Book: The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups about the Life of Jesus
Publishers Weekly Nonfiction Reviews – 10/13/2008 – The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups about the Life of Jesus Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. Touchstone, $16 paper (448p) ISBN 978-1-4165-3166-1:
Picknett and Prince are the authors of controversial and provocative works, including The Templar Revelation and The Turin Shroud, that challenge popular assumptions and bring into question much of what many consider truth. In their newest volume, the authors strike boldly and unreservedly against what they see as the mythos that transformed the historical Jesus into a God, namely, the Christ. Studying the traditions and tensions that surrounded the early Christians and filtering these through the lens of skepticism, they create a picture that is both challenging and disturbing. If they are correct, then the Christ of today’s Christianity is a corruption of the mission of the rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, they conclude that “it seems that even Jesus himself would once have agreed that Christians have been worshipping the wrong Christ for two millenia.” Tough words. Readers will decide for themselves whether the authors prove their case. (Nov.)
Personally, I think Picknett and Prince are themselves mostly conspiracy theory authors, whose evidence is mostly motives and circumstance, sometimes real and sometimes imagined. You should read their books to see how incoherent their theories are.
Leave a Reply
Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
Recent Comments