Monday, October 05, 2009

The recreation of a fake

A scientist was apparently able to create a new version of the famous Shroud of Turin by using methods available in the Middle Ages, the time in which the Shroud was created according to carbon dating performed independently by three laboratories. That would be over 1,200 years after the death of the man whose body the Shroud supposedly was wrapped around.

From Yahoo! News:
An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake.

The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.

"We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud," Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy, said on Monday.
[...]
The Shroud of Turin shows the back and front of a bearded man with long hair, his arms crossed on his chest, while the entire cloth is marked by what appears to be rivulets of blood from wounds in the wrists, feet and side.

Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390. Sceptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business.

But scientists have thus far been at a loss to explain how the image was left on the cloth.

Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages.
No doubt the critics will be loud and the faithful won't give up believing this was the cloth in which Jesus was wrapped after his death on the cross, but I still feel pretty good about the evidence presented here.

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