PaulSacramento wrote:Whether the RCC or any other organized religion ever makes a definite statement on the shroud is irrelevant to me, as it should be to any christian since our SOLE authority on ANYTHING is Christ and not man.
To me, one of the defining moments when I realized the validity of the shroud was when I did a scientific view of it, base don ALL the evidence we have.
And by that I simply means this:
Is the shroud "repeatable"? in other words: Can it be made today?
That NO ONE has been able to duplicate all the qualities of the shroud TODAY speaks volumes to me.
That the closest we have come has been with radiation, SCREAMS volumes to me.
I believe that the image on the shroud is Jesus if for no other reason then this:
If not HIM, who? and if NOT by God, by whom?
http://www.staycatholic.com/shroud_of_turin.htm
This should also scream volumes to anyone also sitting on the fence . All naturalistic explanations came up dry .
It can't even be replicated today , how the heck could someone have replicated it back then ? Paul the circumstantial evidence points to the only historical event that makes the most sense out if all this and that's the resurrection . Where does an ancient forger get the technology to create an image that is so advanced that we can't today replicate it ? And why would he go to such great lengths to do so to fool a medieval audience ? What does he also gain by spreading pollen from Israel on the shroud that can't even be detected by anyone until the 20th century ? Nothing else but that one special event makes sense of all this .
It also screamed volumes on the man who came closest to replicating it with radiation doctor August Accetta who was an agnostic before his experiments and came back to Christianity after.
He knew that even though he came close that he still couldn't replicate the amazing detail of this image
For his part, Accetta grew up Catholic but left the Church as an agnostic in his youth, convinced that belief in God was "pretty much just a way to deal with mortality." In spite of his skepticism, he was intrigued by a radio talk on the Shroud in 1992 by Dr. Alan Whanger, professor emeritus at Duke University and chief researcher for the Council for Study of the Shroud of Turin (duke.edu/~adw2/shroud). He met with Whanger and began to collect information, enthralled by the "clarity" of the materials available. Nevertheless, it was not the Shroud itself but his study of it that made Accetta a believer, he stressed. To know more about the Shroud, he had to study Scripture and Tradition.
Somewhere in 1997," he said, "I realized my data had changed and that I was now a believer."
What got him to start reading scripture again to give Christianity a chance as opposed to his conversion to the agnosticism of his youth ?
Accetta is particularly interested in the image’s photographic aspects, including its three-dimensional qualities and its human anatomical features. He has published four peer-reviewed papers on the Shroud in the area of nuclear imaging. The doctor’s work with nuclear imaging demonstrates that in terms of the Shroud’s inverse color intensity (often described as being like a photographic negative, but actually a mere reversal of light and dark), the image encodes only about the top 1.5 inches of the face and body in three dimensions. "It’s like a relief sculpture," he said, "sort of like when Han Solo was frozen in carbon in" Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
Of equal interest to Accetta is the X-ray-like imaging upon the Shroud; the image reveals the roots of several upper teeth, the metacarpal bones in the left wrist and the femur under the left hand. Furthermore, the image reveals bruising on the cheek just below the left eye. Bruising, according to Accetta, is completely part of the body image, not at all like the bleeding wounds that left blood residue on the surface of the Shroud.
Accetta has shown by injecting nuclear isotopes into his own bloodstream that he can produce a similar image, complete with 3-D information, in photos taken by the gamma camera doctors use to make images of internal organs. "The amount of radiation in the skin and bones," Accetta said, "correlates to the number of pixels on the Shroud."
The guy injected nuclear isotopes into his blood stream !!!
Now this is a truth seeker with guts
Most of the greatest research in the shroud has come from the agnostics and while many like mark Antonacci , August Acceta and Ian Wilson converted , some like Ray Rogers didn't convert .
Thomas de Wesselow , an agnostic Cambridge trained art historian believes that the historical evidence is good enoigh to make him now a believer in the shroud's authenticity but because of his agnosticism he stuck to favoring a natural,explanation for the shroud's image and that is similar to ray Rogers mallard reaction which no one has been able to use to replicate the shroud with lol.
Also Wessellow, because of his problem in believing in miracles put out a wacky theory that Christianity grew not because they saw the risen Christ but because they saw the shroud and out if it the legend grew lol.
This doesn't fit at all with what a first century Jew would believe but Wesselow had to come up with an explanation , and anything no matter how far out there or weird is preferable to a resurrection
