A reader writes:
Picking up on another discussion elsewhere on the internet, my wife and I are thinking, it seems to us that if Jesus’ body had been unwrapped by a person or himself we would not be able to detect this easily on the shroud some 2000 years later. We have often heard that the blood soaked fibers aren’t broken as they would be if someone unwrapped and removed the body. We say this because we think that after 2000 years of rolling and folding the cloth, touching it, maybe brushing it, and holding it aloft outside and in windy cathedrals all of the outermost dried blood would have crumbled, flaked and worn away. There would be no evidence of the original removal of the cloth.
In the past, didn’t Jackson make a big deal about this? I notice that the subject isn’t even mentioned in the latest version of the Siefker and Spicer viewpoint. Has Jackson come to realize this?
That would be (I think), The Shroud: A Critical Summary of Observations, Data and Hypotheses. Version 1.3 (apparently updated online June 4, 2013)
The reader continues:
Understand this does not rule out a miraculous resurrection. It just eliminates a supposedly powerful argument for a dematerializing body. Really, how good was or is this evidence? By whom? STRURP? (sic)
Interesting points. I am currently interested in the idea that some or all of the most prominent blood stains were a medieval ‘add on’. Under this theory the scourge marks might be authentic, as might the trickles of blood across the lower back, which I theorise were not produced by direct contact between body and cloth, but rather were the product of some post mortem blood flowing down fron the wrist wounds, running off rhe hups and hitting the cloth below, creating a small pool, then trickling back in towards the area of the cloth belo the middle of the lower back.
Sorry smart phone typos, ‘rhe hups’ should read ‘the hips’
Wouldn’t the possibility of blood being added on later be precluded by the fact that it’s not whole blood but blood from exudated blood clots? And also wouldn’t the speculation that the blood probably came before the image (since there is no observed image under the blood stains) also preclude this?
For 1, lets not forget how ‘impossible’ it would be for an artist to actually add the “exceptionally detailed” blood stains to the image, when the image is almost impossible to discern from within so many feet and 2, to do so without leaving any trace of applying such, i.e. no brush strokes, directionality etc..
R