The Shroud of Turin

The Shroud of Turin and the Vinland Map

For your information only. Though I might comment one day upon the 'uniqueness' of the 'Shroud of Turin' as to the witnessing of a 'holographic' event, which not only rewrote history 2000 years ago, but also exemplifies a 'pathway' into a new hybrid physics between mass and radiation and consciousness.

Tony B.

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The Shroud of Turin is reputedly Christ's burial cloth. It has been a religious relic since the Middle Ages. To believers it was divine proof the Christ was resurrected from the grave, to doubters it was evidence of human gullibility and one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of art.
No one has been able to prove that it is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, but its haunting image of a man's wounded body is proof enough for true believers.

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The Shroud of Turin, as seen by the naked eye, is a negative image of a man with his hands folded. The linen is 14 feet, 3 inches long and 3 feet, 7 inches wide. The shroud bears the image of a man with wounds similar to those suffered by Jesus.
The shroud is wrapped in red silk and kept in a silver chest in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy since 1578.

The shroud is unquestionably old. Its history is known from the year 1357, when it surfaced in the tiny village of Lirey, France. Until recent reports from San Antonio, most of the scientific world accepted the findings of carbon dating carried out in 1988. The results said the shroud dated back to 1260-1390, and thus is much too new to be Jesus' burial linen.

The section of the shroud showing the face reveals dramatic features
when viewed as negative image.


Three-dimensional relief of the Shroud face after smoothing of rough transitions with a recursive filter.The computer showed us what the face of Jesus Christ probably looked like before the Passion or after Resurrection, through an electronic cleaning of the blood and wounds which provides the almost natural images of the face
Source: http://www.shroud.com/meacham2.htm



Here is an artistic impression of what the face
matching the image might have looked like.


COPYRIGHT 1931 GIUSEPPE ENRIE

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This frontal image (above) shows the forearms, wrist, and hands. There appears to be a large puncture wound on the wrist. This is significant because if nails were placed through the palms of the hand, this would not provide sufficient support to hold the body to the cross and tearing of the hands would occur. Only if the nails were placed through the wrists would this provide sufficient support to hold the body fixed to the cross.

We can also see a large blood stain and elliptical wound on the person's right side (remember, in a negative imprint left and right are reversed). From studying the size and shape of this wound and historical records, we can deduce that this wound could have been caused by a Roman Lancea. This lance is pictured in Slide 13.

In addition, by measuring the angle of dried blood on the wrist, one can reconstruct the angle at which this person hung from the cross. He mainly hung from a position 65 degrees from the horizontal. But there is another angle of dried blood at 55 degrees. This shows that this person tried to lift himself up by 10 degrees. Why? Medical studies show that if a person just hangs from a position of 65 degrees in would start to suffocate very quickly. Only if he could lift himself up by about 10 degrees would he be able to breathe. Thus he would have to raise himself up by this 10 degrees by pushing down on his feet which would have to have been fixed to the cross. He would then become exhausted and fall down again to the 65 degree position. Thus, he would continue to shift from these two agonizing positions throughout crucifixion. That is why the executioners of crucifixion would break the legs of their victims to speed up death. If they could not lift themselves up to breathe, they would suffocate very quickly.



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The following image shows the most likely position in which Jesus died. This body position is based on interpretation of the blood stains contained in the shroud.​

Image Formation Theories

© Dr. John DeSalvo

The Painting Theory


One theory is simply that the Shroud is a painting . It has been proposed that it was painted using iron oxide in an animal protein binder. The STURP scientists have concluded from their studies that no paints, pigments, dyes or stains have been found to make up the visible image. Small amounts of iron oxide have been found on the Shroud but the iron oxide is evenly distributed all over the Shroud. If it were painted using iron oxide you would expect its concentration to be greater in the image areas verses the non-image areas. This is not the case but the iron oxide is evenly distributed all over the Shroud. Thus it is probably a containment caused by the presence of the Shroud in artists studios throughout history who were copying it. It is also possible that the copies may have been touched to the Shroud to transfer its sacredness and this contaminated the Shroud with iron oxide.

Also no painter has been able to reproduce all the different qualities and characteristics of the Shroud. That is, its negativity, 3D effect, no brush strokes or directionality, perfect anatomical details from blood stains, scourging, etc. and the image is a surface phenomena, that is the image only penetrates about 1/500 of an inch into the cloth. It was shown that the blood went on first and than image. Try doing that and then painting the body image. Thus up to now no one has been able to reproduce the Shroud in all its characteristics. Most scientists reject the painting theory.


The Radiation Theory


Could the image have been produced by a burst of radiation (heat or light) acting over short period of time which would have scorched the cloth? Scientists have not been able to duplicate the characteristics of the Shroud using this method just like the painting hypothesis. Also the color and ultraviolet characteristics of the Shroud body image and a scorch are different. The shroud body image does not fluoresce under UV light but scorches like the burns from 1532 do fluoresce under UV light. Thus many scientists rule out the radiation theory.

DeSalvo's Revised Vaporgraphic - Direct Contact Theory

There are other theories regarding vapors from the body diffusing to the Shroud and producing the image. Another theory is a direct contact process in which substances were directly transferred to the cloth and produced the image.
DeSalvo's Theory takes both of these into consideration.

Nature may have supplied us with a miniature example of how the Shroud body image was produced. It is known that when certain plant matter (such as leaves) are placed in a book and left undisturbed for many years, there develops on both the upper and lower sheets of paper a faint sepia colored imprint of the plant matter (called Volckringer patterns). Dr. Jean Volckringer in the 1940's noticed that these plant images closely resemble the body image on the Shroud of Turin. In fact the plant imprint also appears to be a negative image, just like the Shroud, and when photographed a positive imprint appears on the negative plate.

Vockringer Patterns exhibiting positive and negative characteristics​

I decided to explore this similarity in more detail. I was hoping that by understanding how Volckringer Patterns are produced, it would give me some idea of how the Shroud body image was produced. Using a spectrophotomer I did a color comparison between the Volckringer patterns and the Shroud body image. Within experimental error, I showed that the Volckringer patterns were identical in color to the Shroud body image. I than compared the Shroud and Volckringer patterns using UV Fluorescent studies. It was shown that both the Volckringer patterns and the Shroud body image do not fluoresce under UV light. Thus the Volckringer patterns and Shroud body image also have identical UV fluorescent characteristics.

The most startling similarity was that the Volckringer patterns could be reconstructed in 3D relief using a VP-8 analyizer, just like the Shroud body image.

3-D Reconstruction of a Volckringer pattern​

In summary, Vockringer patterns resemble the Shroud body image in negativity, visible color characteristics, UV fluorescence properties, and 3D reconstruction.

Volckringer patterns are produced when acids from the plant are transfered to the paper causing cellulose degradation (oxidation). The most prominent plant acid in this process is lactic acid. Where would lactic acid fit in with the Shroud body image formation process? Human perspiration contains a certain amount of lactic acid. A person who had been tortured and crucified would have sweated profusely and medical studies have shown that this perspiration would have very high concentrations of lactic acid. Thus, this could have been the transferring agent involved in producing the body image on the Shroud. The lactic acid would have been transferred to the cloth by both direct contact and vertical diffusion. Areas of the body like the nose that touched the cloth would transfer the lactic acid by direct contact. In the areas further away that did not touch the cloth, i.e the cheeks, the lactic acid would travel to the cloth by diffusion. Thus two processes, both direct contact and vertical diffusion would transfer the lactic acid to the cloth. Than this acid would oxidize the cellulose in the linen and produce the image over a period of time. It may be that originally there was no image on the cloth and after many years the lactic acid working on the cloth eventually developed the image. This is what occurs with the plant matter in books. My theory does not answer all the questions. Some problems are that the Shroud body image is a surface phenomena but the Volckringer patterns are not. They penetrate into the paper. Also calculations using diffusion of lactic acid would not produce the high resolution of the image we see on the Shroud. Thus my theory does not explain all the characteristics of the Shroud and more research needs to be done. Thus no one theory to date can explain how the image on the Shroud was produced.

© Dr. John DeSalvo
Director of the Great Pyramid of Giza Research Association​

Leonardo da Vinci: Photo-image Theory

Is it possible that the Shroud had been created by Leonardo da Vinci?

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Leonardo was authorized or allowed to dissect corpses. Leonardo, being religious was aware of everything written about Jesus from the New Testament. Leonardo was a pioneer if not the inventor of the camera obscura and he was knowledgeable about photographic chemicals. Acquiring an old cloth should not have been difficult for Leonardo. The body on the Shroud has unusual dimensions due, obviously, to distortions based on the camera obscura method. The head on the Shroud does not join the body. This is simply explained as follows: the head on the Shroud is that of Leonardo!

The following article suggested by Edward Lopez, NYC​

Read More: Shrouded in Deceit - Leonardo's Last Laugh >>​

Shroud of Turin or Carbon 14


This article was contributed to World-Mysteries.com by Doug Yurchey

Pick one! One is true, the other is false.
It is either the Shroud of Turin is a fraud and Carbon 14 is an accurate time-measuring instrument.....or, the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ and Carbon 14 is NOT an accurate time-measuring device.



Everything about the Shroud rings true: It is the material used for burial shrouds 2000 years ago in the area of the Holy Land. There is a wound indicated in the chest area. There is the exact number of lashes from a whipping on the back as stated in the Bible. Religious portraits of stigmata are not accurate when they show wounds in the palm of the hands. Nails, creating the wounds in the palms, could not hold the body on the cross. Tests on cadavers prove that bones in the hand are not strong enough to sustain a body's weight. Nails rip through hand bones and the body falls. On the Shroud, the wounds are at the wrist which can sustain the weight of a body. A religious forger, making a fraudulent Shroud would have placed the wounds in the palms...not at the wrists. The crown of thorns was not a round wreath as we also see in religious portrayals, but a hat of thorns. The trails of blood on Turin's burial cloth are sensible; they conform to the flow of gravity. Also...why is there blood at all when the body was cleaned, then wrapped and the fact that no blood flows from a corpse?

The most amazing evidence to the reality of the Shroud is that it is a PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE.
Secondo Pia was the Shroud's first photographer. The Italian photographed this
faint image on a light-colored material. To his great surprise, when Pia examined his negatives, there was a positive image! By photographing the negative, you have created a positive. The faint image became a light image on a black background. Details emerged that astounded viewers and enlarged the Shroud's controversy.

What could have formed this negative? It certainly was not a 1000 year old artist faking a holy relic. Some say the image captures the moment of Christ's resurrection. Others say that the image was a scorching emanating out due to RADIATION. There were reports that after the Hiroshima blast, pieces of glass were found with negative images of people's faces. These were people who had their faces near windows when the atomic bomb exploded. Radiation does cause negative imprinting.

What is it that tells scientists that the Shroud of TURIN is a fake? Answer: Carbon 14. Are you so sure that Carbon 14 is accurate? Science needs an UNDER-estimate for many ancient mysteries that baffle us and do not fit the traditional picture. In the same way, Science needs a Rosetta Stone (which also is untrue)...so they can think they understand something that is not understandable. Mysterious artifacts are much older than what Carbon 14 indicates. Traditional scientists say there was a smooth progression of knowledge and technology; in the past, it was primitive and in modern times...it is advanced. Anything that disturbs this narrow (flat-Earth) view is not accepted. Carbon 14 is perfect for this agenda.

The truth is the mysterious relics of the past are even more mysterious. The truth is you have to take the date Carbon 14 gives you and multiply it by at least a factor of 3.

[This writer knew this back in the 1970s. When I heard that they were going to date the Shroud with Carbon 14, I thought to myself: NO! My sources told me exactly what is stated in the above paragraph.]

The Shroud was tested with Carbon 14 and the rest is history. Now, the scientific world does not believe in the Turin relic because their holy measuring device said it was only 6-700 years old. Scientists are supposed to be open-minded, not stuck to a canon of unchanging principles. Maybe there are some things that we have to take on a little bit of faith.

© 2002 - D.Y.​

NOTE: Doug Yurchey is a writer, artist and inventor. He has studied ancient mysteries for 30 years and was married to a trans-channel. He has lectured at Carnegie Mellon University and California State at Northridge. For two years a background artist with the Simpsons TV Show, Doug Yurchey now promotes his unique theories.

An Interview with Doug Yurchey​

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News Articles


Tests Show Shroud Of Turin Much Older Than Carbon-14 Date

October 6, 2000 - Sightings - Oviedo, Spain

Scientists and forensic specialists gathered in Oviedo, Spain, this week to examine an obscure relic that many have claimed authenticates the Shroud of Turin - believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
The Sudarium of Oviedo is reportedly the other linen cloth found in the tomb of Christ, as described in the Gospel of John.
The relic, whose dramatic history is intertwined with the Knights Templar, Moors, El Cid, saints and bishops, has been in Spain since 631 A.D.
Meanwhile, in Turin, Italy, the last pilgrims of the Jubilee Year are winding their way past the Shroud of Turin before the exhibit closes on October 23.
Verses 5-8 of the 20th chapter of "The Gospel According to St. John" records, "... he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths, but rolled up in a separate place."
This head cloth, the sudarium, has become the focus of increasing debates over the validity of the carbon-14 tests on the Shroud of Turin.
The carbon-dating tests set the age of the shroud in the 13th century, which would make the Shroud of Turin a pious icon at best, a clever fraud at worst.
However, the scientific community is divided over the shroud dates because -- with the exception of the carbon dating tests -- medical, artistic, forensic and botanical evidence favors the authenticity of the shroud of Turin as the burial cloth of Jesus.
One example of microscopic testing that supports the Shroud as authentic is the 1978 sample of dirt taken from the foot region of the burial linen. The dirt was analyzed at the Hercules Aerospace Laboratory in Salt Lake, Utah, where experts identified crystals of travertine argonite, a relatively rare form of calcite found near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem.
It is a stretch, say researchers, that a 13th century forger would have known to take the trouble to impregnate the linen with marble dust found near Golgotha in order to fool scientists six hundred years later.
The debate over the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin is elevated by the new discoveries resulting from the studies on the Sudarium of Oviedo.
Unlike the Shroud, the Sudarium, which covered the face of Christ for a short time before the body was wrapped in the longer burial cloth, does not carry an image of a man. Instead, the cloth, held against a face of a man who had been beaten about the head, shows a distinct facial impression and pattern of stains.
The cloth is impregnated with blood and lymph stains that match the blood type on the Shroud of Turin. The pattern and measurements of stains indicate the placement of the cloth over the face.
These patterns have been extensively mapped to enable researchers to compare the markings and measurements with those of the Shroud of Turin.
These measurements and calculations, digitized videos and other forensic evidence indicate that the Sudarium of Oviedo covered the same head whose image is found on the Shroud of Turin.
Part of Jewish burial custom was to cover the face of the dead, sparing the family further distress. The sudarium, from the Latin for "face cloth," would have been wrapped over the head of the crucified Christ awaiting permission from Pontius Pilate to remove the body.
Stains made at that time indicate a vertical position with the head at an angle. There are stains from deep puncture wounds on the portion of the cloth covering the back of the head, consistent with those puncture marks found on the Shroud of Turin, theoretically made by the caplet of thorns
A separate set of stains, superimposed upon the first set, was made when the crucified man was laid horizontally and lymph flowed out from the nostrils.
The composition of the stains, say the Investigation Team from the Spanish Centre for Sindology, who began the first sudarium studies in 1989, is one part blood -- type AB -- and six parts pulmonary oedema fluid.
This fluid is significant, say researchers, because it indicates that the man died from asphyxiation, the cause of death for victims of crucifixion.
Recently, Dr. Alan Whanger, professor emeritus of Duke University, employed his Polarized Image Overlay Technique to study correlations between the Shroud and the Sudarium. Dr. Whanger found 70 points of correlation on the front of the sudarium and 50 on the back.
"The only reasonable conclusion," says Mark Guscin, author of "The Oviedo Cloth," "is that the Sudarium of Oviedo covered the same head as that found on the Shroud of Turin." Guscin, a British scholar whose study is the only English language book on the Sudarium, told WorldNetDaily, "This can be uncomfortable for scientists with a predetermined viewpoint; I mean, the evidence grows that this cloth and the Shroud covered the same tortured man."
Guscin also points to pollen studies done by Max Frei of Switzerland.
Specific pollens from Palestine are found in both relics, while the Sudarium has pollen from Egypt and Spain that is not found on the Shroud.
Conversely, pollen grains from plant species indigenous to Turkey are imbedded in the Shroud, but not the Sudarium, supporting the theory of their different histories after leaving Jerusalem.
The significance of the Sudarium to the Shroud, in addition to the forensic evidence, is that the history of the Sudarium is undisputed. While the history of the Shroud is veiled in the mists of the Middle Ages, the Sudarium was a revered relic preserved from the days of the crucifixion.
A simple cloth of little value, other than that it contained the Blood of Christ, the Sudarium accompanied a presbyter named Philip and other Christians fleeing Palestine in 616 A.D. ahead of the Persian invasion.
Passing through Alexandria, Egypt, and into Spain at Cartegena, the oak chest containing the Sudarium was entrusted to Leandro, bishop of Seville. In 657 it was moved to Toledo, then in 718 on to northern Spain to escape the advancing Moors.
The Sudarium was hidden in the mountains of Asturias in a cave known as Montesacro until king Alfonso II, having battled back the Moors, built a chapel in Oviedo to house it in 840 AD.
The most riveting date in the Sudarium's history is March 14, 1075. On this date, King Alfonso VI, his sister and Rodrigo Diaz Vivar (El Cid) opened the chest after days of fasting. This official act of the king was recorded and the document is preserved in the Capitular Archives at the Cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo. The King had the oak chest covered in silver and an inscription added which reads, "The Sacred Sudarium of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
Juan Ignacio Moreno, a Spanish magistrate based in Burgos, Spain, asks the critical question. "The scientific and medical studies on the Sudarium prove that it was the covering for the same man whose image is [on] the Shroud of Turin.
We know that the Sudarium has been in Spain since the 600s. How, then, can the radio carbon dating claiming the Shroud is only from the 13th century be accurate?"

Pollen traces suggest that Shroud of Turin originated before eighth century, near Jerusalem
July 3, 1999 - AP

A new analysis of pollen grains and plant images on the Shroud of Turin places its origin to Jerusalem before the eighth century, giving a boost to those who believe the shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus and refuting a 1988 examination by scientists that concluded the shroud was made between 1260 and 1390.
The earlier study also indicated the shroud came from Europe rather than the Holy Land.
"We have identified by images and by pollen grains species on the shroud restricted to the vicinity of Jerusalem," botany professor Avinoam Danin of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said Monday during the International Botanical Congress here. "The sayings that the shroud is from European origin can't hold."
More than 4,000 scientists from 100 countries are taking part in the botanical conference, which focuses on a wide range of issues related to plants.
The shroud contains pollen grains and the image of a crucified man, as well as faint images of plants.
Analysis of the floral images, and a separate analysis of the pollen grains by another botanist, Uri Baruch, identified a combination of plant species that could be found only in March and April in the region of Jerusalem, Danin said.
Danin identified a high density of pollen of the tumbleweed Gundelia tournefortii. The analysis also found the bean caper Zygophyllum dumosum. The two species coexist in a limited area, Danin said.
"This combination of flowers can be found in only one region of the world," he said. "The evidence clearly points to a floral grouping from the area surrounding Jerusalem."
An image of the Gundelia tournefortii can be seen near the image of the man's shoulder. Some experts have suggested that the plant was used for the "crown of thorns."
Two pollen grains of the species were also found on the Sudarium of Oviedo, believed to be the burial face cloth of Jesus.
Danin, who has done extensive study on plants in Jerusalem, said the pollen grains are native to the Gaza Strip.
Since the Sudarium of Oviedo has resided in the Cathedral of Oviedo in Spain since the 8th century, Danin said that the matchup of pollen grains pushes the shroud's date to a similar age. Both cloths also carry type AB blood stains in similar patterns, Danin said.
"The pollen association and the similarities in the blood stains in the two cloths provide clear evidence that the shroud originated before the 8th Century," Danin said.
The location of the Sudarium of Oviedo has been documented since the first century. If it is found that the two cloths are linked, then the shroud could date back even further, Danin said.
The 1988 study used carbon-14 dating tests. Danin noted that the earlier study looked at only a single sample, while he used the entire piece of fabric.

Leonardo's Last Laugh >>​

BOOKS & Video


The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World's Most Sacred Relic Is Real
by Ian Wilson

Ian Wilson's well-written and intelligent book gives a balanced view of evidence for and against the Shroud of Turin's authenticity (including new finds such as the presence of human blood and DNA on the Shroud), and along the way, provides a fascinating discussion of subjects ranging from capital punishment in first-century Palestine to the chemistry of radiocarbon dating. For Wilson, the Shroud's ultimate significance resides in the very fact of Christians' fascination with it. The Shroud represents the possibility that the Resurrection actually happened; if there's any chance the Shroud is authentic, and if that chance excites you, then historical facts are a crucial aspect of your faith. Given that, the Shroud of Turin becomes much more than a curiosity for cranks and crazies. It's a valuable incitement to introspection for all believers. --Michael Joseph Gross



The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence
by Mark Antonacci

In Resurrection of the Shroud , Mark Antonacci authoritatively and scientifically challenges radiocarbon testing and presents new evidence in determining the Shroud's true age.



Jesus and the Shroud of Turin (1999)
VHS; Theatrical Release Date: January 1, 1999
Video Release Date: March 2, 1999

This video is an excellent documentary of the Shroud's history and scientific investigation. It is easy to understand and quite entertaining as it was filmed in many international settings. The Shroud is not a "dead" issue.



The Shroud of Turin :
The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic[/b
by C. Bernard Ruffin (September 1999)



Relic, Icon or Hoax? : Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud
by H. E. Gove (December 1996)


The Second Messiah :
Templars, the Turin Shroud and the Great Secret of Freemasonry
by Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas

The the shroud itself is a piece of herringbone patterned linen in a 3:1 twill weave. This type of cloth came into use in Europe at the beginning of the 14th Century. Lomas and Knight accept that it would not be impossible for this to have been produced in the first century, however it is unlikely. It is also true, according to the authors, that of all the pollen deposits found embedded in the cloth, no pollen from olive trees has been found, and Israel has always had a high number of these plants. Radiocarbon dating has shown that the flax plants which were used to make the shroud had ceased to live between 1260 and 1390 AD.


On the image itself, Lomas and Knight deduced that the victim whose image the shroud bears was nailed with his right arm over his head and his left arm out sideways. This also corresponds with the observation that the right shoulder on the shroud appears to be dislocated. This conflicts with the traditional crucifixion in which the arms are stretched out sideways to promote great difficulties in breathing. the positioning of the arms on the shroud itself indicates that the victim was not laying on a flat surface, but on a soft padded surface when the image was made. With the head and shoulders raised to assist breathing, and the body heat that would be needed for the chemical process that created the image on the shroud, it suggests that the victim was not only alive, but was intended to recover.


in 1307, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar was a man called Jacques de Molay. In their book, Lomas and Knight demonstrate that the French king Philip IV had planned to restore his fractured economy by stealing the wealth accumilated by the Knights Templar. Prior to Friday 13th October 1307, the Knights Templar had been a holy order but on this day the Paris Inquisition took 15,000 members, including de Molay and also took control of the Paris Temple. William Imbert was ordered by king Philip to extract a confession from de Molay by whatever means necessary but under no cicumstances was he to kill him.. Lomas and Knight produce evidence to show that one Templar, John of Foligny, confessed to the inquisition that there was a 'secret place' inside the Temple which Lomas and Knight believe resembeld a modern Masonic temple, complete with four items within a wooden chest- a human skull, two thigh bones and a white burial shroud (which is still used today in the ritual of the living ressurection just as it was in the Jerusalem Chuch and by the Knights Templar). According to Lomas and Knight, de Molay was interrogated in the Paris Temple. Lomas and Knight believe that Imbert was outraged at the Templars use of a ressurection ceremony which he felt insulted the resurrection of Jesus, and as a form of irony intended that Molay should suffer as Jesus had. They believe thay Molay was nailed most probably to a large wooden door in the manner described above. They believe that when his right arm was raised above his head and the nail driven through the wrist, that the impact from the nail caused his thumb to swing violently across his palm and dislocated at the joint. This concurs with medical examinations of the shroud.


This trauma would have produced large amounts of lactic acid, leading to 'metabolic acidosis' this produces severe cramps and was not helped by the fact Molay would not have been able to breathe propperly. This would have caused 'respiratory acidosis'. It was at this point, Lomas and Knight believe, that Molay was taken down and covered with the shroud found within the wooden chest to show that his "mocking use of a shroud had not gone unnoticed by the Holy Inquisition". Molay was then placed into the same bed that he had been dragged from, supporting the notion that the man on the shroud had been on a soft surface at the time the image was made. As Molay had no family in the area to care for him, Lomas and Knight believe that the family of his right hand man, that of Jean de Charney was called in to care for him. The Charney family removed the shroud and nursed him to health, though the scars never healed and some years later Molay showed papal representatives the extent of his injuries. The shroud which was bloodied, but a useful cloth, was washed and put away.


The shrouds first display was in a small church in the French town of Lirey in 1357. Interestingly, it was lent to the church by the widow of Geoffrey de Charney, a decendant of the family that Lomas and Knight believe cared for Molay after his tourture. This would explain why this shroud came into their possession.


Researcher: Faint writing seen on Shroud of Turin

By ARIEL DAVID, Associated Press Writer Ariel David, Associated Press Writer 32 mins ago
ROME "A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus.
Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.
Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, says in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the cloth.
She asserts that the words include the name "(J)esu(s) Nazarene" " or Jesus of Nazareth " in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.

"Even someone intent on forging a relic would have had all the reasons to place the signs of divinity on this object," Frale said Friday. "Had we found 'Christ' or the 'Son of God' we could have considered it a hoax, or a devotional inscription."

The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping from his hands and feet, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen's fibers at the time of his resurrection.
The fragile artifact, owned by the Vatican, is kept locked in a protective chamber in a Turin cathedral and is rarely shown. Measuring 13 feet (four meters) long and three feet (one meter) wide, the shroud has suffered severe damage through the centuries, including from fire.
The Catholic Church makes no claims about the cloth's authenticity, but says it is a powerful symbol of Christ's suffering.
There has been strong debate about it in the scientific community.
Skeptics point out that radiocarbon dating conducted on the cloth in 1988 determined it was made in the 13th or 14th century.
But Raymond Rogers of Los Alamos National Laboratory said in 2005 that the tested threads came from patches used to repair the shroud after a fire. Rogers, who died shortly after publishing his findings, calculated it is 1,300 to 3,000 years old and could easily date from Jesus' era.

Another study, by the Hebrew University, concluded that pollen and plant images on the shroud showed it originated in the area around Jerusalem sometime before the eighth century.
While faint letters scattered around the face on the shroud were seen decades ago, serious researchers dismissed them, due to the results of the radiocarbon dating test, Frale told The Associated Press.
But when she cut out the words from enhanced photos of the shroud and showed them to experts, they concurred the writing style was typical of the Middle East in the first century "Jesus' time.

She believes the text was written on a document by a clerk and glued to the shroud over the face so the body could be identified by relatives and buried properly. Metals in the ink used at the time may have allowed the writing to transfer to the linen, Frale said.
She said she counted at least 11 words in her study of enhanced images produced by French scientists in a 1994 study. The words are fragmented and scattered on and around the image's head, crisscrossing the cloth vertically and horizontally.
One short sequence of Aramaic letters has not been fully translated. Another fragment in Greek " "iber" " may refer to Emperor Tiberius, who reigned at the time of Jesus' crucifixion, Frale said.
She said the text also partially confirms the Gospels' account of Jesus' final moments. A fragment in Greek that can be read as "removed at the ninth hour" may refer to Christ's time of death reported in the holy texts, she said.

In her book "The Shroud of Jesus Nazarene," published in Italian, Frale reconstructs from the lettering on the shroud what she believes Jesus' death certificate said: "Jesus Nazarene. Found (guilty of inciting the people to revolt). Put to death in the year 16 of Tiberius. Taken down at the ninth hour."
She said the text then stipulates the body will returned to relatives after a year.

Frale said her research was done without the support of the Vatican.
"I tried to be objective and leave religious issues aside," Frale told the AP. "What I studied was an ancient document that certifies the execution of a man, in a specific time and place."
Frale's work usually focuses on medieval documents. She is noted for research on the order of the Knights Templar and her discovery of unpublished documents on the group in the Vatican's archives.
Earlier this year, she published a study saying the Templars once had the shroud in their possession. That raised eyebrows because the order was abolished in the early 14th century and the shroud is first recorded in history around 1360 in the hands of a French knight.

Her latest book on the shroud raised even more doubts among some experts.
On one hand, it is true that a medieval forger would label the object with Christ's name, as were all relics produced at the time, said Antonio Lombatti, a church historian who has written about the shroud. The problem is that there are no inscriptions to be seen in the first place.
"People work on grainy photos and think they see things," Lombatti told the AP. "It's all the result of imagination and computer software. ... If you look at a photo of the shroud, there's a lot of contrast between light and dark, but there are no letters."
Further criticizing Frale's work, Lombatti said that artifacts bearing Greek and Aramaic texts were found in Jewish burials from the first century, but the use of Latin is unheard of.

He also rejected the idea that authorities would officially return the body of a crucified man to relatives after filling out some paperwork. Victims of that form of execution used by the Romans would usually be left on the cross or were disposed of in a dump to add to its deterrent.
Lombatti said "the message was that you won't even have a tomb to cry over."
Another shroud expert, Gian Marco Rinaldi, said that even scientists who believe in the relic's authenticity have dismissed as unreliable the images on which Frale's study was based.

"These computer enhancements increase contrast in an unrealistic way to bring out these signs," he said. "You can find them all over the shroud, not just near the head, and then with a bit of imagination, you see letters."
Unusual sightings in the shroud are common and are often proved false, said Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pavia. He recently led a team of experts that reproduced the shroud using materials and methods available in the 14th century "proof", they said, that it could have been made by a human hand in the Middle Ages.

Decades ago, entire studies were published on coins purportedly seen on Jesus' closed eyes, but when high-definition images were taken during a 2002 restoration, the artifacts were nowhere to be seen and the theory was dropped, Garlaschelli said.
He said any theory about ink and metals would have to be checked by analysis of the shroud itself.

The last public display of the shroud was in 2000, when more than 1 million people turned up to see it. The next is scheduled for 2010, and Pope Benedict XVI has been asked to visit it.
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Stephen E. Jones
Shroud of Turin quotes: Unclassified quotes: November 2007
The following are quotes added to my Shroud of Turin unclassified quotes in November 2007. See copyright conditions at end.
[May, Jun, Jul, Aug (1), Aug (2), Sep, Oct, Dec]



1/11/2007

"The subject of this book is a mysterious length of old cloth preserved in Turin Cathedral. It has been called various names in successive ages by different people. When I first felt its fascination more than twenty years ago, we non-Italians usually referred to it by its traditional Latin name of Sudarium Taurinensis, or sweatcloth of Turin; but other names are more popular today. In Turin and the rest of Italy it is known to millions of Catholics as `la Santa Sindone' or just `la Sindone', and to an ever-increasing number of English-speaking people throughout Christendom and beyond it is becoming known as `the Holy Shroud of Turin', 'the Turin Shroud' or simply 'the Shroud'. There is something apt and familiar about the simplicity of that monosyllable, and an unspoken claim lies in its juxtaposition with the definite article. Other shrouds are preserved in other places, of course, just as there were other dukes alive in the days of Wellington: but this one - paradoxically - is unique. The Shroud." (McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering
UK, 1978, p.21. Emphasis original)

1/11/2007

"On the face of it, the very idea that the linen cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped in the tomb should have survived to this day would seem incredible. It demands even more of human credulity that the cloth bears a photographic likeness which would seem to be that of Jesus as he lay in the tomb. Yet it is on the evidence for these two seemingly impossible facts that this book has been written. The cloth in question is known by the Italians as the Santa Sindone, or Holy Shroud. It reposes within Turin's Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in the circular, black marble Royal Chapel, designed by Guarino Guarini, which was once the place of private worship for the dukes of Savoy, former rulers of Italy." (Wilson, I., "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus?," [1978], Image Books: New York NY, Revised edition, 1979, p.13)


6/11/2007

"Pia's glass plates measured 51 by 63 centimetres, and are preserved in the Museum of the Holy Shroud at Via San Domenico 28 in Turin. He took them home post-haste, leaving his assistants to clear up the Cathedral, and when he developed the first of them he nearly jumped out of his skin: in fact he records that he almost let the plate drop in his astonished excitement. For under his very eyes had formed something new and totally unsuspected, a commanding face of calm and majestic beauty which none of the millions of devoted worshippers in the past had ever seen before. Indeed one of the staggering facts about the Shroud is that although to our certain knowledge it has been venerated as a sacred relic since the fourteenth century, the face which we now see reproduced on the cover of this book (and which is so hauntingly familiar to many of us) was not seen until the small hours of 29 May 1898, just over eighty years ago - in fact within living memory."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.26-27)


6/11/2007

"The explanation is in one sense simple, in another sense baffling. It seems that what meets the naked eye in looking at the Shroud is very like a photographic negative, which, when photographed, becomes positive in the negative of the photograph, when the scuro turns chiaro and the chiaro, scuro. The striking face which Pia first saw in 1898 is the positive preserved for centuries in the arcane negative of the Turin Shroud, which awaited the nineteenth-century invention of photography to reveal it. People who maintain that the image on the Shroud is a medieval fake argue that what has happened here is the well-attested process known in the art world as `reversal'. In a letter to the Observer of 9, April 1978, for instance, Mr John Parker (echoing the Catholic Encyclopaedia of 1912) claimed that "the yellow colouring that represented the sweat of Christ has darkened to brown, through exposure to light and heat, thus converting the pristine `lights' to present `shades' and producing the accidental `negative photo' effects." This solution might be plausible enough if the image of the Shroud-Man had been painted, but I repeat that scientists have detected no trace of any pigment on the Shroud."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.27)

6/11/2007

"Two of the most eminent opponents of the Shroud in the decade after the revealing negative of 1898 were a French Canon and an English Jesuit. Ulisse Chevalier (1841-1923) was a distinguished clerical scholar - in fact he was probably the most meticulous medievalist that France has ever produced. In 1899, 1900, 1902, and again in 1903 he threw the whole weight of his immense reputation for erudition into disproving the authenticity of the Shroud, and at least his E'tude critique sur l'origine du St Suaire de Lirey-Chambéry-Turin (Paris, 1900) should be read and pondered by any serious inquirer today before he leaps to a facile conclusion. At much the same time Father Herbert Thurston, S.J. (1856-1939), weighed in at a more popular level of scholarship and voiced the rational disbelief of many Catholic and most Protestant historians in Britain. He concluded his influential essay of 1903 entitled The Holy Shroud and the Verdict of History with these confident words: `The case [against the Shroud's authenticity] is here so strong that [ ... ] the probability of an error in the verdict of history must be accounted, it seems to me, as almost infinitesimal.'"
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.28. Ellipses original)



6/11/2007

"The irony of those opening years of this century was that some of the top intellectual brass of the Catholic Establishment outside Italy opposed the authenticity of the Shroud, while some of the most distinguished lay agnostic scientists were openly championing it. On 21, April 1902, for instance, Yves Delage (1854-1920), a very eminent Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Sorbonne, who was known for his uncompromising stand against supernaturalism, gave a lecture on the Shroud before the Academie Française in which he declared his belief in its authenticity (and jeopardised his career in so doing). In the same year came out the careful scientific study entitled Le Linceul du Christ by Paul Vignon (1865-c1940), also of the Sorbonne, but later Professor of Biology at the Institut Catholique (Paris) and one of the Shroud's most convinced and able apologists of this century."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.28. Ellipses original)



6/11/2007

"Before the fourteenth century was out, this late arrival on the scene had acquired the two most dangerous and seemingly best informed - opponents in its entire history. Both were Bishops, and both appear to have been men of exceptional probity in their generation. It is quite possible that the Shroud was not exposed at Lirey in Geoffroi's lifetime, but it is difficult to unravel the circumstances of its public debut with any accuracy. What seems reasonably certain is that within a year of Geoffroi's death the Bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, was already condemning the cult of this `false' relic; and late in the year 1389 one of his successors in the see, Pierre d'Arcis, drew up a comprehensive memorandum for the Avignon Antipope Clement VII in which he claimed that the Shroud, far from being authentic, was the work of an artist who had confessed to the fraud. Here, in Herbert Thurston's translation, is the most damning passage from this forthright document, with the original Latin of some of the key sentences in parentheses: `The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the Dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore. This story was put about not only in the kingdom of France, but, so to speak, throughout the world, so that from all parts people came together to view it. And further to attract the multitude so that money cunningly be wrung from them, pretended miracles were worked, certain men being hired to represent themselves as healed at the moment of the exhibition of the shroud, which all believed to be the shroud of our Lord. The Lord Henry of Poitiers, of pious memory, then Bishop of Troyes, becoming aware of this, and urged by many prudent persons to take action, as indeed was his duty in the exercise of his ordinary jurisdiction, set himself earnestly to work to fathom the truth of this matter. For many theologians and other wise persons declared that this could not be the real shroud of our Lord having the Saviour's likeness thus imprinted upon it, since the holy Gospel made no mention of any such imprint, while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely that the holy Evangelists would have omitted to record it, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time. Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.'
[Chevalier, Étude critique, pp. VII-XII; English translation in Thurston, `The Holy Shroud and the Verdict of History' in The Month, CI , January 1903, pp. 17-29] (McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.29-30)


6/11/2007

"Let us suppose that the carbon 14 test, if and when it is applied to the Shroud, comes up with a fourteenth century date. What then? Most of us, I imagine, would dismiss the whole thing from our minds and rue the waste of time spent in studying it. But the niggle would probably remain in more than one conscience, because the scientific evidence of authenticity in fields other than that of carbon dating appears to be so strong."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.32-33)



6/11/2007

"We are left with no viable alternative: if the Shroud-Man is not the self-signature of Christ, then it must be the work of human ingenuity, with either good or evil intent. And yet, strangely enough, the more we examine this third hypothesis - which at first sight seems so much more rational than the direct intervention of God or Devil - the more it proves the most difficult of them all to swallow. Let us spare a thought at this point for the anonymous artist of genius: who was he? What craftsman during the reign of the first two Valois Kings had the requisite skills to create so exact a representation of the naked human body? Girard d'Orleans? Jean Coste? Jean Petit called Jean de Troyes? What we know of their work would hardly suggest that any of these leading painters at the court of King John II conceived and executed the portrait of Jesus on the Turin Shroud."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.33-34)



6/11/2007

"In the past, learned historians both clerical and lay have been satisfied that this portrait was subtili modo depicta and have championed the fake hypothesis. But what is so special about this relic that, six centuries after Bishop Henri de Poitiers unmasked it for a fraud, both Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, rationalists, nothingarians, scientists and even Oxbridge dons are busy discussing it this year, and most of them (as far as I can tell) are admitting that there is more in it than meets the eye? If I had to answer in one word, I should choose the Italian polysyllable which is in the mouth of so many sindonologists today: i n f a l s i f i c a b i l e. The more we investigate this fabulous sheet and the ghostly image it bears, the more we doubt whether any fourteenth-century artist could possibly have faked it. The Shroud-Man appears to be intrinsically unfakeable."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed.,"Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.34)



6/11/2007

"Let us enumerate some of the difficulties which beset the fake hypothesis. First, as we have seen, the admixture of cotton with the linen of the Shroud seems to preclude a European provenance for its fabric, and Dr Max Frei has found that some of the pollen clinging to it came from Asia Minor and the Middle East. But this in itself is not an insuperable difficulty, because a dedicated deceiver might have used a length of cloth brought back by some crusader, or could conceivably have sought the material for his hoax in Palestine himself - although such a quest would appear to be a trifle over-sophisticated for his day and age. Secondly, and much more problematically, how on earth did the fourteenth-century faker project the image of the Shroud-Man on to the cloth? Monsieur le Truqueur painted it on, stated Bishop Pierre d'Arcis in his memorandum of 1389, and that sounds commonsensical enough until we remember that there are no brushstrokes visible on the Shroud, and no vestige of paint or any other known pigment. Another suggestion (by Dr Joseph Blinzler) is that the hoaxer made a life-size statue of a man and pressed it between the upper and nether halves of the folded linen sheet. But this proposed solution bristles with every sort of difficulty. In the first place, is there any record or tradition of sculpture to this degree of stark anatomical realism in mid-fourteenth-century France? (The first Lirey expositions of the Shroud occurred one generation before the birth of Brunelleschi and Donatello in Florence.)"
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.34)



6/11/2007

"In the second place, the mere act of pressing alone, without pigment applied to the statue, would not have left any image on the cloth; and, in the third place, even if it had, it would have produced an image not perfect in proportion but distorted by physical contact, as anyone can confirm by the simple experiment of blacking his face with burnt cork and then pressing his handkerchief all over it. The basic fact remains: we just do not know by what natural means such an image could have been impressed upon the Shroud."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.34-35)

6/11/2007

"Thirdly, we have to account for the mysterious business of the photographic-type negative. We have already seen that it cannot be explained by `reversal' because there is no paint on the Shroud. Yet there must be some natural explanation if the relic is a man-made fake. It would be an unusually clairvoyant and altruistic scoundrel who would perpetrate a hoax so subtle that none of his own generation, nor his children, nor children's children down to the tenth generation could appreciate it with their naked eyes, but which depended for its full impact and effect on the invention of photography five hundred years later."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.35)



6/11/2007

"But perhaps the most staggering clue to the genius of this hypothetical artist is that he has depicted Jesus with the nail-wound in his wrist. In France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere I have studied hundreds of paintings, sculptures and carvings of Christ's crucifixion and deposition from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and not one of them shows the nail-wound anywhere but in the palm of his hand. It is not until we come to Van Dyck in the seventeenth century that we find the first representation of Christ with the nail-wound through the wrist. His painting hangs in the Palazzo Reale in Genoa, a city in which he lived for some time, and it is possible that he may have been influenced in this detail by seeing the Shroud in passing through Turin. Why did our fourteenth-century faker, against all the cultural conditioning of his times, place the nail-wound not in the palm but in the wrist? Anatomy and archaeology have since proved that he was perfectly correct. Dr Pierre Barbet, chief surgeon at the Paris hospital of St Joseph in the 1930s, conducted some revealing if macabre experiments with corpses and amputated limbs at that time. He established the fact that the weight of a human body would cause the nail to tear the flesh right up between the fingers if driven through the palm, because no bone would bar its way; whereas wrist-nailing ensured that the body stayed pinned to the patibulum of the cross when it was hoisted on to the stipes, which was already impaled in the ground at the place of execution. It is surely no dishonour to medieval artists that they did not know this gruesome detail, for only in recent times have archaeologists, historians and medical men begun to rediscover the horrific techniques employed in crucifixion - once all too well known in the Roman Empire; but mercifully forgotten after Constantine abolished this form of capital punishment in 315 AD. Knowledge of the precise physical pains which Christ suffered had been lost long before any medieval artist began to depict them. The Gospels say his hands were nailed, so painters and sculptors naturally represented the wound in the palm. How then did the fourteenth-century faker, who lived a thousand years after the abolition of crucifixion, know this telling and authentic detail of wrist-nailing? For authentic it was proved to be just over ten years ago, when the first known remains of a victim of crucifixion came to light in the outskirts of Jerusalem - a man in his mid-twenties called Jehohanan. His heelbones were transfixed by a single nail and he had suffered the usual crurifragium. Although the nails were missing from his wrists, they had left on the radial bone their telltale marks of scratching and levigation."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.35-36)


6/11/2007

"And now for the most amazing detail of them all, which makes the fake hypothesis virtually incredible: if a nail pierces the wrist between radius and ulna, it touches the median nerve, which automatically causes the thumb to flex across the palm, so that it is invisible to anyone looking at the back of the hand. On the Turin Shroud we see the back of both the hands of Jesus Christ, but there is no sign of either thumb."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.36)



6/11/2007

"Authenticity is stamped all over this enigmatic relic, which just goes on springing surprise after surprise at its mysterious perfection from year to year. The impressive matching of the scourge-marks with the pattern of two soldiers administering the flogging, one either side, one taller than the other: the angle of the bloodflows on the forearm, mathematically exact for crucifixion: the dimensions of the side-wound, and its emission of both blood and water: the stupendous witness of the wounds (in total verisimilitude) caused by the spiky cap: all these features of the Shroud-Man and many more compel us to admit the harmonious integrity of this unfakeable image. But it is above all the face which rivets our responsive gaze - 'an appearance so marred beyond human semblance, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief' (Isaiah 52.14, 53.3) - yet a face of tranquil dignity, of royal authority, of divine beauty - a countenance in a million million: unique. If the Shroud-Man looked like this in death, how did he appear in life? Toi, qui-es-tu? - asked Paul Claudel, brought face to face with the Turin Shroud and its haunting image. The answer is unavoidable: it is Jesus Christ our Lord. In the astonished words of the centurion who saw him die: `Truly this man was the Son of God!' (Mark 15.39.)"
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P.,
ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.36-37)


6/11/2007

"If then this relic is the authentic Shroud of Christ and bears his imperishable imprint, where was it between about 30 AD and 1353? The short and truthful answer is that we simply do not know. It was evidently not displayed publicly in its present form, for if it had been there would surely exist some record of its display. It is not impossible that it remained hidden for a millennium in some remote monastic fastness, like Codex Sinaiticus before it was discovered by Tischendorf: but this we cannot tell. Of course there have been many clever reconstructions of its missing history, the most recent and ingenious being the suggestion made by Mr Ian Wilson that the Turin Shroud and the Edessa Mandylion are one and the same thing.' `Mandylion' is a Greek word which means head-shawl or kerchief, and was applied to a piece of ancient cloth which was venerated in Asia Minor (first at Edessa and later at Constantinople) until it vanished without trace in 1204 AD. It was said to bear the image of the bearded face of Christ, a likeness acheiropoietos, or `not made by hand'. Mr Wilson argues that the Mandylion was the Shroud of Christ so folded up and protected by ornamental trellis that only the image of the face was displayed. His hypothesis, presented with a wealth of circumstantial evidence, is as attractive as it is unconvincing; for, although it would have explained so much, it is fraught with difficulties which many critical readers will find insuperable. One is purely practical, and might occur to any housewife. If a linen sheet is folded and protected so that only a small part of it is exposed to the air, after several centuries that part is likely to have suffered discoloration. If the Shroud spent more than half its life as the Mandylion, there should be a circular area around the face of Christ which is more yellowed than the rest of the cloth: but this is not the case."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, pp.36-37)



6/11/2007

"If the Shroud is authentic, do we need its history before 1353 to prove it? As historians we are programmed to answer Yes: any artefact which turns up in one century purporting to come from another is rightly an object of suspicion until proved genuine, whether it is Drake's plaque, the Vinland map, or Piltdown Man.
But as logicians we are bound to answer No: authenticity is authenticity, and a priori we can argue that if an article is genuine it is genuine, whether we have history to prove it or not. If I find a Rembrandt in my attic its authenticity is not altered by the fact that I cannot account for its provenance. A pot, a coin, or a statue can lie buried for two millennia and retain their integrity: they are what they are. When I was in St Andrews last January, the Professor of ecclesiastical History took me round St Mary's College, and showed me a black leather chalice-holder embossed with the insignia of the Virgin Mary and inscribed with Latin tags. He told me that it was found last year in a college cupboard, where it had gathered dust unnoticed since before the Reformation. Improbable, but true."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering
UK, 1978, pp.38-39)



6/11/2007

"The Shroud is such a remarkable thing that, in the last analysis, there can be only two honest opinions about it. The first (which occurs most readily to the Protestant and rationalist in me) is that it is a piece of fourteenth-century representational art, and therefore probably a fake - an unusual fake, admittedly, well-intentioned possibly, ingenious certainly, but not the shroud in which the body of Jesus Christ was wrapped; or, if indeed the length of linen was that shroud, then the image on it has been added later by human hand as a pious fraud, by some process which even modern scientists do not understand. And of course if the image is not authentic, then the veneration of it comes perilously close ta breaking the First and Second Commandments."
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P.,
ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.39. Emphasis original)



6/11/2007

"The alternative opinion is almost too shattering to the equanimity of most of us to entertain for more than a moment or two. It is that in the Turin Shroud we have not only the linen cloth in which the body of the Lord Jesus was wrapped, but also a representation of that body portrayed by other than human hands, by some supernatural process which confounds all explanation. Either way the thing is a marvel - of illusion if it is a fake, or of reality if it is not. But it is my conviction that in this most mysterious thing - embarrassing in its uniqueness, exciting in its challenge - we face the same reality that confronts us in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ. In both those central miracles of world history was manifested the splendour of God: could it be that the radiant incandescence of that almighty act of love and power when the Son of God 'was raised by the glory of the Father' has scorched his image and likeness on the Shroud, a sign for our scientific century which demands scientific proof?" (McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.39)



6/11/2007

"As a Christian I must declare my belief that the truth of Christianity does not require such signs as the Turin Shroud, for its proof is the living witness of the Spirit of God in all who receive Jesus Christ as Saviour, Lord and God; but perhaps from time to time we fallible human beings need such demonstrations of a reality which transcends our powers of explanation to jolt us out of the complacency of our agnosticism and confirm our faltering faith. Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief!"
(McNair, P., "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in Jennings, P., ed., "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK, 1978, p.40)



8/11/2007

"There is no longer any question but that the artist's rendition preserved in the Hungarian Pray Codex [1192-95 AD] represents the cloth we now recognize as the Shroud of Turin. Moreover, by that rendition we know that this is the earliest firmly documented demonstrable viewpoint that the cloth we know as the Shroud of Turin was the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ. In color photographs of the Codex even one set of the angular flows of blood down one of the arms is clearly visible-an observation I believe was first made by the Belgian scholar, Jef Leysen (personal communication, Spring, 1998). And here is shown-as already noted-a comparatively accurate portrayal of two different sets of holes that represent the pre-1516 burns at the two ends of the Shroud. Therefore, the pre-1516 burn marks are more accurately termed pre-1192 burn marks. But, most importantly, their existence some 65 years prior to the first bracket of the 1260-1390 radiocarbon date creates a problem for the 95 percent confidence level claimed by the three labs because one must conservatively add at least 100 years onto the above date to allow for the development of a tradition that the cloth portrayed by the artist was in fact the burial cloth of Christ. On the other hand it would be commensurate with a 68 percent level of confidence which expands the window to a 500 year opening that would encompass that date. Still, the labs have insisted that the 95 percent confidence level is the level achieved by their tests."
(Maloney, P.C., "Researching the Shroud of Turin: 1898 to the Present: A Brief
Survey of Findings and Views," in Minor, M., Adler, A.D. & Piczek, I., eds., "The Shroud of Turin: Unraveling the Mystery: Proceedings of the 1998 Dallas Symposium," Alexander Books: Alexander NC, 2002, pp.33-34)


9/11/2007

"Another reason why this relic, of all in the world, has been subjected to such unusual debate is, I suspect, because of the awe on the one hand and the fear an the other which it induces. Those who believe in it, like those who believe in God and Christ, are filled with awe at the prospect of the possible truth. Those who profess not to believe in it, who set out to prove its falsity, like those who are atheists and set out to prove the non-existence of God, are filled with an innate tear at the prospect of the possible truth. It is this which has led to the frenetic challenges to its authenticity: that fear by the unbeliever that perhaps the believer is right after all. All cynics and sceptics show that sense of insecurity, no matter what they argue about. When they go against the established tide of human opinion and development, particularly of innate concepts, they display fear. Thus the argument about the Shroud fails into a similar category of insecurity by the doubters and a calm serenity of security and persistent searching by the believers."
(Morgan, R., "Shroud Guide," Runciman Press: Manly NSW, Australia, 1983, p.30)



9/11/2007

"As the (red ochre) dust settles briefly over Sindondom, it becomes clear there are only two choices: Either the shroud is authentic (naturally or supernaturally produced by the body of Jesus) or it is a product of human artifice. Asks Steven Schafersman: `Is there a possible third hypothesis? No, and here's why. Both Wilson [Wilson, I., "The Shroud of Turin," 1979, pp.51-53.] and Stevenson and Habermas [Stevenson, K.E. & Habermas, G.R., "Verdict on the Shroud," 1981, pp.121-129] go to great lengths to demonstrate that the man imaged on the shroud must be Jesus Christ and not someone else. After all, the man on this shroud was flogged, crucified, wore a crown of thorns, did not have his legs broken, was nailed to the cross, had his side pierced, and so on. Stevenson and Habermas [Ibid., p.128] even calculate the odds as 1 in 83 million that the man on the shroud is not Jesus Christ (and they consider this a very conservative estimate). I agree with them on all of this. If the shroud is authentic, the image is that of Jesus.' [Schafersman, S.D., "Science, the public, and the Shroud of Turin," The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 6, No. 3, Spring 1982, pp.37-56, p.42]"
(Nickell, J., "Inquest on the Shroud of Turin," [1983], Prometheus Books: Buffalo NY, Revised, 1987, Reprinted, 2000, p.141. Emphasis original)



9/11/2007

"Can the Man of the Shroud be identified? (Balance of Probabilities) A number of scholars of critical disposition, intent on solving this mystery, have wondered whether the image imprinted on the Shroud might be that of Jesus Christ. Obviously this enquiry too, for it to be of scientific value, must be based exclusively on objective considerations. Here then is a study on the balance of probabilities, made by Professor Bruno Barberis of the University of Turin, reviving and completing studies by Yves Delage, Paul De Gail and Tino Zeuli. The method of research, while of absolute scientific rigour, is based on extremely simple considerations. The thesis is this: `If you throw a coin up in the air, the odds are two to one (1/2) it will land on the side you have chosen; if you throw a die up in the air, the odds against your getting the face of the die with your selected number on it are six to one (1/6). If you throw coin and die up at the same time, since the two events are independent of each other, the odds of your getting the preselected side of coin and face of die at the same time will be twelve to one (1/2 x 1/6 = 1/12). Now let us examine the seven most significant characteristics common to Jesus of Nazareth (according to the Gospel narrative) and the Man of the Shroud, and see what the odds are against all these characteristics being found at the same time in the same man who had undergone the torment of crucifixion.
1. Both Jesus and the Man of the Shroud were wrapped in winding-sheets after death by crucifixion. Note that not many crucified men can have had a regular burial. (It was the most ignominious of punishments, reserved for slaves, brigands and murderers, and extended after death with contempt for the corpse): one chance in a hundred (1/100).
2. Both Jesus and the Man of the Shroud had a cap of thorns put on his head. No historical document mentions any such usage. Let us limit this very remote probability to one in five thousand (1/5000).
3. The patibulum weighed heavily on the shoulders of the Man of the Shroud as also on Jesus's. Only occasionally was the condemned man made to carry the horizontal beam of the cross to the place of execution: odds of two to one (1/2). 4. Same odds (1/2) on the way the hands and feet were fixed to the wood of the cross. They could be fastened with nails but a simpler and quicker method was to tie them on with ropes.
5. The Shroud displays a wound on the right side of the Man who was wrapped in it. John's Gospel (19:33-34) tells how in Jesus's case `instead of their breaking his legs, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance, and immediately out came blood and water.' Odds perhaps of ten to one (1/10).
6. The Man of the Shroud had been wrapped in the sheet as soon as he was lowered from the cross; no washing or anointing of the corpse took place. It was the same with Jesus, since the Jewish Passover was about to begin, during which no manual labour could be performed: odds of twenty to one (1/20).
7. The Shroud bears the imprint of a man's corpse, but no traces of putrefaction. Hence it wrapped a human body for a brief period though long enough for an imprint to be formed on it. And did not the corpse of Jesus rest in the tomb for little more than thirty hours, from Friday evening until dawn on Sunday? This is an extraordinary case of agreement which we may rate at odds of five hundred to one (1/500).
From this analysis, Barberis then obtained the aggregate probability; this is given by the aggregate total of the individual probabilities considered, viz: 1/100 x 1/5000 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/10 x 1/20 x 1/500 = 1/200,000,000,000 In line with the scholars preceding him, he was able to deduce that out of a hypothetical 200 billion victims of crucifixion ONE ALONE could have possessed the same identical characteristics common to Jesus and the Man of the Shroud' and the Gospel tells us what his name is: JESUS CHRIST, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried and who on the third day rose again from the dead."
(Moretto, G., "The Shroud: A Guide," Paulist Press: Mahwah NJ, 1999, p.58. Emphasis original)



9/11/2007

"However, well over half a century before this particular observation by Dubarle and his correspondent, another Frenchman had been fired by the self-same idea that something along these lines was the way to establish that the shroud really was around during the early centuries. This was Paul Vignon, who as early as 1900 had been shown the shroud photograph by Paris anatomy professor, Yves Delage. Although a biologist by training, Vignon became launched into decades of enthusiastic research into every aspect of the shroud. Late in his life, however, the topic that particularly absorbed him was the incidence in early Byzantine portraits of the Christ Enthroned/Christ Pantocrator type of curious facial markings seeming to derive from equivalent features on the shroud. To present his findings, Vignon compiled a beautifully produced book, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la Science, l'Archeologie, l'Histoire, l'Iconographie, la Logique (The Holy Shroud of Turin in the light of Science, Archaeology, History, Iconography and Logic).[Masson: Paris, 1939] But the potential impact of this was tragically blunted by the outbreak of the Second World War within a few weeks of its publication.
(Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, pp.161-162)



12/11/2007

"The Shroud image suggests quite strongly the presence of many skeletal details e.g. carpal and metacarpal bones, some 22 teeth, eye sockets, left femur, left and possibly right thumbs flexed under the palms of the hands, as well as soft tissue and soft tissue injuries; all presumably originating from some form of radiation emitted from the body enshrouded.
[Whanger, A. & Whanger, M., "Polarized Image Overlay," Applied Optics, Vol. 24, No. 6, 1985, pp.766-772]
No scientific human model has been satisfactorily utilized to offer elucidation of the origin of this quality an image. Many have postulated image formation theories ... Later researchers such as Giles Carter and Thaddeus Trenn have studied radiation biology in a theoretical framework and have achieved promising results in terms of image superficiality and clarity.
[Carter, G.R., "Formation of Images on the Shroud by X- rays: A New Hypothesis," in "Archaeological Chemistry," ACS Advances in Chemistry No. 205, 1984, pp.425- 446]
The human radiation model seems to offer the greatest application to the Shroud image thus far."
(Accetta, A.D., Lyons, K. & Jackson, J., "Nuclear Medicine and its Relevance to the Shroud Of Turin," in Walsh, B.J., ed., "Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond, Virginia," Magisterium Press: Glen Allen VA, 2000, p.3)



12/11/2007

"The human radiation model we used generated a number of characteristics which parallel the image on the Turin Shroud. It must be noted that these researchers in no way are claiming that they reproduced any of the exact characteristics of the Shroud image. Rather, those characteristics which are similar can potentially help to explain better those seen on the Shroud as well as point to the probable general origin of its image. ...

First, we demonstrated that a human model can be used to generate images resulting from emitted radiation, that resemble the image on the Shroud. ... Second, we demonstrated that this radiation when captured by a vertical collimator can yield the verticality parallel seen on the Turin image.
Third, we demonstrated that the nature of the emitted radiation is such that it produces an image void of a sharp outline such as that on the Turin Shroud. ..." (Accetta, A.D., Lyons, K. & Jackson, J., "Nuclear Medicine and its Relevance to the Shroud Of Turin," in Walsh, B.J., ed., "Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond, Virginia," Magisterium Press: Glen Allen VA, 2000, p.4)



12/11/2007

"The radiocarbon dating performed on the Shroud of Turin in 1988 by laboratories located in Oxford, Tucson and Zurich concluded with a 95% probability that the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin dated from between 1260 - 1390 AD. A reanalysis of the data used to derive this range of dates suggests that the statistical tests performed earlier assumed C-14 homogeneity in the samples and as a result may have lead to a misleading range of dates. A different series of statistical evaluations has been applied to this radiocarbon date data leading to the conclusion that the Shroud subsamples each contained differing levels of C-14. An evaluation of this conclusion was conducted and found to be statistically supportable. Further analysis revealed that the sample dates observed were directly related to the physical location of the sample on the Shroud linen. This necessarily implies that the linen samples were non-homogeneous as regards C-14 and the radiocarbon date derived for the Shroud samples are of questionable validity. The hypothesis of a relationship between the sample location on the Shroud cloth and the date measured was evaluated and found to be statistically significant."
(Walsh, B.J., "The 1988 Shroud of Turin Radiocarbon Tests Reconsidered," in Walsh, B.J., ed., "Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research
Conference, Richmond, Virginia," Magisterium Press: Glen Allen VA, 2000, p.326)



12/11/2007

"The results of the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin [Damon, P E., et al., "Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin", Nature, 337, pp.611-615, 16 February 1989] caused many who believed that the cloth which was tested could no longer be considered the authentic burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. Further, a number of researchers who had devoted a substantial portion of their research time on issues related to the Shroud saw their funding evaporate or lost further interest. For a number of years, interest in the Shroud waned, only to revive in the late 1990's in anticipation of two public viewings of the Shroud, one in 1998 and the other in 2000. Further, there have been several proposals in recent years that have offered the possibility that the radiocarbon dating may have been distorted by physical or biological agents. In 1997 one researcher [Van Haelst, R., "Radiocarbon Dating the Shroud - A Critical Statistical Analysis," 1999;
]http://www.shroud.com/vanhels3.htm] critically analyzed the statistical evaluation performed in the original dating and found the assumptions made and statistical conclusions drawn to be of questionable certainty.

As noted in the original research, "the spread of measurements for sample 1 (Shroud of Turin sample) is somewhat greater than would be expected from the errors quoted". Applying a X-Squared test to their data, the authors noted, `that it is unlikely that the errors quoted by the laboratories for sample 1... fully reflect the overall scatter'".
(Walsh, B.J., "The 1988 Shroud of Turin Radiocarbon Tests Reconsidered," in Walsh, B.J., ed., "Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond, Virginia," Magisterium Press: Glen Allen VA, 2000, p.326. Emphasis original)



12/11/2007

"This paper has been written to reevaluate the data collected in 1988 and offer alternative and statistically significant explanations for the 1988 measurements. ... Conclusion The statistical analysis techniques employed in the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin appear to have underestimated the potential for a non-homogeneous distribution of radiocarbon in the Shroud linen. The statistical approach employed at that time relied upon weighed means to evaluate measurements. Such a use may be warranted when the scatter of the overall data indicates there is no substantial difference in sub-sample statistical measurements when compared to the statistics derived from the overall population. However, the statistical characteristics of the data from each radiocarbon lab appear to indicate that, in the case of the Oxford lab measurements, its observations were drawn from a statistically different population. Further, by using weighed means to evaluate the Shroud sample measurements, the labs inadvertently masked an underlying difference in the data which appears to be significant in explaining the different radiocarbon date measurements observed.
Using a series of statistical evaluation techniques, it has been demonstrated that there were statistically significant differences between the data reported by the labs involved in the 1988 testing in both the mean values computed and the error terms reported. A re-analysis of the data indicates that it is possible that the location of the sample was directly related to the radiocarbon measurement observed. This finding is supportive of the hypothesis that the exposure of the Shroud of Turin to a thermal event in 1532 enhanced the number of C-14 atoms in the linen, possibly by thermally-induced isotopic fractionation, or by other processes which have yet to be identified. It may be that the three labs that performed the radiocarbon measurements in 1988 actually measured the effects of this enhancement phenomenon."
(Walsh, B.J., "The 1988 Shroud of Turin Radiocarbon Tests Reconsidered," in Walsh, B.J., ed., "Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond, Virginia," Magisterium Press: Glen Allen VA, 2000, pp.326, 340. Emphasis original)



12/11/2007

"THEY CALL IT the Shroud of Turin. You may never have heard of it; few had, until recent years, outside of Italy. Yet this treasured strip of linen cloth-an object of veneration by millions-is one of the most perplexing enigmas of modern times. It is, in fact, the focus of an intensive scientific investigation that reads like a mystery story. The curious blend of history and legend behind that story glitters with kings and dukes, crusaders and popes, and perhaps a consummately clever charlatan. The modern detectives probing the mystery include art historians, pathologists, linguists, biblical scholars, textile experts, chemists, physicists, and photographic specialists. Among the clues to the riddle are such bizarre items as a Roman whip, wizened specks of pollen, bones from a Jerusalem cemetery, and photographs enhanced by space-age instruments designed to study the moon and Mars. But the clue that transcends all others is the remarkable image on the shroud itself-a ghostly image, life-size, of an unclothed, bearded man with long hair. The face, hauntingly serene in death, would grace a masterpiece of art. The body, anatomically correct, bears the frightful marks of scourging, crucifixion, and piercing-perhaps by thorns and lance. It would appear to be a portrait, uncannily accurate when matched against the Gospel accounts, of Jesus of Nazareth. And, indeed, some believe that this stretch of ivory-colored linen is the very cloth that Joseph of Arimathaea placed under and over the body of Jesus in the rock-cut tomb near Golgotha nearly 2,000 years ago."
(Weaver, K.F., "Science Seeks to Solve...The Mystery of the Shroud," National Geographic, Vol. 157, June 1980, pp.730-753, pp.730,734. Emphasis original)



12/11/2007

"It would not be the shroud's first brush with science. That happened eighty years before, in 1898, with the first photographs of the relic. Those pictures uncovered the most surprising of the shroud's many mysteries. When the photographer, Secondo Pia, examined his first glass-plate negative as it emerged from the developing bath, he almost dropped it in shocked excitement. He was looking not at the usually unrealistic, confusing photographic negative, but at a clear positive image. Highlights and shadows were reversed from those on the cloth and were far more lifelike and realistic. Moreover, they showed details never before seen in the shroud, which was now revealed as a negative image. A negative image? Hundreds of years before the invention of photography? The idea that the shroud was a hoax suddenly seemed less plausible, for how could a medieval artist have produced a negative image, and why would he choose to do so?"
(Weaver, K.F., "Science Seeks to Solve...The Mystery of the Shroud," National Geographic, Vol. 157, June 1980, pp.730-753, 743. Emphasis original)



12/11/2007

"PRIOR TO RELEASING OUR FINDINGS ON the Pantocrator icon and the Justinian II solidus, we had read about the work of Father Filas on the identification of coins over the eyes of the Man of the Shroud. The possibility of the presence of coins over the eyes was first raised when three scientists, John P Jackson, Eric J. Jumper, and R. W (Bill) Mottern, the instigators of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, put a photograph of the Shroud face in a VP-8 Image Analyzer (a specialized computer device which converts the density of an image into height) and saw, to their astonishment, an accurate three-dimensional representation rather than the irregular and distorted image resulting from all ordinary photographs and paintings. Two button-like objects, one over each eye, were visible; it was suggested they might be coins which had been used to keep the eyes of the dead closed, a practice common to many peoples for many centuries [Jackson, J.P., Jumper, E.J. Mottern, B. & Stevenson, K.E., ed., "The Three Dimensional Image On Jesus' Burial Cloth," in Stevenson, K.E., ed., "Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference of Research on The Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Bronx NY, 1977, pp.90-91].

British historian Ian Wilson mentioned several coins from the time of Pontius Pilate which would correspond to the size of the `buttons,' about fifteen millimeters or five-eighths of an inch in diameter. In 1979, more out of curiosity than anything else, Filas re-photographed an enlargement of a photograph which had been made from a second-generation 1931 Enrie print of the face. To his surprise, he noticed something he had not seen before-a sort of design directly over the right eye. He took this photograph to Michael Marx, a numismatist (coin expert) who had earlier volunteered his professional expertise. Marx became excited as he scanned the photograph with a magnifier, for he could identify four curving capital letters, UCAI. There also was something that looked like a shepherd's crook. Filas next obtained a copy of Madden's History of Jewish Coinage, and of Money in the Old and New Testament and a catalog of all Pontius Pilate coins in the British Museum. He found only one coin which had as its main motif a `shepherd's crook,' actually an astrologer's staff or lituus: this was a lepton (small coin) or `widow's mite' of Pontius Pilate, and it was the correct size. Then, also in 1979, numismatist Bill Yarbrough obtained several Pontius Pilate lepta and gave one to each of several Shroud researchers, including Filas, as a souvenir. Filas became convinced that there are indeed images of coins over the eyes. He identified the one over the right eye definitely as a lituus lepton of Pontius Pilate; and on very minimal evidence (three very short curving lines that seemed to spread away from each other from a common source) suggested that the one over the left eye was likely also a Pontius Pilate lepton but of a different design, that of a sheaf of barley, which is found on a Pontius Pilate lepton known as the Joulia (Julia) lepton, which was struck only during a six-month period in A.D. 29 in honor of Julia the mother of Tiberius Caesar. " (Whanger, M. & Whanger, A.D., "The Shroud of Turin: An Adventure of Discovery,"
Providence House Publishers: Franklin TN, 1998, pp.23-24. Emphasis original)



12/11/2007

"Detailed identification is not possible without further investigation, but we propose that they may be some kind of coins since: (1) they are both nearly circular and approximately the same size, and (2) scriptural accounts indicate that Joseph of Arimathaea, a wealthy man, was responsible for burying Jesus. He obviously had money on his person at the time of Jesus' burial for he was able to purchase a linen burial cloth. Thus, if Joseph followed Jewish burial custom to cover the eyes, then it is not unreasonable that the most natural and convenient thing for him to use would have been coins rather than pottery fragments. If our conjecture is true that these images are of coins, then we may have a truly unique method of dating the image. Computer enhancement of high quality closeup photographs of the eye region followed by a statistical correlation with known coinage of a given era and locality may be able to: (1) identify the objects as coins and (2) date and locate the probable time and place the image and not just the cloth was formed.
Indeed, we have some computer enhancements which, though lacking sufficient resolution for positive identification, indicate a possible structure on the surface of the objects. In addition, Ian Wilson has suggested several Judean Bronze Lepton coins which are about the correct size as the buttonlike images.
In particular, a Lepton of Pontius Pilate coined in A.D. 30-31 seems to agree especially well. On the other hand, a silver Denarius of Tiberius, coined in A.D. 14-37 was entirely too large. According to Wilson, a Lepton would probably be a likely candidate for Joseph of Arimathaea, an orthodox Jew, to use since it was acceptable as a Temple offering. It should be noted in passing that the fact that objects are found on the eyes indicates that the head of Jesus must have been in a nearly horizontal position, for otherwise they would have fallen off the eyelids. It is interesting to note further that these objects might have been mistaken for open eyes at one time; for example, Ian Wilson points out that the image on the Mandylion cloth (possibly the Shroud) was thought to be a face with the eyes open. If the identification of these images as solid objects over the eyes is correct, then another significant aspect of the image forming process comes to light: whatever process formed the image had to have acted the same way not only over the body and hair, but also over presumably organically inert fragments situated atop the eyes. This conclusion, we believe, is of significance, for it places great restrictions on the possible image formation processes. In short, three dimensionality implies that the image forming process, acted uniformly through space over the body, front and back, and even seemed to act independently of the type of surface, organic and inorganic, from which the image was generated. In addition, this identification of the 'objects' seems to strengthen the authenticity of the Shroud. For what artist or forger in the Fourteenth Century would have thought to place objects on the eyes of Jesus?" (Jackson, J.P., Jumper, E.J. Mottern, B. & Stevenson, K.E.,ed., "The Three Dimensional Image On Jesus' Burial Cloth," in Stevenson, K.E., ed., "Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference of Research on The Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Bronx NY, 1977, pp.90-91)

 

14/11/2007

"Most remarkable of all was the fact that Yves Delage took an active part in the investigation. He was an agnostic with a strong prejudice against anything that savored of the miraculous or the supernatural, but he was also a first-rate scientist of international reputation and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
.... After a year and a half the investigation came to an end with a resounding climax. These hard-headed scientists were convinced of the authenticity of the Shroud. ... They decided to bring their findings before the Academy ... What was still more startling, it was Yves Delage who proposed to put the case before his fellow Academicians. ... It was April 21, 1902 ... The Shroud is not a painting at all, said Delage, either of the fourteenth or of any other century. No matter what the documents in question may say, that hypothesis is absurd. Here is the proof before our eyes-the Shroud itself reproduced with perfect fidelity in these two photographs. They show that the two figures are negatives. The idea of a negative was unknown before the era of photography, and se no artist before that time could even have thought of painting a picture like that on the Shroud. Not only that, but these two figures, though outlined by a rather faint stain on the cloth, are as exact as a negative formed by light on a photographic plate. That is why the positive version reveals such a clear and natural portrait, anatomically correct, with true perspective, and with an aesthetic character that one would never have expected. ... In the hypothesis that this is a painting, continued Delage, you must imagine an artist who conceived the idea of a negative centuries before the invention of photography. Then you must imagine that this incredible genius knew how to place the lights and shades so that the photographic inversion of his hand- designed negative reveals this unrivaled portrait with its haunting, complex expression. The artist himself could not have seen this positive image while he did his work, since he would be doing everything in reverse. And he would have to do everything with perfect precision ...There would, of course, be no conceivable reason why the hypothetical artist should want to do a negative. Presumably, he would be painting for his contemporaries, not for the Academy of Sciences or for the parties of the present dispute; nor could he foresee the invention of photography, the only means that could reverse his negative into a positive. He would be taking infinite pains to conceal forever a masterful portrait in an apparently crude sketch. He would also have used materials and applied a technique unknown before the photograph of the Shroud inspired some clumsy imitations. There is not the slightest trace of any pigments here, nor the least sign of any preparation of the cloth to receive the twofold image. There is nothing but the delicate stain completely absorbed by the fabric, and it is of this stain that that perfect negative is formed. Yes, the painting hypothesis is absurd, no matter what any written documents may say to the contrary. In this conclusion the members of the Academy agreed with Delage. After examining the two glass plates provided by Secondo Pia, they admitted that the images on the Shroud could not be the work of any artist."
(Wuenschel, E.A., "Self-Portrait of Christ: The Holy Shroud of Turin," [1954], Holy Shroud Guild: Esopus NY, Third printing, 1961, pp.17-20)


20/11/2007

"The Shroud is in the form of a cloth strip, yellowish-white in colour, 4.37 metres long, 1.11 metres wide and 1.450 Kg in weight. It shows, close to each other at the head, the front and rear imprint of the body of a man. From the archaeological standpoint, the Shroud is a burial-sheet, wrapped round a corpse on the table in the tomb where the body was laid. To forensic medical examination, the image of the body seems to be stiffened by rigor mortis, and reveals a whole series of wounds and injuries corresponding to those recounted in the Gospels as being inflicted on Jesus. Signs of flagellation over the whole body, small wounds in the scalp caused by a helmet of thorns, two torn areas in the left scapula zone and the right super-scapular zone, holes in the wrists and at the feet, which could be caused by the penetration of nails, and a wide injury caused by a steel weapon in the lower right rib region."
(Cassanelli, A., "The Holy Shroud," Williams, B., transl., Gracewing: Leominster UK, 2002, p.15)



20/11/2007

"A LARGE piece of ancient linen, it apparently bears images of a bearded, naked, crucified man. That is the Shroud of Turin. ... What is the Shroud like? It is a piece of ancient linen cloth, presumably a burial shroud, fourteen feet three inches long by three feet seven inches wide. This sturdily woven cloth today would be a 'second' since the various batches of yarn were not matched for color and texture, and frequently the weave-pattern from one day's work was not carefully blended into the next. It was hand woven in a three-to-one herringbone twill from fairly heavy yarn made of Near East or Mediterranean-Basin flax, and the cloth is in an excellent state of preservation."
(Tribbe, F.C., "Portrait of Jesus: The Illustrated Story of the Shroud of Turin," Paragon House Publishers: St. Paul MN, Second edition, 2006, pp.1,3-4. Emphasis original)



20/11/2007

"On the Shroud are indistinct images of the front and back views of a man. The two views are nearly joined at the head, as if the man's body had been wrapped in the cloth lengthwise, foot to head to foot. Optimum viewing distance is six to ten feet from the Shroud; closer or farther, the images fade out completely. Apart from being indistinct, the body images are, in an undefinable sense, 'not natural.' They are of a faint sepia color (light tan) on the off-white, yellowing old cloth. Superimposed on these body images are darker markings resembling bloodstains, that are brownish red in color. These `bloodstains' are significantly seen at the wrists and feet, which exactly correspond to the blood stigmata of a classical Roman crucifixion. There also appear to be wounds covering the top of the head, the face, and one side of the body as well as several dozen smaller wounds on the back, all of which dramatically conform to the biblical description of Jesus' wounds. On the back, or dorsal, view, a narrow configuration extends for some eight or ten inches from the long hair of the head to a point midway between the shoulder blades. Some experts feel this may be a pigtail or ponytail hairstyle, as if the hair was caught and tied at the base of the skull-a common hairstyle among Jewish males in Palestine during Jesus' time. The Man's beard seems to show the twin points of the Nazarene style of that day." (Tribbe, F.C., "Portrait of Jesus: The Illustrated Story of the Shroud of Turin,"Paragon House Publishers: St. Paul MN, Second edition, 2006, pp.4-5)



20/11/2007

"In 1453 the Shroud was purchased by the Duke of Savoy, and the Savoy family owned it thereafter until 1983. The Savoys ultimately ruled over all of Italy, which was unified in the nineteenth century. Umberto II was deposed as king of Italy in June 1946 and lived in exile in Portugal until his death in 1983. He was titular head of the House of Savoy during his lifetime and owner of the Shroud, and regularly consulted with the archbishop of Turin, who was the Shroud's custodian. By his will, Umberto gave the Shroud to the pope of the Roman Catholic Church and his successors; the bequest was accepted by Vatican announcement of October 18, 1983. On February 7, 1984, the Vatican secretary of state announced that under the terms of Umberto's will, the Shroud was to remain in Turin, and that the archbishop of Turin would be the pope's personal representative for all future Shroud matters."
(Tribbe, F.C., "Portrait of Jesus: The Illustrated Story of the Shroud of Turin," Paragon House Publishers: St. Paul MN, Second edition, 2006, p.5)



20/11/2007

"The linen, although ivory-colored with age, was still surprisingly clean looking, even to the extent of a damasklike surface sheen. It was possible to study closely the herringbone weave of the linen. In the areas untouched by the ravages of history it was in remarkably good condition. Even when examined under a magnifying glass, the fiber showed no signs of disintegration. The texture was also surprising. Some writers have described it as 'coarse.' This is quite definitely not so. Although any handling was officially disapproved, the temptation was too great not to touch the linen gently when at close range. It was light and almost silky to the touch. The dimensions of the cloth are impressive: 14 feet 3 inches long by 3 feet 7 inches wide. It was created in a single piece, apart from a strip approximately 3½ inches wide running the length of the left-hand side and joined by a single seam."
(Wilson, I., "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus?," [1978], Image Books: New York NY, Revised edition, 1979, p.21)



20/11/2007

"It is the imprint of the all-important `double image' that principally draws the eye. There, like a shadow cast on the cloth, is the faint imprint of the back and front of a powerfully built man with beard and long hair, laid out in the attitude of death. To anyone who has not seen a photograph of the Shroud before, the two figures could only appear most curious, until one understands the manner in which the image seems to have been formed-that the body was first laid on one end of the cloth, with the remaining half of the cloth then drawn over the head and down to the feet. The sixteenth-century Italian artist Clovio illustrated this beautifully in an aquatint of the Shroud in which, below the angel-borne cloth, he painted Joseph and Nicodemus wrapping Jesus in just such a manner after the descent from the cross. The astonishing aspect of seeing the Shroud itself rather than a photograph is discovering how pale and subtle the image appears.
The color of the imprint can best be described as a pure sepia monochrome, and the closer one tries to examine it, the more it melts away like mist."
(Wilson, I., "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus?," [1978], Image Books: New York NY, Revised edition, 1979, p.21)



20/11/2007

"The `Holy Shroud' is a large, oblong linen cloth, of great but contested age, which is normally housed in a chapel built especially for it in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in the city of Turin, in northern Italy. It is displayed only on rare occasions, contained in a frame that shows the length of the cloth parallel to the ground. The cloth, marked by various blemishes and stains, measures fourteen feet three inches long and three feet seven inches wide - or, according to the measurement in use in the Middle East in the first century, eight cubits by two. [Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.181]
Experts in the field of textiles have determined that the threads were hand-spun and the fabric hand-woven in what is known as a `three-to-one herringbone twill.' This was a type of weaving practiced in the Middle East at least as far back as two thousand years ago.
[Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., "The Enigma of the Shroud," PEG: Malta, 1996, p.198]" (Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of
All the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, p.11)



20/11/2007

"The linen has a number of scratches and burn holes, as well as water stains. The features most visible to the naked eye are two dark blemishes, one on each side of the fainter body image, running parallel to the sides of the cloth. Along these streaks, on both front and back images, on either side of the shoulders and on either side of the knee, are diamond-shaped patches. These are the result of a fire that broke out in December 1532, in the chapel in France where it was housed. The patches cover holes that were burned through the folded cloth by hot metal. There some other burn marks on the fabric which are much less obvious. There is a row of three small holes with burnt edges on either side of the crossed hands on the frontal view, and similar configurations on each side of the posterior portions of the figure on the back image. No one knows the cause of this damage, which seems to have been the result of a hot poker being thrust three times through the center of the cloth. Because these holes are evident in a copy of the Shroud which dates to 1516, it is clear that they predated the damage from the fire. A second fire, during the night of April 11-12, 1997, once again menaced the Shroud, but through the courageous actions of the firefighters from Turin's Twenty-First Brigade, who smashed the display case to rescue the celebrated artifact, a conflagration that heavily damaged the Cathedral and the adjoining Royal Chapel left the Shroud untouched."
(Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, pp.11-12)

20/11/2007

"Less evident on the Shroud than the sixteenth-century fire damage are the two faint head-to-head straw-colored images of an undressed man that appear in the center of the cloth, one of the front of the body, the other of the back, with the feet of both images facing the outer margins of the fabric. There are only a few inches between the front and back images of the head. It seems as though a body had been laid on its back at one end of the cloth, which was then drawn over the front of the man, and that somehow an image was made of him. If the viewer approaches too close, he (or she) is unable to see anything except stains.
Standing three to six feet away from the cloth, he will be able to discern some detail. From the frontal image the observer will be able to make out the shape of a man with long hair and a beard, with his hands folded over his pelvic area and his knees slightly drawn up. Around the head, wrists, and feet are what appear to be bloodstains, especially on the back image. Viewing the cloth with the naked eye, it is hard to make out anything else - much less determine whether the image is a painting."
(Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, pp.12-13)



20/11/2007

"In ancient times the word `sindon' was used to indicate a cut of cloth for a particular use, such as a length of woven cloth, a sheet, or a tunic. The Turin Shroud is, in fact, a rectangular sheet, strong and solid, made of pure flax of a yellowish colour; it is sewn and stitched on to a white holland cloth backing; this backing was made by the Poor Clares of Chambéry, to support the Shroud, in 1534, two years after the fire that had damaged the relic. A blue satin hem surrounds the perimeter of the sheet. Along the top side of the Shroud, disposed, according to tradition, with the frontal image of the body on the left-hand side of the person who looks at it, there is a length of red satin, sewn on in 1868 by Princess Clotilde of Savoy, to protect the image when the sheet is put back in the reliquary. The Shroud is 4.36 metres long and 1.10 metres wide. Originally it was probably longer by about 30 centimetres; there are various reports of small fragments having been cut from the relic and then distributed to churches and monasteries. One of these relics is to be found in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Perhaps concessions of pieces from the Shroud continued for years and it proves that the Shroud was an object of veneration even in much older times. The thickness of the cloth, about one third of a millimetre, is greater than that of cloth usually used to make covers for mattresses; this does not prevent the linen from being soft and easy to fold. The Shroud was woven in one whole piece in a diagonal weave shape of `three to one': the transversal thread of weft passes alternatively over three and under one of the longitudinal threads of the warp. This type of weave helps to guarantee its strength. The twill that runs along its length varies its inclination at every centimetre, giving the cloth its characteristic 'herring-bone' aspect."
(Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., "The Enigma of the Shroud: A Challenge to Science," Scerri, L.J., transl., Publishers Enterprises Group: Malta, 1996, pp.161-162)



20/11/2007

"A nearly 8 centimetre wide strip, incomplete at its extremities, forms part of the sheet on the topmost side. The missing pieces were 14 and 36 centimetres long. This side strip is made from the same twilled cloth of the Shroud, of which it originally formed part; in fact, the irregularities of the weave, clearly visible in the principal section, extend exactly to the side strip, as can be seen from the radiographies carried out in 1978 and published by Schwalbe and Rogers. [Analytica Chimica Acta, 135, 1982, p.42]"
(Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., "The Enigma of the Shroud: A Challenge to Science," Scerri, L.J., transl., Publishers Enterprises Group: Malta, 1996, p.162)



20/11/2007

"Along these same lines has been a study of the shroud's dimensions as recently made by an expert in early Syriac, Ian Dickinson, from Canterbury, England. [Dickinson, I., "Preliminary Details of New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud: Measurement by the Cubit," Shroud News, April 1990, pp. 4-8] Curious at the shroud's, by British units of measurement, anomalous 14 foot 3 inch by 3 foot 7 inch overall size, Dickinson wondered if these dimensions might make more sense if converted to the cubit measure as prevailing in Jesus's time. Establishing that the first-century Jewish cubit was most likely to the Assyrian standard, reliably calculated at between 21.4 and 21.6 inches, Dickinson found that if he chose the lower of these measures there was an astonishing correlation, accurate to the nearest half-inch:

Length of Turin shroud 14 feet 3 inches
8 cubits at 21.4 inches 14 feet 3 inches
Width of Turin shroud 3 feet 7 inches
2 cubits at 21.4 inches 3 feet 7 inches

Such conformity to an exact 8 by 2 Jewish cubits is yet another piece of knowledge difficult to imagine of any medieval forger. It also correlates perfectly with the `doubled in four' arrangement by which we hypothesized the shroud to have been once folded and mounted as the `holy face' of Edessa, for the exposed facial area of this latter would have been an exact 1 by 2 Jewish cubits."
(Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.181)



20/11/2007

"In 1931, Virginio Timossi, a textile expert, examined the Shroud, and observed that it was made of flax and that it was of rudimentary manufacture. ... According to Pausinius (1st century AD), Palestinian linen had a pleasing yellow colour. ... The threads used to weave the Shroud were handspun. They are of varying diameters and have a clockwise `Z' twisting as against the anti-clockwise `S', which is common in Ancient Egypt. This fact points to a Syro-Palestinian origin: linen with `Z' twisting were in fact discovered in Palmyra (Syria) and in the Giuda Desert. Even the weaving of the cloth, carried out on a rudimentary pedal-driven loom, is irregular. There are sudden changes in the beating and weaving mistakes. The three-to-one `herring-bone' twill is made of `strips', each about 11 millimetres wide. The diagonal three-to-one weave was obtained by passing the transverse thread of the weft alternately above three and below one those longitudinal of the warp. As a textile, the Shroud could very well date back to the first century AD since pictures of looms that could produce that kind of cloth have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs such as at Beni Assan, 3000 BC. Linen was woven by the Egyptians on large cloths. As for burial sheets, it is normal that they were rapidly destroyed by the decomposition itself of the bodies. In Egypt, however, the mummification of the body and the use of many bindings and bandages have made possible the preservation of a few such sheets. In the Egyptian Museum in Turin there is a perfectly preserved sheet dating back to 1696-1784 BC which is seven metres long and as narrow as the Shroud. According to Curto, until the third century AD, flax cloth was the Egyptian textile par excellence. It seems that during their Egyptian captivity the Jews had mastered the art of weaving. Curto, however, distinguishes between the weaves of the textile. Egyptian cloth is always orthogonal `plain woven'; the `herring-bone weave', on the other hand, originated from Mesopotamia or Syria. The herring-bone weaves, which makes the cloth more close and resistant to use, was already known in the Middle East in the time of Christ and was commonly used in Syria. The cloth of the Shroud must therefore have arrived in Palestine from a neighbouring country such as Syria or Mesopotamia. Indeed, pieces of silk of the third century AD, with a three to one weave, were discovered at Palmyra, in modern Syria; other similar cloths, dating back to the Greco-Roman period, were found at Dura Europos, also in Syria."
(Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., "The Enigma of the Shroud: A Challenge to Science," Scerri, L.J., transl., Publishers Enterprises Group: Malta, 1996, pp.197-198)



21/11/2007

"The body in the Shroud had to have been set at a slight angle, the head raised by some pillow-type support, the arms drawn very stiffly over the pelvis - left hand over right- the right shoulder set lower than the left, the legs decisively flexed at the knee and the left foot partly over the right. As Wilson remarked, 'If the Shroud is a forgery, the care with which even the post crucifixion lie of the body has been thought out is quite remarkable.' [Wilson, I., "The Mysterious Shroud," Doubleday & Co: Garden City NY, 1986, p.16]
The body is clearly laid out in an attitude of death. It would appear, then, that the Man of the Shroud was of Jewish origin and that the bloodstains and wounds studied by forensic pathologists in their careful examination of the Shroud are remarkably coordinated with the testimony of the Gospels relative to the Roman crucifixion weapons and procedures regarding the passion, death and resurrection of the historical Jesus Christ. His burial is consistent with Jewish burial practices of the day as outlined in the Mishnah which contains interpretations of scriptural ordinances as compiled by the Rabbis in the first and second centuries. ... More recent investigations of the Shroud by Dr. Alan Whanger, Professor Emeritus of Duke University in North Carolina, utilizing modern scientific instrumentation such as the polarized image overlay technique, appear to reveal the presence of a tephillin- a Jewish phylactery or prayer box that contains a portion of Scripture - attached to the forehead and the right arm. [Stevenson, K.E. & Habermas, G.R., "The Shroud and the Controversy," Thomas Nelson: Nashville TN, 1990, pp.67, 165-166] In addition to the possible phylactery, previous investigations of the Shroud point to the presence of Roman coins over the eyes (identified by some as leptons or widow's mites minted during the administration of Pontius Pilate), pollen from the ancient Near East, calcium carbonate (limestone) dust from the cave-tombs of Jerusalem, mites from the ancient Near East as well as possible floral images around the head area. Such findings ... confirm the longevity and antiquity of this cloth. As several authors point out, if the Shroud was the work of a forger, its creation would be more `miraculous' than if it were the actual burial cloth of Jesus."
(Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, pp.8-9. Emphasis original)



21/11/2007

"Some consider the images to have been formed by some as yet unknown `natural phenomena.' However, as Stevenson rightly points out, `If this type of body-on-cloth is natural, why are there so many burial garments that have no images of the person buried in them?' [Stevenson, K.E. & Habermas, G.R., "The Shroud and the Controversy," Thomas Nelson: Nashville TN, 1990, p.127]
Sindonologist Robert Wilcox states that 'even if (researchers) come up with some 'natural' process, the failure, so far, to find anything like the Shroud amongst the world's body cloths and artifacts leaves them with the further problem of why the process occurred only once in the history of the world, so far as is yet known.' [Wilcox, R.K., "Half of Shroud Scientists Say Image Is Authentic," The Voice, 5 Mar. 1982, p.13] The late Dr. John Heller, who was a research scientist at the New England Institute and author of the book Report on the Shroud of Turin, commented: 'We do know, however, that there are thousands on thousands of pieces of funerary linens going back to millennia before Christ, and another huge number of linens of Coptic Christian burials.
On none of these is there any image of any kind.'
[Heller, J.H., "Report on the Shroud of Turin," Houghton Mifflin Co: Boston MA, 1983, p.220]" (Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, p.10)



21/11/2007

"From 1978 to 1988 the scorch hypothesis appeared to be most popular among scientists who expressed their views on the cause of the image. However, it must be carefully noted that the question of whether the Shroud provides evidence for Jesus' resurrection is not dependent on whether the image was caused by a scorch. The Shroud appears to be unique at this point, even if a natural explanation for the image is found.
As Wilcox pointed out: 'But even if [researchers] come up with some `natural' process, the failure, so far, to find anything like the shroud amongst the world's body cloths and artifacts leaves them with the further problem of why the process occurred only once in the history of the world, so far as is yet known.' [Wilcox, R.K., "Half of Shroud Scientists Say Image Is Authentic," The Voice, 5 Mar. 1982, p.13] In fact, Wilcox even observed from his 1982 study that the thirteen scientists who indicated their belief that the Shroud was the actual burial garment of Jesus also thought that a natural cause for the image would be consistent with the Christian belief in Jesus' resurrection: While all 13 indicated they thought a `natural explanation' (meaning one that can be explained by science) for the cloth's images will eventually be found, they also indicated they believe the shroud's uniqueness (nothing like it has yet been found on earth) will remain, thus keeping it, in their view, consistent with the Christian belief in Jesus' death and resurrection. [Wilcox, R.K., "Shroud: Real or Fake?" The Voice, 26 February, 1982, p.12] John Heller has also commented on the Shroud's uniqueness: `We do know, however, that there are thousands on thousands of pieces of funerary linen going back to millennia before Christ, and another huge number of linens of Coptic Christian burials.
On none of these is there any image of any kind.' [Heller, J.H., "Report on the Shroud of Turin," Houghton Mifflin Co: Boston MA, 1983, p.220] Therefore, even if a natural hypothesis for the Shroud's image is discovered, it would not discount the image as evidence for Jesus' resurrection. In fact, a natural thesis could even produce evidence for this historical event, since scientific phenomena such as those described later in this chapter still exist. Some of those who have studied the Shroud have related its revelations to Jesus' resurrection. STURP pathologist Robert Bucklin, who did not support the scorch theory, still believed that the Shroud provided evidence for the Resurrection: 'It was inevitable that the question of the resurrection would come up in relation to the Shroud studies.... While the majority of the scientists have been reluctant to take a stand on this matter, a few of us have openly expressed our opinions that there is support for the resurrection in the things we see on the Shroud of Turin.' [Bucklin, R., "Afterword," in Stevenson, K.E. & Habermas, G.R., "Verdict on the Shroud," Servant Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981, p.190]"
(Stevenson, K.E. & Habermas, G.R., "The Shroud and the Controversy," Thomas Nelson Publishers: Nashville TN, 1990, pp.134-135. Emphasis original)

22/11/2007

"Throughout all our discussion of the so-called body image on the Shroud negative, there was one point which we quite deliberately ignored, rather as if it was to be taken for granted. This was consideration of whether any genuine dead body has ever been known to make a similar imprint to the kind seen on the Shroud. The blunt answer to this has to be no. If it were quite normal for dead bodies to make imprints of themselves, then the Shroud's image would not retain the mystery it has. Which does not mean to say that dead bodies cannot and do not sometimes leave strange stains. For instance, among the exhibits in the British Museum's `Byzantium' exhibition held in 1995 there was a pair of sixth-century Byzantine curtains that had subsequently been used for an Egyptian's burial shroud. These unmistakably bear brownish stains from their contact with this Egyptian's body. Likewise, in the wake of a UK television documentary on the Shroud transmitted in October 1988, retired London undertaker Ronald Warrior wrote to the programme's producer remarking on indelible brownish stains that he used 'frequently' to find in the white-painted interiors of the wooden 'shells' in which he and his fellow undertakers routinely transported corpses. Also, in 1981 a West Indian who died of cancer of the pancreas in a Liverpool hospice left remarkable and equally indelible outlines of his arm, hand and buttocks on a mattress cover ... The problem with these is that none has exhibited images even remotely comparable to the Shroud's 'photographic' body imprint. "
(Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.30)



22/11/2007

"In fairness to Dr Straiton ... he has justifiably alluded to one modern-day Shroud-type phenomenon that is undeniably intriguing, the so-called Jospice Mattress. When in 1981 a West Indian died of cancer of the pancreas in a Jospice International hospice on the outskirts of Liverpool, to the astonishment of his carers he left an indelible partial imprint of himself, predominantly his hand, buttocks, arm, shoulders and jaw, on the synthetic mattress on which he had been lying ... . Yet enigmatic though this imprint remains in its own right, in the final analysis it cannot be regarded as sufficient of a parallel to the Shroud to suit Straiton's argument. The body features appear on it in the form of simple outlines and blocks of shadows. Even the lines of the hand can be seen. And there is nothing special to its photographic negative."
Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.209)



23/11/2007

"Later, in 1973, French scholar, Professor Gilbert Raes of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology in Belgium, was permitted to join the team to carefully examine two small linen samples (one 13 x 40 millimeters, the other 10 x 40 millimeters) from the Shroud. Dr. Max Frei, a Swiss criminologist and botanist, also joined the team to study pollen samples on the Shroud. Dr. Raes reported that the Shroud was indeed woven of linen with a three-to-one herringbone twill with a Z-twist and that it is sewn with linen thread (all the warp, weft and sewing threads of the Shroud are of linen). He noted that the yarn was indicative of a good-quality workmanship and the weave density an average of a little over thirty-five threads per centimeter, corresponding favorably with the thirty thread per centimeter average of the finest Egyptian mummy fabrics. The normal weave in Palestinian, Roman and Egyptian loom-technology was a one-over-one. The three-to-one herringbone twill was a more refined weave. It would have been an expensive piece of cloth for the first century. However, we know from the Gospels that Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man and it was he who provided the Shroud used to bury Jesus (Mt 27:57-61). During the radiocarbon analysis done at Oxford in 1988, cotton fibers were found on the Shroud. `The cotton,' according to Peter H. South, director of the laboratory for textile analysis at Ambergate in Great Britain, `is a very fine dark yellow color, probably of Egyptian origin and very old. Unfortunately, how it found its way into the Shroud is impossible to say.' Dr. Raes, using polarized light for microscopic viewing, had also identified traces of cotton fibers (fibrils) that he classified as of the Gossypium herbaceum type, a cotton that existed in the Middle East of the first century. [Raes, G., "Rapport d'Analise," La S. Sindone, supplement to Rivisita Diocesana Torinese, January 1976, pp.79-83] Professor Philip McNair of Birmingham University, England, supports these finds and points out that the occasional cotton fibers in the Shroud were of the Gossypium herbaceum type that was cultivated in the Middle East during the first century, but was not known in Europe during the period when possible faking of the Shroud could have occurred. The cotton traces indicated that the Shroud was woven on a loom that had been used previously to weave cotton cloth. Paul Maloney, a research archaeologist and sindonologist from Pennsylvania, notes that cotton was actually a part of the linen thread. Dr. Raes says that these findings support the contention that the Shroud linen was woven in the Middle East, since raw cotton was unknown in Europe until the ninth century when it was first planted in Spain by the Moors. Cotton was first woven in Venice and Milan in the fourteenth century and cotton cloth was not even seen in England until the fifteenth century. Cotton was grown in China and India in antiquity and was expertly woven in India several centuries before the Christian era. By the first century it was grown extensively in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Wilson notes that cotton is also known to have been introduced to the Middle East by the monarch Sennacherib during the seventh century B.C. By the time of Christ it would certainly have been established in the environs of Palestine, and therefore offers no difficulty to the authenticity of the Shroud. Dr. Raes concluded that this piece of linen could have been manufactured in the first century. He could not say with certainty that it was. The late John Tyrer, a chartered textile technologist who worked in the field for twenty-five years as an associate of the Textile Institute of Manchester, England, discovered that while Middle East linens similar to the Shroud exist as far back as 3600 B.C., not much medieval linen has survived. He states that 'it would be reasonable to conclude that linen textiles with Z-twist yarns and woven 3-1 reversing twill similar to the Turin Shroud could have been produced in the first-century Syria-Palestine.'
[Tyrer, J., "Looking At the Turin Shroud as a Textile," Shroud Spectrum, 6, 1983, pp.68-69]" (Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, pp.13-14)



25/11/2007

"In 1978 the S.T.U.R.P. team with over 40 scientists conducted a thorough scientific investigation of the Shroud using the latest equipment. The group determined that the actual image was created by a phenomenon (as yet unknown) or a momentous event that caused a rapid cellulose degradation (aging) of the linen fibers, that is, an accelerated dehydration and oxidation of the very top linen fibrils of the cellulose fibers of the Shroud, thereby creating a sepia or straw -yellow colored image similar to that of a scorch.
Whatever precipitated this rapid aging affected only the very top fibrils of the fibers of the linen. As noted previously, the images are a surface phenomenon. Most scientists compare it to a light scorch such as might be created if an iron touched a handkerchief for too long a period. What caused this to happen? This is a central part of the mystery of the Shroud. No one has yet been able to provide a comprehensive explanation ...
Those who believe in the Resurrection of Jesus believe that something startling occurred at the moment of the Resurrection - some phenomenon as yet not understood by science that left its mark on the Shroud - a photo of the Resurrection for people of all eras to ponder. Many call the Shroud the 'silent witness' for this reason and claim that the Shroud is a modern witness to the Resurrection."
(Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, p.15. Emphasis original)



25/11/2007

"Ancient Pollen on the Shroud? The late Protestant Swiss botanist and criminologist Dr. Max Frei was permitted in 1973 and 1978 as part of the S.T.U.R.P. team to take sticky-tape samples of pollen grains directly from the Shroud. Pollen grains are of special interest because they have an exceptionally hard outer shell, the exine, which can last literally millions of years. Dr. Frei was highly respected in Europe, having founded the scientific department of the Zurich Police. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the flora of Sicily and continued this study of the Shroud's pollen until his death in 1983. The entire Frei Collection, formerly in the possession of the Association of Scientists and Scholars International for the Shroud of Turin, Inc. (A.S.S.I.S.T.), was transferred to the United States in 1988 and placed under the guardianship of Dr. Alan Whanger of Duke University in North Carolina where further studies have been done under the aegis of research archaeologist Paul C. Maloney. Before his death in 1983, Dr. Frei had identified fifty-eight [57 - SEJ] different types of pollen on the sticky tapes and further demonstrated that some of this grouping came from Jerusalem at the time of Jesus; some from Eastern Turkey and some from Europe, the final resting place of the Shroud. With regard to Turkey, Dr. Frei was certain that the Shroud had been in the area he describes as the Anatolian steppe, which he qualifies as a phytogeographical term for the region of the towns of Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Mardin, Urfa, Gaziantep and Malatya. Urfa is the modern Turkish name for the former Byzantine city of Edessa, believed to have been home to the Shroud until 944.
[Wilson, I., "The Shroud of Turin,"Doubleday & Co: Garden City NY, 1979, p.293] At the time of his death, Frei was seeking to identify nineteen other pollens which would have brought the number to seventy-seven. Maloney placed this work in the hands of Aharon Horowitz, an illustrious Israeli palynologist, who noted that the pollens found on the Shroud can be compared to pollens found in Palestine but not in North Africa. Avinoam Danin, the chief expert in Israeli desert flora, agrees with him and adds that it is possible to demonstrate, on the basis of the pollens present on the Shroud, an itinerary across the Negev to the highlands of Lebanon. [Marinelli, E., "La Sindone: Un' Immagine `Impossibile,'" Edizioni San Paolo: Milan, Italy, 1996, p.27]
Some critics have proposed that pollen could have been airborne from the Middle East to Europe and made their way to the Shroud. However, Dr. Frei, responding to this claim stated: Groups A, B, and C of plants on the Shroud from Palestine and Anatolia are so numerous, compared to the species from Europe, that a casual contamination or a pollen-transport from the Near East by storms in different seasons cannot be responsible for their presence... the predominance of these pollen must be the result of the Shroud's stay in such countries.
Migrating birds or contamination with desert plants by pilgrims can be excluded because they had no possibility of direct contact with the Shroud. It should also be noted that the prevailing winds in the region move from Europe to the Middle East, not the reverse.
[Frei, M., "Nine Years of Palynological Studies on the Shroud," Shroud Spectrum International, 1, June 1982, p.7]" (Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, pp.19-21. Emphasis original)



25/11/2007

"The Presence of Mites on the Shroud Dr. Frei concluded that many pollen matched species found 'almost exclusively' in halophyte fossils from the Dead Sea. To Frei's mind, the weight of evidence mitigated against a medieval fraud. Stevenson further points out that this was Dr. Frei's field of expertise and his work has been confirmed by Turin microbiologist Dr. Giovanni Riggi Di Numana, who also found samples of mites or `minute animal forms extremely similar in their aspects and dimension to those from Egyptian burial fabrics.' [Riggi Di Numana, G., "Rapporto Sindone 1978-1987," 3M Edizioni: Milan, Italy, 1988] During Dr. Riggi's analysis of samples vacuumed from between the Shroud and its backing cloth in 1978, he isolated and identified a mite peculiar to ancient burial linens, specifically Egyptian mummy wrappings. As Stevenson points out: 'If the Shroud was a creation of the Middle Ages, then its forger must have ordered the mites (and pollen) to go with it.'
[Stevenson, K.E. & Habermas, G.R., "The Shroud and the Controversy," Thomas Nelson: Nashville TN, 1989, p.65] In addition, the work of Oswald Scheuermann and Dr. Alan Whanger ... further confirms the work of Dr. Frei since the [images of] flowers they identified are consistent with the pollen identified by Dr. Frei. Renowned archaeologist William Meacham further stated that 'pollen...is empirical data... ipso facto evidence of exposure to the air in those regions.' [Meacham, W., interview with Rev. Kenneth Stevenson, Tarrytown NY, July 15, 1988]" (Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, p.21. Emphasis original)



25/11/2007

"Bulst further states: `Pollen grains can come upon the Shroud only when it is exposed in the open. It would have been a stupendous miracle if, precisely in the few days when the Shroud was being exposed, storms would have brought pollen over a distance of 2,500 kilometers and - even more miraculous - if those winds were carrying many more pollen from the East than from the European environment. Moreover, the pollen on the Shroud are from plants which bloom in different seasons of the year. Therefore the same improbable accident must have happened repeatedly.' [Bulst, W., "The Pollen Grains On The Shroud of Turin," Shroud Spectrum International, 10, 1984, p.25] Stevenson points out that "pollen analysis is acceptable evidence in a court of law and therefore certainly empirical data as to the Shroud's authenticity, antiquity and non-European origin and the value of the presence of ancient pollen and mites on the Shroud should not be underestimated." [Stevenson, K.E. & Habermas, G.R., "The Shroud and the Controversy," Thomas Nelson: Nashville TN, 1990, p.65.]
Dreisbach advises that archaeologist and cave-tomb specialist James Strange of Florida, with assistance from Dr. Giovanni Riggi, found pollen on the outside of the Shroud differing from those of the inside. The outside pollen were mineral coated, reflecting the likelihood that the outside of the cloth came in contact with the limestone ledge of the grave."
(Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, p.24. Emphasis original)



25/11/2007

"Floral Images on the Shroud? During his studies in 1983, Oswald Scheuermann made an observation that there seemed to be flowerlike patterns around the face of the Man of the Shroud. Two years later, Dr. Alan Whanger, while examining photographs of the Shroud with a magnifying lens, suddenly saw out of the corner of his eye the image of a large chrysanthemum-like flower on the anatomic left side about fifteen centimeters lateral to and six centimeters above the midline top of the head. [Whanger, A. & M., "Floral Coin and Other Non-Body Images on the Shroud of Turin," Duke University: Durham NC, 1989] Dr. Whanger and Oswald Scheuermann collaborated in further studies. Dr. Whanger utilized many life-size second generation photos of parts of the Shroud as well as the full length images from the Giuseppe Enrie negatives of 1931.
These were processed and enlarged by Gamma Photographic Laboratories of Chicago, Illinois. Some were processed with the specific request to maximize the detail in the off-body area. By standing some distance away from the photographs and looking at the off-body areas, definite patterns became apparent to Dr. Whanger. He secured the definitive set of volumes of Flora Palaestina by Michael Zohary [Zohary, M., "Flora Palaestina," Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities: Jerusalem, 1966-1977] and reviewed drawings of the 1,900 plants depicted therein. Whanger worked with flowers, buds, stems, leaves and fruits that are reasonably clear. He did side-by-side comparisons of images - and polarized image overlay comparisons in a number of instances - to show reasonable compatibility of the drawings of the plants from Flora Palaestina with what is seen on the Shroud. While there are vague or partial images of many flowers with what is seen on the Shroud. While there are vague or partial images of many flowers on the Shroud, Dr. Whanger and Oswald Scheuermann believe that they have tentatively identified twenty-eight plants whose images are sufficiently clear on the Shroud to make a good comparison and to be compatible with the drawings in Flora Palaestina . Of the twenty-eight plants identified on the Shroud, twenty-three are flowers, three are small bushes and two are thorns. All twenty-eight plants grow in Israel and twenty grow in Jerusalem itself (i.e., the Judean mountains). The other eight plants grew either in the Judean desert or the Dead Sea area or in both. Hence, these plants or flowers would have been available in Jerusalem's market in a fresh state. [Whanger, ibid]. They noted that a rather high percentage of the flower images identified have corresponding Pollen found on the Shroud by Dr. Max Frei. Of the twenty-eight plants whose images they believe they have identified, Dr. Frei had already identified the pollen of twenty-five of them. In addition, they noted with great interest that twenty-seven of the twenty-eight plants bloom during March and April, which would correspond to the time of Passover and of the Crucifixion. Dr. Whanger also states that the age of the flowers between the time they were picked and the time that the image was formed can be reasonably determined. He notes that the evidence indicates that the image of the body was formed (mysteriously) in a very brief time by some type of high energy process sometime between twenty-four and forty hours after death when decomposition (not seen on the Shroud image) would have begun to be apparent. Whanger believes that most of the flowers whose images are on the Shroud would be between twenty-four and thirty-six hours old after picking. He notes that the image formation of the flowers and other non-body objects may not be from the same mechanism that formed the body image."
(Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, pp.25-26. Emphasis original)



25/11/2007

"The Vignon-Markings Wilson's theory linking the Image of Edessa with the Shroud receives strong support from the work done previously by the famous sindonologist Paul Vignon in the 1930's. Vignon pointed out that, among the family of post-sixth century portraits of Christ, there was a recurrence of certain unusual markings seemingly derived from the Shroud. Tribbe notes that `in each of these cases, the artist, wishing to be totally faithful to the original, incorporated these oddities even though they are irrelevant to or detract from the naturalness of the face.' He goes on to say that `all these artists must have copied from the same original, and all of them misunderstood the nature of these imperfections.' However, because of the sacred status of the acheiropoietas it was very important that every detail, even if odd or unusual, be faithfully duplicated by the Byzantine artists.
[Tribbe, F.C., "Portrait of Jesus?," Stein & Day: New York NY,1983, p.239] Wilson, following Vignon, cites fifteen such oddities or anomalies which have come to be known as the Vignon- Markings: Starkly geometric topless square (3-sided) visible between the eyebrows on the Shroud image. 1. Starkly geometric topless square (3-sided) visible between the eyebrows on the Shroud image. 2. V-shape visible at the bridge of the nose. 3. A transverse streak across the forehead. 4. A second V-shape inside the topless square. 5. A raised right eyebrow. 6. An accentuated left cheek. 7. An accentuated right cheek. 8. An enlarged left nostril. 9. An accentuated line between the nose and upper lip.
10. A heavy line under the lower lip. 11. A hairless area between the lip and beard. 12. The fork in the beard. 13. A transverse line across the throat.
14. The heavily accentuated `owlish eyes.' 15. Two loose strands of hair falling from the apex of the forehead.' [Wilson, I., "The Shroud of Turin," Doubleday & Co: New York NY, 1979, pp.104-105]"
(Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, pp.151-152. Emphasis original. List numbers mine)



25/11/2007

"The Polarized Image Overlay Former Professor of Psychiatry and long-time sindonologist Dr. Alan Whanger of Duke University developed the technique, noted earlier, called the Polarized Image Over lay, to point out these many oddities and anomalies relating the Shroud with post-sixth century Christian art. The technique basically utilized two polarized filters at right angles to each other and enabled Whanger to superimpose two images over each other and shift back and forth to discover similarities or anomalies. He discovered that many images of later (post-sixth century) art must have been made directly from the Shroud or a copy of it based on the high number of congruencies between the images. He studied many portraits, mosaics, frescoes and coins and compared them, via the Polarized Image Overlay, to the Shroud images. He concludes that a consistent, shroud-like, long-haired, fork-bearded, front facing likeness of Christ can be traced back through numerous works in the Byzantine tradition dating many centuries before the time of Geoffrey de Charny (1357). [Wilson, I., "The Mysterious Shroud," Doubleday & Co: New York NY, 1986, p.105] Wilson had noted the same thing, citing as an example the Christ Pantocrator (meaning having power over all the universe) from Cefalu, Sicily. He also notes, a century earlier, the Pantocrator of the Dome of the Church of Daphni, near Athens (a city that once served as the temporary home of the Shroud from 1204-1207) ; the "Christ Enthroned" in the church of St. Angelo in Formis, near Capua, Italy in the tenth century; and a similar Christ portrait from the eighth century found in the depths of the Pontianus Catacomb near Rome. In the sixth century, the Christ portrait appears on a silver vase found at Homs, in present-day Syria and on the beautiful icon of Christ Pantocrator from the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert. As Wilson states: "Despite stylistic variations, each of these works seems inspired by the same tradition of Jesus' earthly appearance. And each has a strong resemblance to the face visible on the Shroud." [Wilson, 1986, p.105] We can add to this list the seventh-century coins, the tremisses and solidus coins, minted by Justinian II with shroud-like images; the Spas Nereditsa fresco (Savior of coins, minted by Justinian II with shroud-like images; the Spas Nereditsa fresco (Savior of Neredica) in 1199 and the icon in the Church of St. Bartholomew of Armenia in Genoa, Italy."
(Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, pp.153-154. Emphasis original)



25/11/2007

"The Epitaphioi - Embroidered Cloths In the tenth and eleventh centuries there developed the epitaphioi in Byzantine art. These are large embroidered cloths used in the Good Friday liturgy explicitly in Byzantine art. These are large embroidered cloths used in the Good Friday liturgy explicitly symbolic of the Shroud. The body of Jesus is depicted frontally with hands crossed such as the epitaphioi of King Uros Milutin. All of these seem to point to the rediscovery of the full-length of the Shroud in Constantinople in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Image of Edessa, when brought to Constantinople, was apparently removed from the board on which it was folded and mounted, revealing its full length and hence the full-body images (front and rear) and bloodstains." (Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, p.154. Emphasis original)



25/11/2007

"The Hungarian Pray Manuscript: Four Fingers and Four Circles On the Shroud today one notes that, in addition to the distinctive marks of the 1532 fire, there are four sets of triple burn holes that are the result of some incident previous to the famous fire that damaged the Shroud. This prior existence is known because a painting of 1516 from the Church of Saint Gommaire, in Lierre, Belgium, clearly shows the four sets of triple holes. In 1986, the French Dominican Father A.M. Dubarle, corresponding on the subject of sets of triple holes. In 1986, the French Dominican Father A.M. Dubarle, corresponding on the subject of sets of triple holes. In 1986, the French Dominican Father A.M. Dubarle, corresponding on the subject of the Shroud-like figure on the Hungarian Pray Manuscript (1192-1195), had his attention drawn to some curious holes noted on the Shroud in the illustration. Wilson points out that "clearly visible on the sarcophagus in the scene of the three Marys visiting the empty tomb was a line of three holes, with an extra one offset to one side." [Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.160] Even more curious, though almost vanishingly tiny, was a similar set of three holes to be seen on the Shroud or napkin-like cloth depicted rolled up on the sarcophagus. It appears that the artist of 1192 who illustrated the Hungarian Pray Manuscript was aware of the "burn-holes" on the Shroud in his day. If correct, it would set the Shroud's date nearly a hundred years earlier than the very earliest date allowed by Carbon-14 dating.

Significantly, Jesus is depicted as naked and laid on a Shroud. His arms are crossed, with the right hand placed over the left, and the hands show only four fingers. There is a herring-bone weave in the lower illustration. There is an imprint of a body on the inside and not on the outside of the Shroud. However, on the illustration there are four circles that appear to be burn holes on the Shroud. The othonia (other burial cloths) are rolled up separately. The appearance of only four fingers and four circles on the illustration and matching the same on the Shroud is highly significant. Pathologists studying the Shroud noted that only four fingers appear to the viewer, and the thumb is not seen, as we noted earlier. Moreover, the four burn holes seen in the Hungarian Pray Manuscript correlate to four holes found in the corresponding area of the Shroud and predate the fire of 1532."
(Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, pp.154-155. Emphasis original)

26/11/2007

"Mites Another interesting aspect of the microscopic material found on the Shroud is the discovery of mites by Professor Riggi During his analysis of samples vacuumed from between the Shroud and its backing cloth in 1978, he isolated and identified a mite peculiar to ancient burial linens, specifically Egyptian mummy wrappings. If the Shroud was a creation of the Middle Ages, then its forger must have ordered the mites to go with it."
(Stevenson, K.E., "Image of the Risen Christ: Remarkable New Evidence About the Shroud," Frontier Research Publications: Toronto ON, 1999, pp.129-130. Emphasis original)



26/11/2007

"Artifacts Artifacts visible in the Shroud image areas are the next
consideration. These include `coins' over the eyes, a possible phylactery upon the forehead (which logically should have a corresponding 'prayer box' on the arm), and other `clothes:' such as a modesty cloth or `bands' at the head, hands, and feet. In 1978 Eric Jumper, John Jackson, and I coauthored an article which appeared in The Numismatist and postulated the theory that 3-D objects visible on the eyes might in fact be coins. Working with Ian Wilson, we suggested the lepton of Pontius Pilate because the size, shape, and markings seemed uncannily accurate.
[Jumper, E., Stevenson, K.E., Jr. & Jackson, J.P., "Images of Coins on a Burial Cloth?" The Numismatist, American Numismatic Association, July 1978, pp.1349-1357, 1356]"
(Stevenson, K.E., "Image of the Risen Christ: Remarkable New Evidence About the Shroud," Frontier Research Publications: Toronto ON, 1999, p.130. Emphasis original)



26/11/2007

"First, the late Father Filas proceeded to find coins that matched the initial lepton, right down to a peculiar misspelling. The coin's inscription contained the letter sequence UCAI. The correct spelling should have been UKAI. Father Filas found several extant copies of the lepton with this spelling error. Apparently, the dye used to make the coin was misstruck in the same way as a twentieth-century three-legged buffalo nickel.
And it was used until the error was finally detected. Josh McDowell and many others who were suspicious of the Shroud's authenticity criticized Shroud supporters asserting that `the coin striker would have had to be either drunk or ignorant' to mint a coin with such an error.' [McDowell, J. & Stewart,., "Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith," Here's Life: San Bernardino, 1980, p.168]
It seems they forget that Romans, like the rest of us, made mistakes occasionally, even honest ones. Second, Father Filas submitted that research to Dr. Haralick who independently confirmed the presence of the 'coins'... [Haralick, R., "Analysis of Digital Images of the Shroud of Turin," Virginia Polytechnic University, 1983, p.34] Finally, a separate 3-D analysis also confirmed the identification. It is most interesting to me that the 3-D photos of the 'coins' actually reveal more clearly the letter shapes which match the Pilate coin inscription.
... I spent some time with Jewish scholars in an attempt to clarify the burial custom controversy. Once again, however, the results were inconclusive. While some felt that nothing precluded the custom, others felt there was relatively little to support it either. Though no clear custom can be established, coins have been found in skulls in the Middle East dated in and around the first century A.D. For example, the tomb and ossuary holding the skeleton of the High Priest Caiaphus, who presided at the trial of Jesus, was found with a coin minted in A.D. 41 showing the head of King Herod Agrippa. Alternate theories can be advanced to explain this archeological fact, but no one knows for certain in the absence of either a written record or eyewitness testimony. The primary significance is that if the coin is in fact the Pilate lepton, it is strong corroborating evidence that both the image and the cloth date to the first century. And with this form of dating, the margin of error is substantially less than with C-14."
(Stevenson, K.E., "Image of the Risen Christ: Remarkable New Evidence About the Shroud," Frontier Research Publications: Toronto ON, 1999, pp.130-132)



26/11/2007

"In addition, the overlay technique of the Whangers confirmed the presence of not only coins but also phylacteries. When the 3-D photographs revealed that the 'box' on the dead man's forehead was apparently an artifact, Wilson and a Jewish cadet at the Air Force Academy both suggested a tephillin-a Jewish phylactery or prayer box which contains a portion of Scripture. When I later discussed this possibility with Eleazor Erbach, an Orthodox Rabbi from Denver, he not only confirmed its size and shape, but also suggested that the broken blood flow on the right arm might have been caused by the corresponding arm phylactery. [Erbach, E., personal interview, April 1978] If indeed these artifacts are what they appear to be, then not only do they add to the case for longevity, but they also mitigate strongly against forgery."
(Stevenson, K.E., "Image of the Risen Christ: Remarkable New Evidence About the Shroud," Frontier Research Publications: Toronto ON, 1999, p.132)



26/11/2007

"Archeological Peculiarities One facet of age determination that has been little developed is verification of archeological details and peculiarities. For example, researchers have often observed that all medieval artists have depicted the nails in the hands of the crucified Jesus, not in His wrist. Meacham noted, 'The nail through the wrist is a solid historical indicator. After all, all of the evidence says that this is a crucifixion victim. So that puts the Shroud in the years of crucifixion-a date from 150 B.C. to A.D. 350. You can't do much better than that even with C14. "
[Meacham, W., personal interview, 15 July 1988]" (Stevenson, K.E.,
"Image of the Risen Christ: Remarkable New Evidence About the Shroud," Frontier Research Publications: Toronto ON, 1999, p.132. Emphasis original)



26/11/2007

"Another indication that mediates against the medieval date is the length of the dead man's hair. As Noel Currer-Briggs pointed out, 'The fourteenth century was not alone in disapproving men with long hair....
[Medieval] contemporary inconography depicted Jesus with fairly short hair.' [Currer-Briggs, N., "The Shroud and the Grail," Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London, 1987, p.241] He even intimated that this may have incited the medieval inquisitors to attack the Templar Knights. The Templars were the same group art historian Ian Wilson suggests became custodians of the Shroud after it disappeared from Constantinople.
What other indicators would a trained historical or scriptural expert come up with given a detailed firsthand study of the cloth?"
(Stevenson, K.E., "Image of the Risen Christ: Remarkable New Evidence About the Shroud," Frontier Research Publications: Toronto ON, 1999, p.132)



26/11/2007

"Textile Studies Textile comparisons also testify to the longevity of the Shroud. John Tyrer, a chartered textile technologist who has worked in that field for twenty-five years, discovered in his research that while Middle East linens similar to the Shroud exist that date as far back as 3600 B.C., not much medieval linen has survived. Additionally he determined, `It would be reasonable to conclude the linen textiles with 'Z' twist yarns and woven 3/1 reversing twill similar to the Turin Shroud could have been produced in the first-century Syria or Palestine.' [Tyrer, J., "Looking at the Turin Shroud as a Textile," Shroud Spectrum, 6, 1983, p.38] Tyrer even suggested that textile analysis alone would aid in dating the cloth. He also confirmed what early Shroud researchers have suggested concerning the longevity of linen. Furthermore, he added that textile analysis might offer important clues to the effects of yarn variations on image-formation and to cloth draping. Tyrer concluded, 'The Shroud is probably the most remarkable 'Standard Sample' for the interpretation of the history of textiles that has come down to us.' [Ibid., 43]"
(Stevenson, K.E., "Image of the Risen Christ: Remarkable New Evidence About the Shroud," Frontier Research Publications: Toronto ON, 1999, p.133. Emphasis original)



26/11/2007

"Heller and Adler published their findings in an article titled `A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,' in the Canadian Society for Forensic Science Journal, Vo1. 14, No. 3 (1981). For our purposes it is important to take note of the exhaustive studies the two chemists performed to answer the question of whether or not the `blood' on the Shroud was real blood. ... Heller, in his 1983 book Report on the Shroud of Turin, takes note that any one of these: the reflection scan, the microspectrophotometric scan, the positive hemochromogen test, the positive bile test, the positive cyanomethemoglobin test, the heme porphyrin fluorescence - is forensic proof in a court of law that blood is present. Taken together, the proof is irrefutable. The forensic evidence demonstrates the presence of about 120 scourge marks (some visible only under ultraviolet light), primarily on the back and shoulders of the figure. There is a mass of blood dripping from the crown of the head, from the puncture wounds in the hands and feet, and from a wound in the side.
All the forensic evidence conforms in detail to the Gospel renditions of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Reputable scientific -conclusion #1: THE BLOOD ON THE SHROUD IS REAL BLOOD." (Case, T.W., "The Shroud of Turin and the C-14 Dating Fiasco," White Horse Press: Cincinnati OH, 1996, pp.18-20. Emphasis original)



26/11/2007

"The Image has been determined by the same two chemists-Heller and Adler-to be the result of chemical degradation of the crowns of the top-most fibrils in the Image area. This degradation fits most closely the operation of acid on linen. It first of all involves dehydration: a severe drying out process. Secondly it is oxidation, the mild forms of which produce a yellowing or browning, the more severe forms of which produce a scorch, a char, and finally a fire. Heller and Adler found that a piece of linen soaked in sulfuric acid for half an hour produced the requisite straw-yellow color of the Image. Light sources, including ultraviolet and infrared rays, gamma rays, and the other rays constituting the electromagnetic spectrum, were applied to linen-none produced the color of the Image. Furthermore, there was no evidence of any foreign substance (in anything like enough quantity) that could possibly be construed as being the result of painting, or rubbing, or spraying, or any conceivable artistic procedure. Spectroscopic analysis as well discovered no evidence of the metals which would have had to be present in any sort of inorganic `paint' that could make the image by artifice.
Reputable scientific conclusion #2: THE IMAGE WAS FORMED BY DEHYDRATION AND OXIDATION OF THE FIBERS OF THE IMAGE AREA ITSELF, AND NOT BY ANY ADDED COLORING AGENT."
(Case, T.W., "The Shroud of Turin and the C-14 Dating Fiasco," White Horse Press: Cincinnati OH, 1996, pp.21-22. Emphasis original)



26/11/2007

"This is, so far, only to describe the chemical properties of the Image. There are a couple of other odd features which must be mentioned. The various shades of color in the Image are not caused by a deeper or lighter coloring of any particular fibrils. They are caused rather by the density of colored fibrils in a given area. It is a lot like the half-tone prints in newspaper photos, where `black' is made by black ink dots bunched together, and `gray' is made by black ink dots interspersed with white areas. Suppose, then, that some sudden light or heat radiation mildly `scorched' the Shroud to make the Image. It is difficult to see how such a radiation could selectively produce the localized `on-off' coloring that produces the shading in the Image. Nor could the Image be any sort of naturally produced oxidative scorch at all, since a scorch fluoresces orange under ultraviolet light, while the Image does not fluoresce at all. The only way the Image resembles a mild scorch is in its color and in its being the result of some kind of dehydration. We must also recall that if the Image on the Shroud was somehow projected from the body by a kind of unknown 'radiation' from that body, nothing could be natural about the process. Dead bodies do not radiate anything like what is required for the Image. Nor do they secrete any oils or vapors in any conceivable manner that could produce the undistorted 3-D detail of the Image. The Image is a perfect three-dimensional rendition of a crucified man. Assuming the Shroud was in contact with the body, any transference of 'something' from that body onto the Shroud, would, when the Shroud is straightened out, produce an utterly distorted Image.

This is a point brought out strongly by John Jackson and other scientists who investigated the typography of transferring an image from a three dimensional object to a two dimensional object. Imagine rubbing your face with charcoal, and then pressing a cloth to it so that an image of your face would be transferred to the cloth. Then straighten out the cloth. Your nose, to take the most acutely three dimensional area as an example, would show up on the flattened cloth several times too wide. The imprint of your whole face would bloat laterally and longitudinally, making a comical distortion. The Shroud Image, on the other hand, resembles exactly a mirror image. It is like the image you see when you look into a mirror face on. The mirror shows your whole frontal appearance in depth. It shows nothing of your sides, or the back side of your arms or legs, or the back of your head, or any of your head past the top point. If you turn your back to the mirror, though you can't see it, the image of your back would have the same characteristics. And in fact, this is exactly the portrait of the Crucified Man, front and back on the Shroud of Turin. The most important thing to understand is that, supposing a radiation of some type proceeding outwards from every point on the body, if the Shroud that covers the body is draped or curved over it in any degree, the resulting image on the Shroud must necessarily be distorted. That holds especially if the source-points of the radiation throw out their rays in all directions. It also holds if the radiation proceeds straight outwards in single lines from every point on the body. And it also holds even if the `rays' were projected straight upwards to intersect the draped Shroud at an angle. No matter: once the Shroud is straightened out, it will have inscribed on it an image distorted to a degree that becomes more extreme as the curvature of the previously draped cloth was greater. It will be wider and a little longer than the original, and all the features on it will be wider and a bit longer. Most readers of this book have seen a reproduction of the Man on the Shroud. It is not the portrait of a roly-poly fellow with a face twice as wide as it is long. It is the spitting image of Near-Eastern Semitic male possibly in his thirties whose visage is serene and quietly majestic. The only way, according to the optics of the situation, that the Image could be the mirror image that it is, is for the Shroud to have been stiff as a board as it lay atop the body. Then if any `rays' came straight upwards from the body, they would impact the Shroud so as to produce an undistorted image.
Reputable scientific conclusion #3: NO ONE CAN TELL HOW THE IMAGE GOT ONTO THE SHROUD IN ORDER TO PRODUCE AN UNDISTORTED THREE-DIMENSIONAL COPY OF THE FRONT AND BACK OF THE BODY"
(Case, T.W., "The Shroud of Turin and the C-14 Dating Fiasco," White Horse Press: Cincinnati OH, 1996, pp.22-25. Emphasis original)



26/11/2007

"On the other hand, if we go back to the forgery thesis, we may say that of course the artist painted on a flat surface, producing an image faithful to his own conception. It would not be distorted. One may then ask how a medieval artist knew how to paint a pale, diffuse yellow image that disappears if you look at it closeup, and paint it in such a manner that a photographer (after photography was invented 600 years later), could take a picture of the Shroud, develop the negative, and watch as that negative suddenly and strikingly formed into a perfectly clear three dimensional image-an image not at all apparent from the original?
The photographer was Secondo Pia, and the year was 1898. In his own time Pia was accused of photographic fakery. He was not vindicated until Giuseppe Enrie duplicated his work in 1931, and again when Bill Mottern and John Jackson first produced their computerized image on a VP-8 Analyzer at Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque in 1976. John Heller, in the accompanying interview, tells us how this medieval magician would have had to work in order to acid-paint each individual microscopically-sized fibril. Recall that there is no 'direction' that would be present even if a Pointillist applied tiny dots. Even a 'dot' would betray a slight directional movement. Rather the color comes from acid-like degradation of the very crowns of individual micro-fibrils. And the microfibril next door might have no color. The `painting' would have to be done under a powerful microscope with an 'enormous focal length' (notes Dr. Heller); and painted so fast that the acid would not destroy the artist's 'brush'; and then immediately the artist would have to wash away the acid before it ate away the cloth-which would smear the image. And if he were to succeed in performing these impossible tasks, his 'masterpiece' would look pale and flat and diffuse, only to come clear and distinct 600 years later in a photographic negative. The further conclusion ... is that what we have here is either a Medieval miracle or a first century miracle. If the 1988 C 14 test dates are correct, we have a Medieval miracle, complete with human (or at least primate) blood. This is extremely important to understand. ...
supposing that after all the C-14 tests performed in 1988 gave the true date, the fact is that the Image on the Shroud could not have been produced by any conceivable human agency-whatever the true date of the Shroud. If the Shroud were discovered today, and it was determined somehow that it was `made' today, it would still fail every scientific test intending to show that it could have been made by the hand of man. If there was something wrong about the C-14 test, and the correct date is around 33 A.D., we have overwhelming indications that the Turin Shroud is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ, with an oxidation Image faithfully reproducing his features-either as a by-product of the Resurrection, or as a purposeful supernatural work done at the time of the Resurrection, for a sign and an aid to belief. In either case, it is worth remarking that it was twentieth century science that first demonstrated the detailed chemistry and 3-D optics of the Shroud, and ruefully declared it could not conceive of how the Image could possibly have gotten onto the cloth."
(Case, T.W., "The Shroud of Turin and the C-14 Dating Fiasco," White Horse Press: Cincinnati OH, 1996, pp.26-27)



30/11/2007

"On October 11, 1965, Yale University Press announced the publication of a scholarly book with the peculiar title, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation. (The odd title of the book referred to two medieval documents-bound within one cover-that Yale University had purchased; the book itself was a technical analysis of the two.) The publisher had originally planned to release the book on Saturday, October 9th, Leif Erikson Day, but had to change the publication date to the following Monday, the 11th. Little did they know the furore that would greet that innocent decision. What was intended to be a modest academic celebration turned into chaos, as the university and the authors of the book were vilified, accused of a direct attack on that cornerstone of American history, Christopher Columbus's discovery of the New World on October 12, 1492. The Chicago Tribune called it 'The Map That Spoiled Columbus Day.'
Why the indignation? One of the two medieval documents, the Vinland Map, portrayed the world including Iceland, Greenland and 'Vinland,' a large island that scholars were sure represented North America. The island was divided into three by two deep inlets (possibly Hudson Strait and the St. Lawrence River); the three parts might well be the Helluland, Markland and Vinland described by the Norse sagas dating back to AD 1000. Not only that:
the experts agreed that the map had been drawn around the year 1440. This map was the first ever found to provide solid evidence that Norse explorers like Leif Erikson were actually the first people to 'discover' America, and they did it nearly five centuries before Columbus. No wonder there were outraged headlines.
Of course that was 1965. There wouldn't be nearly the same fuss now-the Norse settlement discovered since at L'Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland proves that the Norse were here, map or no map ..."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, pp.150-151)



30/11/2007

"But while Americans and Canadians have largely forgotten the Vinland Map brouhaha, the experts haven't, for they continue to fan the flames of a controversy of their own: is the map a fake? The arguments on both sides offer a glimpse into two fascinating worlds: that of medieval historians trying to work from circumstantial evidence and scientists trying to apply the highest technologies available, both groups attempting to authenticate the map-or not. It might seem at first glance that the scientific approach would be more objective, but, as the evidence is rolled out, the two have more in common than you would think.
When it comes to science, it's not so much the technology that counts-it's who is using it. And while a majority seems to have decided that the map is the real thing, there are still nagging doubts. Doubts that, maybe surprisingly, haven't been resolved by the hard-nosed technological approach."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, pp.151-152. Emphasis original)



30/11/2007

"So in February 1972, Yale turned to science for something more definitive. Had they known how many more twists and turns lay ahead they might have had second thoughts. An independent scientist named Walter McCrone was chosen to analyze the map. McCrone had built a reputation as a microscopist supreme; his six-volume work 'The Particle Atlas' is a standard reference on the identification and analysis of microscopic particulate matter of all kinds. McCrone assigned one of his colleagues to pick fifty-four extremely tiny particles from the surface of the Vinland Map (tiny enough that all fifty-four together weighed less than a millionth of a gram and if piled together would be barely visible to the naked eye) and examined them with an array of technologies: microscopes, ion microprobes, X-rays and electron diffraction, all aimed at determining exactly what substances were present on the surface of the map. His conclusion wasn't long in coming and it was a shocker: McCrone's analysis showed that the ink that had been used to draw the map and write the inscriptions contained very large amounts of titanium-in some places as much as 50 per cent."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, pp.159-160)



30/11/2007

"Titanium is a metal that when combined with oxygen forms a titanium oxide called anatase, used widely today as a white pigment. It seemed extremely unlikely that a fifteenth-century ink could contain as much as 50 per cent titanium. But the clincher came when these pigment particles (so small that it would take one hundred thousand of them to span your little fingernail) were examined with the electron microscope. It revealed the crystals to be round and regular, typical of those created in industrial processes first used to manufacture titanium pigments in the 1920s. The only one who saw any humour in the results was McCrone himself, who said that the chances of a five-hundred-year-old map containing such pigment globules were about the same as Admiral Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar being a hovercraft. The one loose end was the fact that the ink on the map was yellow, but anatase is a brilliant white. However, when anatase was first being produced eighty years ago it was contaminated with iron, giving it a yellowish hue, perfect for imitating faded medieval ink. McCrone's report was devastating. Most of the world at large and many of the experts were convinced that the suspicions had been borne out, the chemistry didn't lie and the Vinland Map was a brilliant, imaginative, scholarly and almost perfectly executed hoax."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, p.160)



30/11/2007

"However, a few insiders clung stubbornly to their belief that the map fit just too perfectly into the scenario that had been created for it to be dismissed by the first science that came along. And indeed there were some puzzles in McCrone's data. For one thing, there were places where there seemed to be ink but no titanium. Some of the faithful-scientists among them-were uncomfortable with the idea of extrapolating from a millionth of a gram of material to the entire map, an unavoidable consequence of picking micro-particles from the map's surface."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, pp.160-161)



30/11/2007

"Perhaps inevitably, a second scientific analysis was performed on the Vinland Map in January 1985, at the University of California, Davis. There, a group led by Tom Cahill used particle-induced X-ray emission, PIXE, to catalogue the chemicals present on the Vinland Map. Cahill's team at Davis has analysed more than a thousand ancient documents, including a Gutenberg Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In PIXE, a high-speed beam of protons, particles from atomic nuclei, is aimed at the target-in this case the ink line on the map. The protons dislodge electrons from the ink atoms, forcing these atoms to rearrange their remaining electrons. In doing so all chemicals emit a unique set of X-rays. So you simply aim the beam at the ink, read the X-rays coming back and you have a list of the chemicals present. The results were stunning. PIXE detected levels of titanium tens to hundreds of thousands of times lower than those reported by McCrone. Cahill reported seeing no crystals of any kind, let alone of the twentieth-century compound anatase, and he and his colleagues went even further. They drew fake map lines using a modern titanium-based ink on a sixteenth-century piece of parchment. Then they erased those lines to the point where they were no longer visible to the naked eye. Even so they still found levels of titanium twenty thousand times higher than they had detected on the Vinland Map. The Davis group had even found more titanium in the ink of their Gutenberg Bible than they found on the Vinland Map. If PIXE were capable of finding titanium in a fake ink even when it can't be seen, yet detected none on the Vinland Map, how could McCrone have found so much? The two results cannot be reconciled. Tom Cahill has put it well: `Let's say there's a piece of ink and he [McCrone] pulls a crystal off it, and it's fifty per cent anatase. He extrapolates to say the whole ink is fifty per cent anatase. Because we analyzed all the ink present, we have to extrapolate nothing. We found the ink was highly variable across the map: some of it has titanium, some doesn't.' McCrone contends that by surveying broad areas, PIXE reduces the concentrations of titanium to insignificant levels. As to how McCrone is able even to find modern-looking crystals with so much titanium in them, Cahill raised the possibility of contamination-a white painted room is full of such crystals, many of them airborne."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, pp.161-162)



30/11/2007

"That was the situation in the mid-1980s. Since then Walter McCrone's analysis has taken some further hits. Two of the new introductory chapters in the rereleased version of The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation include thinly disguised or undisguised attacks on McCrone. One is by George Painter, who attacks anyone and everyone who has questioned the map's authenticity and characterizes McCrone's theories of how a forger might have executed the map as 'absurd,' 'pointless,' 'incredible' and 'preposterous.'

Two chapters later, Tom Cahill, the scientist behind PIXE, adds these comments about the validity of the McCrone procedure: `we can find no evidence that the critical particle removal process was guided on site by manuscript experts as it was being performed,' and goes on to lament the `lack of prior experience of the McCrone investigators.' While Cahill suggests that the titanium that Walter McCrone found in crystals from the Vinland Map might be a modern contaminant, a different explanation (and just as convincing) has come from Jacqueline Olin of the Smithsonian Institution. She has shown that minute titanium crystals, of approximately the type seen under McCrone's microscope, can result from a typically medieval preparation of ink, which involved roasting materials until they had been reduced to fine powders. Olin claims that some anatase-like crystals, modern in appearance, could result from this process if the furnaces used reached high enough temperatures."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, p.162)



30/11/2007

"For his part, McCrone, on the McCrone Research Institute website (www.mcri.org), scoffs at the idea that the necessary heat could have been generated in a furnace being used by a fifteenth-century ink-maker. He also wonders why, if his method is so flawed, he and his colleagues found two hundred times as much titanium (in modern form) on the Vinland Map as they did on either the Tartar Relation or the Speculum Historiale. If all three documents were prepared at the same time using similar or even identical inks, why is the map so much richer in titanium? And McCrone, too, can boast of support from the Smithsonian.
Kenneth Towe, in that museum's department of paleobiology, agrees with McCrone that the likelihood that a fifteenth-century ink-maker could produce true anatase crystals is exceedingly small and that in fact Olin's crystals aren't like the ones on the map. He has also analyzed Cahill's data statistically and concluded that the amounts of titanium in the ink are significantly higher than those from the parchment alone. If indeed the titanium in modern crystalline form has drifted onto the map from white-painted walls, why did those particles land only on the inked portions of the map?"
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, p.163)


30/11/2007

"There is an object lesson here for anyone out there who still believes that science is an unbiased route to the truth. In this case each individual scientific approach leads to a version of the truth, but the two independent approaches are diametrically opposed. Walter McCrone has a reputation for skepticism. He performed a similar particle analysis on the Shroud of Turin and demonstrated (to the satisfaction of many) that the mysterious image on the shroud had been painted. It's not surprising he concluded the map to be a forgery. On the other hand, would Tom Cahill have gone to the trouble of retesting the Vinland Map if he didn't believe there was still a good chance it was authentic? I'm not suggesting that either scientist has been dishonest, but it's a very good bet they started with different preconceptions and after all, the answers you get are constrained by the questions you ask. At any rate, in the case of the Vinland Map, straightforward scientific approaches cannot, by themselves, answer the question everyone is asking. Even if McCrone had found no titanium, or Cahill had found plenty of it, there would still be doubts. The map could be radiocarbon dated, found to be five hundred years old and still be a forgery."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, pp.163-164)



30/11/2007

"After endless arguments over the heat of fifteenth-century furnaces or the motives of a putative forger choosing a 1920s house paint to fake a fifteenth century map you can't help conclude that belief, not science, is what is most important here. And in that sense the saga of the Vinland Map is no different from any other kind of science. Until the data is overwhelmingly persuasive, belief holds sway. As one last thought, assume the Vinland Map is real. Imagine the reaction of the man who laboured so carefully on its precise coastlines and near-microscopic inscriptions, if he were told that five hundred years in the future, scholars would be holding conferences, blowing up his images to thousands of times their actual size and bombarding the map with mysterious streams of particles, all in an effort to determine if he really had drawn it. I think there might be a smile on his lips."
(Ingram, J., "The Vinland Map," in "The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science," [2001], Aurum Press: London, Reprinted, 2005, p.164)

 

​

Quantum Immortality

Re: Steven Weinberg and 'Einstein's Mistakes'/Quantum Immortality.

--- In Panentheism@yahoogroups.com, "april0203ebay" <april0203@...>wrote:
--- In Panentheism@yahoogroups.com, "khaibit1975" shadower@ wrote:
​

JS, do you accept "Quantum Immortality?​

April​

You might think of it this way April.
Is an electron immortal?
Of course it is and so is the proton as the two most elementary bulding blocks of atoms (with neutrons which only decay if 'away' from the nucleus of such an atom)

Your body, as the materialists will tell you, is made up from those 'atomic building blocks'.
But are those atoms you? Skeptics and atheist often proclaim this being so.
So in quantum terms, the constituents of your body are already immortal and can, theoretically BE anyplace in the physical universe.
As Carl Sagan has said, you are made from stardust (of supernovae as dispersing stars).

Quantum Immortality as then proposed by Tegmark, Lewis and others is imo 'hocus pocus' (using Herb's favourable sense of expressionisms).
It introduces many aspects of quantum mechanical interpretation which (in Mac's words) are extremely nonparsimonous; the Many-Worlds-Hocus Pocus being the main ingredient.

The 'scientific' debates on Quantum Immortality serve really only one ontological purpose; namely to 'kill the concept of God' and the concept of 'spirituality'.
They are so the (imo) hogwashed attempts to portray 'reductionistic science' as the 'new religion' of rational reasonings.
Ok, I won't rave on; but define Quantum Immortality in a comprehensive manner, which synthesises the 'spiritual immortality' with the 'quantum immortality of the atomic constituents.

Quantum Immortality REQUIRES a TRANSFORMATION of the atomic structure, not the atomic structure in its material essence (protons, neutrons and electrons), BUT the atomic structure in its macroquantised state, namely your entire bodyform.
So you 'keep' your atomic structures, BUT the TRUE YOU (who uses the atomic structure as a house or dress or temple) becomes enabled to SYNERGIZE the macroquantum (you as a hologram) with the microquantums (the atoms and subatoms also as holograms, but of the entire universe).

As ex-baptist this might now make some sense to you:
I'll intersperse the Quantum Physics contained in the words of Paul with the scriptural CODE:

1Corinthians.15:
³⁵But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?

The body of the dead will NOT resurrect in flesh and bone (spiritual archetype in Ecclesiastes in the' valley of the bones') - but the bones (atoms) CAN become a form opf skeletal basis for the new body.

³⁶Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die:


You MUST be REBORN as April in a NEW body should you like to keep the present one in a 'quickening' -this is the quantum micro-macro synergy in the holographic universe.

³⁷And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain:

The present April, getting older (because of somatic cellular telomere depletion in cellular mitosis and DNA blockages between dimensional genomatic induction) and expecting to physically 'die' in say 50 years; IS presently LIKE A SEED for the 'potential future body.

³⁸But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.

April, AS the ambassadora for the Body of "God's Wife", namely the PHYSICAL UNIVERSE as the template for April's miniaturization harbours a 'SOUL' as part of God's Image in 'his' wife the universe. So April's Soul is the BELOVED of GOD and he has pleased himself in giving HER the body she has, SUBJECT to her self-consciousness as to what SHE is, namely the wife of God in miniaturization of the hologram.

³⁹All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.

This 'fleshiness' DEFINES the graduation of the 'souls' in the physical manifestation of consciousness -determined by natural selective evolution Darwinian style, but with Epigenetic (read Lamarckian) overtures of environmental adaptations.


⁴⁰There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but theglory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.

The 'glories' here are a reference to to manifestation of the Universal Consciousness of God, say as defined in previous posts. A star has an enormous 'space consciousness' due to the volume of space it occupies, a planet has less so and a moon lesser, but more than a country landmass etc.
Then of course, the solar consciousness becomes a BASE-Consciousness INTERACTING with the cosmic environment, say the solar wind. This is HOW LIFE forms in solar systems.
The communication between star and planets becomes energy exchange and the 'solar base consciousness' 'enriches' and supports the planetary evolutionary cycles on all levels.
Many levels are mineral and crystalline and gaseous; some are able to manifest aquatic environments as the prerequisite for biovital lifeforms and so on.

⁴¹There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.

As in the above. Paul was a suave and clever gnostic, who understood the Gospels of John and Thomas in their archetypical and NOT historical agendas.


⁴²So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption:

This is the Quantum Immortality in the quantum relativistic holographic sense.
The 'decaying bodyforms' of the blocked superDNA expression and the telomerase depletion are the corruption; whilst the baseperfect DNA encoding of the synergized bodies is the incorruption.

⁴³It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:

Every baby that is born presently is 'born to die'. The soul assumes the bodyform KNOWING from where it came, that this cycle of the damned graves CAN be circumvented. The weakness and dependencies of babies are meant to 'mirror' the weakness of the human condition. One must 'overcome' the world of the 'bodies destined for the tomb or the fire' to 'inherit' the resurrection.

⁴⁴It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

The natural body is the biological synthesis of parental sexual chromosomes, then triggering the biochemical DNA-encodings.
The spiritual body is the 'shadow body' of the soul growing, developing and evolving WITH the biochemical body and the one which serves as the memory repository and the library for the human experience in 'the souls life' in the embodiment.

⁴⁵And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.

Very short and succinctly; Jesus of Nazareth was the Quantum Physicist who solved the mysteries of the archetypes. Without himher NOONE will be able to attain those 'New Bodies'.
One word; skeptics beware - you are literally playing with your incarnational histories.

⁴⁶Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.

The archetype was a normal human bodyform, housing the supreme wisdom of the gnosis and the insights, able to decipher Isaiah. Then he died in the body and had nowhere to go, because he had solved the 'Puzzle of God'; so he (as the soul of God) simply transformed his body in resonance with the Universe's collective superconsciousness (The physics is available in technical terms for this).

⁴⁷The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.

Jesus of Nazareth is in heaven=wavefunction of the entire universe now; but he is also within you, April as the Lover of your soul as she. But without listening to himher, many cannot believe that this is a fact of the Quantum Holofractal Cosmology.

⁴⁸As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.

Earthy here is fundamental as the Particular (Individual) Part and also archetyped as the 'Hellish'; the heavenly is the Wavicular (Collective or Holistic) Part as expressed in the solution of the Schroedinger's Cat Paradox.


⁴⁹And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.

The Soul within everyone IS an intimate part of God. As Man your soul is the Beloved of the 'Goddess' as the Quantum-SinkSource and as Woman your soul is the Beloved of 'God' as the Quantum-SourceSink. The quantum source is the vibratory microscaled part of the wave-particle duality of the Universe in toto and the quantum sink is the winded macroscaled part of the latter.

The micro indicates characteristic wormholes and the macro indicates the scale of galactic superclusters as gravitational limit in the cosmological principle and homogeneity and isotropy.

⁵⁰Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.

You are born to die, UNTIL you GET IT - the quantum holographic Eucharist.

⁵¹Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

The mystery is the metamorphosis of the old April into the new April by the 'power of God', which is the soul of April.

⁵²In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

Well, that is the parousia, which is coming nearer as the message sent from the galactic center about 25,624 civil years ago and which will hit the center of the earth on December 21st, 2012 and then REFLECT and travel back at lightspeed to where it came from.

⁵³For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

It was done on April 1st, 31 AD to implement the universal archetype (for all cosmic civilisations not just the one on earth, but the latter is itself destined to become an archetype as a collective civilization -hard to believe at the moment I know) and it will happen again.


⁵⁴So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
⁵⁵O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

I can't wait and hope to still be in my suffering abode, when the timeline ends.

John Shadow in the Cave of Plato for Dragonheart 111


The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics concentrates on a 'classical treatment' of the observer and the observed; leading to a 'collapse of the wavefunction' upon the act of the observation.
This has little to do with the 'quantum phenomenon of entanglement' as is indicated in the Weinberg critique of Copenhagen below.
Summararily, Schroedinger was right in the first instance; BUT this does NOT require a Copenhagen observer.
Schroedinger's Cat is BOTH ALIVE and DEAD as the superposition of quantum selfstates and INDEPENDENT on any classical observer (looking at the cat).

The superposition is the entanglement of the collapsed and the escaped quantum eigenstates.
The cat is a living Particle-Entity with 'consciousness/soul/god' INSIDE as a collapsed wave.
And the cat is a dead Wave-Entity with a 'consciousness/soul/god' OUTSIDE as an escaped wave.
These two eigenstates define QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT of the SIMULTANEOUS
CAT, being BOTH a living body and a dead nonbody at the same time.
Why does the human mind find that this is so hard to understand?
JS
​

Many physicists and philosophers have objected to the Copenhagen interpretation, both on the grounds that it is non-deterministic and that it includes an undefined measurement process that converts probability functions into non-probabilistic measurements. Einstein's comments "I, at any rate, am convinced that He (God) does not throw dice and "Do you really think the moon isn't there if you aren't looking at it?" exemplify this. Bohr, in response, said "Einstein, don't tell God what to do".​

​

Steven Weinberg in "Einstein's Mistakes", Physics Today, November 2005, page 31, said:​

All this familiar story is true, but it leaves out an irony. Bohr's version of quantum mechanics was deeply flawed, but not for the reason Einstein thought. The Copenhagen interpretation describes what happens when an observer makes a measurement, but the observer and the act of​

measurement are themselves treated classically. This is surely wrong:​

Physicists and their apparatus must be governed by the same quantum mechanical rules that govern everything else in the universe. But these rules are expressed in terms of a wave function (or, more precisely, a state vector) that evolves in a perfectly deterministic way. So where do​

the probabilistic rules of the Copenhagen interpretation come from?​

Considerable progress has been made in recent years toward the resolution of the problem, which I cannot go into here. It is enough to say that neither Bohr nor Einstein had focused on the real problem with quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen rules clearly work, so they have to be​

accepted. But this leaves the task of explaining them by applying the deterministic equation for the evolution of the wave function, the Schrödinger equation, to observers and their apparatus.​

The problem of thinking in terms of classical measurements of a quantum system becomes particularly acute in the field of quantum cosmology, where the quantum system is the universe.​

​

​

"april0203 wrote:​

Thank you. I'm fixing myself some lunch, and I'll sit down here and reread this piece. I could grasp the first half well enough upon first read. I prefer to stick with science these days, as I view Scripture as a product of its time. Though you do make some compelling connections between what St. Paul wrote about the spiritual body and the quantum body.​

Do you accept the Bible's teaching of hell?​

April​

Heaven and Hell are NOT locations, physical or 'spiritual'. They are archetypical entities, i.e WORDS or labels, which are most definitely related to the 'States of Mind' and so 'consciousness' and selfawareness as other such 'labels'.

The heaven and hell of Jesus are very real mental states'.
The sheeps and goats of the 'last judgements' are objects and their images.
The object is YOU as an individual and your image is you as a 'false identity'.

"Two will be in a field, one will be taken and one will remain" means that EVERYONES 'fake image' will literally 'go to hell' i.e. the 'lake of fire (your yin) and brimstone (your yang)'.

The 'lake' encompassing this is your 'new body' after you have 'eaten the lion'.
It is sad to hear that the skeptics and atheists have 'talked you out' of the scriptures.

The bible, if read correctly, is a 'handbook and manual' for the 'new physics' for the 21stcentury.

The trouble is simply that the expert, the theologians and historians (and as Mac has poignantly said) have little nous of how to 'interpret' the scriptures NOT as historical evidence, but as a basis in allegory and metaphor and symbolism leading the way into a total ABOLISHMENT of
dogmatic religion with their 'Fake-Gods' , Fake-Devils, Fake-Christs {Yes, the Jesus of dogmatic christianity is the false prophet in John's Revelation and the child-killing and woman-raping Jehovah of the OT is a 'Fake-God'}.

Then the trouble at the present time are not the scriptures, but the people who think they know what the scriptures mean and represent: from the Pope to your Latter Day Saint and Jonestown.

JS

​

April wrote:​

Yes, the focus on gender is anthropomorphic, but consider the slant on my question. What I was basically wanting to know was how can God have gender without a body? I so closely connect gender and personality and consciousness. I guess I see them all intertwined.​

...​

That last sentence of yours hits the nail the head with me. It is what I have been trying to convey for ages. How could something without consciousness give rise to consciousness? Of course, there is emergence that cuts both ways.​

​

One raw food guru once pointed out that all of nature is one giant sex act. Makes sense.​

JS: Your guru here is absolutely correct.
The biochemical and evolutionary development began at the Big Bang, when the 'universe' was at its minimum consciousness level.
The first consciousness crystallized in the natural beta minus decay of natural radioactivity, when the primordial neutrons 'decayed' into yin-protons and yang-electrons.
The space between the nuclear core of the hydrogenic proton and the hydrogenic electron became the medium for individuated consciousness to manifest. This is SPACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS as a form of base-consciousness.
About 17 billion years later, little tadpole like creatures, inhabiting the primordial ponds on a terraforming planet first became AWARE of lightsources shining onto the pond as sunlight and as starlight.
The hydrogenic space-consciousness had evolved from an earlier material Big Bang unconsciousness into the selfawareness-consciousness of the 'tadpole'.
About 500 million years ago, the evolution of the tadpole had resuled in the archosaurs, then dinosaurs and reptilian paramammals (pecylosaurs), then mammals and the primate trees began so 6 million years ago with the australopithecines and home erectus.
The hydrogenic space consciousness is within the 'tadpole' is within the stegosaurus is within the smilodon is within Austalopithecus Afarensis is within Cleopatra is withn April is within God the Immanent.
But the hydrogenic spacial consciousness is within God the Transcendent.

April: Btw, lest I forget, I'd love to get a discussion of the Gaia Theory going on this list. But I'll have to wait for my exams to be over first...here in a few days. If I forget, I hope someone will remind me.​

JS: Gaia is an archetypical label for the collective planetary consciousness as indicated above. You may in all seriousness consider the works of James Lovelock - he does indeed lock in the love!
Gaia is April the Greater and Bill the more Encompassing and John the Elevated.
The BODY and MORPHOGENETIC GESTALT of April is the archetype of Eve.
Just as Eve as archetype 'came out of Adam', so did the UNIVERSE as the Body of God, 'come out' of the NOBOBY God in transcendence.
Therefore Adam AS ARCHETYPE is the bodyimage of God in immanence mirroring the transcendence.
Bill is a REAL Adam; REALISING the archetype or template of Adam.
Bill getting to know himself as Adam True makes God very happy; because then Bill can begin to KNOW God as BEING the image of God.

Gaia is the Universe in miniature. This will become physicalized in 2012/2013 in no 'uncertain' terms.
The Mother Earth=Eve archetypy=Gaia=Gaea=Nut=Cosmos=April in hologramic selfsimilarity and DESTINY (within the present or some other BODY as the temple and WIFE of the transcendent God becoming immananent).
​

April wrote:​

I forgot...I think I was going to say something about the electron itself being both alive and dead. They say, Spirit has to Die to Become Matter.​

Is it a wave, or a particle ?​

JS: Spirit doesn't die, but becomes changed from undefined into defined. The consciousness of the transcendence then becomes immanent and subject to development in interaction with whatever environment it encounters.
To allow a MAXIMUM development, the selfconsciousness of the transcendence must by MINIMIZED. This is the total forgetfulness of the Quantum Big Bang - the Universe in subconsciousness.
There exists only One electron and One particle in the transcendence. This then becomes a wavefunction of a dual nature and as described and 'solved' in the Schroedinger Kitten. Then there will be zillions (but yet a finite count) of 'particles', comprising the wavefunction in evolution.

​

Perhaps in a moment of death the electron becomes 'real' and 'does something' and​

is 'measured' or 'judged'. Or is it a moment of life ?​

JS: The reality of anything is quantum relative to the anything in the only fundamental duality of the Infinite being rendered Finite. The unmeasurable becomes measurable with the boundary between them being the Definition of anything finitized from first principles.

​

Allan wrote:​

And then it goes off again, neither here nor there, precisely.​

Perhaps string theory is, in principle, Schroedinger's last stand, his wave formula itself, neither alive nor dead, waiting patiently for its own apocalypse.​

JS: The electron's apocalypse will be its metamorphosis into lightmatter. The electron and anything else defined in inertia will become hybridized in photon-matter interaction which will 'trap' the light invariance in local quantum standing waves. This is the materialisation of the 'auralike' shadow into physicality of the waveparticle duality becoming monadic.

​

Allan wrote: A 'waveform' standing, might can blend and morph, 'be' the atom, not an element thereof, and split and be now both this and that... and that other thing.​

Perhaps...​

JS: Yes, you are intuiting the above.
​

Allan wrote:​

Schroedinger has it..​

What if there are no 'strings', only Branes. And strings are the pure and abstract intersection of branes, like the lines of intersecting planes, but in a new dynamic geometry of pure information.​

​

JS: Yes indeed; the strings are the duality and the branes are the monads, because the strings are asymptotically 'evolving' and become the information projected as the supermembranes onto a dimension one higher than the string dimension. Because of the asymptotical infinite approach of the superstrings towards its parental supermembrane mirror; the physicality of the superstring can be mapped as data onto the superphysicality of the supermembrane.
Basically, you got it Allan. Now put the 'Holographic Principle' and the Modular Duality with it and you have your NOSPACE cosmology in NOW-Time.

​

Allan wrote:​

We strangely result, in our world. Echoes of what happened only a moment ago, guided by what is about to happen, just a moment from now.​

We cannot "be" in "the now", as every electronic now, happened 'then' by the time the overall raster scan results in the next moment of 'me'. So how is it our collective elements think there is a 'now' ? This too, 'now', must be 'a strange sort of average', surfing the past, blind-actually to the future that only seems to exist more than a billionth of a second hence, yet that future tends to come. Did we really see it ? Or did we see its shadow too ?​

JS: The NOW-Time is the quantum of time, defining all physicalisable parameters. So no more duration intervals become appropriate.
This is nought but the BOUNDARY between the transcendent cosmology/universe and the immanent cosmology/universe.
​

April wrote:​

And the wave comes to shore, as usual. We saw it happening, then, in the past, even though it hadn't happened yet.​

So 'reality' knows, in advance, the amazing computational result of the entire ocean.​

Next. Fascinating...( and, past my bed time )​

JS: Yes, indeed! The 'End of the Universe' is required to be DEFINED before the Beginning of the Universe. The forethought of the transcendent 'Father' becomes subject to the 'Afterthought' of the immanent 'Mother'.
​

 

- Posted Apr 10th 2012

​

Shared by Zaina and Raven - Gracias Madmoiselles!

[3:20:49 PM---April 10th, 2012 - +10UCT] Ishtara Raven: Hey Tony
[3:21:53 PM] Ishtara Raven: what is the reason you put up the skeptic message with the video? I guess I don't see what your trying to say by adding that as a comment.
[3:22:34 PM] Tonyblue: Read it and you'll see
[3:23:24 PM] Ishtara Raven: well i got alot of it read and still didn't get it, haven't finished because its pretty long
[3:24:10 PM] Tonyblue: http://www.thuban.spruz.com/forums/?page=post&fid=&lastp=1&id=147A63E1-BA03-4A9E-A960-D1C5D24D3892
[3:24:18 PM] Tonyblue: I edited
[3:24:59 PM] Ishtara Raven: ok i see, the author of this is a personal friend of hers
[3:25:47 PM] Tonyblue: No this is a 'reformed skeptic' yet still a sceptic like me
[3:26:15 PM] Tonyblue: Its an excellent article
[3:26:30 PM] Tonyblue: His ref to ANITA IS IN GREEN
[3:26:45 PM] Ishtara Raven: yes i see that, i just couldnt see the relation until i got passed the huge amount of medical data
[3:26:52 PM] Tonyblue: lol
[3:27:51 PM] Ishtara Raven: well i only asked you because I thought perhaps you didn't like the video and i was panicing a little i guess.
[3:28:06 PM] Tonyblue: No no Anita is the real thing
[3:28:26 PM] Tonyblue: I liked it so much I looked for a piece to publisize
[3:28:30 PM] Ishtara Raven: yes i thought so too, i felt her experience was very real
[3:28:35 PM] Tonyblue: Of course
[3:28:45 PM] Ishtara Raven: Zaina found this
[3:28:54 PM] Ishtara Raven: and i saw it on her FB and watched it
[3:29:08 PM] Tonyblue: I will thank you 2 then
[3:29:21 PM] Ishtara Raven: and felt it was incredibly appropriate for our situation and Fates questions on death
[3:29:58 PM] Ishtara Raven: i especially liked what she said about how incredible it was to become aware of her own magnificance
[3:30:08 PM] Ishtara Raven: this is it to me
[3:30:20 PM] Ishtara Raven: divine ego vs BS Fake i am better then thou
[3:30:42 PM] Ishtara Raven: she experienced the encompassment
[3:30:52 PM] Ishtara Raven: KNEW it
[3:31:00 PM] Ishtara Raven: and came back to share it with the rest of us
[3:32:10 PM] Ishtara Raven: she went to a place where she was able to strip herself from all the vanity and social conditioning of the world and just BE herself, no pressure, just all encompassing love and acceptance
http://marksspiritualblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/sceptism.html
Sunday, 17 April 2011


Sceptism

Sometimes when I reflect on the list of things that now comprise my belief system – afterlife, reincarnation, alternative medicine, psychic powers – compared to just a couple of years ago, it can momentarily cause a sense of disquiet in me. Am I starting to go soft in the head? What will I start believing in next? Pixies and fairies? Maybe my age related dwindling of neurons has caused me to lose it a bit. Or perhaps I smoked too many spliffs at university and it is now beginning to catch up with me. Maybe my bs filters have been compromised. Perhaps they need beefing up a bit?

If I am honest, I think with regard to that last point the opposite might be true. My bs detectors are working more keenly than ever before as they now get more exercise. What need does a sceptic have for the ability to discern truth? To simply impose a blanket ban on anything coming dangerously close to brushing up against the perimeter of one’s current belief system takes no real ability of discernment at all.
It is sometimes a good thing to be a former sceptic. It allows one to identify more with sceptical arguments. Some viewpoints are actually reasonable (that’s not to say they are also valid). One of them is the thought that if there were an afterlife why is it not more evident? Surely dead people would be popping up left right and centre and making us aware of their presence. Passed loved ones would be coming back all the time to tell us they were still around. If an afterlife were real it would be as evident to us as is the fact of gravity. And I for one would have great fun haunting people if I managed to come back. That would be the start of some seriously frenetic poltergeist activity! Just think of all the wonderful possibilities for scaring the bejesus out of people.

It would be a nice thing if there was that kind of in your face evidence to support belief in an afterlife (not the poltergeists) however what we do have is not that bad either. After years of hard work researchers have provided us with an extensive and comprehensive insight into what goes on when people come close to death.

The words close to death are actually a bit inadequate though. The full significance of clinical death is not always obvious to people. It is not simply a case of being unconscious! When people are brain dead there is no neural activity whatsoever. Not a flicker. Not so much as a whimper of a neuron firing. In other words it is pretty much like actually being dead. I sometime hear it said that if the people had really died they would not have been bought back again. However this statement is confusing clinical death with biological death. They are two different things. It is true that if someone is biologically dead they will not come back. That’s why decomposing corpses don’t suddenly spring back to life (except on Jeremy Beadle. Remember that one where the corpse suddenly sat upright in front of the mortified mortician and said ‘hello’. Actually you wouldn’t remember it because they weren’t allowed to air that particular episode due to the fact the mortician jumped out the window. It would have been great to see though wouldn’t it?) Clinical death occurs when the heart stops beating and blood flow to the brain stops. The crucial point is that clinical death has an associated brain state of nil activity, which is also the brain state corresponding with biological death. You don’t get neurons firing in a decomposing corpse (I assume) as also you don’t get neurons firing when a person is clinically dead. That is the connection. There is admittedly some debate surrounding the validity of the assumption there is absolutely zero brain activity, since EEGs measure only surface brain activity. However there is something slightly hair splitting about making a big thing of this, as some sceptics do. In conditions such as cardiac arrest (not a heart attack) the affects on the brain are well understood. Loss of consciousness occurs in seconds due to complete cessation of blood flow, then the neurons stop firing. Simply put the brain needs oxygen (and lots of it) to function. The brain doesn’t have a reserve store of energy for a rainy day in the form of glucose or glycogen or anything like that. It gets its supply of glucose from the blood, and if that stops coming so does the glucose. And even if the brain did store its own supply of glucose it would need plenty of oxygen to burn it anyway. So the brain is in double trouble. No energy and no oxygen to burn energy. (It is true that the brain is capable of anaerobically utilizing glucose, but there still needs to be blood flow to the brain, if only deoxygenated blood which will carry on supplying the glucose. This is clearly a different situation to what we are talking about here where there is no blood flow to the brain at all. Even in that situation the anaerobic utilization of glucose contributes only to briefly maintaining cell integrity. The oxygen still needs to come back pretty sharpish!)

The brain’s metabolic processes are very power hungry too. It burns a lot of calories to work properly. Although the brain represents only 2% of the body weight, it receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization (Wikipedia) and the bioelectric signals in the brain consume nearly 10% of the whole bodies energy. Without that constant supply of oxygen the neurons simply stop signalling to each other and go on strike. Everything shuts down real fast. All this is very well understood and there is no real debate about it.
As well as all this there have been studies looking at blood flow and glucose utilization in the brain at the time people have flat EEGs, using isotope tracers and such things. They find flat EEGs do correlate closely with a very inactive brain. So medical doctors are not just shooting in the dark when it comes to EEG readings. Much is understood about flat line EEGs and what it means in terms of brain activity (there is none).


There was however this one guy, an anaesthesiologist by the name of Dr. G.M. Woerlee I think it was, who tried to make the claim this isn’t what happens. He said he was shocked by the fact that Pim Van Lommel’s research (a cardiologist from the Netherlands involved in a major NDE study) was accepted for publication in the Lancet (a well respected peer reviewed medical journal) and that it should never have got in there. He was basically claiming that cardiac arrests don’t result in a cessation of brain activity. This is the mother of all whoppers! How dare he! Someone should whip him with his stethoscope for telling such porkies! It does result in a cessation of brain activity Dr. Woerlee and you are a cheeky monkey for suggesting otherwise.

He does raise a slightly more valid point with regards to the potential of the resuscitation procedure itself to generate some level of consciousness, such as applying heart massage, defibrillation etc. However, even though the possibly of the resusitation procedure generating some brain activity can't be entirely discounted, this doesn't seem to be an adequate explanation for the lucid and coherent forms of consciousness experienced during a typical near death experience. Can a few sporadic spikes of activity really be responsible for such elaborate and meaningful experiences? A brain trying to splurt and splutter its way back online is hardly likely to result in any coherent thought patterns. In fact this is well understood also. The immediate period of time surrounding a person regaining consciousness is typically characterized by confusion, not clear coherent thoughts. And certainly not the upgraded level of consciousness typically associated with an NDE. So there does seem to be something slightly straw clutchy about the claim this is what’s causing near death experiences. Also it doesn’t explain how people can have veridical experiences incorporating conversations that took place in another part of the hospital or viewing objects or people they had no way of knowing about by normal means even if they were fully conscious. Additionally it doesn’t seem to explain cases such as Pamela Reynolds, who due to having a deep brain aneurism had all her blood drained from her body while she was kept in a frozen state. Pam was able to identify a range of surgical instruments used during the course of the operation and was aware of conversations taking place between the surgeons while the operation took place (all verified). It also doesn’t explain people who are blind, some from birth, who are able to see during their near death experience.

One of the more remarkable NDE cases I have heard of concerns a woman by the name of Anita Moorjani (a Facebook friend of mine). She had end stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a form of cancer) and was given just a few hours to live (this was back in 2006). Many of her organs had shut down by this stage and she was in a coma. This resulted in a near death experience where she was presented with the choice of whether or not to return to human life. She was told that if she made the decision to return her cancer would clear up as a result of that decision. And it did. In a matter of weeks! She went on to make a full recovery and has been in full remission ever since. The doctors concerned were completely baffled, admitting there was no medical explanation for this. In fact medically it was impossible. The huge quantity of cancer cells being flushed from her body should have killed her never mind the cancer itself. This is a well documented case that took place during 2006 in a hospital in Hong Kong.

So the idea that a few possible spikes of electrical activity during defibrillation could cause all of these things to occur seems to be stretching things a little. Also even if one were to concede there might be undetected brain activity taking place despite the flat EEG one is still confronted with the curious fact that a dramatically reduced level of brain activity (something everyone agrees on!) results in a dramatically (in most cases) increased level of consciousness. Something doesn’t seem quite right about this. Wouldn’t you agree?
One has to wonder about Dr. Woelee’s motives in the first place. He has published a couple of debunking NDE books and appears on various chat shows for the sole purpose of rubbishing ideas of an afterlife. Even if he doesn’t personally believe in this stuff, why is he, and people like him, on some personal crusade to persuade others not to either. This in itself doesn’t mean he is biased but one certainly wonders if this is the case. If you heard about a person who had invested serious time conducting a study in order to confirm people of a certain ethic group have inferior intelligence you would probably have immediate concerns about the quality of the research on account of the implicit bias being suggested by the actual point the person was trying to make. It wouldn't necessarily be correct to simply assume the conclusion reached was incorrect, but you would certainly have a reasonable basis for alarm bells going off in your head. (By the way this kind of study has been done. It was called phrenology and has since been thoroughly debunked). The sceptics of course could make a similiar claim about NDE researchers, claiming they are biased in favour of NDEs, but at least on close inspection their conclusions do seem to correlate with the actual data. And anyway I am not altogether convinced that kind of bias is quite the same thing as the negative bias motivating some of these sceptics.


Another sceptical line of attack is to question the significance of the fact NDEers can accurately describe the details of the resusitation procedure used to revive them during a cardiac arrest, and in the case of operations are able to identify the surgical instruments that are used. The general claim by sceptics is these people have simply watched TV shows such as ER and have picked up details of how resusitations are performed from watching these shows. It is allegedly this they are describing. Also in the case of surgical instruments it is alleged by sceptics that it is not too hard to make intelligent guesses as to what they look like. Dr. Penny Santori, an ex-nurse and former NDE researcher, directly confronted these issues in her research. She conducted a five year study where she used a control group to establish the difference between the accuracy of the descriptions of resuscitation from people claiming to have had an NDE and those that hadn’t. It was subsequently found people who didn't have an NDE experience had no idea about the resuscitation procedure that had been administered to them, and when they made guesses their replies were based on TV dramas, and as a result were wildly inaccurate. The people who had a near death experience on the other hand were able to very accurately describe the resuscitation procedure that was used to revive them. The difference between the two groups was profound, lending considerable support to the validity of the out of body experience reported by near death experiencers. Another issue Dr. Penny Santori looked at in her research was the effects of endorphins, abnormal blood gases or low oxygen levels, the very things typically used by sceptics to explain away the near death experience. She claimed in regards to these things “all the current sceptical arguments against near death experiences were not supported by the research”. This has been consistently found in a number of other relatively recent large scale studies also. The traditional arguments against NDEs are looking quite worn. They are simply not supported by the data.


It is not unheard of that following a near death experience people can develop some form of psychic ability, or perhaps become slightly more intuitive compared to before. This led me to do a bit of research on psychic powers. Again I was surprised regarding the scope and credibility of the research on this subject. This is all stuff I simply knew nothing about until now because my preconceived biases prevented me from ever looking into it. IONS (Institute of Noetic Sciences) has been conducting a comprehensive and detailed study of psychic phenomena for several decades, including such things as exposing one person to flashing lights and looking at corresponding brain activity of someone sitting in an adjacent room (the rooms were sealed). The results are pretty unambiguous. The global consciousness project is another study which has been running for 10 years and is still ongoing. The alleged odds of the correlates they have found to large events are something of the order of billions to one. Obviously the results are attacked by sceptics, normally on statistical grounds. I do however know something about this subject since statistics was a compulsory module during the first year of my undergraduate mathematics degree, and I have to say the accusations levelled against IONS constitute pretty basic statistical errors. Most of the researchers conducting this research are of such a calibre I find it hard to believe they are capable of making the kind of errors they are accused of. These are people with some impressive academic credentials behind them, not some whacked out bunch of hippies (sorry if you happen to be a hippy. I mean no offence).


Going on to the subject of alternative/complementary medicine, as my girlfriend works in the local hospital as a mental health worker I am in a position to be aware of the more recent changes in attitude towards alternative and complementary therapy in the UK Health Trust. Techniques such as mindfulness have become fairly common place, and Buddhist type practitioners are springing up in the Health Trust like there’s no tomorrow. The accusation that these kind of therapies and treatments are being introduced into the health service on purely financial grounds is certainly not true according to what I am hearing. Apparently it is generally quite expensive to use complementary and alternative therapies. They are being used because they work. There are other alternative treatments available in the health service as well, including such things as reiki and reflexology. Since we are fundamentally energy anyway (I know this from physics) the idea of any healing modality that works through manipulating one's energy seems to be quite a reasonable premise. (Things like homeopathy are different. I am not sure on that one).

People sometimes claim the only reason anyone believes in an afterlife is because it is comforting. Take that psychological motivation out of the equation and no one would believe it. I certainly think we should always be cautious about being led astray by our wishful thinking. An awareness of this character trait is healthy. If we weren’t able to rise above wishful thinking we would be at the whim of every fraudster out who relied on this potential vulnerability to dupe us into buying into whatever it was they were selling. So this character trait is a good thing to acknowledge. However it doesn't at the same time mean if something is good it isn't true. Sometimes things are good and true at the same time. If you saw the lottery results and the numbers looked somehow familiar you wouldn't fail to check your ticket simply on the assumption that you can't have won because it would be too good to be true would you? You would check your ticket anyway. That is because acknowledgment of the connection between wishing and believing things to be true isn't carte blanche to outright reject the possibility of all good things. You look at the facts. If the data or facts is justafiably leading you in a certain direction then this legitimately overrides the concern about wishful thinking getting the better of you. There should be some sort of reasonable balance between healthy sceptism and outright dogmatism. I don’t think this balance is always achieved.


I don’t think embracing spirituality is all about believing what one wants to believe anyway. Certainly not for me it isn't. Take life reviews for instance. Thinking about these always makes me feel a bit on edge. I don't mean by this that I think they are a bad idea. I think they are a great idea! I can think of no other form of justice that is better than for everyone to be accountable for every misdeed they ever made in their lives, and to feel all the hurt and pain they inflicted on others. This has got to be the crème de la crème of any form of justice that could possibly be thought up. The only snag of course is that it applies to me as well. Another aspect of spirituality that doesn’t immediately jump out at me as being a particularly good thing is reincarnation. This is something you have to confront sooner or later if you get into studying NDE accounts in any great depth at all. There is no serious doubt that we keep coming back here (what lunatics). The good news is that we get to choose whether or not to do this. We don’t have to. It isn’t like some of the more Buddhist and Hindu kind of ideas on reincarnation where you simply default into another life when you are through with this one. That’s the good news. The bad news is you make the choice from an entirely different perspective to that of human perspective. And that lead us to make choices we would not necessarily make here. I find that a bit disempowering. Some reasons I would currently have for not wanting to come back here again mean squat to a light being (I should say light being perspective since we are light beings). So this another aspect of spirituality I have had to get my head around that hasn’t bought me any immediate comfort. I don’t like the idea of not existing but I am also not too keen on the idea of multiple trips back to Earth for yet more lesson learning. I think I am going to try and learn all my lessons in this incarnation so I don’t wind up coming back here again! In terms of the evidence to support reincarnation this is quite compelling as well. Dr. Michael Newton is just one researcher in this field who has produced surprisingly compelling results. You do have to be a bit careful with believing things like this. I am sure there are many cases of fraud, and sometimes false memories produced by hypnotism etc. But the number of compelling cases with verifiable evidence backing them up is strongly suggestive of the reality of reincarnation to say the least.
With the issue of fraud in general, I have always had the attitude that irrespective of whether or not such a things as psychic abilities exist there are always going to be some people who will make false claims about posessing psychic abilities. That is just obvious. To some degree that probably applies to such things as NDEs as well. I'm sure some people are probably fabricating stuff for whatever reason they have. So the odd case of fraud popping up presents no surprise, whether talking about NDEs, reincarnation or whatever. The key question is whether there are enough credible cases to back the phenomena up. In the case of NDEs even sceptics don’t doubt the general validity of their occurrences. To believe otherwise is to believe there has been some global conspiracy to make them all up. Not even the sceptics believe that.


In terms of proving conclusively by the standards of scientific rigour that there is an afterlife, that is a tricky one. I prefer to think of it more in terms of a law of court kind of thing. We can reasonably apply concepts such as balance of probability and beyond reasonable doubt to the evidence supporting the existence of an afterlife. In a civil court balance of probability will dictate the outcome of a trial (something OJ Simpson is acutely aware of after being successfully tried in a civil court). In terms of balance of probability I think that is a safe bet. In terms of beyond reasonable doubt, in my personal opinion this as well. In fact I personally know of two NDE cases where each case individually is beyond reasonable doubt, at least as far as I am concerned. So I am pretty confident overall. That’s not bad going for someone who’s most profound spiritual experience was to see Avatar. There is certainly no substitute for a personal spiritual experience but I seemed to have done quite well without one. It would be nice however to have a near death experience without the near death part wouldn't it?


Sometimes I have heard it said that if you are going to believe the anecdotal evidence supporting NDEs then you might as well believe in the anecdotal evidence supporting anything at all. In fact you might as well believe in pixies and fairies they say. However branches of social science relies to some degree on anecdotal evidence. Surveys and questionnaires are especially used in psychology and sociology for instance. This form of research is in essence anecdotal evidence, and the results of these methods of research form the basis of many social science theories. Even the use of census forms presupposes most people will tell the truth. Additionally circumstantial eye witness testimony can sometimes secure a criminal conviction. Of course the penalty of lying under oath is a powerful enough incentive to make most people think twice about not telling the truth on the stand, but this doesn’t change the brute fact it is still anecdotal evidence. There are mistrials of course but I am not stating any of this to indicate proof of an afterlife. I am simply stating that while sceptics reject outright the use of anecdotal accounts associated with NDEs simply on the basis that it is only anecdotal evidence they will inconsistently accept it in other contexts. This seems to me to be kind of hypocritical.


Couldn’t this same argument apply across the board though? What about all the anecdotal evidence regarding UFO sightings and other things such as alleged sightings of the Loch Ness monster and Yetis? Well anecdotal evidence is like all other forms of evidence. You take them on their individual merits. I personally don’t know enough about UFO sightings to make any sort of meaningful judgement on the matter. If I looked into it and the evidence was as suggestive as I currently believe it is for the case of near death experiences I would probably end up believing in UFOs as well. I simply don’t know because I haven’t looked into it in any depth. But it is not mutually exclusive anyway. UFOs might be a reality and NDEs might be a reality. In terms of the other things such as the sightings of monsters, fairies, pixies etc exactly the same principle applies.


This leads us naturally to the classic archetypal sceptical argument:- extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The first question to ask oneself when considering the above statement is in what sense the notion of an afterlife is extraordinary. Or more to the point why does it seem so extraordinary. Is it because it is extraordinary in real terms or is it just extraordinary in psychological terms? What is the difference?


The idea of consciousness existing without an associated physical form is only extraordinary if one believes that humans are physical in the first place. But what is physical? Science tells us there is no physical. At least not the way we imagine it. What we call physical is just energy. That’s all there is. The distinction between what we call the physical realm and what we would call the spiritual realm is pretty much an artificial one. According to people who have had extensive near death experiences we don’t literally go anywhere when we die. Instead it is an expansion of consciousness. The resulting expansion of awareness takes us out of this limited human perspective and enables us to perceive a larger part of reality, the part we can't perceive while in human form. The idea of living without physical form is only surprising if one insists on making a distinction between physical and spiritual. In other words it is only extraordinary in a purely psychological sense, and is simply resulting from the erroneous belief that we already live in a physical world. The world only seems physical to us because of the way the human senses work and the way the human mind works to construct a convincing appearance of physical reality. So acknowledging the fact we are not physical in the first place is in effect a realization that the notion of living a non-physical form of life is not that extraordinary at all.


So let's go back to address the original point of why dead people don’t pop back all the time to say hi. Is there some sort of conspiracy going on to prevent us from knowing the truth? One of the things apparent from examining multiple NDE accounts is the reason we come to human life in the first place is for a bit of lesson learning (the situation is slightly more complex than this according to extensive NDEers but I will cover all that in a future post). It is clear we don’t come here for the sole purpose of having a good time. Everyone who has died and come back to tell the tale is very definite and clear about how much better it is on the other side. They generally don’t want to come back again. So this isn’t a vacation (for most of us anyway). The amnesia we have as humans of the real reality and the nature of what we really are is a deliberate design feature. It is necessary for us to be able to carry out the kind of missions we have come here for in the first place. The fact that we are beginning to get a significant hint of an afterlife now as a result of the many people being bought back through improved resuscitation techniques doesn’t offset this in any relevant way. None of this really takes away from the feeling of reality we get when we come here to Earth. We are not constantly able to remember our former spiritual lives because it would prevent us from believing the human experience is real, which is necessary in order to get what we want out of the experience. The fact that we are now getting these indications of an afterlife doesn’t really take that crucial aspect away.
Despite acknowledging that contacts with the dead aren't everyday occurences for most people I do sincerely believe it does occur on a lesser scale. I have personally had family members tell me of events that have happened to them that are quite profound in nature. And more recently from my current girlfriend as well. These are all people I trust and I am personally sure of the fact they are not fabricating the details of these events. So as far as I am concerned contact does sometimes happen on some sort of level.

In summary:

Sceptics (informed ones) believe in the reality of the near death experience (they believe they do actually occur). The focus of their sceptism is generally concerning two main issues. One is the issue of how much brain activity is going on during an NDE and how this contributed to the NDE itself. The second issue of their focus concerns the timing of the NDE. For instance did the NDE happen just prior to slipping into unconsciousness or perhaps when coming out of unconsciousness.
We have looked at why we can be sure nothing much is going on in the brain during the period of flat EEGs and found the claims of the sceptics unfounded. They are not really basing their argument on the actual data. Researchers such as Penny Santori have successfully addressed the second issue. By using a control group she found stark differences in the ability of people having NDEs to be able to accurately relate details of their resuscitation procedures compared to those who had no such experience.

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Just a quick comment on something I just recently found out about. Michael Jackson is still making music apparently. They dug him up the other day and he was decomposing.


(Sorry!)
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Post last edited Apr 10th 2012

 

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The Code of Thubanet
The Fable of Little Adam and the Rooster's Egg​

Little Adam came to his Dad Tony and and his Mum Sharon on his ninth birthday to ask his parents a question, which had been on his mind for some time.

'Hey, Dad, Mum, where exactly did I come from?'
Well my son, answered Tony, you came out of your Mum, her womb, exactly nine years ago.'

'Yes, it was quite an occasion, Adam', added Sharon.
It was just before lunchtime, when you were born on the 4th of August 1989.'

'Hmm!', said Adam; 'and where did you come from?'

'I came out of my mother's tummy on the 21st of October 1960, around breakfast time, as far as I know', replied Sharon. 'Ok, and where did your mother, my grandma come from then?', Adam continued.

'Your grandma was born on the 16th of May, 1922 and I don't know when', answered Sharon and realising the nature of Adam's enquiry, she continued: 'And I also do not know when your greatgrandma, the mother of my mother was born, I didn't really get to know her, before she died, this got lost in history.

But she too, came out of her mother's womb and her mother was born by her mother and so on back to the beginning of time.'

'Ah, but then right then, at the beginning there must have been a mother of all mothers; where did that one come from - it could not have had a mother, isn't that so?', Adam continued his train of thought.
'Now you are asking a deep question about the nature of all things,' replied Tony.
'The answer is found by discovering the nature of yourself; what you truly are and away from what you think or might believe you are; being here in a certain place at a certain time and asking such pertinent questions.'

'Many people have asked and thought about the same thing, Adam', continued Tony.
'One story says, that the first mother's name is Eve or Sarah or Dawn and she did not have a mother but was created out of her husband's tummy, whose name was Adam or Abraham or Sunset.

The story goes, that Eve was formed out of one of Adam's ribs; so to get the rib, the first belly-button had to be created on Adam's tummy, but Eve had no belly button.

To give Eve a belly button, she had to become like a mirror image of Adam and this is a selfreproductive process, where Eve comes out of Adam's tummy as a rib and Adam comes out of Eve's tummy as another kind of rib, you might call it a baby-rib.

One day you will understand this story as a metaphor for a recursive or selfiterative mathematical function or as a process in the genetic expression of the sexual chromosomes; say in the creation of the differences between male and female.
If you have XX or eight digits put together and then you take away one of the digits, then you get XX-1=XY and more specifically XX becomes XX+XY, because the single digit of the rib brings back the XX as a oneness or an unity.
So the X-part of the chromosome partners XX+XY defines the femaleness in Eve and the Y-part of the pairing patterns the maleness in Adam.

Eventually the genetic code of 16 generational permutations derives from that and all of that becomes part of a mathematical encoding of energy in geometrical forms, which then can build bodies and biochemical structures in using that code.
Now the story breaks down Adam; because you see it talks about your namesake Adam as being the first father, also being the first Son of God.
People begin to argue about just who this God is, does it exist or not?

Is it a he or a she and things like: if God created Adam and Eve out of Adam, then who created God?
And who or where are God's parents, and do they have belly buttons or not?

So to answer your question about where you came from, one must also answer this question about what God is; otherwise the story just goes on and on without end.

But once you know what God is; then you will be able to solve many mysterious and paradoxical questions about the nature of time and space and the nature of all things; the universe, your life and the beginnings and the endings and so forth.

Again, the solutions can be made or explained rather technically, what with quantum physics and multidimensional spacetimes in relativity.
It can also be told in the form of a parable; here it goes:




"Once upon a time, there lived this rooster in a place enclosed by walls of pure crystallised mountains. It was a world all within itself. This selfcontained universe of the rooster was all the rooster knew. There was this big problem stirring in the rooster's head however.
Not only was this rooster absolutely alone in its world, it was also totally invisible.
It knew itself to be a rooster, because it had thought and imagined itself to be a rooster.
But try as it might, it could not see, hear, smell, touch or taste itself.

And so this rooster was staring at the crystallised mountain walls with its own imaginary rooster eyes and thought of its own wretched state of existence of no experiences, except of what it could dream up or imagine in its thoughts.
The rooster knew that all of its world was pure imagination; the crystal mountains and all the stillness and movement within it.
Sure, the rooster conjured up other roosters and places and things; but it was all imaginative; it all revolved around itself and its own thoughts.

The rooster's imagination was all and everything it could be, yet it was so limited in its expression of itself as itself.
It was so absolute in its omnipresence and omnipotential, that it only produced loneliness; no other rooster or thing or movement or stillness was able to interact or share anything with the rooster.
The rooster was the absolute and infinite creator of all its own imaginings; but being so totally eternal and so absolutely alone made the rooster very unhappy and very sad.
Well, one could say, the definitions of what unhappy and sad and loneliness are, became an inner experience, created by the rooster's very own thoughts and imaginings.

So the rooster created its inner world and reflected upon it, imagined it to be its outer world also, passed and beyond the crystalline mountain walls.
'What was the other side like, the outside', the rooster thought to itself?
'Is there an opposite to unhappiness, to excruciating loneliness and to sadness?'

The rooster did not know and it was tired to imagine so many beautiful things, which did not create tangible experiences, but seemed only to accentuate the rooster's sense of being all alone in the world.
But a thought dawned on the rooster, perhaps somehow the outer world could become reflected in the inner world.
And so the rooster devised a way to turn the situation inside out.

The one thing the rooster knew very well, was its own energy, its creative potential.
And it knew abstractions, numbers, shapes and concepts it had created in using its discoveries of numbers and the invention of geometries in iterative mathematical functions and relationships.
Like the event, when it finally escaped the circular selfrepeating computational loop of its own primary state of experiental being in simply cutting the circle to define the numeral 1 from the Zero and to allow a linear beginning and a linearised end.
12 dimensions could be enfolded in 3, time and space had come into being and nested complexities of topologies and relative curvatures allowed refinements on quantumised scales of energy and displacement.
Oh it had been fun; the rooster's mind had felt elated, good, euphoric.
Names like that had also become definitions, contrasting the feelings of unhappiness and loneliness - and the rooster knew that it had established a set of feelings and experiences from whom it could now choose.
Did it prefer a feeling of happiness and joy to an experience of loneliness and sadness?
It had often been very painful, this journey of selfdiscovery and the creation of the ever expanding perimeter of its own realm of existence, which was all there was or ever could be.
'But how can one experience those numbers, ratios and shapes as an outer experience and out of one's own mind', the rooster asked itself?

Then an idea came to the rooster; the rooster would have to project itself in giving part of itself away and out of itself - to create the imaginary outside reality and to energise the same, bathing it in the rooster's very own energy of self.
How to do it?
'I shall transform my own energy into other forms', so the rooster decided.
Now how to project?
'I must define myself as source energy, able to penetrate myself, my own self-limitations and my own boundary conditions, however subject to extension and refinements.
Then I must somehow reproduce myself in such a way that the projection of myself is able to know me as itself; my image can then become real as the part of me, which I have projected and energized.
But I shall be careful in that I shall not allow my projected and imaged self to know myself in the totality which I am and which I have experienced.'
'I am so sick of being everywhere at all times and of experiencing that wretched state of being everything, unable to get away from my own self.

I am going not to be omnipotent any more; I'm going to share myself around as me, in parts.
So I choose to lose myself in what I am going to create in such a way, that I can have an adventure and fun in finding myself again within my own creation.
And my inner self shall be as one with my outer self, but my outer self shall have a scope of discovery and a sense of not knowing what my inner self knows.
And so the learning of my outer self shall thrill me and allow my inner self to grow in tandem and in harmony with my outer self.'
'Now the smart thing to do is to create in such a manner, that I get back more than what I give away from my energy, and the way I shall define this, is to set the thing up so that the more of myself I give away, the more I am used up, the more reflection potential my creation shall have.
So when my creation wakes up and when it begins to release my absorbed energy back to me, then will my creation, my Beloved and my baby begin to shine its light upon me and this will make me visible for the first time in the history of myself.'

The rooster got excited; 'I, the rooster shall become visible one day', it thought!
It quickly devised a selfconsistent and logical way to create the outside world and called it the rooster's universe.
The rooster took an algorithm from its mathematical repertoire and produced 10 fundamental numerical constants to mix up the dimensions, forces and energy interactions necessary and then it initiated a process of self-reproducing blueprints, the primary principles and the elementary laws regulating the omniphysical nature of the universe.
That was the easy bit.
The universe became created mathematically and in imaginary complex functions, seeded in quantised numbers called integers and series of numbers, some converging in limits and others diverging in unitary infinities.
But how to bring it outside the crystalline mountain walls, which had proved so impenetrable to the rooster's mindfulness?
A virtual reality relative to the rooster had to become an omniphysical reality relative to the creation and this selfsame creation could then copy the rooster's own creativity and create a virtual reality relative to itself, but the same which would become the rooster's omniphysical reality.

Then the light emitted by the rooster's creation would shine onto the dual reality of the rooster and render it visible as the holographic image of the creation's very own blueprints, defined in the interference patterns of the absorbed light the creation had used from the rooster to define itself.
'Ah, I need a balancing mechanism', the rooster thought; 'I contract in principle as the inside and the antiprinciple expands as the outside.'
And so the rooster defined itself to reside in the 13th dimension and it defined the space outside of the crystal mountain walls to be the 12th dimension mirrored in the space within as the 10th dimension and the crystal mountain walls themselves to be the 11th dimension, forming the great divide between the creator and its creation.
And so the creation became 10-dimensional, but manifested in the quantisation of the 13th dimension as the 4th dimension in the numerical root reduction 1 3=4=9 4.
The next step was to define a 12-dimensional energy source, which could move freely between all of the dimensions and using the linearisation of the 4-dimensional spacetime as a consequence of the fundamental constants of the Genesis.

The rooster decided upon a form of light, defined in frequency independent of time in its primary form, but set as inverse time in its secondary application.
And so a coherent, monochromatic laserlight in 3 dimensions became the selfdefinition for the rooster's 12-dimensional energy in a secondary effect.
The rooster called it its electromagetomonopolic source energy.
'Right,' the rooster thought, 'now I radiate my primary light, which I shall name my LOVEPHOTON as the quantum of 12D-omnispace outwards and away from myself.'
'I shall make everything dependent on its energy, all the mechanics and dynamical interactions of the universe, all its geometries, movements, stillness and relationships and its number shall be three thousand million billion trillion precisely.'
'This unit of time shall also define the units of space and of restmass in correspondence to something I shall measure as part of myself inside the creation as a 13-dimensional source energy and outside the creation as myself as the invisible 12-dimensional rooster in omnispace.'
Then I shall define the 11th dimension as a mirror, half visible and half invisible, semitransparent in reflecting the inside outwards and the outside inwards.

Then whenever I shine my LOVELIGHT onto that mirror, then half of my LOVEPHOTONS shall penetrate into the outside world of myself and the other half shall reflect back into my inside world to make a record of my creation in the interference patterns created by the mirror of my 12-dimensional blueprints reflected in 10D-spacetime.'
'Now I shall shine my LOVEPHOTONS onto this record, which I shall name the rooster's hologram.
My ingenious invention of putting myself outside of myself, rests on the fact that my imaginary self is located outside of myself in the outer space, and from whom my own LOVELIGHT can reflect as my image within my own creation.
My imaginary rooster self so becomes my imaginary source energy within my creation and I myself will become my own hologram relative to my imaginary rooster self.
This reflection from my imaginary rooster self outside my world, shall so come back to me to merge with my internal reflection of my own LOVELIGHT on the hologram, the record of my endeavours.'
'Having a combined record of my outgoing and incoming source energy in the form of my hologram, will then allow me to shine my LOVELIGHT onto my holographic library for a second time.
The first coming of my LOVEPHOTONS gave me the means to make myself real in the image of my second coming in the illumination of my records, the initialisation of myself in two places at the same time.'

The Code of Thubanet

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'I shall call this process the rooster's holography in 12 dimensions, defined in the omniscience of my specifications and which I then allowed myself to rediscover in the form of a science in 4D-linespace, reckoned in a dating of 1947.
Amongst many of my children, one of my sons, named Dennis Gabor invented the process of holography on my behalf and brought it to the world's attention.

All my children are me as my adventurers, trying to help me to find myself again as the now not so lonely totality which I am.
But no longer, my second coming allows me to redefine my virtual creation as a real creation; so no more 'Maya', no more illusion - all shall be real to me.
Well all is real relative to the creators and all the creators are my sons as bridegrooms, waiting to meet their brides in their own creations.
It must be so, since all my creator sondaughters and creator daughtersons have done exactly the same thing, which I have done.'
'All the creator sons have hatched from the same egg, which I the rooster have laid.

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You see, the image of myself in outer space also becomes the birth of the 10-dimensional universe as my own hologram, enveloped and reflected in the 11th dimension of my semitransparent mirror of my crystalline mountain walls.
So the Big Bang 19.11 billion years ago, but appearing to have happened 14.7 billion years ago because of the electromagnetic doubling of my SOURCELIGHT for the last 2.2 billion years, was caused by me.'
'When I first kicked off and began to radiate my LOVELIGHT and after having defined the technical details in mathematical application of the physical and natural laws; then this ejaculation of my LOVESEED fertilised the universe as my very own Mother.
And then 'the big She' manifests my laws and definitions in giving birth to them.
Yeah, and so did I become a 'He' and the Father for all of the creation; and I created the universe for a very simple reason, namely for IT, being a SHE to give birth to me as a HE and as each other's Beloveds, FatherMothers and SonDaughters - all in One.'
'And both of us are born with bellybuttons in this way, being each others parent and giving birth to one another.
And I set up my very own dimensional expansion in creating my own Mother; for my Mother is my Beloved wife, my gorgeous darling and my eternal bride.
She grows, expands and evolves in unison with me.
She grows in Understanding out of her inborn Wisdom and I grow in Wisdom out of my inborn Understanding - those two things are necessary and go together in any harmonious application of a base of Knowledge.'
'And my Mother hasn't got a Mother of course; but she's got me as her Father.
She was created out of my own seed, because I am my own Father, the one and only true Bastard; just as my Beloved is the one and only true Bitch.
When we are together as One; male and female in One; cosmic seed and cosmic ovum in One; then the FatherMother is the MotherFather and the Father is not and also the Mother cannot be just by herself.'

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'So before IT came apart to cause the Big Bang; the Fatherpart had thought of IT and only then did the Motherpart give birth to IT, namely ALL of IT; the Oneness out from the Nothingness of the Fatherpart and the Infinity out from the Everythingness of the Motherpart.
We find eggs everywhere; cosmic eggs, chiral eggs, cellular eggs, Easter eggs - and so whenever a sperm infiltrates an ovum; then the Big Bang happens over and over again.
And what is the result of all those unions?
A bellybuttoned Adam or a bellybuttoned Eve in terms of the starhumanity!

Adam is me as my Beloved firstborn sondaughter and Eve is me as my Beloved firstborn daughterson; and every child constructed from one of my seeds and from one of my eggs is necessarily the firstborn of my infinity of potential starhuman universes.'
'The universe is your body as the visible reality of me and as created body, made from the elements of the fundamental forces and the dust of the ground.
Your body is half of you, the female part of you; the male part of you is your other half in your roosterness and the world of your own mind.
Your male part is trying to understand what the heck is going on in your life and just as I did in my own isolation of my roosterhood as the Egg of the Philosophy.
Your female part is attempting to live your life as good as you can in the circumstances you find yourself in.
Your maleness is mindcentred and your femaleness is bodycentred and as it should be.
So your male thinking and your female doing will be my adventure; coming back together as one in two and two in one and in one big starhuman family.

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And the experiencing are the thoughts in action in the doing of the mindful creativity.'
'Then when a firstborn sondaughter creates hisher very own firstborn selfmade universe, then heshe courts and marries a firstborn daughterson as hisher creation and the bride gives birth to the oneness and this oneness makes one out of two in joining it back together in the world where I am visible and where I can experience myself by seeing and by hearing myself as each other through our eyes and through your ears.
Where I can play and feel by your touch and where I can taste myself by your tastebuds and where I can smell the roses through your very own noses.'
'All in One and One in All implies the selfrelativity of everyone of your starhuman dragonomies; you are each one brick in each others houses or a single braincell or neuron in each other's head.
Only in unifying yourself in the starhuman couplings can you escape each others dominations - for how long will you remain satisfied to recycle your experiential database of your memories, subject to your neighbour's dying body?'
'Once united in the form of DadMums and as MumDads, you will actually become grown up in an androgynous merger with me and my Beloved as the four in two in One.
I am like the Zero and my Beloved is the Infinity; the bridegroom is the Minus One and the bride is the Plus One; together you will then have graduated as an immortal God and an immortal Goddess.
And did not One after my own true image proclaim to you:

John.10.34-35:
'Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I SAID, YE ARE GODS?
If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scipture cannot be broken;...

1Corinthians.5.3:
'Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?'

But it will take two to tango the ultimate waltz; you cannot do it on your own.
And two 'wrecked' fleeting lives of nothingness do make eternity in 0 0=8=Infinity!
I had to give half of myself away to find my own Beloved in my missing half and you will have to do the same if you would wish to unify your bodies with your minds and to become enabled to keep the bodies and the minds you now believe to possess.'
' The universe cannot die as my Beloved, because I choose eternity as my playground.
Parts within the universe recycle and transform in energy to give you bodies made from stardust and starborn minds induced by your dreams and visions.
One evolutionary cycle ends and another begins; I do set the recharging under the auspices of my natural laws of omniscience and my Beloved implements them in mass and in radiation.
And do not all parts of your bodies recycle periodically?
Is not every cell in your body renewed in cycles of seven or nine or parts thereof?
So you should begin to think for yourselves and try to remember yourselves as every word you speak comes out of my mouth and every thought you think I have already thought, anticipating yours.'

'For when the Big Bang happened and when space and time were created; all the LOGOS was there; all of your WORDS and THOUGHTS were there.
They are in all of my children - waiting to remember; waiting to come home!"
And so did the rooster lay its egg to bring back together again, what it had to give away to experience what IT is, to be truly ALIVE.


So my dear son,' asked Tony; 'where did you come from Adam and why are you here?'
'Oh I know now, I've come from a place and time before time and space existed and I'm here to make my own universe, to become creative, to find my Beloved and to help Grandpa God's adventure.
And I can do all this in laying my own imaginary egg', replied Adam."

Sirebard Beardris, October 24th, 2016

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