of Amarathea, and came to these isles. Hence William Blake wrote the poem Jerusalem.

Oh... don't start :-D

My great great grandfather, the noble Wyndham Lewis, upon his deathbed out-lined the familiy lineage from Jesus... :roll:

[Bobsonsirjonny]

Oh - did he?

Tell us more :-P

[bloodline]

Bobsonsirjonny wrote:
Oh - did he?

Tell us more :-P

Yes, and I believe he was quite mad (many have described him as such). Selling all the stately homes in Wales and managing to loose a family fortune of over a thousand years, I would tend to agree with them.

[Bobsonsirjonny]

He didnt happen to have anything to do with Tredegar Park did he?

Where abouts in wales. Chances are your family and some distant relative of mine in the past may have drawn swords :-D

[Tigger]

Wilse wrote:
There is a theory that the shroud is indeed a genuine burial shroud but not that of Jesus. In keeping with the carbon dating and various other 'evidence', it's claimed to be the shroud of the head of the Knights Templar.
I think he was called Jacques de Molay, or something.


The Second Messiah theory (ie the shroud image being that of the tortured leader of the Templars Jacques de Molay) is much less likely then that it is the burial shroud of christ. That theory came about because Geoffroy de Charny (a well known Templar) had that shroud at one time and according to shroud lore gave it to Lirey Abbey in 1353 (his family recovered it two years later), this was over 40 years after Friday October 13, 1307 when King Phillip betrayed the Templars and seized most Templar possessions. I see we have been discussing the 1988 Carbon dating of the shroud to the 1300's (14th century)(which is what also lead to the de Molay theory) without looking at either the findings at Sommerset (a painting of the shroud which dates back a 100 years older then that carbon dating), we also have two written accounts, one with drawing of the shroud from the 12th century, both talking about it being a great treasure in Constantinople. And of course we have lots of information about when the Image of Edessa (which becomes known as the shroud of Turin) comes to constantinople in 944, including the sermon presented on the day it came into the city. Given the ultraviolet pictures show that the area used for carbon dating is basically a patch (one of several) on the original cloth, I'm not sure I'd be accepting the number given by that analysis. In addition, I have yet to see a good explanation of how the shroud was faked, good enough to be seen as a 3 dimensional representation as shown in the 1976 computer analysis by a group of people in the 14th century.
-Tig

[bloodline]

Bobsonsirjonny wrote:
He didnt happen to have anything to do with Tredegar Park did he?

Where abouts in wales. Chances are your family and some distant relative of mine in the past may have drawn swords :-D

My Family is Lewis of Van, and I believe the final years were around Bridgend.

I imagine our families have fought each other... hell... we might even be related! :-o

:-D

[Bobsonsirjonny]

Bridgend is a bit to far west.

As for Tredegar park I am in no way related to that family at all. And Im glad cos they were once a good family, but the final line was a mad nasty {bleep}, who abused his power.

You said that your family had blown a fortune - well this is what this bloke did. I thought you may have been related to him.

The last Lord Tredegar would have orgies and would hump anything - men, women, children, animals.. he was a great Friend of Alistair Crowley the self proclaimed high priest of satanism. He would get up to all kinds of shockingly debauched (even by todays standards) acts, and destroyed all his industy by blowing his money on pleasure.

The generation before basically built south wales. Newport (My home town) in its hay day was a very wealthy provincial town thanks to them. The family pretty much employed everyone in the towm. Provided them with health care - housing. They were very good when it came to looking after people. But then along came that @@@@Wit and with his greed set about its destruction..

[ajlwalker]

KennyR wrote:

Damn, why can't I find a link to this documentary...


Kenny, is this the documentary?:

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/B/believeitornot/shroud.html

I too saw this documentary and was very impressed with the presentation and the theories investigated.

The theory surrounding the ancient photo was fascinating. One of the main proponents of this theory claims that all they need do is test the shroud for presence of Silver. The guardians of the shroud have not allowed this!

I recommend reading the above link. The section of the documentray regarding Orviedo was astounding. This other shroud DEFINITELY dated back to Christ's time and the blood group matched the Turin shroud. Strange holes found on the Turin shroud perfectly lined up with holes on the Orviedo shroud.

I'm not saying the Turin shroud is genuine, only that if you had seen this documentary, you would think twice. I have to say the programme was balanced and even presented arguments to suggest it was a fake.

All very interesting.