ABC News: Good Morning America on History Channel’s Shroud of Turin special
GREAT INTERVIEW: Click here for Good Morning American five-minute segment on the Face of Jesus.
Using cutting-edge technology on the famed Shroud of Turin, a team of computer artists has uncovered what they say may be a portrait of the true face of Jesus.
The History Channel will reveal the image — and the painstaking and technical process of finding it — tonight at 9 p.m. ET in the special "The Real Face of Jesus?"
Viewers should be prepared: The results achieved through the convergence of science and religion doesn’t resemble the popularized images of Jesus
Story by THEA TRACHTENBERG and SUZAN CLARKE for ABC News Good Morning America
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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
Hi
Finally got to see your face & voice in action too when it replayed here in Australia. Interesting looking documentary – the comments at Alan Boyle’s MSNBC blog made me wonder if people would ever just look at the data. Atheists do nothing for their cause by bleating how JC was mythical or similar tripe. And the number who got reiterated a sadly ignorant line about JC not being Caucasian. Semites aren’t Caucasian? News to me and anthropologists everywhere.
i always thought that ABC news is even better than CNN when delivering up to date news.:’