Author: hughfarey

Caveat auditor.

If you buy a horse with a visible defect, then you’ve only yourself to blame if it dies suddenly, when it is as old in years as the moon was in days when it was born. After all, wrote Anthony Fitzherbert in his Book of Husbandry in 1534, “the byer hath bothe his eyen to […]

Medieval Blood

Even today, there is no shortage of Christ’s blood. It is preserved in reliquaries in Italy, France and Europe, and is even available for sale, for about £5000. From russianstore.com, whose selection changes regularly. And this, it should be noticed, is not blood collected from statues or pictures that drip miraculously at certain times of […]

Christians versus … Christians?

Rather to some people’s surprise, Matthew Cserhati and Rob Carter of Creation Ministries International have recently published a thoughtful and reasonably well researched article deciding, on balance, that the Shroud is not the actual burial cloth of Jesus. (‘Is the Shroud of Turin Authentic?’, creation.com/turin-shroud) This was rapidly followed by a denunciation from Duane Caldwell, […]

The Medieval Weave

Much has been made of the uniqueness of the Shroud’s distinctive 3/1 ‘herringbone’ weave, with rather bold and unjustified claims that it is ‘typical’ of various times and places, from Ancient Egypt to Medieval Denmark, which can hardly be justified by the evidence. Nevertheless, a close study of some of the errors in the weave […]

Name the Artist!

I recently took part in a discussion in which my interlocutor suggested that if the Shroud were a medieval artefact, it should be possible to name the artist who made it. She went on to imply that if I couldn’t, that in itself was evidence of authenticity, which, of course, I disagreed with, but let […]

The Medieval Craftsman and the 3D Effect

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, I think the Shroud image was produced by a craftsman commissioned to provide some visible ‘evidence’ that the cloth displayed before the congregation at the conclusion of the Easter ‘Quem Quaeritis’ ceremony resembled one that might really have covered the body of Jesus. There was, I think, no claim at its […]

Clarifying Pareidolia

The Medieval Shroud 2 begins with a discussion about pareidolia which I think has been widely misunderstood, entirely due to my own extension of the meaning of the word further into general perception than was popularly warranted, and insufficient explanation of what I had extended it to mean. Let me clarify. Pareidolia is usually defined […]