The Real Face of Jesus this Lent and Eastertide
A reader writes:
I want to watch the Real Face of Jesus before Easter. Will the History Channel being showing again this year?
The online schedule for the History Channel (in the U.S.) only goes out to March 16 and Easter (Gregorian) is March 31. My bet is that the History Channel will show it again around Easter in the U.S., the U.K. and on some of other international History channels. So watch the schedule.
But you have several good options for watching this highly rated Shroud of Turin documentary:
1) You can watch it by linking to YouTube or you can watch it right here.
2) For $1.99, you can purchase a downloadable version (search for “Real face of Jesus”). This can be viewed with many television set top boxes, such as TIVO, or on your computer. You can watch it as often as you want. This version is available in HD format.
3) Tor $3.99, you can also purchase an Apple iTunes version for the iPad, iPhone or your computer.
4) For $24,95, you can buy the DVD from Amazon or the History Channel. It is often on sale for less.
I keep a fully licensed version on my laptop and another one on my iPhone. I’ve used the iPhone version with a large-screen projector to show clips of the show to an audience.
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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
Definitely one of the best documentary on the Shroud.
Concerning the last part with Ray Downing’s experiment resulting in an image “close” to the one encoded on the shroud, one should note it is based on light diffusion with a controlled source… one more step and you can model gas diffusion on a thin layer ;-)
All I can say is, Beautiful, Thank you Jesus, Glory to the Lamb of God, who was, and is to come. the Savior of the World, the one, and only King of kings, and Lord of lords, again Thank You Jesus.