The Shroud and Historicity

[pavurcn]

That's what we don't have with the shroud. All efforts to turn the shroud into primary evidence are circular or at least question-begging.

I do not see how you can a priori determine that the Shroud is not evidentiary. One might easily disprove a fake: it was made out of the wrong materials or in the wrong weave-type or at the wrong time or it bears marks of the wrong site of origin. But the Shroud, long claimed to be the shroud of Christ, with a plausible trail to the ancient Near East, if considered authentic, should be accepted as evidence. Why not? The chances of another person being crucified in the same rare way as Jesus at the same time as Jesus and having a shroud such as mentioned in the gospel accounts that survives and gets associated with Jesus are astronomically small.

If a person were to demand concrete evidence and then rule out what is plausibly brought forward, then that person would be playing a crooked game indeed.

[pavurcn]

Sorry I messed up the formatting again. Corrected:

That's what we don't have with the shroud. All efforts to turn the shroud into primary evidence are circular or at least question-begging.

I do not see how you can a priori determine that the Shroud is not evidentiary. One might easily disprove a fake: it was made out of the wrong materials or in the wrong weave-type or at the wrong time or it bears marks of the wrong site of origin. But the Shroud, long claimed to be the shroud of Christ, with a plausible trail to the ancient Near East, if considered authentic, should be accepted as evidence. Why not? The chances of another person being crucified in the same rare way as Jesus at the same time as Jesus and having a shroud such as mentioned in the gospel accounts that survives and gets associated with Jesus are astronomically small.

If a person were to demand concrete evidence and then rule out what is plausibly brought forward, then that person would be playing a crooked game indeed.

[neilgodfrey]

Sorry I messed up the formatting again. Corrected:

That's what we don't have with the shroud. All efforts to turn the shroud into primary evidence are circular or at least question-begging.

I do not see how you can a priori determine that the Shroud is not evidentiary. One might easily disprove a fake: it was made out of the wrong materials or in the wrong weave-type or at the wrong time or it bears marks of the wrong site of origin. But the Shroud, long claimed to be the shroud of Christ, with a plausible trail to the ancient Near East, if considered authentic, should be accepted as evidence. Why not? The chances of another person being crucified in the same rare way as Jesus at the same time as Jesus and having a shroud such as mentioned in the gospel accounts that survives and gets associated with Jesus are astronomically small.

If a person were to demand concrete evidence and then rule out what is plausibly brought forward, then that person would be playing a crooked game indeed.

I am not quite sure if I understand what you mean by "evidentiary". Of course it is a real thing. It exists. But what it signifies, what it is evidence of, is yet to be determined.

I was watching recently a (BBC?) program on the secret or private life of Queen Victoria. In her latter years she allowed herself to become grotesquely fat and mention was made of the size of her drawers/undies. The interviewer asked the archivist or whoever she was to show them to the viewers so we could all see just how "big" she was in girth. A box was pulled from some shelves and opened, and there they were... massive underpants or drawers or whatever you want to call them.

The interviewer (Tracy Borman) then asked the pertinent question: How do you know that these were Queen Victoria's?

The archivist or woman who clearly had some responsibility for the display was able to explain the details of the provenance of the drawers and in addition point to physical evidence to establish that what we were seeing was indeed an undergarment worn by Queen Victoria and not some fraud. All the details were presented to enable any curious person to check their authenticity for themselves. The documentation and facts were clear. There was a documented record for any interested historian to physically check and verify.

That's how historical evidence works.

[spin]

Sorry I messed up the formatting again. Corrected:

That's what we don't have with the shroud. All efforts to turn the shroud into primary evidence are circular or at least question-begging.

I do not see how you can a priori determine that the Shroud is not evidentiary.

It's this simple, one needs to demonstrate the historical value of the shroud. Until that is done the shroud remains an uncontextualized religious relic of no evidentiary value. It cannot be introduced until its relevance has been established. All we ever see is the ridiculous "oh there's a possible problem with X (eg C14), so it must be TRUE!!!!" nonsense. We need to definitively place the shoud in the historical context of the first century. No dummy has done that over the many decades of rearguard activity.

Hmm, Neil got there while I was typing.

[Paul the Uncertain]

I was disappointed that the response to the observation that the victim looks like a European was a learned disquisition about how he looks Sephardic. Lol.

The provenance of the artifact is dodgy, the identification of its subject non-existent, and the body depicted is, to all appearances, dead. The only observable relationship between the artifact and specific Christian dogma is that a Christian church acquired the item and now displays it along with other mementoes of what it fancies its institutional history to have been. Part of that instutional history is, ironically, a persistent lack of critical judgment about the authenticity of such purported relics.

Believers do not depend on the Shroud for their belief, only for helpful corroboration in the face of deniers. Mythicists desperately need the Shroud not to be true if they are first and foremost committed to a belief in the mythical character of the origins of Christianity.

Oh, the drama. The fact is that you've got a picture of corpse and a story about how it might be old enough and might have been somewhere near the right place sometime. To that you add another story about how an undefined "singular energy event" created the world's first selfie.

Now that's what desperation sounds like.

[iskander]

If two independent witnesses tell the same story, the veracity of the story is bolstered. The Shroud of Turin seems to tell the same story as gospel accounts. Thus, if the Shroud is judged authentic, we have external historical corroboration from outside the gospel accounts, original material evidence in fact, and this cuts against the fabrication-template that some want to lay over all the texts of the gospels.

The radio-carbon dating of a repair-flap from the edge of the cloth does not disauthenticate the Shroud. But even if you apply the 1290 date to the whole shroud, you then have to explain the amazing amount of technical and historical knowledge and material (such as travertine aragonite) that the 13th-century forger would have had to have (and go out of his way to include though no one of the time would notice it).

National Geographic says "Every scientific attempt to replicate it in a lab has failed."

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

The case pro and con on the Shroud's authenticity is neatly put here.

Still advertising relics?

"Christian relics and pilgrims. ( a vast treasure of relics and of places to visit)

Holy Blood of Wilsnack
"Wilsnack in the Margraviate of Brandenburg was first mentioned in 1384. The town became a pilgrimage destination after being burned down on 15 August 1383 during a raid by the Mecklenburg captain and robber baron Heinrich von Bülow against the Bishopric of Havelberg. It was believed that aft the fire some hosts were found to have survived, but had the appearance of being bloodied.

The Holy Blood of Wilsnack was authenticated when the Havelberg bishop Dietrich Man went to consecrate the hosts as a precaution, and the central one overflowed with blood, according to later accounts...
The pilgrimage led from St. Mary's Church in Berlin to Wilsnack"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Wilsnack
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2565&hilit=relics&start=10
Spot on!, toejam That is also my reading of Mark . The business selling this commodity will acquire wealth and also power over the ' electorate'.


The abuse is difficult to control:
"Naturally it was impossible for popular enthusiasm to be roused to so high a pitch in a matter which easily lent itself to error, fraud and greed of gain, without at least the occasional occurrence of many grave abuses..."
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12734a.htm


But it will not soil the ' authentic ' relics:
"In such an atmosphere of lawlessness doubtful relics came to abound."
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12734a.htm
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2525&p=56760&hilit=relics#p56760 "

[pavurcn]

To iskander: "Some relics were faked" does not mean "All relics are fake." Simple logic. Skepticism is fine. A priori close-mindedness not. For this shroud to be a fake, you would have to have a brilliant master-forger who could work miracles.

To Paul the Uncertain: Sephardic similarity suggests the possibility of shared genetic material. No cause for Lol. The provenance is determined partly by pollen studies. You do not do justice to the uniqueness of the Shroud.

To neilgodfrey: The problem with radio-carbon dating means not validity but no debunking yet. Scientific studies have worked to confirm the historical context. The presence of a coin minted by Pontius Pilate is rather suggestive of a date. The unique configuration of features seems to point in a definite direction...but only to the fair and open-minded.

You seem to want 21st-century techniques of handling evidence to have been used 2000 years ago. We can try our best, but imposing our forensic expectations on ancient generations doesn't seem fair. We have a plausible scenario of how the shroud came down to us. There are mentions of this type of image and its features can be shown to have likely had a visible impact on the iconography of Jesus from ancient times. If you want to study these things, the research is available. But you have already made up your mind.

[iskander]

To iskander: "Some relics were faked" does not mean "All relics are fake." Simple logic. Skepticism is fine. A priori close-mindedness not. For this shroud to be a fake, you would have to have a brilliant master-forger who could work miracles.
...

Relics are a discredited witness.


" Composed by his predecessor, Sixtus IV, in which Sixtus states that in the Shroud "men may look upon the true blood and portrait of Jesus Christ himself." A certain difficulty was caused by the existence elsewhere of other Shrouds similarly impressed with the figure of Jesus Christ and some of these cloths, notably those of Besançon, Cadouin, Champiègne, Xabregas, etc., also claimed to be the authentic linen sindon provided by Joseph of Arimathea, but until the close of the last century no great attack was made upon the genuineness of the Turin relic....
...
On the supposition that this is an authentic relic dating from the year A.D. 30, why should it have retained its brilliance through countless journeys and changes of climate for fifteen centuries, and then in four centuries more have become almost invisible? On the other hand if it be a fabrication of the fifteenth century this is exactly what we should expect."
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13762a.htm

[pavurcn]

Relics are a discredited witness.

This is all too fundamentalistic, simplistic, and dogmatic a statement. You are a "true (dis)believer" indeed!

If we can have the body and mask of Tutankhamun (14th c. BCE), and if we can have Phidias's cup from Olympia (5th c. BCE), certainly prized objects from a later date can be kept, protected, and revered too, especially if they are as significant as the Shroud. It stands to reason.

You quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which came out in 1913, only about 15 years after the first photographs revealed the Shroud image to be a negative (1898). Heaps and heaps of research and study have been done since then.

Color loss happens differently for different objects in different settings. It is not determinative of authenticity in the case of the Shroud. And who knows if the image was not "touched up" and what was noticed fading was the additional pigment rather than the image itself, which is not a pigment (even though that image may fade over time as well)?

BTW, the famous Jewish researcher on the Shroud Barrie Schwortz withheld his belief on the authenticity question for 17 years because the blood on the Shroud was red rather than what he expected (black or brown). Then someone told him that torture victims secrete a certain chemical whose presence keeps the color red. See this too. (My, what a forger must have known!)

And you still have no good explanation for the marvel of the Shroud.

[iskander]

Relics are a discredited witness.

This is all too fundamentalistic, simplistic, and dogmatic a statement. You are a "true (dis)believer" indeed!

If we can have the body and mask of Tutankhamun (14th c. BCE), and if we can have Phidias's cup from Olympia (5th c. BCE), certainly prized objects from a later date can be kept, protected, and revered too, especially if they are as significant as the Shroud. It stands to reason.

You quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which came out in 1913, only about 15 years after the first photographs revealed the Shroud image to be a negative (1898). Heaps and heaps of research and study have been done since then.

Color loss happens differently for different objects in different settings. It is not determinative of authenticity in the case of the Shroud. And who knows if the image was not "touched up" and what was noticed fading was the additional pigment rather than the image itself, which is not a pigment (even though that image may fade over time as well)?

BTW, the famous Jewish researcher on the Shroud Barrie Schwortz withheld his belief on the authenticity question for 17 years because the blood on the Shroud was red rather than what he expected (black or brown). Then someone told him that torture victims secrete a certain chemical whose presence keeps the color red. See this too. (My, what a forger must have known!)

And you still have no good explanation for the marvel of the Shroud.

Relics have BO and the Catholic Encyclopaedia provides an assessment from the faithful learned people of the Holy Mother Church , which affirms that relics are an untrustworthy witness .

This relic has bewitched you through the power of Satan.