The Shroud of Turin
For today's random topic, I'm going to go off about the Shroud of Turin for a bit. Kay?
Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in unexplained spooky things. I was forever checking out library books about unsolved murders, the Loch Ness monster, ghosts, whatever. I don't so much care about Nessie anymore, but one item that has continued to fascinate me is the Shroud of Turin.
The Shroud is a length of woven linen about 14 feet long which supposedly bears an image of the dead body of Jesus. Two images, actually...one front and one back, meaning that if it IS his shroud, it was wrapped around him lengthwise. The first recorded appearance of the Shroud was in the mid-1300's, and its provenance has been traced continuosly since. It was given over to the ownership of the Vatican inn 1983, and is currently housed in a church in Turin, Italy.
Is it real? Is it fake? Nobody knows. Just the fact that no one's been able to prove that it IS a fake is interesting to me. I'll sum up some of the salient points about the Shroud.
Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in unexplained spooky things. I was forever checking out library books about unsolved murders, the Loch Ness monster, ghosts, whatever. I don't so much care about Nessie anymore, but one item that has continued to fascinate me is the Shroud of Turin.
The Shroud is a length of woven linen about 14 feet long which supposedly bears an image of the dead body of Jesus. Two images, actually...one front and one back, meaning that if it IS his shroud, it was wrapped around him lengthwise. The first recorded appearance of the Shroud was in the mid-1300's, and its provenance has been traced continuosly since. It was given over to the ownership of the Vatican inn 1983, and is currently housed in a church in Turin, Italy.
Is it real? Is it fake? Nobody knows. Just the fact that no one's been able to prove that it IS a fake is interesting to me. I'll sum up some of the salient points about the Shroud.
- The image is quite clear and shows wounds that correspond to the historical crucifixion wounds. There is blood flow on the cloth from the wrists, feet, forehead, back and side. Scougemarks are visible on the back and legs. It is significant that the hand wounds are shown through the wrists, which is historically accurate but not what was commonly believed in the Middle Ages. A forger of the time would probably have put the wounds through the palms, as was iconic at the time.
- No one can seem to determine how the image came to be on the linen. Microscopic examination revealed that the discoloration penetrates no more than single fiber deep, which is impossible for paint or other pigment. There are no pigments on the fabric. It isn't burned on. The color appears to be the result of some kind of chemical change in the fibers themselves. It's very strange. One guy who was part of the 1978 team of scientists who were finally allowed to investigate the Shroud claimed that he found pigments, but he's the only one and no one else has ever been able to find any traces of pigmentation applied to the cloth.
- The bloodstains on the cloth are interesting, but what's more interesting is that there is no image underneath them. This implies that the cloth was bloodstained first, and the image later appeared around them.
- The cloth has been carbon-dated by three separate labs (using a sample from the same bit of the shroud, which is important) and all three came up with dates in the range of 1290-1370, which corresponds to the Shroud's first appearance in history. This would seem to eliminate the possibility that it might be the actual shroud of the historical Jesus.
- BUT some other guys found pollen grains on the shroud from two separate plants, both of which only grow in the Middle East, and which only grow together in and around Jerusalem and Palestine. Since for the cloth's recorded history it has only been in Europe, this suggests a life for the cloth before it arrived in France. However, these results have been seriously questioned and one can imagine other mechanisms for pollen grains to have arrived on the cloth without it ever having been in Jerusalem.
- The image is faint and ill-defined, but a photographic negative of it is very clear and looks almost like a positive image, which means that the original image on the cloth is itself a negative image. The image also has three-dimensional information encoded in it, which is not true of an ordinary photograph. These results prove nothing except that people think it's pretty unlikely that a medieval forger could have created this image with this level of sophistication.
- The results of the carbon-dating have been called into question a lot. Possible sources for confusion are that the samples were actually taken from a patch which was applied later, or that a fire in 1532 actually changed the carbon content of the cloth.
So no one knows what's up. The Church won't permit any further testing of the cloth, although this may change in the future as non-invasive, non-damaging tests become available.