Toad sent me an email today. I’ve told you about Toad before but you may not remember or you may not have been around when I discussed him. Toad never comments in the blog but sends many, many emails. At least he used to. Toad is my nickname for him: Ten Opinions A Day. But he hasn’t lived up to his name, recently. Today, however, he wanted to know if I thought that all the guess-ta-mating and talk about radiation was scaring people away from the Shroud.
Maybe scaring is the wrong word. Driving away, maybe?
I think Toad has been reading Here be Dragons over at Hugh Farey’s The Medieval Shroud blog. It’s a great posting by Hugh that should be read by everyone interested in the Shroud.
Here is my answer to Toad: I don’t know about others, but if I was just finding out about the Shroud of Turin for the first time, I’d be fast-walking towards the nearest exit. I know that many of you who read this blog feel differently. I understand.
These days my thinking is this: 1) The image is implausibly natural, 2) somehow manmade, or 3) though it makes little sense, totally miraculous without any help from nature. Anyway, that is what I think. I can’t imagine anything proposed by Bob Rucker, John Jackson or Mark Antonacci.
Hey Dan,
Such a wonderful surprise to discover your site has resumed and to see many familiar names (sadly too many others are no longer with us).
I’ve been following Colin’s work in the interim and scouring the STERA updates. I find myself still leaning toward authenticity for the Shroud, but that needle swings over to man-made almost as often. The Shroud remains, either way, a fascinating enigma/puzzle.
I’d like to add a question, in honour of TOAD. It’s one that has piqued my imagination. It stems from Colin’s hypothesis of the Shroud being a man-made replica of the linen used to carry Jesus from the cross to the tomb.
My question is a rather simple one, which some may find of little importance. Why is the linen (and image) folded top to bottom versus side to side?
My father was a funeral director and I often helped him retrieve bodies from morgues and death scenes. So this may explain my unique interest in the preceding question. Because, to my knowledge, when corpses are retrieved using sheets/linens the intuitive method of doing so is to place the body on the sheet and fold it side to side. It’s a logical use of surface area and makes the job itself go more efficiently. From body bags to sleeping bags, we tend to fold side to side, not top to bottom.
Now, if one believes the Shroud is medieval this may illicit an ‘exactly!’ – because one could postulate that this is evidence the Shroud was designed to be used for liturgical display (perhaps even as an alter banner/cloth). That’s why the linen is folded top to bottom – to provide the maximum width of view for such usage. It’s not a real corpse retrieval cloth – it’s only meant to mimic one. Its primary purpose is to be a displayable relic.
On the other hand, if one believes the Shroud is 1st century, this also could produce an ‘exactly’. The Gospels clearly point to a need for haste in retrieving Christ’s body from the cross and prepping it for burial in the tomb. If Joseph was forced to use what he had on hand, and he chose to use a ‘rich’ linen that reflected his reverence for Jesus, he may very well have used a linen bolt that necessitated a top to bottom fold – because that linen was originally meant for use as a table cloth or other similar purpose. It wasn’t a bed sheet.
Either way, the folding top to bottom is yet another enigmatic characteristic of the Shroud.
And here’s a bonus thought on modelling. I’m hoping computers can allow us to model biochemical properties related to the Shroud image formation process. For example, some pro-authenticity advocates have theorized that the Shroud could be a result of a cascade effect of natural elements combining, in a unique way, to produce the image. It is nearly impossible to model this with actual human bodies.
You can’t torture a man for hours on end, crucify him, bake him in the sun outside of Jerusalem, wrap his dead body in expensive herringbone weave and then dump the body in a tomb hewn in the local rock. Well, maybe you could get away with it once, but you certainly can’t do this umpteen times, each time tweaking the scenario parameters to see how it affects results.
But could a computer program do this with any sense of accuracy? I would imagine any program robust enough to do that would also be useful for modelling bas relief theories (Hugh’s preference) or Colin’s Easy Bake Oven theory (which in all seriousness is a viable theory as he’s been modelling brilliantly).
Keep those minds a grinding folks!