Last week, in his Hidden Experience blog, Mike Clelland pointed us to Jeffrey Vallance’s cartoon website and his piece about some other images that people see in the shroud. Be sure to see the ventral and dorsal (front and back for the rest of us) images and some of his other provided links. The picture here is an interpretation of the sinister clown images seen in the burn marks. Enjoy the laugh:
However, some people have claimed to have seen "other" images on the Shroud such as coins on the eyes, chin bindings, Jewish packets on the forehead called "phylacteries" and cryptic words and letters. Researchers believe they see specific coins minted by Pontius Pilate placed over the eyes Of the shroud man. A group of secondary images caused by burn marks from a fire in 1532 produced what appear like sinister clown-like faces. Some believe that the devil tried to burn the Shroud in 1532, but when this proved unsuccessful, he created the scorch marks (that are actually darker than the Holy Face) in an attempt to mock the Shroud. As the true burial cloth of christ, the Shroud was the most dangerous object to the forces of evil. The Devil was so exasperated by the existence of the Shroud (the most scientifically conclusive evidence of the the Resurrection) tha he sought to destroy the relic forever – instead he only pathetically managed to burn the clown-like faces on it. Both the devil and the clown are trickster figures. The sinister clowns on the Shroud can be interpreted as diabolical portraits made by the devil himself.
[ . . . ]
Patriotic Americans think that they see the profile of President George Washington in the blood stain on the side of the Shroud made form the wound of the Holy Lance .
“I think I see” just simply isn’t enough to elicit interest. Even more so when using the Enrie images since they are pushed contrast images that distorted the image to make it clearer.
Clowns have had a bad rap ever since Stephen King’s Pennywise in his novel “It” (1986). I read the book way back, seen the movie. But hidden faces? More “I think I see” stuff!
what about the view of collinsberry that scorch marks are not readily detectable over a long period of time? He claims scientific reasons for this view, and states that shroud protagonists are mistaken when they hold that the image could not have been produced by scorching. your comments please.
Colin Berry does not say that scorch marks are not detectable over a long period of time. That would truly be absurd. He has said that the shroud image looks very like a scorch, which indeed it does, and has conducted a number of experiments which demonstrate this. The problem is that scorch marks also fluoresce quite brightly under ultra-violet light, and we are told that the shroud image does not. Experiments I am carrying out, albeit so far unsuccessfully, are attempting to produce visible scorches that do not fluoresce. If these experiments are consistently unsuccessful, the claim that the image might be a scorch is weakened, although time may be a factor which I do not have long enough (700 years or so) really to explore.