SHROUD OF TURIN PROOF OF THE RESURRECTION & A FLESH AND BONES HEAVEN!

A Shroud Of Mystery!

An amazingly detailed picture of a bearded man who had been beaten about the body, crowned with thorns & pierced with nails through the wrists & the feet," is how Newsweek magazine described the Shroud of Turin. For centuries, this unique burial cloth has generated intense controversy. Many scholars, historians, scientists and theologians have been convinced that it is the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion, and that by some unknown process his image was transferred onto it.

In 1889, something extraordinary happened. Technical progress had made it possible for the first photograph of the the Shroud to be taken. As the photographer, Secundo Pia, examined his first glass-plate negative, he almost dropped it in shocked excitement. What he saw was not an unrealistic and confusing photographic negative, but a clear positive image. Highlights and shadows were reversed from those on the cloth, & were far more lifelike & realistic, & the positive image of a man's face was clearly visible. Pia's sensational photograph showed that the actual image on the Shroud was a negative image!
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).

In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) came into being. Scores of the World's top scientists, pathologists, textile experts, chemists, physicists & photographic specialists obtained permission to spend five days thoroughly examining the mysterious cloth in Turin, Italy.
National Geographic reported, "Perhaps never before had an object of art or archeology been subjected to such exhaustive examination. The scientists bombarded the relic with ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and examined it microscopically & took photo micrographs. With sticky tape & a vacuum device, bits of dust, pollen & other particles were captured for analysis." Their conclusions were startling.

"I was convinced it was a forgery"

confesses Dr, John Heller of Yale medical school, the blood expert of the team. Today he admits,

"NO QUESTION IN MY MIND! There was a scourged, crucified man in the Shroud."

STURP team member, Dr. Robert Bucklin, chief pathologist of the Los Angeles city morgue, states:

"If I were asked in a court of law to stake my professional reputation on the validity of the shroud of Turin, I would answer very positively & firmly that it is the burialcloth of Christ. It's Jesus Whose figure appears on the Shroud. It is not a matter of faith to me, it's just a matter of common sense. Knowing what we know, who else could this have happened to?"

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.

"All coin experts agree that Pontius Pilate alone issued a coin with the staff on the back of it." Said FATHER Filas.

Marx, a coin expert for more than 35 years and owner of M. and R. Coins and Stamps in Oak Lawn, Ill. Concurs with the theologian.

"As a coin expert, I can confirm that the coin that appears on the cloth is one of the coins issued only during the last seven years that Pontias Pilate was governor of Judea--A.D. 29 to 36," he said.

"The markings on the coin date the shroud within that seven years period. The shroud is obviously real."

And Dr. Nancy Waggoner, curator of Greek coins at the American Numismatic Society, confirmed that the coins with the lituus on one side fall within the time of Pontius Pilate's governorship.

DNA Tests Find Jesus' Blood On Turin Shroud

Electronic Telegraph

The Turin Shroud will be at the center of fresh controversy when a scientist details his claims to have isolated DNA from the "blood of Jesus." In his book, The DNA of God?, DR Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a former professor of microbiology, describes tests carried out by colleagues at the University of Texas which show that the "red" areas on the cloth, far from being paint, are ancient blood stains of a group consistent with a Jewish male. The book details the experiments which show that the "blood" on the shroud is ancient and contains XY chromosomes--which establishes it as human and male. The tests were conducted by a team headed by Dr Victor Tryon, director of the Center for Advanced DNA Technology at the University of Texas Health Science Center.
Gene segments from the stains showed that the blood came from a male with an AB blood type, common among Jewish people. Dr Garza-Valdes, a practicing Catholic, said that the placing of the blood traces strongly indicated that the body was that of Jesus.

"Not many people in the first century suffered all those lesions, the crucifixion wounds, the crown of thorns, the spear wound in the right side of the chest, the flagellations," he said.

A Russian biochemist now claims the radio carbon findings are wrong and the shroud is at least 1,800 years old and possibly older. Dr. Dmitri Koutsensov's theory is that the radio carbon dating done in 1988 was skewed. "The test failed to take into account the effect the fire had on the shroud more than 500 years ago, and Koutsensov showed that fire takes carbon from the air and bonds it chemically with the fiber. That carbon is younger than the cloth and if you don't take that into account, you get a data too young." AP reported.

Rebecca S. Jackson, grew up as an Orthodox Jew and studied Jewish ethnology for more than 30 years. She stated that the shroud is made from linen mixed with cotton, but without wool, according to Jewish law of Christ's time. In Jewish measurements the shroud comes exactly to 2 by 8 cubits, which sounds a lot more reasonable than Western measures of 14 feet, 3 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches. If the shroud had been a forgery made in the Middle Ages, than the forger and painter would have had to be experts on Jewish cultural characteristics, which is hard for medieval gentiles or Goyim.
She also said that "the Image of the man in the shroud shows wooly hair texture, a full lower lip, high cheek bones, and a bump on the left side of the nose. All in all very Jewish and not European features."

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.

Characteristics of the Shroud image include:

CLEAR IMAGE. The body image is so well resolved that even features as detailed as the lips are discernible. This remarkable property revealed by photography is way beyond all attempts at artistic imitation or laboratory reconstitution.

SUPERFICIAL IMAGE. The body image penetrates the cloth no more than a few fibrils and is limited to the crowns of the threads. The body image fibrils are individually colored but their coloring does not follow the bends or crevices connected with the intersecting threads of the weave. Furthermore, the fibrils are not cemented and there is no additional pigment to account for the macroscopic image color.

THREE DIMENSIONAL IMAGE. The intensity of the frontal body image correlates overall with expected separation distances between an assumed body and the enveloping cloth. This correlation is independent of implied body surface composition such as the skin, hair, etc.

ABSENCE OF SIDE IMAGES. There are no side images to be seen surrounding the front and back body images, not even in the region the two heads.

OXIDATION. The chemical formation of the body image is due to a change in the cellulose of the cloth, in particular a conjugated carbonyl structure associated with dehydration.

BLOOD. The red image stains are formed of blood and/or blood derivatives.

VERTICAL ALIGNMENT OF THE IMAGE. The Shroud is draped naturally over a body lying horizontally, but the frontal body image aligns vertically over corresponding features on that body.

WEIGHTLESSNESS. Maximum intensities of the front and back images are practically equal."
- Bruno Bonnet-Eymard, "Physics and Chemistry of A Glorious Body and of A Glorious Blood"

"The arms would be too long if the Shroud Man would be flatly reclining. The arms, however are entirely parallel with the surface of the Shroud and we see them in linear full length. The torso, the thighs, the lower legs on the other hand we see shortened by geometric perspective and not in full length. They stand at an angle to the surface. "
- Isabel Piczek, "Is the Shroud of Turin a Painting?"

Height calculations of the figure on the Shroud vary greatly due to the difficulty of taking into account factors such as the foreshortening of the legs, the extended position of the feet, and any possible stretching in the cloth. The most common estimate is 6 ft 11 in. Proportionately, however, the head on the Shroud is 1/9 of the body instead of the average 1/8. Using this as a basis for estimation of height, Picknett and Prince concluded:

"Our calculations put the height of the man on the Shroud - at the front - at 203cm...Put in imperial measurements we calculate that the front image is 6 ft 8 in and the back 6 ft 10 in"
- Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

If Jesus was treated according to Jewish burial practices, "signs of the bandages around the hands, feed and head ought to appear on the Turin Shroud.
"They do not. If the shroud had been tied down there would be clear crease marks, which there are not. It did not fall closely over the sides of the body, and this agrees with the temporary nature of Joseph's and Nicodemus' attentions, for they expected the final burial to be made after the Passover. Then the body would have been more securely wrapped."
- Alan Millard, Discoveries From the Time of Jesus

Conclusion:
If nowhere else in this World exists a cloth dating from at least 1600 if not 2000 years ago, with
* the negative of a true-to-life photographic picture in it, of a unique, never seen before, serene authoritative face only befitting a king,
* not made of paint, but superficially scourged into a typical Jewish burial cloth with "technology" or unknown process we don't even possess in this hyper technological age,
*with the imprint of a unique coin of 30 AD Palestine
* enhanced by sweat, body fluid residues & Jewish type blood in all the right places,
*and totally Illustrative of the documented sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth as he died on the cross and was witnessed by 500 of his contemporaries as resurrected from the death!
THEN would we not be awfully blind and prejudiced to reject such a supernatural artifact and proof of His death and resurrection as documented in the Bible?

If Jesus Shroud is what it proves itself to be, then we can be sure, that this picture was burned into it in 30 A.D. when Jesus' soul was not left in Hades, but came back into his body, when it was transformed into a supernatural resurrection body, like that of the angels. And when that happened, you can bet your boots that it will happen to you as well, at the imminent return of Jesus, if you have received the Spirit of this Man, the son of God, into your heart, as the Bible promises, that

"...if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead lives in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also make alive your mortal bodies by his Spirit that lives in you!" Romans 8:11

Therefore if you would like to obtain an upgrade in Spirit and Body, why not receive this Man Jesus, the Son of God, into your heart as well. He promised that
"I stand at the door (of your heart) and knock (He obviously wants to come in)
If any man hears My voice and opens the door, I WILL COME INTO HIM (her) and will dine with him and he with me!" Revelation 3:20.
Just say now: 'Dear Jesus please come into my heart. Forgive me for my lack of love and give me the gift of eternal life. In Jesus Name I pray. Thank you! Amen.'

PLEASE CLICK THE VOTE BUTTON TO TELL US YOU DID IT!

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT
WHY SIMPLY PRAYING THIS LITTLE PRAYER
SAVED YOUR SOUL FOREVER,
CLICK ON THIS LINK

Breakthrough Effort Authenticate The Shroud
By Randy Boswell -- The Ottawa Citizen and Citizen News Services 8-30-2

The Ohio woman who appears to have discovered a critical flaw in the 1988 carbon dating of cloth samples from the Shroud of Turin says her insights into the controversial Christian relic were communicated to her by Jesus Christ himself.

Sue Benford, who co-authored a research paper in 2000 with her partner Joseph Marino, a respected shroud scholar, told the Citizen yesterday she's "excited" that their findings could help refute the 1988 tests that have led most experts to conclude the shroud was a medieval forgery and not the burial cloth of Christ.

Roman Catholic officials in Italy have confirmed that new experiments are being performed by a Swiss textile expert, apparently to test the Benford-Marino theory: that the cloth sample chosen in 1988 - and which yielded a date of origin between 1260 and 1390 A.D - was actually a blend of original material almost 2,000 years old and newer threads woven into the shroud as recently as 400 years ago to repair damaged or pilfered portions of the sacred object. Ms. Benford, a former nurse who now runs a nonprofit educational organization near Columbus, said it was a "divine revelation" in March 1997 - followed by months of arduous research with Mr. Marino - that produced their theory that the 1988 study was fundamentally flawed.

"I was working at my computer when a voice told me to go watch TV," said Ms. Benford, 45, who began flipping channels until she happened upon a show about the Shroud of Turin. "I was just stunned," she said, because she instantly recognized that the face on the shroud belonged to the same man whose voice had instructed her to watch television, and which later explained to her why scientists had mistakenly concluded the shroud was a fake. "I don't want to sound like a nut case, but that's what happened," she said. "I was given the answer."

The couple's theory was presented at a conference in Italy in August 2000, around the same time the Vatican announced there would be no further testing on the age of the shroud in the immediate future. But members of the official Committee for the Conservation of the Holy Shroud have disclosed to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero that testing has begun again.

They said that the cloth's backing and about 30 triangular patches used to mend the shroud in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire have been removed in a "secret experiment." They added that the committee as a whole has not been consulted and instead the testing has been authorized by a small number of church "insiders." Officials in Turin also confirmed that the shroud has been removed from its case and would not be on display while the experiment was in progress. They said the operation is being conducted by Swiss textile expert Mechtild Flury-Lemberg.

As startling as Ms. Benford's story might seem, the central argument she and Mr. Marino have advanced has also been embraced by a prominent U.S. scientist who first studied the shroud in 1978 and still possesses samples of the cloth. Ray Rogers was part of an international team 20 years ago that performed a chemical analysis of shroud fibres and determined that the image on the cloth was not painted.

That finding ruled out an obvious hoax and left open the possibility that the shroud was authentic. But most of the scientific community - including Mr. Rogers himself - were later convinced by the 1988 carbon dating that the cloth was a fake after all.

Mr. Rogers, a retired chemist living in Los Alamos, New Mexico, told the Citizen yesterday that he dismisses Ms. Benford's story about speaking with Jesus. But the observation itself - that old and new fibres had been mistakenly mixed in the 1988 experiments - is valid, he says.

"When I first saw Benford and Marino's study, I said they're full of it," recalls Mr. Rogers, who re-analysed his shroud threads based on the Ohio couple's hypothesis. "But I have to agree with what they're proposing. The 1988 radio-carbon analysis was probably the very best ever done, but it was done on the worst, most stupidly selected sample of cloth."

The 1988 sample, explains Mr. Rogers, comes from the lower left corner of the shroud which, it appears, has been "cleverly rewoven" over the centuries to disguise the fact that cuttings have been taken from the outer edge of the cloth from time to time.

But several threads studied by Mr. Rogers in 1978 came from a section of the shroud slightly closer to the famous image of a crucified man that appears in the middle of the cloth. Some of those threads had been expertly "spliced" to connect older and newer fibres. In 1982, says Mr. Rogers, one of the threads from his samples was carbon dated - unbenownst to himself and against the wishes of Roman Catholic officials who had authorized the chemical analysis. Nevertheless, that test showed an age difference of more than 1,000 years between the newer and older fibres - and suggested the original portions of the shroud dated from around the year 200 A.D.

"I have not been able to find any information on the accuracy and precision for the dating method used," says Mr. Roges. "However, the dates determined are so different that I could believe a real difference between the ends of the threads." The shroud, preserved in Turin Cathedral, is held by many Christians to be the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after the Crucifixion. Venerated for centuries as the Holy Shroud, it preserves the image of a tall man with crucifixion marks which only came to light when the 4.37-metre-by-1.11-metre cloth was first photographed at the end of the 19th century.

(First published 8-21-02)

1988 Carbon-Dating Of The Shroud Questioned
By Orazio Petrosillo Il Messaggero 8-9-02

Two scholars claim there are also invisible seams on the linen cloth. The radiocarbon test may have been altered. "According to the Carbon 14 test, the cloth appeared Medieval... but perhaps only some of the threads were."

ROME -- Medieval was the darn, not the Shroud. Just while 30 visible patches are removed, some scholars direct their attention to the invisible darns on the Turinese Sheet. They were widely used in the Middle Ages for very precious cloths, just like the one venerated as the holiest of relics. Therefore, the result of the dating tests of the Shroud with the radiocarbon method (14C), carried out by the laboratories of Oxford, Tucson and Zurich in 1988 and dating the Shroud cloth between 1260 and 1390, has been altered by the presence, just in the area of the dating of the small linen samples, an invisible darn dating back to the 16th century. Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, two American sindonologists, claim this. A series of pictures of one of the samples taken in 1988 for the radiocarbon dating and of the remaining part that was not used were submitted to three textile experts, independently and without saying the samples had been taken from the Shroud. All the three experts recognized a different weaving on one side of the samples. According to the calculations of Beta Analytic, the largest provider of radiocarbon dating in the world, a mixture of 60% of material, from the 16th century, with 40% of material from the 1st century would carry a 13th century dating. The proportion of more recent material has been evaluated on the basis of what the three textile experts observed.

Interesting observations have been carried out by Ray Rogers, a chemist who was a member of STURP, the group of American scientists who examined the Shroud in 1978. Rogers has linen fibers (which the Shroud is made of) coming both from the same area of the sample for the 14C analysis (they had been cut by the Belgian expert Gilbert Raes in 1973) and from other areas of the Shroud. In only the Raes' corner, where the 1988 sampling had been carried out, the fibers appear coated and soaked by a yellow-brownish amorphous substance, whose color varies in intensity from one fiber to the other. On the contrary, the fibers coming from the other parts of the Shroud do not have such a coating, which is almost certainly a yellow-rubber vegetable, very likely the gum-arabic, once used for textile applications. Moreover, Rogers has observed a superimposition (splice) in the center of a thread of the Raes sample: it is an invisible darn, widely used in the 16th century. In 1982 a thread of the Raes sample had already been dated with a radiocarbon method at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). Half of the thread appeared covered with starch. The thread was divided in half: the non-starched part turned out to date from the 3rd century A.D., while the starched end gave a date of the 13th century A.D. This is a message for the Holy See to plan a new 14C test with serenity but in a multidisciplinary context and with a particular attention to the representativeness of the sample.

Also see: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20020819/shroud.html http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-3-389723,00.html

Italy - Experts Attack Latest Tests On Shroud Of Turin
By Richard Owen c. 2002
The Times - London

A fresh attempt by Catholic officials to prove that the Turin Shroud is genuine and not a medieval fake has provoked a row after experts said that the tests could damage the cloth.

The shroud, preserved in Turin Cathedral, is held by many Christians to be the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after the Crucifixion. Venerated for centuries as the Holy Shroud, it preserves the image of a tall man with crucifixion marks which only came to light when the 4.37m-by-1.11m (14ft4in-by-3ft7in) cloth was first photographed at the end of the 19th century.

Carbon-dating tests conducted in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona, in 1988 indicated that the shroud was a forgery and had been made between 1260 and 1390.

Two years ago Vatican officials said that there would be no further tests in the foreseeable future. However, members of the official Committee for the Conservation of the Holy Shroud have disclosed that testing has begun again.

They said that the cloth's backing and around thirty triangular patches used to mend the shroud in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire, had been removed in a "secret experiment". They added that the committee as a whole had not been consulted and instead the testing had been authorised by a small number of church "insiders".

Officials in Turin confirmed that the shroud had been removed from its case and would not be on display while the experiment was in progress. They said that the operation was being conducted by the Swiss textile expert, Mechtild Flury-Lemberg.

Supporters of the latest move said that there was a "plausible theory" that the 1988 tests on tiny fragments taken from the shroud had been "skewed" by the possible fusion of the original 1st-century cloth with the fibres of later additions, giving a "confused and inaccurate" carbon dating. Removing the patches would enable scientists to test the original cloth with less likelihood of contamination.

Two American shroud scholars or "sindonologists", Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, told Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, that independent tests conducted on some of the fragments of cloth used in the 1988 carbon dating showed that 40 per cent were 1st-century fibres and 60 per cent were 16th-century material. That would have produced a "median date" of around the 13th century, they said.

Emmanuela Marinelli, a leading expert on the shroud, is angry about the decision to remove the patches and the cloth's backing. "This is bound to cause damage of some kind. It is at odds with the great prudence with which it has always been handled until now."

The existence of a Holy Shroud was first recorded at Edessa (now Urfa in modern Turkey) in the 2nd century and again at Constantinople in the 10th century.

In the 14th century the "burial cloth of Christ" was allegedly brought to France by Crusader knights. A linen cloth purported to be the shroud was later entrusted to an order of nuns in Chambery, who repaired it after a fire in 1532.