reel.deal wrote:Maat, yes, guilty as charged! in the immortal words of Anne Magnussen from Bongwaters' 'Folk Song', which i posted in the chatbox recently...
..."besides, its a lot easier to accept Jesus Christ into your life as your personal saviour, when he looks like Willem Dafoe..."
Eew, that'd have the opposite effect on me, I find Dafoe weird and creepy looking!
Anyway, sorry for the late reply, I find this a tricky
object to deal with without referencing the
subject it represents — bit of a Catch 22. But since you did ask some questions I thought I should try to answer
But seriously, you're right, my brain is conditioned by the religious iconography in art history; the emaciated skeletal crucifixion scene as exemplified in the above Giotto depiction is fairly typical. If Jesus did indeed spend much time in Kashmir, as the 'Did Jesus Die' documentary alledges, then perhaps he could have honed some amazing physique & practised extraordinary physical feats like the Shaolin monks of today. I recommend that doc, btw, in the archaeology thread. You are right that i stereotype my preconception, it just looks so startling to see the thickset Christ of 'The Shroud', contrasted against pretty much all other depictions.
Yes, I know it's so easy to forget how much our perceptions have been influenced by centuries of artists' impressions of what we all have been
told to believe by the Church. And when the media gets in on the act, they muddy and confuse it even further.
But why would you expect the BBC to produce anything but their usual purposely omitted facts and spin for sensational effect and maximum distraction? That was just another distortion of what is already known about his travels to India, Persia and Egypt (18 years preparation)
before his return to Judea — not after crucifixion
Since his mission was to liberate people from lies, it would make no sense for him to then deliberately perpetuate one.
Also, that angled picture distorts the image — if you look at the original official photo on the STURP site (Shroud of Turin Research Project) I linked to before, you can see it's not "thickset" but well proportioned.
http://www.shroud.com/examine.htm (you can click any part of the image to examine it in detail)
Having said that, my school years were spent in the Roman fort city of Chester, near the N. Wales border; the square mile or so of the city is contained within the Roman Walls. There are many b&w tudor features in the city centre, and a 2-tier street-level & 2nd level walkways & shop-facades called 'The Rows'. Some of these 'Rows' the ceiling level dips to around 5' high. In essence what i'm getting at is that in Medieval NorthWest England the average height was maybe 5'?, rather than the 5'10" or so of today. So, if JC was say 5'11"; would he not seem outlandishly tall amongst the Palestinians & Romans of 2000 years ago? Is there any mention or citations of JC's unusual height in the bible?
Well, the Romans' average height was fairly short (as were Britons), and architecture of those times also differed (for various practical reasons) from more modern styles of high lintels.
Judea of Roman times had a mixture of ethnic groups from various parts of the Empire, but estimates of 'average' height can be misleading, especially if assumed to mean 'most', since they would have had the same genetic variations as we do now, even among ethnic groups considered 'short', e.g. Maltese and Japanese.
There is no specific reference to his actual height in the NT, although it is implied. e.g.
Following his 'temple escapade' as a 12 year old: "And Jesus
increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man." Luke 2:52 (i.e. in
every way, spiritually, mentally & physically)
But much more can be inferred from descriptions of how he was recognized by those who had evidently only
heard of him, e.g.
"On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Sama'ria and Galilee.
And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance
and lifted up their voices and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us."Luke
17:11-19Not sure how they could know which one he would be among all the various travellers along a main road if he was 'average'.
I will watch the Schwortz doc, but for now will say that the creases in the shroud may indeed prove that the Turin Shroud is the same one as the one looted in the French Crusades sacking of Constantnople around the turn of the 11th/12th century; 160 years before it 'reappeared' in Lirey, France. There is good analysis in the BBC 'New Evidence' doc of the particular folds that seem to reinforce the 'same shroud' theory. I find the whole thing fascinating, it is truly one of the greatest enigmas of all-time.
You'll find that part of its travels is mentioned in the
undisputed list of events in its history:
http://www.shroud.com/history.htmThat video I posted is actually a radio interview with Schwortz, so you get to hear details directly from one personally involved in the project.
I'm not stuck or tied to any particular theory. I'm just psyched to have the right 'think outside the box' people to sound-out & bounce some ideas on 'The Shroud' around with...
It is fascinating, especially with such a long traceable history (in private hands), that it has left scientists stumped. Not the least of which is that no one in Medieval times could have known every detail of
real Roman crucifixion methods.
You would think, just as the original team that examined it first assumed, that it
should be easy to prove it was a fake. They couldn't.
As I said before, what is most significant is that no one on either side of the 'authenticity' debate has been able to duplicate the exact same effect on the cloth (
nor produce a perfect 3D with the
VP-8 Image Analyzer as only the shroud does) — and
everything has been tried over the last 30 years without success,
including the 'scorch' experiments on a bronze statue. Being familiar with the original scriptures and early church history, it always puzzled me why it would have survived so long (despite fires and deliberate attempts to destroy it), given that it is just a 'dead' thing to anyone who knows what Y'eshua taught.
However, it occurred to me that it actually serves as a mnemonic device, or a reagent if you will, that can help us see through the subtle layers of deception that are only recognized when presumptions and prejudice are removed.
i.e. Just because certain government institutions or Church hierarchies continually deceive to maintain power & control, doesn't mean
everyone working within or affiliated with them are automatically corrupt or 'in on' such schemes. As
David Yallop mentioned in his book,
In God's Name (about the murder of Pope John Paul I), it was a few good people in the Vatican who first asked him secretly to investigate that suspicious event.
So, I couldn't automatically dismiss anything so complex with such a long history without proper examination of all the known facts, despite healthy doubt. Truth can sometimes be found in the most unexpected places. Like Nathaniel's first reaction to being told by Philip that they had found the
one that Moses and the prophets wrote about "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
I would only suggest starting with the original research team's findings, rather than second hand speculations or media productions.
Here's a quote from the
STURP site maintained by original team member Barrie Schwortz who, although Jewish and still agnostic, is convinced it is authentic:
The 1978 Scientific ExaminationThis page will present an overview of the first ever in-depth scientific examination of the Shroud of Turin, performed by an international team of experts in 1978. A large part of that group consisted of the Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc., (STURP), a team of American scientists and researchers that spent over two years preparing a series of tests that would gather a vast amount of Shroud data in a relatively short period of time. STURP's
primary goal was to determine the scientific properties of the
image on the Shroud of Turin, and what might have caused it. In October of 1978 the STURP team spent 120 continuous hours conducting their examination of the Shroud.
To this day, scientists around the world use the data gathered by STURP for their Shroud research. Even the Vatican has stated that the material gathered in 1978 constitutes the
official scientific data available for Shroud research and it has no plans to allow any further testing, except in the area of conservation of the cloth itself. Although carbon dating of the Shroud in 1988 yielded a 12th century date, newly discovered information has led many researchers to believe the carbon date is in error. The controversy continues. In any case, no serious study of the Shroud of Turin can ignore the immense volume of scientific facts determined from the 1978 data, and a close look at the 1978 test results must be on the agenda of any intelligent person interested in deciding for himself.
Unfortunately,
most of the published scientific work on the Shroud has not been readily available to the general public. Much of STURP's work was technical and resides in refereed scientific journals that are quite obscure to the average person. The general public usually gets their information from the media, who often present biased interpretations and include commentary from so-called "experts" who draw conclusions or present their own theories with little regard for the facts. Over the years, this created a blending of fact and fiction in the eyes of the public that evolved into a Shroud "mythology."
