Originally posted by Various
From World Net Daily: "At the heart of the Shroud controversy is the validity of the carbon dating performed on three samples snipped from the Shroud in April 1988. The samples were taken from the front foot area of the14-foot-long linen, on which the faint image is laid out in a head to head, dorsal and frontal view. Three international laboratories were selected to run the newly refined accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) method of carbon dating: Oxford University's Research Laboratory for Archeology and the History of Art, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona at Tucson. On Oct. 13,1988, the long-awaited press conference revealed that all three labs concurred: The Shroud was dated 1260-1390 AD.
Many in the academic and scientific community were stunned. Earlier scientific examinations, medical and historical studies had placed the Shroud in the first century. Some called into question the integrity of the samples -- had they been cut from an area charred during a fire in 1532, thus compromising the carbon testing? A fascinating finding comes from Dr. Leoncio A. Garza-Valdes of the University of Texas. Garza-Valdes notes that a biopolymer coating manufactured by bacteria and fungus is notoriously difficult to clean. This calcium carbonate varnish-like substance compromises any accurate dating of the linen fibers that are coated with the material. Garza-Valdes claims the coating continues to be produced on the surface of the Shroud. Some scientists have objected to his findings, although the inventor of AMS, Dr. Harry Gove, concurs.
Famous and often hilarious examples are cited that credibly argue that carbon dating may be among the least accurate methodologies for assessing the age of the Shroud. An example comes from the Swiss lab that participated in the carbon-14 dating on the Shroud. Dr. Wolfli, head of the lab, ran a C-14 test on his mother-in-law's 50-year-old tablecloth. The results of the C-14 test set the age of the textile at 350 years old! Dr. Wolfli theorizes that soaps were the compromising factor. The University of Arizona lab has had its own C-14 gaffs. It dated a Viking horn as a "back to the future" anomaly: 2006 AD."
Originally posted by Osiris-RA
Furthermore, forensic evidence confirms that the red stains are blood, type AB, and that this blood has elevated levels of bilirubin, presumably caused by the trauma of scourging. Drs. John Heller of the New England Institute and Alan Adler of Western Connecticut State ran a series of blood studies. Pathologists employing immunochemistry confirmed their work. Another historical cloth, the Sudarium of Oviedo, known from the first century as being the face cloth of the entombed Christ also contains bloodstains -- type AB.
Modern medical investigations yield a vast amount of physiological information that was unknown in the Middle Ages. The medical studies on the image of the "Man of the Shroud" reveal a bloody and brutal death. Careful review of the angles of the flow of blood from certain wounds indicates an impossible accuracy for a painted, flat image. Clearly, the image is derived from a real body. Enhanced magnifications of the wounds on the back uncover dumb-bell shaped pellet marks, consistent with the scourging whips used by Roman soldiers, wounds that fall in precise relationship to the contours of the body, over the shoulders and around the sides.
Most startling for a layman is the anatomical accuracy of the "disappearing thumbs." On the Shroud image, the victim lies with his hands crossed over the lower abdomen. The natural position would expose at least one thumb. However, when a spike is driven through median nerve of the wrist the thumb jerks back into the palm. French surgeon Pierre Barbet, an early researcher, asks, "Could a forger have imagined this?"
Originally posted by Madeleine_W
How could a negative image be produced on a piece of cloth centuries before the invention of photography? Scores of specialists from all over the world began to earnestly study the mysterious Shroud. Attempts made by skilled painters showed that no artist was able, even when using a model, to convert a human face by the process of the mind into a negative image, & paint it. Leo Vala, a noted photographic expert who pioneered the development of 3-D-photography, recently told Amateur Photographic magazine, "I can tell you that no one could have faked that image. No one could do it today, even with all the technology we have." The educational magazine, National Geographic, reports that the face on the Shroud, hauntingly serene in death, would grace a masterpiece of art. The body, anatomically correct, bears the frightful marks of scourging, crucifixion, & piercing--perhaps by thorns & lance. It would appear to be a portrait, uncannily accurate when matched against the Gospel accounts, of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, many believe that this stretch of ivory-coloured linen is the very cloth that Joseph of Arimathea placed under and over the body of Jesus in the rock-cut tomb of Golgotha nearly 2.000 years ago. (See Mark 15:46).
One of the World's top investigative dentists, Dr. Max Frei of the University of Zurich, a specialist in tracing where a fabric has been, through microscopic pollen analysis, declares: "My tests have convinced me that this Shroud is in fact the cloth in which Christ's body was wrapped. I have isolated from the Shroud more than a dozen pollen grains from plants that grow only around Jerusalem & its deserts." The STURP scientists concluded that the image on the Shroud could not be the work of a painter or artist, for it is too thin, & lies only on the very topmost surface of the threads, nor has it soaked into or left any deposits between the threads as would happen had it been painted. The scientists also agreed that the dark stains that permeated the image were human blood. But the question that haunts them & that has eluded their grasp is, what then could have created this mysterious image?
The general consensus is that the molecular composition of the image is similar to faint scorch of some kind, yet the scientists cannot determine by what means such a delicate image could have been made. It is now being suggested that an unknown energy force was applied to the lifeless body wrapped within the Shroud, & that a burst of extremely high intensity heat or light for an extremely short duration--probably milliseconds--somehow caused the Shroud to become a primitive polaroid film. Robert Dinager of the Los Alamos scientific laboratory in New Mexico stated, "It seems as if the image possibly came from some short-term pulse of energy. You could say it was instantaneous. It would have had to be a pretty good amount of energy, but not too much or it would have destroyed the cloth." For those who believe the Bible, the answer to this riddle is apparent: At the climactic moment that Jesus dead body was quickened to life, this "photograph" was left behind on His burial cloth as a silent witness of the greatest miracle that ever took place: The resurrection of Christ!
New Evidence That The Shroud Is Real (National Enquirer 20/11/79): The image of a coin placed over the right eye on the figure on the burial cloth actually shows the coin was minted near the time of Christ's death, according to Rev. Francis L. Filas, S.M., a top expert on the Shroud. With the assistance of coin expert Michael Marx, Father Filas has identified the image of a coin imprinted on the shroud as a coin minted only between A.D. 29 and 36. Christ died in A.D. 30. Placing coins on the eyes of the dead was an ancient burial custom in Christ's time, according to Father Filas, professor of theology at Loyola University of Chicago. Using high quality, high contrast photos of the shroud, Father Filas and Michael Marx deciphered that the coin clearly features a tiny staff, called a "lituus," bordered by four Greek letters. That staff and the Greek letters were found only, on coins minted during Pontius Pilate's governorship of Judea, from A.D. 29 until A.D: 36.
A list of definitive results from research carried out this century: The image is not a painting, and it was left by the corpse of a man who was beaten and crucified. Computer processing has shown that the image has three-dimensional properties, something which neither paintings nor standard photographs possess. Pollens have been found on the cloth, strongly supporting the view that the Shroud spent time not only in Europe but also in the Near East. Tests on traces of blood from the Shroud have revealed the presence of human blood from blood group AB. In 1988, carbon-14 dating was carried out on a fragment of the Shroud. The results date the fabric to between 1260 and 1390 AD. The scientific community itself now questions these results, and more recent experimental studies have reopened the debate."
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