Archive
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?
John Klotz on John Heller
You need to read John Klotz’ entire posting, John Heller and the Shroud of Turin Research Project over at his blog Living Free. It starts out:
Anyone who is serious about current research on the Shroud, sooner or later, reaches out to Barrie Schwortz, the documentary photographer of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) and webmaster of Shroud.com. I expect they get referred by Barrie (as I was) to Dr. John Heller’s intimate look at STURP in action: “Report on the Shroud of Turin,” Macmillan, New York 1983. It’s available used on Amazon if you can’t locate it anywhere else.
Klotz quotes Heller. Here is a tidbit but you need to read the whole thing:
"The team itself – its formation, cohesion, diversity, collaboration, as well as his sacrifice of time, talent and treasure – is unique in scientific annals.
"The role of "coincidence" is awesome.
"Science undertook its specialty, which is measurement. We were supremely confident that the answers would – indeed must – be forthcoming. And we fail.
Actually, you should read the book. It is available through Amazon.
The Shroud in Early Modern Europe
This book, Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Intersections) by Wietse De Boer and Christine Gottler (Oct 2012), looks like it might be fascinating as it explores, with regards to the Shroud of Turin, attitudes and beliefs about the shroud in the late middle ages. Two contiguous snippets from separate pages follow. The Emanuele Tesauro mentioned would be the historian and writer from Turin writing in the late 1600s.
Want the book tomorrow? Amazon has only sixteen copies left in stock. There is no Kindle version so you will need to settle for the hardcover, which sells for a mere $194.49.
Press Release . . . and finally explained the process that created the image on the cloth
Again?
Press release dated February 22, 2013 for a new book on the Shroud of Turin. This release says surprising little about the book, but you can read the Preface and Introduction at Amazon.com by clicking on the “Look Inside” icon.
Here is the release:
The Truth Behind Shroud of Turin: Follow the Light Published by Outskirts Press
Outskirts Press announces the latest highly anticipated religion and science book from Lake City, FL, author T. C. Newman.
Lake City, FL, February 22, 2013 –(PR.com)– Outskirts Press, Inc. has published Follow the Light: The Shroud’s Revelations by T. C. Newman. The author’s most recent book to date is a 6 x 9 paperback in the religion and science category and is available worldwide on book retailer websites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Follow the Light is also available in a 6 x 9 casebound edition. The webpage at http://www.outskirtspress.com/followthelight was launched simultaneously with the book’s publication.
What began as a home-science project between a mother and her eight-year-old child led to an innovative photographic method that exposes the truth behind the creation of the image of the Shroud of Turin — the most misunderstood artifact known to mankind and one of the most rigorously investigated. This innocent science project led to life-changing realizations as the author, an artist, began to unravel the mysteries of the Shroud, and a new method slowly emerged — one that both recreated the image in three dimensions and finally explained the process that created the image on the cloth. It also explained the timeline between Jesus’ death and the creation of the image, why there are three ratios of size, and why the bloodstains are in the wrong position — and it provided many more answers to questions that have plagued scientists for centuries. Sometimes the simplest of explanations are closest to the truth. It’s time to rethink the nature of the Shroud of Turin and simply “follow the light.”
115 pages in length, Follow the Light: The Shroud’s Revelations is being aggressively promoted to appropriate markets with a focus on the religion and science category. With U.S. wholesale distribution through Ingram and Baker & Taylor, and pervasive online availability through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and elsewhere, Follow the Light meets consumer demand through both retail and library markets with a suggested retail price of $14.95 and $24.95 for the paperback and casebound editions, respectively.
Additionally, Follow the Light can be ordered by retailers or wholesalers for the maximum trade discount price set by the author in quantities of ten or more from the Outskirts Press Direct bookstore at www.outskirtspress.com/bookstore.
ISBN: 9781432797263 Format: 6 x 9 paperback white SRP: $14.95
ISBN: 9781432797270 Format: 6 x 9 casebound SRP: $24.95For more information or to contact the author, visit www.outskirtspress.com/followthelight.
About the author:
As a self-taught artist, T. C. Newman splits her passions between art and family. Her mother was an artist and her father a physicist, so she developed a strong knowledge of art as well as all things mysterious.
About Outskirts Press, Inc.
Outskirts Press, Inc. offers full-service, custom self-publishing and book marketing services for authors seeking a cost-effective, fast, and flexible way to publish and distribute their books worldwide while retaining all their rights and full creative control. Available for authors globally at http://www.outskirtspress.com and located on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, Outskirts Press represents the future of book publishing, today.
There is also a Kindle version for $9.99.
Stepping Out Beyond Science?
Over at NPR, Alva Noe asks and answers, Do We Know How Life Began? Not Really, and quotes Peter Godfrey Smith’s review over at the London Review of Books of Thomas Nagel’s recent book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Got that? It doesn’t matter; just read the quote or click for more::
How did life first happen? How did it begin? We don’t know. As Peter Godfrey Smith puts it, in his elegant review of Thomas Nagel’s recent book: "We still know very little about how life began, and it is hard to assess whether this problem will eventually yield to ‘normal science’ or whether a more dramatic innovation is needed."
The philosophical implications are there. Imagine a new age of reason when ‘normal science’, like mythology before it, is replaced by something even more dramatic. Quantum? What?
Is the ‘dramatic innovation’ the proper domain of the Shroud?
Tinfoil Hats All Around, Quickly
Dr. Joseph S Maresca reviews Past Lives of the Rich and Famous by Sylvia Browne in Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Browne discusses Elizabeth Taylor who lived 47 times before. Taylor was Anata of Babylonia. In the 1500s, she was a member of a Benedictine convent in Switzerland. She lived as Marie Lilliane and died at 89 years of age. Browne explains that specific memories of past lives are on the other side. But are they?
The story of Mother Teresa is equally fascinating. Browne relates how the Mother Teresa lived in the person of Leah during the time of Christ. Leah came to know Jesus Christ through the Apostle Luke. In addition, she attended the Sermon on the Mount. Mother Teresa lived through her 54th and last incarnation according to the author.
And there is this:
There may be remnants of Christ’s DNA on the Shroud of Turin. If DNA traces could be found on the Shroud of Turin, the DNA could be dated to the time of Christ. These aspects should be addressed by Browne.
Yeah, right, that’s a good idea.
In addition, the crucifixion itself was an event bathed in blood. If blood stains could be recovered from Golgatha Hill, these stains could be used to create a Christ-like human form in the laboratory. The implications of this event would be very controversial for the Judeo-Christian world.
Ya think?
Browne’s notions could be put to the test in other ways. For instance, there would have to be specific burial plots of two people thought to have identical past lives. Samples of the DNA would have to be tested after exhuming the bodies. If the samples matched, the claims might be proven. Such an experiment would require the approval of medical science due to the ethical and moral issues inherent in conducting such tests.
Science? Fiction? Science Fiction? None of the genre’s quite fit, do they? What’s sad is this was published in a paper with an online circulation of 4 million people; and some people will believe this stuff.
Source: Book Review: Past Lives of the Rich and Famous by Sylvia Browne – seattlepi.com
New Book on the Shroud of Turin
Like in an old fashioned bookstore, Amazon lets us page through many of its books before buying. This is true even for books published only in Kindle format.
You might want to check out the newly published The Shroud of Turin and the Tomb of Christ by Francisco A Menchen Barba . If you like what you see, the book sells for $3.00 and you can be reading it on your Kindle or iPad in less time than it takes to read the short sample provided in the box below
The Evidence Strongly Suggests Nothing of the Kind
There is the following from an article The TRUTH about Jesus Christ? appearing in the San Diego Healthy Restaurants section of the Examiner. No really, the San Diego Healthy Restaurants section:
The evidence strongly suggests [Jesus] recuperated in a cave for three days, tended by Essene monks, who massaged him with an Aloe and herb mixture, covered him with what is now known as the ‘Shroud of Turin’, and nursed him though his Soma trance. (emphasis mine)
And this:
There is ample evidence that after recovering from the crucifixion,
Jesus eventually returned to Kashmir, where he had previously
grown "in wisdom and stature" (- Luke 2:52) during the 17 year biblical gap
regarding his whereabouts from age 13-30.
and this . .
The evidence strongly suggests the reason Jesus "died" so quickly on the cross,
was because he was given Soma, an herbal concoction that was known to induce a
trance-like state for 3 days!
I’d like to add, “There is ample evidence, in this goof ball article, that anyone who can spell a few words correctly and breakup a stream of nonsense into something resembling paragraphs can write articles for the Examiner.
There is this (no there is nothing wrong with your browser):
The REASON the Catholic Church has gone to such lengths to try and "prove" the Shroud of Turin is "fake", is because they don’t want the world to know the truth the Shroud reveals:
Jesus was alive!
Thanks to a great number of writings from sources who met him throughout
his travels, both before and after the crucifixion, we can map out
the chronology of his life:I’m not quite sure why James Cameron dug up a tomb in Jerusalem, claiming it was
where Jesus was buried next to Mary Magdalene. The evidence strongly suggests she went west into France, and Jesus went east, into Kashmir, where he lies buried this very day:Ok, I know your mind is blown, but before you stick your head in
the sand of Blind Faith, read on…
And it gets better. To be fair, all of this comes, we are told in the article, from “an incredible book which meticulously details the archaeological & historical evidence surrounding the most influential human who ever walked the earth.”
The evidence strongly suggests that San Diego healthy dining may include Soma juice.
The Urantia Book Again
Yodr777 posted in Christian Forums:
I’ve previously argued in favor of the Shroud of Turin on this forum, yet I don’t believe it is a necessary evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Given that the shroud has been carbon dated to the middle ages, added to the fact that the first historical mention of the shroud wasn’t until the middle ages, I’m comfortable with believing that it may be a forgery. However, that would raise the question of how the remarkable image on the shroud originated. I find the possibility of it being produced by camera obscura very interesting.
I personally believe in the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection because of the Urantia Book,
Whoa! Full stop! The Urantia Book? . . .
which includes an eight hundred page biography of the life and teachings of Jesus that claims to be given by the apostle Andrew’s guardian angel. The Urantia Book’s account of the resurrection is far more detailed than the New Testament, providing more appearances of Jesus to various believers.
Forgoing the full 800 pages (no I have not read it), I’ll opt for a summary from Urantia News – Verifying History and Science in The Urantia Book:
The Urantia Book says the angels performed a time-accelerated elemental disintegration of Jesus’ body and this has intriguing correlations with the image found on the Shroud of Turin. It says that Jesus’ resurrected body was like that of angels and that his physical body still lay in the tomb after the resurrection and that the angels were given permission, upon request of an archangel, to cause the accelerated dissolution of his physical remains. This permission was requested and granted so that they would not have to witness the decay of his body. The correlations have primarily to do with the superficial nature of the image and current theories about corona discharge and nuclear medicine imaging . Additionally, there are intriguing correlations related to the Sudarium of Oviedo, a face napkin said to have covered Jesus’ face as part of the burial process.
I wonder if Fanti and Jackson know about this. I recall another criticism from a UBer. This time the topic was evolution. Someone who called himself Nautiusmaxi wrote to me, “When you mention Darwin you’re showing your ignorance as humans were not addressed in the Origin of the Species.” Maybe that was because Darwin knew (according to Wikipedia):
According to The Urantia Book, multi-colored human races originated suddenly in one generation and in one family, producing brothers and sisters that variously turned blue, yellow, red, green, orange, and indigo when exposed to sunlight. Their offspring subsequently favored the parent color. Later, Adam and Eve produced a violet race. In the book’s account, the blue, yellow, and red races were considered “primary”, and the green, orange, and indigo “secondary”. The green and orange races were driven to extinction, and the rest mixed over time.
I have no problem with whatever someone chooses to believe. That is just as true if someone is a follower of Urantia Book, an Atheist or a member of any number of religions and religious cults with which I disagree. If they publish and promote on the internet, then I am entitled to criticize in the same venue.
Nautiusmaxi had said, why “insult people who just might be on your side.”
It’s not about sides. It is about truth and if the truth is ultimately that I was wrong and the shroud is a fake, then that is the side I’m on.
Having said all that. I don’t put any stock in the Urantia Book. I don’t want anyone other than UB followers thinking the shroud is real because of this book. Yodr777 must not have read the full 800 pages or he wouldn’t have doubted the shroud. Right?
Another, Different Truth by Fiction
Jill Rachel Jacobs interviews Linda Stasi (pictured), Author of the new novel The Sixth Station in the Huffington Post: (But first read my previous post, And what theory is that?)
[Stasi is] an award-winning Big Apple columnist in a newspaper with over 1 million readers daily. Media critic and co-host of NY1′s "What A Week," Linda Stasi, has also been a guest on The O’Reilly Factor, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The View, Chris Matthews, CBS Morning Show,Good Day New York, to mention a few.
In her new book, The Sixth Station (Jan. 22), Stasi reveals a riveting and provocative read, full of twists and turns, passion and conspiracies, while tackling a host of hot and timely topics, such as terrorism, Christianity, good vs. evil. . . .
The interview explains how she conducted her research for six years. And then:
Q: So is there really a relic that exists in a monastery deep in the mountains of Italy that may contain the DNA of Jesus?
A: I believe that it does. It’s called il Volto Santo and is the true Veil of Veronica, which is celebrated as part of the Stations of the Cross in almost every Catholic Church in the world. The thing I discovered is, however, that there never was a saint — or a woman– named Veronica. That is a story made up by the Church. The image most likely however, appeared on the cloth wrapped around the face of Jesus — as was the Jewish custom back then — as he was laid in the tomb. The Shroud of Turin was then wrapped around the cloth and the body. Thus the images.
And then:
Q: What do you say to cynics or to those whose feathers may have been ruffled with the controversial subject matter you tackle in The Sixth Station?
A: For one thing I prove that Saint Veronica, who is celebrated in The Sixth Station of the Cross, and for whom the fourth and most important pillar of the entire Vatican is dedicated, is a total fiction story. She never existed — but the story was made up because the Church wouldn’t have allowed the most important relic in all of Christendom to be placed in the hands of a woman they denigrated –Mary Magdalen. Did I mean to upend a 2,000 year old belief?
No. As a reporter did I have a choice? No–not once I found out the truth I didn’t.
Okay, I ordered the Kindle version. I wish it came as an audiobook so I could listen to it while walking the dog.
And what theory is that?
I can hardly not wait to read Linda Stasi’s novel, “The Sixth Station,” due out tomorrow, after reading this in the NY Post:
What if they cloned Jesus — would the same thing happen all over again?
That was the idea I had when I began researching my first novel, “The Sixth Station,” out Tuesday.
I began by exploring the possibility that the DNA of Jesus could be present somewhere — most likely, of course, on the Shroud of Turin. I was surprised and disappointed to discover that the image on the Shroud is only a negative — like an old photo negative. What’s dark is light, and what’s light is dark. The theory is that the image was likely transferred from something other than a body. Therefore no DNA.
Don’t you love it when someone says, “The theory is . . .”
And then there is this:
But the real surprises were yet to come: As I photographed [real Veronica’s Veil at Manoppello], each image on my digital camera bore a different expression. In one, the mouth was open, teeth showing. In another, the mouth was closed in a beatific smile causing Father Jake to faint on the altar.
Well at least this book is a novel. And I will read it, well maybe/ It is available in Kindle and Hardcover.
Facts by Legends, Rumors and Imagination
From a book Joe Marino discovered comes a new, crazy natural hypothesis on how the image was formed.
Here is some information from/about the book, And Did Those Feet…? by Michael Goldsworthy and published in June of last year by Troubador Publishing Ltd. The paperback goes for $65.51 at Amazon and the Kindle version sells for $9.29; how did I miss this one? I didn’t, well, sort of. I touched on the subject of Michael Goldsworthy’s fertile imagination in October of last year; I just didn’t know about the book. Maybe I’ll buy and read the Kindle version.
I’ve taken the liberty of bolding some references to the Shroud of Turin in the material below:
Nobody was too sure where the island of Avalon was, but everybody knew that King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea, were buried in Avalon. Neither William of Malmesbury nor Geoffrey of Monmouth associated Glastonbury with the Island of Avalon at the time they wrote. This was a later corruption by monks and the sole purpose of producing the fraudulent cross was to establish Glastonbury as Avalon. If Glastonbury could only be established as Avalon by the unearthing of King Arthur, then it must follow the Joseph of Arimathea was also buried within the Abbey grounds if all were convinced that Glastonbury was Avalon. To unearth Joseph of Arimathea, however, would prove difficult as it was known that he was buried with the holy Grail. Since the monks were not apprised of what the holy Grail consisted of, it was easier to fabricate the unearthing of King Arthur with a cross attesting to the fact that where he was unearthed was indeed Glastonbury and therefore it must be the island of Avalon. The reason Joseph of Arimathea needed to be associated with Glastonbury is because the monks needed funding to rebuild their Abbey after the fire.
Prior to the fire of 1184, there existed a prophecy written by a monk called Melkin. In this prophecy, (once it is decoded), Melkin supplies very pertinent information in geometric instructions, that gives precise directions to an island in Devon. This island is Burgh island in Devon. Melkin states that the body of Joseph of Arimathea lies in the southern angle of a bifurcated line. Once Melkin’s code is deciphered, it clearly portrays that Avebury is the point on the St. Michael’s ley line, which in his puzzle, he refers to as a ‘sperula’ or sphere, meaning a stone circle. This is the point within the Avebury stone circle complex which, at 13°, if one scribe’s a line through Montacute to Burgh island (which Melkin calls the island of Avalon), it is exactly one hundred and Four nautical miles, the exact number that Melkin gives. We should not forget that Father William good deposited this clue in the English college at Rome. Someone or some organisation had tried to eliminate this information from Maihew’s Trophea to prevent the Joseph line being found but luckily this clue was preseved in Stillingfleets private collection and thus acts as a confirmation that the line is Genuine. It also seems that several marker churches that identified the genuine Avalon were also destroyed to prevent this information coming into the public arena.
The location of Avalon has always been thought to exist at Glastonbury but with a recent study of some of the oldest text and the uncovering of the fraud concerning King Arthur carried out by the monks at Glastonbury, it is evident that Avalon is in Devon . The references that Melkin gives are part of a geometric riddle that once solved, points straight to the island in Devon which is obviously fits Diodorus’s description as Ictis.
This is in fact named in the Grail stories as the island of Sarras named after Judah’s eldest son Zarah, who broke the womb first. His name has the same pronunciation as Sarra in French and his descendants came to the south-west and were the primordial miners of tin on southern Dartmoor who brought their tin to this island to be sold. This is the reason that in the Grail stories, the island is called Sarras and to which the holy Grail was brought. It is to this island that after the crucifixion of Jesus, when his body was taken down from the cross by his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, it was then conveyed to a box filled with Cedar oil so that it might preserve his corpse. This box or coffin known as the Grail Ark was then conveyed with Joseph and several others from Jerusalem to the island of Sarras, which Joseph knew well, having visited many times previously on his mercantile trips with Jesus. This island had been known about in the Greek chronicles because Pytheas a Greek explorer had visited the island on his expedition to find amber which they did not realise was the sometime by product of tin and copper smelting. The island was kept secret over many years since Pytheas’ visit, until Joseph of Arimathea visited the island with Jesus on one of his trips abroad gathering metals.
It was to this island previously known as Ictis that Joseph of Arimathea chose to convey the Grail ark and place Jesus in an old tin vault that had been shut down or made redundant due to the Roman invasion. For about 1000 years, the island called Burgh island had been the place on the coast where all the tin miners up on southern Dartmoor had brought their tin to be stored in the vault. This transpired so that visiting traders could take away tin at any time and the island acted as a trading post. It is for this reason that Diodorous refers to it as an ‘emporium’. It becomes clear now the reason that Joseph of Arimathea knew the island very well. Strabo even relates the story behind the cache of tin ingots found at the head of the Erm.
The gospels relate that Jesus was laid to rest in a hewed out tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea and the rumours still persisted as eyewitnesses had seen the doubled over white shroud that covered his body as he lay in the Grail ark. One wonders if the Gospel accounts of the burial of Jesus are just the echoes of the misconstrued eyewitness accounts that existed in Jerusalem just after the resurrection. This set of events aslo explains why the flower imprints were found on the Turin shroud. This is fully explained in detail in a book called ‘And did those feet’, written by Michael Goldsworthy as new theory as to how the Grail stories, the Arthurian legend at Glastonbury and the gospels interlink and provide evidence of the whereabouts of the body of Jesus.
Melkin, who actually wrote the original book of the Grail, which ended up over in France and gave rise to the many Arthurian Grail romances now is understood to be the same person who provided the rumours of Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. So now we have a tomb containing King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus that was last shut when Melkin moved to France in around 600AD, sometime after the Saxon invasion. However the Templars, once they have been disbanded in the Middle Ages, were also privy to this island location and they knew what was buried within. It was here on Christmas Day in 1307 that they decided, (after King Philip and the Pope had disbanded their organisation), to relocate their treasure that they had managed to recuperate and ammased it into three treasure ships that left La Rochelle on 13Tth October 1307.
While depositing their treasure in the tomb they removed the Shroud of Jesus that had been submerged in the Cedar oil for 600 years while covering his body. It is inside this vault that the image of Jesus on the Turin Shroud was formed while draped over the body of Jesus in Cedar oil. The evaporated Cedar oil has left a caramel like substance all over the Turin Shroud, but the image itself was formed by the detritus left behind by anaerobic bacteria.
Only 50 years later, one of the Templars that died with Jack de Molay near Notre Dame in Paris, had a granddaughter that produced the Turin Shroud. This is not coincidence and answers the many questions of why there is no provenance for the Shroud of Turin prior to 1354. The Shroud had existed within the tin vault until the Templars arrive and remove it. The song which became a Christmas Carol; ‘I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas Day in the morning’ is really the echo of the Templars bringing their treasure to the island of Avalon in Devon. However, this song had always been associated in Cornish tradition to the visit of Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea. It was the Templars, however, that marked out all the churches dedicated to St. Michael that lie along the St. Michael Ley line. Oddly enough, it is the other St. Michael churches that we used as markers, that confirm that the island of Avalon is indeed Burgh island in Devon
Source: Deciphering Melkin’s Prophecy
The Shroud was the Resurrection?
Annette Cloutier, author of Praey To God: A Tasteful Trip Through Faith writes:
Have you read James Tabor’s book yet Paul and Jesus?
I think you can then figure out better how the resurrection stories developed.
I do still believe as Loken and deWesselow have stated that the Shroud was the Resurrection.
Tabor bases his resurrection theories mostly on the VISIONS of Paul. I think Paul was blown away by his private observation of the Shroud and went bonkers. Mark writing about three and a half decades after Paul (c 80) then went into the Jesus Family Tomb for his characters.
As far as the Empty Tomb is concerned… I also believed Mark invented it. Tabor does not… he believes that the body was stolen as was rumored to have happened the rumor being reported by Matthew. I believe the rumor was the result of Mark’s Gospel… not of the actual circumstance of an Empty Tomb.
There’s a lot of invention and creativity with storytelling… especially one writing as skillfully as Mark. But there sure is nothing more creative nor inventive than the Shroud. Anyone can see it had not been made by “human hands”.
Happy and Exciting Blogging New Year!
Annette
Is it absurd to think that the Shroud can show a physical trace of the Resurrection?
Yannick Clément, in an open letter to scientists, quotes French Catholic theologian Odile Celier from Qui a peur du Saint Suaire? (Who’s Afraid of the Holy Shroud?) by Brice Perrier (2011). I have taken the liberty of tweaking Yannick’s English (by guessing) but only in these quoted paragraphs and not in the full open letter, which follows:
Since science became involved (note: it is even truer since the failure of STURP to totally explain the image on the cloth, which doesn’t mean however that this image will never be naturally explained in the future), the devotion to the Shroud underwent a real mutation because it is no more [longer[ the memorial of the Lord’s Passion and death than [but] the material witness of his Resurrection and, by doing so, the providential object called to healed this modern decease which is the decline of the Christian faith.
Yannick goes on to say:
There’s no doubt that such a mutation is not seen with a good eye by the Vatican, because, as Jean-Michel Maldamé (a Dominican monk who’s also a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science) states in Perrier’s book, the idea that the Shroud can really show a physical trace of the Resurrection of Christ is absurd from a theological point of view. And Maldamé continue by saying this (personal translation):
The word “Resurrection” would lost [lose] his sense and would be deformed. This would be a materialization of the Resurrection and that’s contrary to the theology teaches [taught] by the Church. The only trace of the Resurrection that exist[s] can only been found in the Gospels and in the testimonies of the Apostles.
Yannick’s complete open letter is contained below. You may need to click on “Read more” to uncover it:
AN OPEN LETTER
TO ALL OF THE SCIENTISTS
WHO ARE HONEST AND SINCERE
IN THEIR QUEST FOR TRUTH CONCERNING THE SHROUD
After having read carefully the translation of M. Barberis comments provided by Dan (link: http://shroudstory.com/2012/12/13/barberis-fantis-conclusions-are-not-scientific/), I just want to say that I am VERY PLEASED by it! Some of you will remember that I was one of the first to elevate my voice against M. Fanti’s unscientific antics at the moment he published his “special edition” issue about the Shroud. At that time, I wrote an open letter that you can find here on the blog at this adress: http://shroudstory.com/2012/08/07/and-yannick-responds-to-giulios-comments/. I said roughly the same thing as M. Barberis but in a much longer and exhaustive way. What I love the most about M. Barberis comment is the fact that here, unlike myself, you got someone well-established and well-respected in the Shroud world who finally dare to critic M. Fanti’s way to do Shroud science (which is, in fact, unscientific to say the least). Such professional comment should have come much sooner but at least, it is there for anyone to read now!
So we are fruitcakes, just in time for Christmas
John Rentoul, writing in the Independent and the Huffington Post UK, wants you to know about his new book coming out just in time for Christmas. Here he focuses on newspaper headlines:
Many of them were picture questions, with a bias towards aliens and monsters. "Is This Atlantis?" (The Sun, February 2009.) "Is This the Monster of Lake Windermere?" (Mirror, February 2011.) "Is This a Squadron of UFOs Flying Over California?" (Daily Mail, May 2011.) "Is This a Secret Space Station on Mars?" (Mail Online, June 2011.) "Is This an Alien Spacecraft Parked Next to Mercury?" (Daily Mail, December 2011.) "Is This Life on Venus?" (Mail Online, January 2012.) Most of those could have been entitled, "Is This a Speck of Dust That Has Been Magnified So Much That It Looks a Bit Like Something Else?"
Any picture that included anything that could have been a blurry human-shaped figure would be headlined "Is This Bigfoot?" or "Is This Finally Evidence That Bigfoot Exists?" Or "the Yeti".
One of my early favourites was "Is the Turin Shroud Genuine After All?" a lovely question in the Mail on Sunday in April 2009, especially for that highly-collectable "After All" at the end, which brilliantly implies that the Mail on Sunday knows perfectly well that the shroud is a fake, but that some startling new evidence has come to light that suggests that the fruitcakes had been right "all along".
[ . . . ]
The collection now has 882 exhibits, the best of which are selected for a book published in time for Christmas by Elliott & Thompson.
(Bold emphasis mine)
Blinding ignorance does mislead us
In today’s Huffington Post book section, Ross King, the author of Leonardo and the Last Supper [Walker & Company, $28.00] writes an article, 10 Myths About Leonardo da Vinci:
Leonardo da Vinci bears the burden of great expectations. The undeniable breadth and depth of his genius means there was, it seems, no intellectual feat of which this original Renaissance Man was incapable. Almost five centuries after his death, his legacy thrives not merely in his paintings, two of which, The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, are arguably the world’s most famous and celebrated works of art. It also throbs in the chests of those whose damaged hearts have been repaired by the British surgeon inspired by Leonardo’s writings on the mitral valve. It takes to the air on the tiny wings of a bluebottle-sized robot designed by aerospace engineers captivated by Leonardo’s studies on flight. It even lingers, courtesy of the entrepreneur Alessandro Passi, in a range of pasta shapes, perfume bottles, and pepper grinders – all based on Leonardo’s drawings.
Leonardo was certainly wide-ranging and eerily modern in his interests. With his dreams of manned flight, submarines, and weapons of mass destruction such as giant crossbows and doomsday cannons, he almost seems more a prophet of our age than a product of his own. His known accomplishments – in anatomy, engineering, hydraulics, optics and painting – are undeniably astounding. But often he is given a little too much credit. He tends to get abstracted from his own time and fast-forwarded into ours, and in doing so he slips out of documented history and soars into the giddy realms of myth. So it is that he gets credited with tasks as varied as forging the Shroud of Turin by taking the world’s first photograph, or serving as the Grand Poobah of an arcane lodge charged with keeping ancient secrets about the bloodline of Christ.
Just how much do these and other claims stand up to scrutiny? "Blinding ignorance does mislead us," Leonardo himself said. "Oh, wretched mortals, open your eyes!" So let’s open our eyes and look at some of these claims about Leonardo in the light of documented fact, not hero worship or wishful thinking. (bolding mine)
And then he tells is as it is:
The history of the Shroud of Turin is complex and controversial enough without having Leonardo thrown into the mix, but he has been pushed forward as its creator. In 1993 Nicholas Allen proposed that the image on the linen shroud could have been produced in the Middle Ages via a photographic process that involved suspending a cadaver in the air for three or four days while its image slowly blossomed on the chemical-soaked cloth. Others were quick to give Leonardo the credit, even though he was born a century after the first documented reference to the Shroud. But who else could have pipped Daguerre – by some three and a half centuries – to the world’s first photo?
Like others before him, Leonardo did experiment with a camera obscura. But there is zero evidence that he had any knowledge of – let alone used – photo-sensitive chemicals. Even if he did invent something as earth-shattering as photography – and it’s a truly massive if – why should he have kept quiet about it? Why not take more pictures? The fact is that not a single shred of evidence links Leonardo to either photographic technology or the Shroud of Turin. As one critic has written: “The premise is more demanding of faith than is the authenticity of the Shroud.”
Yep! But blinding ignorance will persist.
Christopher Howse: For important read stupid
Many contributors help shape The Spectator’s ‘Books of the Year’ edition. One of them is The Telegraph’s Christopher Howse who writes for that paper about Christianity and other faiths. It helps to read up to his comments about de Wesselow’s The Sign just to get a sense of his curmudgeonity:
. . . The most helpful piece of scholarship was Noel Malcolm’s translating the Latin version and appendix of Hobbes’s Leviathan in his monumental three-volume edition (Oxford, £195). I still haven’t got over the old devil insisting that God is corporeal. What could he have meant?
The best cover — to which the book lived up — this year used a wood engraving (reproduced below) of a shire horse by C.F. Tunnicliffe for the New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, edited by Steve Roud and Julia Bishop (£25). Yet the same publisher also sent out a note this year saying that their volume on the Shroud of
Turin, Thomas de Wesselow’s The Sign (£20), was ‘one of the most important books we have published’. For important read stupid.
I’d like to know why Howse thinks it is stupid. Contrast this with what Barrie wrote on his site just a couple of days ago:
Speaking of the British Society for the Turin Shroud, the organization held its first public meeting in many years in Beaconsfield, England on Sunday, October 21, 2012. The highlight of the meeting was the presentation titled, "Why the Shroud of Turin Is Not a Medieval Hoax," made by featured speaker Dr. Thomas De Wesselow, acknowledged expert in medieval art and author of the recent book, "The Sign." Fortunately, the presentation was recorded on video by BSTS member David Rolfe and posted on his Shroud Enigma web page so you can watch it yourself. Of course, many readers already accept the scientific evidence that clearly demonstrates the Shroud is not any type of artwork, medieval or otherwise, but it is refreshing to hear it so clearly presented by a true expert in Medieval art history. This video is worth watching by every student of the Shroud and a "must see" for anyone who still believes the Shroud is a medieval hoax. I urge you to watch it and share it with your friends and family.
Punk Rock Jesus #5 – Review « Weekly Comic Book Review
Dean Stell, writing in Weekly Comic Book Review, updates us on the ongoing saga of Punk Rock Jesus who was cloned from the Shroud of Turin. Can it be that we are up to the fifth volume of this comic book series and I haven’t yet been tempted to read it? Maybe I’m just not into comic books anymore. But thousands upon thousands of people are and they are reading this.
The Story: Chris continues his assault on fundamentalist religious movements.
Review (with SPOILERS): This is a very interesting issue. On the surface, Murphy has introduced some fun and exciting elements to this issue. At first, it’s tempting to think that Murphy is putting away all the allegory from the series so that he can tell a rousing finale – allegory can be confining, after all. But if you ignore the bright and shiny stuff, all the complexities are still right there, causing you to think and ponder. It’s impressive that Murphy can simultaneous tell a story that is (a) entertaining and (b) has a lot of depth.
Let’s talk about the fun stuff first. Any comic that focuses so much on religion can get a little heavy at times.
. . . [nonetheless] . . .
- Chris is just a normal person: There is nothing supernatural about Chris. Even if you accept that Jesus existed and that Jesus is the Son of God and that there was something divine in Jesus’ DNA, Chris doesn’t have any of this.
- [ . . . ]
- LOTS of stuff about worshiping the wrong things: Whether it is the mindless people worshiping Slate’s TV shows or the lunatic fringe worshiping Chris (before turning on him), there are a LOT of people in the world of PRJ who have their values out of whack.
[ . . . ]
Conclusion: This is the best comic being published right now. From a writing/art standpoint, it might have a few equals, but the fact that Murphy actually has something to say puts it in another class.
National Geographic Book: Mysteries of Jesus
A friend just sent me this. The description at Amazon reads:
Join National Geographic and bestselling author Jean-Pierre Isbouts to investigate ten enduring mysteries of Jesus in this original ebook short. Who was the unnamed "Beloved Disciple’, who leaned on Jesus during the Last Supper? What did the Holy Grail look like—and could it possibly still exist? What do alternative tales of Jesus’ life, not included in the New Testament, suggest about early Christianity? From the extraordinary circumstances of Jesus’ birth to the latest analysis of the Shroud of Turin, Isbouts consults with the world’s leading scholars to shed new light on the mysteries that surround the extraordinary story of Jesus’ life.
Has anyone read it? It was released earlier this year. It is only 60 pages, so maybe next weekend.
The Latest and Greatest Near Death Experience (NDE) So Far?
"This book is a thunderbolt!" writes Dr. Rabbi Meir Sendor.
And a priest comments in an article that appears in the Huffington Post, Eben Alexander, Harvard Neurosurgeon, Describes Heaven After Near-Death Experience a(VIDEO):
"I stood at Eben’s bedside ready to read Last Rites," writes Rev. Michael R. Sullivan, Rector, Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Ga. "With vivid detail and description, he invites you to walk with him to that place none of us has experienced yet in our humanity we know we shall one day certainly travel. Having survived a near death experience and brought his neurological expertise and background to it, we gain both the insight of the mystics in his poetic words and the reality of the physical world in his scientific explorations."
And as Eben Alexander, himself, explains it in Newsweek. It is the Newsweek cover story:
Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.
In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am.
The question that many will ask is how this relates to the other big NDE story reported on here about a year and a half ago, Akiane’s Jesus, Heaven is for Real and the Man in the Turin Shroud.
Certainly, the “witnesses” to heaven are different. How different are the descriptions? How different are the criteria for judging the truthfulness of the stories. We will need to read Alexander’s book when it comes out. In the meantime we have this by Raymond Moody, MD, PhD, author of Life Beyond Life, 1974:
Dr Eben Alexander’s near-death experience is the most astounding I have heard in more than four decades of studying this phenomenon. In my opinion, Dr Alexander is living proof of an afterlife. The extraordinary circumstances of his illness and his impeccable credentials make it very hard to formulate a mundane explanation for his case. For me, it is difficult to shake the feeling that his experience was somehow divinely ordained. Dr. Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven deserves to be a major international bestseller, and I believe it will be.
I am confident that Dr. Alexander’s story will capture worldwide interest. It will inspire many to accept that there really is life after death. I suspect his book will be a global game-changer. It has seismic implications and may help humanity arrive at a more accurate understanding of life’s true meaning and purpose in the larger sense.
Dr. Eben Alexander’s near-death experience stands as perhaps one of the crown jewels of all near-death experiences. The knowledge of what he experienced raises the bar for serious investigators and pundits. It marks the beginning of a new era of rational investigation of humankind’s deepest mystery, life after death."
And many more reviews at Life Beyond Death: Consciousness if the Most Profound Mystery in the Universe
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
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