The Shroud of Turin: Has the identity of the imprinted face been confirmed as Christ?
Posted: Friday, November 20, 2009
by Edward Rhymes
Has the Shroud of Turin be authenticated as belonging to Jesus? Vatican researcher Dr Barbara Frale believes so. She says, "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth." She said that she had reconstructed it from fragments of Greek, Hebrew and Latin writing imprinted on the cloth together with the image of the crucified man. The shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral and is to be put in display next spring, is regarded by many scholars as a medieval forgery. A 1988 carbon dating of a fragment of the cloth dated it to the Middle Ages.
However Dr Frale, who is to publish her findings in a new book, La Sindone di Gesu Nazareno (The Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth) said that the inscription provided "historical date consistent with the Gospels account". The letters, barely visible to the naked eye, were first spotted during an examination of the shroud in 1978, and others have since come to light.
Dr. Frale disputes the claims that the shroud was from the Middle Ages because the text written on the cloth refers to Jesus as "the Nazarene" and not the Son of God (which would have been considered heresy in medieval times).
The letter could only be properly deciphered through in negative photographs (sort of like a backwards writing being complete understood when held up to a mirror.
Dr Frale told La Repubblica (the second largest-circulated Italian daily) that under Jewish burial practices current at the time of Christ in a Roman colony such as Palestine, a body buried after a death sentence could only be returned to the family after a year in a common grave.
She says, "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth."
However Dr Frale, who is to publish her findings in a new book, La Sindone di Gesu Nazareno (The Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth) said that the inscription provided "historical date consistent with the Gospels account". The letters, barely visible to the naked eye, were first spotted during an examination of the shroud in 1978, and others have since come to light.
Dr. Frale disputes the claims that the shroud was from the Middle Ages because the text written on the cloth refers to Jesus as "the Nazarene" and not the Son of God (which would have been considered heresy in medieval times).
The letter could only be properly deciphered through in negative photographs (sort of like a backwards writing being complete understood when held up to a mirror).
The death certificate was glued to the face of the deceased so that the body could be later recognized and retrieved.
Dr Frale said that the use of three languages was consistent with the polyglot nature of a community of Greek-speaking Jews in a Roman colony. Best known for her studies of the Knights Templar, who she claims at one stage, preserved the shroud, she further stated what she had deciphered was "the death sentence on a man called Jesus the Nazarene. If that man was also Christ the Son of God it is beyond my job to establish. I did not set out to demonstrate the truth of faith. I am a Catholic, but all my teachers have been atheists or agnostics, and the only believer among them was a Jew. I forced myself to work on this as I would have done on any other archaeological find."
Dr. Frale disputes the claims that the shroud was from the Middle Ages because the text written on the cloth refers to Jesus as "the Nazarene" and not the Son of God (which would have been considered heresy in medieval times).
The letter could only be properly deciphered through in negative photographs (sort of like a backwards writing being complete understood when held up to a mirror.
Dr Frale told La Repubblica (the second largest-circulated Italian daily) that under Jewish burial practices current at the time of Christ in a Roman colony such as Palestine, a body buried after a death sentence could only be returned to the family after a year in a common grave.
She says, "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth."
However Dr Frale, who is to publish her findings in a new book, La Sindone di Gesu Nazareno (The Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth) said that the inscription provided "historical date consistent with the Gospels account". The letters, barely visible to the naked eye, were first spotted during an examination of the shroud in 1978, and others have since come to light.
Dr. Frale disputes the claims that the shroud was from the Middle Ages because the text written on the cloth refers to Jesus as "the Nazarene" and not the Son of God (which would have been considered heresy in medieval times).
The letter could only be properly deciphered through in negative photographs (sort of like a backwards writing being complete understood when held up to a mirror).
The death certificate was glued to the face of the deceased so that the body could be later recognized and retrieved.
Dr Frale said that the use of three languages was consistent with the polyglot nature of a community of Greek-speaking Jews in a Roman colony. Best known for her studies of the Knights Templar, who she claims at one stage, preserved the shroud, she further stated what she had deciphered was "the death sentence on a man called Jesus the Nazarene. If that man was also Christ the Son of God it is beyond my job to establish. I did not set out to demonstrate the truth of faith. I am a Catholic, but all my teachers have been atheists or agnostics, and the only believer among them was a Jew. I forced myself to work on this as I would have done on any other archaeological find."
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)I'm absolutely convinced the Shroud of Turin was a Renaissance era hoax, and might even have been perpetrated by the Master himself, Da Vinci. There is just an enormous amount of evidence that the Shroud came out of no where in the mid 14th Century, it simply does not pass muster with carbon dating, and the abundant evidence which I think summarily dismisses the Shroud as anything more than an artistic hoax is so well documented as to be beyond what I should include here.
But, even beyond the scientific scrutiny, there is the face itself. The face of the man imprinted on the Shroud of Turin looks like a northern European, in my estimation, and it may very well have been so, if it was one of the Knights Templar, as Lomas and Knight claim in their book, Second Messiah: Templars, the Turin Shroud and the Great Secret of Freemasonry. While I think Lomas and Knight took some poetic license with the missing spaces of their history, I think their story is much more probable than that of the legend of the Shroud as an authentic artifact.
That yet another Vatican scholar found something more, a date that supposedly correlates with a time when everyone knew Jesus was supposed to have lived anyway is a big So What in my book. Europe is full of relics, including several Holy Grail chalices, and points to a deeper cultural mystery, which is Catholicism's need to identify their faith with artifacts. You don't really see it in Protestantism (except, perhaps, with the Stone of Scone), and the Jewish people certainly have nothing left except for one ancient wall of the Second Temple, the Wailing Wall.
As for writing Jesus the Nazarene instead of Jesus, Son of God demonstrates two things: One, that perhaps a middle age heretic did forger the Shroud (and that would be Da Vinci, the trickster coyote of the Middle Ages), or that, if we presumed the Shroud was authentic, that those who made the Shroud did not think of Jesus as the Son of God (which I believe was probably the truth of it, at the time). So, you can have your choice: Made either by a Middle Ages forger, or a First Century mourner who did not know Jesus as the Son of God. Either way, someone's got some 'splainin' to do!
Da Vinci knew full well how to use the camera obscura, and I have seen one of these at an art installation. Da Vinci the alchemist was also aware of the use of photosensitive chemicals to leave impressions on linen. That an imprint of a "death certificate" was deciphered from the Shroud sounds even more incredulous.
I'm not writing as one rejecting this article, and then searching for the facts to back up my position, but as one who has done quite a lot of reading about the Shroud's history and authenticity over the years. I can't say I am brushed up or current on all things Shroud, but that's only because once I became firmly and unequivocally jaded by the Shroud as a relic, there didn't seem to be much point in keeping up with further attempts to prove it is Jesus' actual death shroud.
- GWhoa G.I thought that this was a bit of interesting news and like you, it does fall into the "so what" category as far as I am concerned --- as a believer I find that the dependence upon relics and ritual to be the antithesis of what faith really is.I won't try to add to your well-thought out response. As always G, thanks for commenting.
It is a very interesting bit of news Dr Rhymes, I happen to particularly like watching the History Channel and Discovery when they discuss the findings relating to the Bible and the middle ages.I am particularly happy they will be presenting it for public viewing. Such things are not for the select few, they are for the masses to make up their own mind about what they believe.What I really hate with a passion is when some official of the church or government makes a unilateral decision what is good for me to know and what is not. If the mob panics is because the person presenting the information is incompetent and 9 times out of 10 the news does not even shake the belief of core believers.Even if the shroud is an elaborate forgery, it is not for anyone to keep in their own private collection. It belongs to all of us because it gives us hope, maybe false hope, but hope none the less.Dealing with today's crises, we can all use some light, false or not. The financial crises proves that the powers that be do not necessarily know what is best and people are more resilient than they are given credit.We are not children, we are also not afraid to have our beliefs challenged. As this whole story unfolds I realize that the more fanatic the beliefs the more anxious the believer gets when facts show that they are wrong.Thanks for commenting Thoriso.I personally think that this is more of a story of interest, than a story of significance --- which is why I laid it out pretty much as Dr. Frale presented it, without any personal commentary.As I stated in the previous response, the need for these artificial appendages seems to run counter to what actual faith is ---- the evidence of things not seen.Thanks for stopping by and welcome to SearchWarp Thoriso.My pleasure, keep the articles coming.
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