King Dave's pavurcn's Top Ten Reasons The Shroud Is Authentic

[JoeWallack]

From our Home Temple in Jerusalem King Dave's pavurcn's Top Ten Reasons The Shroud Is Authentic:

10. Someone claims twenty-three matches between the Shroud and the gospel accounts.


He-hee!

[Kapyong]

9. Coins can be seen over the eyes of the image with writing identifying them as from Pilate's time !

[arnoldo]

8. The shroud ain't fake so it's real.

[Secret Alias]

7. Jesus had to be buried in a cloth - why not this one?

[Secret Alias]

6. There is an image of a bearded face on the shroud; Jesus is usually depicted as having a bearded face - therefore the shroud preserves for us Jesus's actual face!

[Secret Alias]

5. There are no historical relics of Jesus's existence on earth; but that makes it seem as if Jesus might not have existed. God wants us to believe in Jesus's existence - therefore the shroud is authentic!

[MrMacSon]

4. The term shrouded in mystery doesn't apply because the Shroud wasn't itself shrouded; so it's not a mystery, so it's authentic.

[arnoldo]

5. There are no historical relics of Jesus's existence on earth; but that makes it seem as if Jesus might not have existed. God wants us to believe in Jesus's existence - therefore the shroud is authentic!

Wouldn't the empty tomb be a historical relic?

Women at the Tomb of Christ. Wall painting in the domus ecclesiae in Dura Europos.

320px-Dura_Europos_baptistry_women_at_the_tomb.jpg (13.7 KiB) Viewed 4798 times

[DCHindley]

9. Coins can be seen over the eyes of the image with writing identifying them as from Pilate's time !

The images I have seen over the eons show what appear to be coins over the eyes, but the detail does not seem sharp enough for anyone to distinguish the exact coin that was used. I would be highly surprised if the exact coin could be determined even by those who examined the shroud directly. If someone has made such a claim then it would seem to have been a case of "Well, they kind of look a little like some general type of coin circulating in Pilate's time." In other words, they are round and about the size of one of the many coins then in circulation in Palestine (ranging from denarii, drachmas, to copper/bronze fractional coins).

Coins placed over the deceased person's eyes is and has been a fairly common practice across both time and regions of the world. If it is not an authentic artifact, I would not at all be surprised to see that a creator who had painstakingly scoured through the gospels for little details (and use them all!), perhaps also, in the spirit of verisimilitude, added the detail of coins over the eyes (and probably others if we were to look for them).

The Byzantine empire had some pretty impressive technologies, and the highly intelligent engineers who came up with them probably included those who were also artists. If it is a representation of what the real shroud may have looked like if recovered, it is in my opinion actually pretty well done. That person, it seems to me, would have to have possessed a level of genius approaching that of Leonardo da Vinci. I believe one of the books on the shroud contains an account of the way a shroud very much like this one was displayed using a mechanism that had it rise up out of a storage box and then be displayed in all its glory for parishoners at (I think) the church of Hagia Sofia.

But that it could be the *real* shroud, well, I highly doubt it. It is just *too* conveniently true to details in the gospels, and we have no way of knowing whether any of the canonical gospels have accurately represented any real details about his "passion" (assuming for the moment that there was a real Jesus who was whipped, crucified and then buried in a shroud), and are not simply rhetorical "details" added for effect or cohere with the gospel writers' particular private agendas and attempts to rhetorically manipulate the emotions of his/her readers or hearers (pity, empathy, etc.).

DCH

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

I would be highly surprised if the exact coin could be determined even by those who examined the shroud directly. If someone has made such a claim then it would seem to have been a case of "Well, they kind of look a little like some general type of coin circulating in Pilate's time." In other words, they are round and about the size of one of the many coins then in circulation in Palestine (ranging from denarii, drachmas, to copper/bronze fractional coins).