A succession of ‘suggestions’ ‘in which I might be interested’ by academia.edu, cluttering up my inbox, has recently focussed my attention on the fact that much serious, not to mention intense, Shroud debate is not in English, and as such is largely ignored by those to whom French, Spanish and especially Italian is not easily […]
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 […]
The novelty of being able to convert areas of different shades on an image into a representation of a three dimensional landscape, with the darkest areas the highest and the lighter areas lowest, was so exciting in 1976 that all sense of scientific caution was blown to the winds, and wildly exaggerated statements of the […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In his “List of Evidences of the Turin Shroud”, Giulio Fanti and his co-authors include: “B13) The body image has the normal tones of light and dark reversed with respect to a photograph, such that body parts nearer to the cloth are darker.” At first sight this may seem reasonable, and explains the remarkable appearance […]
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 […]