The Shroud of Turin and What It Represents

The Shroud of Turin is a centuries old linen cloth that bears the image of a crucified man. A man that millions believe to be Jesus of Nazareth. Is it really the cloth that wrapped his crucified body, or is it simply a medieval forgery, a hoax perpetrated by some clever artist?

Modern science has completed hundreds of thousands of hours of detailed study and intense research on the Shroud. It is, in fact, the single most studied artifact in human history, and we know more about it today than we ever have before.

The Shroud is a single piece of linen cloth about 14 feet long by 3 feet wide. The twill is a 3 over 1 herringbone weave. It is bloodstained and shows faint front and back images of a man who, by the visible wounds appears to have been crucified. He seems to be resting in in burial repose.

The bloodstains
The bloodstains on the Shroud are composed of hemoglobin and give a positive test for serum albumin. Numerous tests confirm that the blood is real human blood.

The images
The Shroud's images are superficial and fully contained within a thin layer of starch fractions and saccharides that coats the outermost fibres of the Shroud. The coloration is a caramel-like product or the product of an amino/carbonyl reaction. Where there is no image, the carbohydrate coating is clear. There is also a very faint image of the face on the reverse side of the Shroud which lines up with the image on the front of the cloth. There is no image content between the two superficial image layers indicating that nothing soaked through to form the image on the other side.

Until recently, it was widely believed that the images on the Shroud of Turin were produced by something which resulted in oxidation, dehydration and conjugation of the structure of the fibres of the linen itself. This has been shown to be incorrect. The images are now understood to reside within a coating a coating of raw starch and various saccharides.

The images as they appear on the Shroud are said to be negative because when photographed the resulting negative is a positive image.

The Turin Shroud was examined with visible and ultraviolet spectrometry, infrared spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, thermography, pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry, laser microprobe Raman analyses, and microchemical testing. No evidence for pigments (paint, dye or stains) or artist's media was found anywhere on the Shroud. Nor is any photographic emulsion found on the Shroud.

The Peculiar 3D Phenomenon of the Shroud of Turin Image
For simplicity, let's confine our discussion to black and white pictures. The Shroud, after all, is monochromatic: brown and white actually.

Like any painting or photograph of a face or an entire human body (or for that matter a vase, apple or any three dimensional object) brightness represents light. Look at a full frontal picture of a man. The tip of his nose approaches white and the depth of the recesses of his eyes are darker. The roundness of his face from his cheeks towards his ears is progressively darker. At first glance, the face on the Shroud of Turin appears to be such a picture. It isn't.

How do we know this?
All regular pictures, be they paintings or photographs, represent light coming from some direction and being reflected towards our eyes. The eye of the painter or the camera lens is a proxy for our own eyes. The reason the recesses of a man's eyes are darker than the tip of his nose is because less light gets to into the recess. Image analysis shows us that this is not so with the facial image on the Shroud. There is no direction to what seems like light. Something else is causing the lighter and darker shades. That is looks like light to us is an optical illusion.

Look at the black and white picture that looks like a smoke ring. We might think that this is light reflected off of the smoke. It is not. This is an analogue data file of elevation, sometimes called a bump map in the world of computer graphics. With special computer software we can plot the data, the brighter and darker tones, as an elevation. That is exactly what we can do with the image on the Shroud of Turin: plot it as an elevation.

Let's be clear: You cannot plot a regular photograph this way. Nor can you do so for a painting, even a brown and white painting. You can do so with a precise copy of the Shroud, however.

Not only does this show that the image on the Shroud is not a photograph or painting, it shows that something extraordinary occurred to form the image.

Concluding,
There does not really seem to be any great doubt at all that the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, has left us an image of his earthly appearance which undoubtedly shows his outside persona as he was when he walked here on the earth amongst men. After all, his physical self was shown to the disciples, his mother, the Roman soldiers and many, many others who he made contact with while here on the earth as he walked and talked and preached.

As that is the case, then why would it not be plausible that he would reveal his earthly appearance to those here on the earth after he had been crucified and descended up into Heaven?

However, the outside appearance the world was shown while he was here on the earth was only the outside shell and was not the real appearance of Christ of Christ as we will see him after we descend up into Heaven ourselves. That appearance shall be far more radiant and glorious than what we have seen for the short time he was here.

There are several mentions in the word that tell us that instead of being rugged and handsome and charismatic he was nothing more than an ordinary looking man in so many ways. After all, if he were all of those things while he was here on the earth (and was not just an ordinary looking sort of a fellow) there are some whom he may not have saved if that were the case?

Accordingly, he would have had to have looked just the same as everyone else. For that reason so what he looked like while here on the earth is neither here nor there as far as this fundamentalist Born Again Christian is concerned.

However, what the Shroud of Turin does show us by the miracle it represents that it proves beyond any doubt at all that the son of God was here on the earth and that he was sent here as the saviour of mankind as an ordinary looking man which is more important than what he may have looked like while he was here. However, as has been mentioned above that fact alone does not really count for all that much at the end of the day. God bless all who come to this BlogSpot.