Shroud of Turin

Negative image of the face of the Shroud; the photographic qualities of the Shroud were unknown until 1898.

The Shroud of Turin is a long cloth that contains the image of an apparently crucified man who had also been scourged and crowned with thorns. Many believe it was the burial cloth for Jesus. It has been the source of intense scientific controversy and there have many modern attempts to prove or disprove its authenticity. It was owned and maintained by families in Italy for centuries and given only in the late 20th century to the Roman Catholic Church, which has never taken a position for or against its authenticity.

The Shroud has several unique characteristics. First, its image is brighter in as a photographic negative, suggesting some extraordinary type of interplay of light in the burning of the image. Second, the nail wounds are through the man's wrists rather than his hands, despite the unanimous and inaccurate medieval depiction of the nail wounds for crucified victims as being through the hands. Modern analysis indicates that the hands are not strong enough to sustain the weight of man on the cross, while the wrists would be. Third, all the indicators of the unique scourging and crucifixion of the man are present on the Shroud, when it is unlikely anyone else would have been both scourged and crucified. Computer analysis suggests the image of coins on the Shroud that date from the time of Pontius Pilate.

As reported by the BBC, the leading secular British news source, "Mechthild Flury-Lemberg found that the fabric was woven in a three-to-one herringbone pattern, used for high quality cloths in the ancient world."

Scientists have devoted years of work in analyzing the Shroud. Several of these scientists who have studied the Shroud converted to Christianity as a result.

Early history

Image of Edessa/Mandylion

According to Eusebius, King Abgar of Edessa was afflicted of an illness, and hearing of the miracles of Jesus as a healer he sent a letter to Him, asking if He would come to his aid. Jesus responded that He could not come, but would send his disciple Thaddeus, who comes and heals him [3]; according to variants of this story King Abgar is left with the cloth image of Jesus, beginning with the Doctrine of Addai (ca. 400 A.D.) in which a court painter created an image of the Lord and "brought with him to Abgar the king, his master. And when Abgar the king saw the likeness, he received it with great joy, and placed it with great honor in one of his palatial houses." [4]. Artistical works of this relic - called either the "Image of Edessa" or the "mandylion" - generally have it portrayed as the face of Christ upon a towel or kerchief.

The mandylion would surface again around 525 when Edessa was flooded by the Daisan River. Workmen repairing one of the city's gates discovered a niche with the cloth inside; the mandylion was declared to be Acheiropoietos (Greek: Αχειροποίητος), "not made by hands", meaning that it was a miraculous image created supernaturally and not by man. The mandylion stayed in Edessa as a means of protection for the city from harm until forcibly taken to Constantinople in 944, where it was received with great fanfare by Emperor Romanus I. Placed within the church of Saint Mary of Blachernae, it stayed there as a Christian relic until disappearing in the sack of the city during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. One of the knights who participated in the sacking of Constantinople, Robert de Clari, left a detailed letter of what he observed at the time, and he referred to this relic as being more than a facial image:

"But among the rest, there was also another of the minsters, which was called the Church of my Lady Saint Mary of Blachernae, within which was the shroud wherein Our Lord was wrapped. And on every Friday that shroud did raise itself upright, so that the form of Our Lord could clearly be seen. And none knows - neither Greek nor Frank - what became of that shroud when the city was taken."[5]

Dating the Shroud

Raymond N. Rogers, a retired chemist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, studied the Shroud and declared, "The chemistry says it was a real shroud, the blood spots on it are real blood, and the technology that was used to make that piece of cloth was exactly what Pliny the Elder reported from his time," about A.D. 70. "It's a shroud from the right time, but you're never going to find out (through science) if it was used on a person named Jesus," Rogers said.

In 1988, carbon dating of a small snippet of the Shroud was performed, and the results suggested that the Shroud originated between A.D. 1238 and 1430. However, a peer-reviewed scientific paper later demonstrated the invalidity of those results, suggesting instead that the Shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old. The sample for the 1988 analysis had actually been taken from cloth woven into the Shroud during the Middle Ages, thereby giving a false result. Moreover, "the 12th Century Hungarian 'Pray Manuscript' come to depict Jesus being wrapped in the shroud - with authentic herringbone pattern and burn marks - 100 years before carbon-dating says the material originated."

The defect in the carbon dating was that the samples were "uniquely coated with a yellow–brown plant gum containing dye lakes. Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin." Instead, [e]stimates of the kinetics constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin indicate a much older age for the cloth than the radiocarbon analyses."

The Lamb

According to a paper by Dr. Petrus Soons scientific research of some of the photographs of the shroud show an oval object under the beard of the image. After much research three cursive letters were identified and translated from the Hebrew. The meaning of the translation was, "The Lamb," a name in which Jesus was refered to in the New Testament. This finding now makes the person on the shroud exclusively identified with Christ.

Sources

• Amazing Details about the Shroud