Folks, you are free to have and hold any opinion, religious belief, anti-religious belief, theory, hypothesis, etc. But when it comes to the Shroud of Turin we need to deal with facts, proper science and objective history. What follows, quoted below, is not. And, frankly, given that I have and hold opinions, as well, I think the quoted paragraph is bizarre. No, I’m not saying I don’t respect the religion of Halbert Katzen and his followers, whatever it is and based on something called The Urantia Book. It becomes bizarre when, as I see it, belief become the evidence in support of the belief. As such, I do not think that it offers credibility to the Shroud of Turin.
Mr. Katzen tells us that the picture at the right was created using an algorithm he created to give us the best possible image of Jesus derived from the Shroud. If that is so, what is the algorithm? Let scientists examine it and work with it. I can see that banding has been minimized. Banding is a technological problem that many Shroud of Turin scientists have struggled with. What is the algorithm? What happens to the 3D data?
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’m afraid that we are going to see many peculiar “theories” in the months and years ahead. They are piling up fast. I need to write more and I will.
Allow me clear up a few things:
Roger Basset created the algorithms for taking the distortion out of the Shroud image. He has worked in cooperation with STURP researchers for decades and his body was used as the starting model when researches wanted to create a physical, 3D representation of the image on the Shroud. To my knowledge, he is not holding the algorithms secret. If anyone is serious about wanting to review the algorithms, Roger can contacted.
I do not have any followers and The Urantia Book culture does not have religious authorities. People believe the book, but no one is “following” anyone else as a spiritual leader. Ritual and dogma are not part of this culture; people interpret the book to the best of their ability.
From The Urantia Book: “What both developing science and religion need is more searching and fearless self-criticism, a greater awareness of incompleteness in evolutionary status. The teachers of both science and religion are often altogether too self-confident and dogmatic. Science and religion can only be self-critical of their facts. The moment departure is made from the stage of facts, reason abdicates or else rapidly degenerates into a consort of false logic.”
Halbert
The most probable hypothesis about what happened with Jesus’body was its transportation toward an unknown dimension during very short time. He reappeared again with Your body time traveled up to the time when He was arrested. This would be accomplished with the aid of those two angels mentioned in the Gospels. I can give more deiaisl of this theory for those who are interested in