The Shroud and Historicity

[perseusomega9]

Mark ends at 16:8, every subsequent gospel embellishes the story more and more, so your source is now GJohn? Written way after that fact, not even by an alleged eyewitness.

[MrMacSon]

It is highly unlikley that, in those days, a crucified person's body would be taken down, carefully wrapped, and entombed.

[pavurcn]

It is highly unlikley that, in those days, a crucified person's body would be taken down, carefully wrapped, and entombed.

Perhaps that is why the initiative / sponsorship of Joseph of Arimathea was needed:

John 19:38 After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body. 39 Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. 40 They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. 41 Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. 42 And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

[pavurcn]

Mark ends at 16:8, every subsequent gospel embellishes the story more and more, so your source is now GJohn? Written way after that fact, not even by an alleged eyewitness.

But why should some historical details not filter through, even in John's gospel? It depends on the line of transmission. Alex Hailey found a connection to Kunte Kinte in Africa 200 years after the fact through the oral historians (griots). No writing involved. John does have the Pool of Bethesda that many people thought was fiction until the 19th century, when archaeologists discovered it.

And I remind you of Homer, who had more of history in his basic idea than the smart classical scholars thought. It took a smarter amateur, the businessman Heinrich Schliemann, to teach them otherwise. Homer (if a person) lived maybe 500 years after the event of the Trojan War, but some details, like a specific kind of shield used in Mycenaean times, survived in memory, as did the memory of a writing system that was lost in the "dark ages." So what is a 50 or 60 year interval in the first century, when many eyewitnesses were still around to corroborate or deny? We need to know more about the practices of memory in first century Palestine. If they were strong, and Jesus established what was in effect a school of disciples whom he taught (as the texts say he did), what would they have been learning in school but some of the things that later were put into the gospels, like the parables and the Sermon on the Mount and the Our Father?

[Kapyong]

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

Wrong. From wikipedia :

Medieval photography

According to the art historian Nicholas Allen, the image on the shroud was formed by a photographic technique in the 13th century.^[174] Allen maintains that techniques already available before the 14th century—e.g., as described in the Book of Optics, which was at just that time translated from Arabic to Latin—were sufficient to produce primitive photographs, and that people familiar with these techniques would have been able to produce an image as found on the shroud. To demonstrate this, he successfully produced photographic images similar to the shroud using only techniques and materials available at the time the shroud was supposedly made. He described his results in his PhD thesis,^[175] in papers published in several science journals,^[176][177] and in a book.^[178] Silver bromide is believed by some to have been used for making the Shroud of Turin as it is widely used in photographic films.^[179]

174. Nicholas P L Allen, Verification of the Nature and Causes of the Photo-negative Images on the Shroud of Lirey-Chambéry-Turin
175. Allen, Nicholas P. L. (1993) The methods and techniques employed in the manufacture of the Shroud of Turin. Unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Durban-Westville.
176. Allen, Nicholas P. L. (1993) Is the Shroud of Turin the first recorded photograph? The South African Journal of Art History, 11 November, 23–32
177. Allen, Nicholas P. L. (1994)A reappraisal of late thirteenth-century responses to the Shroud of Lirey-Chambéry-Turin: encolpia of the Eucharist, vera eikon or supreme relic? The Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 4 (1),62–94
178. Allen, Nicholas P. L. (1998)The Turin Shroud and the Crystal Lens. Empowerment Technologies Pty. Ltd., – Port Elizabeth, South Africa
179. Hamilton, J.F. (1974). "Physical Properties of Silver Halide Microcrystals". Photographic Science and Engineering. 18 (5): 493–500.

Kapyong

[pavurcn]

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

Wrong. From wikipedia :

Medieval photography

According to the art historian Nicholas Allen, the image on the shroud was formed by a photographic technique in the 13th century.^[174] ...

Kapyong

This is a long, long, long way from reproducing the full range of qualities of the Shroud. Of course people might produce marks of coloration on linen that superficially appear to look like the image on the Shroud. I wouldn't deny that. The Shroud has many very special properties and aspects that cannot be replicated in toto, however. How do you get a detailed full body image front and back, with the blood applied to the cloth before the image is applied? Let's see a full comparison of Nicholas Allen's work with the Shroud reviewed by a competent sindonologist. Then let's find some proof that people were using this method in the 14th century. Then let's look at the results of what they did.

The Wikipedia article is heavily biased toward the discredited debunking approach. It is not an objective encyclopedia article as it stands now. Science that supports debunking is highlighted. Science that does the opposite is ignored or belittled.

[spin]

"Some relics were faked" does not mean "All relics are fake."

True, but with the C14 dating putting the shroud in the fake relic high period, anyone advocating the genuineness of the shroud without primary evidence must seriously consider why it isn't a fake, rather than making nugatory denials.

[yalla]

Joe Nickell, the shroud and National Geographic.
https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/ ... hic_author

[Kapyong]

Gday all,

Joe Nickell, the shroud and National Geographic.

Thanks yalla, here below are some quotes -


When a great magazine like National Geographic speaks, the world naturally listens. We were especially glad this is so when—for its March 2015 cover article, “The War on Science”—it cited such attacks as those on climate change, evolution, vaccinations, and genetically altered food, as well as the moon landing. “Thanks, National Geographic,” we said (2015) in our magazine, Skeptical Inquirer.

And yet science—and truth—have since come under attack by an online article that bears the imprimatur of National Geographic. Written by Frank Viviano, the article “Why Shroud of Turin’s Secrets Continue to Elude Science” (2015) is so misleading, so replete with falsehoods, so lacking in basic facts about the notorious “shroud” that it is an affront to the proud name of National Geographic.
...
When the cloth first appeared in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, its owner could not, or would not, explain how he had acquired the most holy relic in Christendom. In 1389 a bishop reported to Pope Clement VII that it had been used in a faith-healing scam in which persons were hired to feign illness, then, when the cloth was revealed to them, to pretend to have been healed, “so that money might cunningly be wrung” from unsuspecting pilgrims. “Eventually,” he said, after “diligent inquiry and examination,” the “fraud” was uncovered. The cloth had been “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it” (D’Arcis 1389).
...
Moreover, there is no history of this cloth (there have been some forty True Shrouds) prior to its appearance in Lirey, and the image’s elongated forms are those of French gothic art of that period. Iconographic elements also date the image to the middle ages. The radiocarbon date, obtained by three laboratories, was 1260–1390 ce, consistent with the ca. 1355 hoax and forger’s confession.
...
Viviano has been lured by shroud partisans into thinking that if an exact replica cannot be made then somehow this proves the shroud could be genuine after all. Actually, of course, no artifact—not for instance the hoaxed Cardiff Giant stone figure of 1869—can be precisely duplicated. Shroud partisans claim—or hint strongly—that if the shroud cannot be exactly recreated it suggests a supernatural origin. This is nothing less than the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Yet it is the way “miracle” claims are typically made, in a shrewd attempt to have dogma seem to trump science.
...
More recently, Luigi Garlaschelli, professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, used hypotheses I advanced in my Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (Nickell 1998) to produce a full-size replica of the shroud with the properties of the original. (For example, Garlaschelli’s reproduction has sparse red-ocher pigment confined to the tops of the threads, accompanied by cellulose degradation.) (Nickell 2013, 130–131)

Conclusions

Scholarship and science have proven the Turin “shroud” a fake, from its incompatibility with first century burial cloths and procedures, its lack of historical record, and a bishop’s report that the forger had confessed, to the suspicious-looking “blood” that is really tempera paint, pigments making up the body image, and the radiocarbon dating that confirms the cloth originated at the time of its documented appearance in the fourteenth century—when it was fraudulently claimed to the be Holy Shroud of Christ. Such evidence against any secular object would be considered clear proof of inauthenticity.

Frank Viviano’s article is a disservice to science and unworthy to appear under the respected name National Geographic.

[pavurcn]

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

Wrong. From wikipedia :

Kapyong

Kapyong was premature in his appreciation of Nicholas Allen's achievement. Here's what a real expert on the Shroud concludes:

The proto-photography theory proposed by Prof. Nicholas Allen was able to create an image on linen cloth, but not one that duplicated the image properties of the Shroud of Turin. When attempting to provide a viable image formation mechanism for the Shroud, one has to account for all of the image properties, not just a few of them. Allen failed to understand certain important facets of the image on the Shroud of Turin. Much as it truly takes a professional artist to properly evaluate a painting, so too must photography be evaluated by the professional photographer. In the case of the proto-photography theory, other professional evaluations of Allen's theory have reached similar conclusions.

From "Is The Shroud of Turin a Medieval Photograph? A Critical Examination of the Theory" by Barrie M. Schwortz © 2000 All Rights Reserved https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/orvieto.pdf accessed 9/Nov/2017