Karen from Miami writes:
Regarding your post about Petri Paavola from Finland, the man makes Christine O’Donnell seem positively liberal and scholarly. PetriFB, as he calls himself is seeking out every blog and chat forum about religion and posting a message with the following sentences that seems so reasonable: “Some people say that it is the genuine and some that it is the fake and the hoax. . . . If we can find even one evidence, which disprove (sic) the shroud of Turin theory, so (sic) the whole story shall be invalidated.”
So then PetriFB presents several “evidences”: 1) On the Shroud Jesus is naked and God would never allow that. 2) On the Shroud Jesus is shown with long hair and the Bible proves that he had short hair. 3) The image on the Shroud is a graven image and God would never allow that. 4) It is a “Roman Catholic” relic and thus by definition it is false.
Usually, these sort of comment-crusaders run out of steam pretty quickly. Their arguments carry virtually no weight, particularly among those who read them.
An anonymous commenter (whom I assumed from his writing style was this Petri Paavola) recently left a comment under my blog posts: “Burial shroud proves Turin Shroud not from 1st century C.E. Jerusalem?”, as follows:
“Many people speak in favor of the shroud of Turin. Some people are against the shroud. The Bible bears witness against the shroud and indicates it for false and a fake. This article points out in the light of the Bible that the shroud of Turin is a fake:
http://koti.phnet.fi/petripaavola/shroudofturin.html
My response included:
“Thanks for the link. But the article is wrong on all its key points. Significantly his reference list does not include any actual books on the Shroud, which discuss the Biblical and Jewish issues at depth. It is typical of well-meaning but uninformed criticism of the Shroud by some Christians. … I may answer that webpage in detail in a separate post.”
Since my above brief response, I had already decided to respond to the claims on that web page in detail.
Stephen
http://www.kotipetripaavola.com/shroudofturin.html
Worthty reading.