*With apologies to Forest Gump, John Klotz tells us as a footnote to a posting in his blog, Living Free. Because he first wrote the posting as a comment on this blog and because it is so good, I’m reposting, pretty much entirely, what he writes:
I have recently read the original Paul Vignon book on the Shroud of Turin originally published in 1902 which was reissued in English in 2002. I got it through Amazon. In 1902, three decades before he published his “Vignon Markings” he compared medieval depictions of Christ and found them inferior to the Shroud image and quite different.
I was originally attracted to Christ to Coke because its author Martin Kemp was the leading art historian backing the DaVinci origination of what he dubbed "La Principessa" an art scandal par excellence when Christie evaluated a 100 million dollar drawing for $17,000 and sold it on consignment. See National Geographic Feb 2012, p. 101
Kudos to Martin Kemp for "La Principessa." Really! Bronx cheer for "Christ to Coke!!"
His opinion is ignorant and a disgrace for an expert. I say "ignorant" because he obviously didn’t do his homework on the Shroud. He cites Pantocrator as the seminal Christ icon and ignores or does not know about the well publicized Vignon markings linking it the Shroud image to the Pantocrator. He is dismissive of Ian Wilson’s “Mandylion theory,” and list Wilson’s latest book as “Reading” as well as the entire Shroud.com cite. (Kemp, Martin [2011-10-13]. "Christ to Coke : How Image Becomes Icon" Kindle Edition location 1005). He ignores the Vignon markings even though they are discussed in the Wilson book he lists as “Reading.” (Wilson, supra: Figure 26, Kindle location 2680)
And he sort of grouses about the carbon dating controversy and then swallows it whole hog. His attribution of it to the Medieval/Renaisance times as a painting by an unknown Italian or French artists is – GIVEN THE EVIDENCE – absurd.
“If I were asked to provide an art-historical date for the portrayal of Christ on the Shroud, I would estimate it have been made in the later thirteenth or first half of the fourteenth century in Italy or southern France. This is consistent with the much denigrated carbon dating.” (Kemp: Kindle Locations 954-956).
It is not a painting. If anything, what Barrie Schwortz has estimated to be more than a quarter of a million hours of Shroud research has demonstrated that.
However, I have a working theory or an opinion about Mr. Kemp’s astute blindness. One of the bases of his LaPrincipessa opinion is carbon dating that was done on its vellum which dated it to DaVinci’s time. Is it possible that Oxford Don Kemp used Oxford’s very own carbon dating lab to do the dating? If so, is his attack on the Shroud authenticity occasioned by a necessity to, at least indirectly, defend the Oxford carbon dating lab?
Perhaps the good Professor could enlighten us on who did is carbon dating? Just asking. Were we in court and he was testifying as an expert on the Shroud, it would be an admissible question on cross-examination. It’s called bias.
*Apologies to Forest Gump
Source: Living Free: Oxford is as Oxford Does:* The Christ Icon and the Shroud of Turin
Quote : “He is dismissive of Ian Wilson’s “Mandylion theory…”
Remark from me : As it should be !!! Very good ! I do the same…
Just prior to that quote, we can read : “He cites Pantocrator as the seminal Christ icon and ignores or does not know about the well publicized Vignon markings linking it the Shroud image to the Pantocrator.”
Is it possible for M. Klotz to understand that Paul Vignon, because of his markings study with some Mandylion copies, conclude that we can ALSO make the same kind of direct link between the Shroud image and the Mandylion image ?!?!?
And is it possible for M. Klotz to understand that, along with his markings study, Paul Vignon developed a very interesting hypothesis that pretend the Mandylion was a false relic created by the Byzantine Church during the 6th century, principally to fight the heresy of the Monophysites who pretend that Christ had only a divine nature and didn’t possessed a real human nature ? In order to have a powerful “tool” to fight this heresy (and later, to fight the Iconoclasts), the Byzantine Church would have decided to create a “religiously correct” icon of a living Christ (without any injury or blood, i.e. the Mandylion), probably based directly on the Shroud image. They would have done this simply because it would not have been acceptable for the time (the second half of the 6th century) to show the Shroud image, mainly because of all the blood and injuries present on it and also because the nudity of Christ…
In fact, the public showing of a blood stained cloth with a burial nature like the Shroud would have been completely scandalous for that time. Remember that the Christians were not Jewish no more but, nevertheless, they were Judeo-Christian in many aspects of their lifes and it is not a big stretch to think that they still had many Jewish-related customs or traditions (especially concerning the burial and funeral traditions), and we know full well that, for the Jews, a blood stained cloth is considered completely impur. It is not hard to think it was the same for the Christians of that time ! In fact, in the very good paper about the ancient history of the Shroud, written in 1969 by Maurus Green, we can have a feeling that this was true.
Here’s what we can read about the burial custom of the early christians : “From 1897 to 1902 Albert Gayet unearthed some 10,000 pagan and Christian bodies in an intact state. The Christians were buried in a variety of ways, some clad in clothes, others wrapped in shrouds with and without face veils, their ankles and wrists bound by ribbons,. People were interred in anything up to twenty shrouds, embroidered with the early Christian symbols of the Alexandrian catacombs. SINGLE SHROUD BURIALS WERE LIKE THE JEWISH BURIALS OF THE POOR IN PALESTINE before and after Our Lord’s time, such as are described in pre-Christian apocrypha and recorded of Rabbi Gamaliel and his grandson.” In other word, for the Christians that were poor, it seems that the normal burial was done exactly like it was done for the Jews that were poor during Christ time. We can see here a close relation between Christian burial customs and Jewish burial customs. In fact, we don’t used the term “Judeo-Christian” for nothing ! It is ludicrous to think that, in the first millennium after Christ, all the Jewish customs were completely left aside by the Christians ! So, if a blood stained burial Shroud showing a nude man on it was most probably considered completely scandalous for a Jew of that time (and probably for a modern orthodox Jew), why thinking it was different for a Christian of the first millennium ?
I know I’ve already talked about this topic very often on this blog, but I will always set the record straight everytime I’ll see people using the Vignon markings in order to comfort the hypothesis of Wilson. Vignon himself would not have been in agreement with this kind of acting !!!