by VorJack
The Shroud of Turin is back in the news, thanks to the Alien Autopsy Channel – erm, the Ice Road Trucker Channel – I mean, the History Channel. A team of 3d modeling and computer graphics experts led by Ray Downing have been working with images of the shroud to create a 3d image of the face that supposedly produced it.
[Shroud researched John] Jackson and others have posited that the image on the Shroud of Turin contains unique three-dimensional information in the form of shading variations that indicate how close the body was from the cloth. The tip of the nose, for instance, appears darker because it was near or touching the linen at the time the imprint was formed. As Ray explains it, “It is as if there is an instruction set inside a picture for building a sculpture.â€
For some reason, the History Channel’s attempts to be sensational frequently get passed off as newsworthy. I first heard about this story on the evening news, and MSNBC science blogger Alan Boyle has a post about it. At least Boyle has the decency to give Joe Nickell the chance to play token skeptic:
“There are two approaches to this,” Nickell told me. “There’s ordinary science, and then there’s what I call shroud science. Ordinary science starts with evidence, and lets the evidence lead wherever it will. This is the approach used by a ‘CSI’ team. Shroud science is quite different, and it starts with the answer. They start by saying, ‘This is the shroud of our Lord,’ and then they take whatever steps they need to get to that answer.”
Nickell is skeptical … not only about the Shroud of Turin, but also about the prospects for settling the shroud debate to everyone’s satisfaction.
“Shroud science is backward from ordinary science,” he said. “It’s very discouraging to me that the media have been so willing to give it a pass.”
Here’s the thing I don’t understand about the Shroud. It depicts a man with shoulder length hair hanging down around his face. Having had extremely long hair in my time, I have to point out that if the man were lying down, the hair would not be framing his face.
How the fuck does hair even leave trace on the shroud!?
Exactly. Some people have suggested that maybe the early stages of decomposition might make the body give off a chemical that might cause a quasi-photographic process, but hair is notoriously resistant to decay.
Well, if you believe the shroud is genuine you could easily explain it by claiming that the imprint didn’t occur so much because it was wrapped around Jesus’ body, but because of the body radiating holy light.
Or something like that. When you’ve already accepted the shroud as being a holy relic it doesn’t really matter if it fails to line up with natural processes. When believers can’t explain something by natural means they can always invoke the miracle trump card. I suppose in a circular way it may probably even serve to strengthen their belief when a miracle is the only possible “explanation”.
Very good point.
I think that because of this many scientists refuse to work on religious relics.
As is well proven, the shroud is a medieval painting onto cloth. If it had been an imprint then it wouldn’t look anatomical as it does. Try painting your face and wrapping a cloth around your face. the imprint doesn’t look like a painting, it looks like you’ve been run over by a steam roller!
As you say, there is Science and there is trying to produce controversy to make a fake interesting.
I’m sure I saw it reproduced on TV once by soaking a cloth with silver nitrate solution and hanging it opposite a window. Incidentally, wasn’t the Turin Shroud carbon-dated to less than a thousand years old?
Carbon dated to the 13th century, IIRC.
And then a Shroud Scientist measured the amount of lignin that had turned into vanillin (or vice versa, I forget), and assuming that it had never been exposed to elevated temperatures, determined that it was at least 2,000 years old. His explanation for why the Real Scientists got it so wrong was that they’d accidentally tested a patch that had been added to repair fire damage without noticing. Well, actually, five different patches in five different areas.
But, yeah, the Shroud dates to about the time it first got discovered, when there was a big market in Shrouds of Jesus (most of which are now forgotten); the fibres and the weaving techniques weren’t used in 1st century Palestine, and the image is in red ocre, which was commonly used as a paint in the 13th century. And, as others have pointed out, it doesn’t look like it’s actually been wrapped around (or even draped over) a face…
Carbon dating was invented by Satan the same week he planted all the fossils in the ground silly.
Er, no – the Devil traveled backwards in time to plant the fossils in the appropriate rock strata – don’t you know ANYTHING?
But since the earth is only 6000 years old Satan would need to take the earth back with him to a point in time billions of years before the creation of the universe so he can plant the fossils in it. Now that’s what I call impressive.
I could see some channels doing this but the History Channel isn’t the one that should be doing it. I used to be a big viewer of the History Channel but now I tend to avoid it because it lost its focus. I would like to see them go back to their original type of programing but doubt that they will since it won’t draw the money that these types of stories bring in.
For that matter, why does god always send vague indications he exists for followers to gobble up. Jesus on a skillet, on a shroud, on a piece of toast, why not just have something like clouds forming the words “HEY GUYS HOW’S IT GOING?” everywhere on the earth at the same time?
Cloud science.
I could definitely back cloud science.
Won’t work, they would then blame it on HAARP
Oh, come on. Sometimes there’s history on the History Channel.
Too many people won’t be satisfied with anything less than proving the shroud genuine. Real science can never do that.
But real science can,on the other hand, proved that it isn’t genuine.
THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!
True enough. But it’ll never convince them.
Ah! “Shroud science” sounds just like “Creation science” – start with the answer, and then try to show why it’s true, while throwing out any evidence that doesn’t lead to the desired answer.
Also, about “Our Lord’s” hair! LOL! good point! Here is Shroud science’s answer: His hair was so stiffened with sweat, blood, and other sacred crud that it remained totally in place, even when Our Lord went vertical. OR – God wanted to make sure we all got to see Jesus’s hair style 2,000 years later, so he made a miracle and held the hair in place. Another miracle proving the both existence of God and the authenticity of the Shroud!
‘the hair would not be framing his face.’
Depends on how tightly he was wrapped. Plus, maybe he was black.
Plus, maybe he was black.
Win =)
Just a wild guess, but….not one of you dweebs has a girlfriend, right? You’re so smart, so tragically hip that you are just as rabidly on your side of the Shroud controversy as the folks who don’t even question it might not be real. Change out of those dirty sweatpants and tie-dyed tee shirts, throw out that bag of Doritos, and scrape the rust off your imagination for 5 fucking minutes.
Maybe he was bagged and tagged standing up.
To get a complete imprint jeebus should have been shrink wrapped. Do you think they had vacuum packing in 34 AD Jerusalem.
With jeebus, all things are possible.
Including his not existing?
Especially that.
Except that then it wouldn’t be a miracle. It would be, er, normal.
Nah, don’t you see, if he doesn’t exist, he exists! That means its a miracle, and that means that there must be a God. QED, atheists!
OK, I’m convinced. Guess it’s time to start worshipping Frank (see the previous blog post for more details).
The Shroud of Zappa – got a nice ring to it :D
If the shroud is Jesus’, when he returns do you think he’ll want it back? Won’t it be all sort of glowy in the dark because of all the X-rays and other stuff they’ve exposed it to over the years? He’ll be really pissed off at all those researchers – they didn;t even wash ot for him.
It’s a fake. A French scientist reproduced it some years ago: http://www.unice.fr/zetetique/anglais/a_pictures_bank.html
A video of him doing it can be found here: http://www.unice.fr/zetetique/page_film_allemand.html (middle of the page on the right, documentary is in German)
Not to mention the face looks like a typical medieval artist’s conception of an idealized westernized Jesus. It looks nothing like a swarthy middle eastern Jew, which is what Jesus certainly would have looked like had he existed.
You know, that always caught me, even as a Christian, why everyone I knew believed that Jesus was white despite where he came from. I can’t really see colour being important if you are the God of everything.
However I can definitely see how old racism factors into that.
“Having had extremely long hair in my time, I have to point out that if the man were lying down, the hair would not be framing his face.”
Not to mention, if you’ve ever done 3d modelling, you know what the impression of a face on a cloth draped over it would look like: not a well-proportioned face, but like an inside-out mask.
I thought this had been sussed already. Didn’t they run a bit of the thing through a spectral analyzer and carbon dating and determine that it was a 13th century forgery?
Yes, they did do that, but the believers just have to say, “Look! It had to be repaired from fire damage, and the piece they took just had to be from the part that was repaired. Oh, nevermind that they used several pieces of the cloth. Those all were repaired, too.”
Because they know that the cloth is real, no evidence will convince the more dogmatic Christians that this is not the shroud of Jesus. Even if it had been from that time period, who is to say that this European looking man is their Jewish messiah? And even if it is Jesus, what does it prove? It certainly doesn’t tell me that the man rose from the dead.
Maybe I’m remembering wrong here, but doesn’t one of the gospels say that Jesus’ body was wrapped in two cloths? One for his head, and one for his body? And doesn’t the Turin shroud depict the entire body on one piece of cloth? Could have swore I’d read that basic idea in an issue of Skeptical Inquirer many years ago.
So Jesus was a hoodie?
Jesus would have been banned from my local shopping mall in that case. I shall shop there more often knowing that :D
Ugh, there was an article in the National Post recently about how the Vatican proves miracles last week. Their little hook was the story of an atheist scientist who was contracted to interpret some laboratory slides, and then found out her testimony was being used to prove somebody’s sainthood. This was their front-page headline story. The only good thing about it was that it was called Saintly ‘Science’, not Saintly Science, and the aforementioned atheist is still one.
(For those who don’t know, the NatPo is Canada’s paper equivalent of FoxNews – though not nearly so bad. They have had Coulter write articles for them, though.)
Wow!! A dude with a beard! Itz a miracle!
Doesn’t look any different from the 1960s pics in occasional magazines.