New Book: Recycling Jesus
The Chesapeake area Bay Weekly has an article about a new book by Peter Abresch released January 31 called Recycling Jesus. I hadn’t heard about it and I can’t find any reviews. But I did find that you can get it at Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
Calvert County author Peter Abresch has a new mystery out just in time to add a touch more intrigue to the election of a new pope.
Recycling Jesus, the author’s 10th novel, is a mystery wrapped in the Church’s most venerated relic, the Shroud of Turin. The crime might have gone undetected had not the Shroud’s guard been killed.
Retired DEA agent Duncan Crouther is recruited to investigate. He is joined by the well-traveled and good-humored priest, Father Kevin O’Byrne. As the crime occurred on Italian soil, the Italian military police, the Carabinieri, are also involved — in the person of Maria Teresa Sconzo, a beautiful, fast-driving and very resourceful agent.
The spiritual and secular intertwine as this trio does some Grecian island-hopping in their quest to answer a very intriguing question. Do the thieves plan to use DNA from the Shroud to recreate Jesus?
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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
From the back cover “If Bagratian can prove the body on the Shroud was Jesus, and manage to sequence the DNA, and make a new Jesus, what’s to keep him from replicating a whole bunch?”
A whole bunch of Jesuses…
Note from the copyright page. “This book is a work of fiction”
I am quite sure the shroud is NOT the one that was used to cover The Lord Yeshua Hamaschia. The book of John/Yohanan, chapter 20, vers nuber 7 in the Norwegian translation of KJAV 1611 states that the sweat cloth that had been wrapped around His Head did not lay together with the linen clothes, but was folded together on a place of it`s
own. Luke 24, vers 12 also states that the linen clothes were put for themselves. In my mind that most likely means at at leas 2 places. Why does not the Turin shroud story contain these elements? I remember havin read that thousands of men were crusified as a roman
death punishment, and lots of testing of this shroud does not bring The Body of The Lord Yeshua into it any way. I think it looks like a religious hysterical wishthinking hoax.
Svein, kindly, before you go making comments such as; “I think it looks like a religious hysterical wishthinking hoax.” on this site, may I suggest you open your mind, leave any preconceptions behind, and then do some serious research on the matter. Your comment on the sweat cloth alone shows your total lack of knowledge on the matter.
Thanks,
R