Just in time for Easter. The Intriguing mysteries surrounding the Shroud of Turin. |
| The positive and negative aspects on the shroud are reversed. The first photo is what the average person sees and its very flat and hard to read, the second image is the negative of that other image but you see more detail and its more like a positive image. This unusual aspect of the"3D coding" in the shroud was not seen until late 1800's when it was first photographed. |
Years ago I worked for a photographic company as a photo restoration artist. While I worked at the company in 1979 in Philly they were commissioned to do reprints of hundreds of photos that were being distributed by the The Shroud of Turin Society for their large membership. These photos were part of the recent evidence that had been brought out by a commission who had unprecedented access to study the Shroud (historically recorded as the actual burial shroud of Jesus Christ) in 1978.
The actual size of the cloth is 15 feet in length and from the painting you can see how the body was wrapped in it.
So it was with great interest that I saw a posting of a recent show on George Noory's Coast to Coast AM radio show when he hosted a Dr. Andrew Silverman, an expert on the Shroud of Turin, who discussed the various studies which have been done on the enigmatic holy relic.
This is a front and back view of the body's imprint on the cloth of the shroud, again seen better in a negative.
"I don't look at the Shroud from a religious perspective," Silverman explained, "I look at it to try to understand the evidence that is on the cloth and all the empirical studies that have been done."
Check out his website and you will read further on the remarkable facts presented about the shroud.
http://www.lightoftheshroud.com/
Studies into the cloth, itself, he said, have revealed that the image rests within only a tiny layer of the fabric and, therefore, precludes the possibility that the picture was a painting and a fraud. If someone scraped it with a knife the image would disappear.
This was a huge controversy for years, if you remember, all over the media and TV over the idea that someone in medieval times painted the image on the fabric. Given at the early time that the study of anatomy wasn't allowed or sanctioned by the Catholic Church (physicians forbidden to preform autopsies, because the Church believed it corrupted the body, and artists forbidden to paint from nude subjects) so this was nearly impossible to recreate.
Then there was a new theory: Because the image of the body on the shroud was in such perfect proportions it was suggested that it was painted by no other than the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci and used himself as the face of Christ! Holy Mona Lisa!
I got so sick and tired of hearing these pronouncements over the years that the cloth was painted "It's a fake!" "It's a forgery!" on repeated shows and interviews without proof of how it was done. As an artist who uses watercolors and oil paints I could see on the close up photos that the image was not produced by painting the cloth. Paint, either watercolor/tempera base-which soaks right through cloth or oil paint- which will leave a filmy, spreading residue through the cloth-if the cloth isn't treated with a vapor barrier and primer like our commercial canvases are made today. (The Venetians invented the method in the 1500's of sealing their canvases before applying paint just for that reason because the paint will bleed through and rot the fabric linen or cotton canvas cloth over time). None of this was present on the cloth.
Additionally, Silverman detailed how experiments with ultraviolet pulse lasers allowed for the creation of an image with the same general thinness of the Shroud picture. These findings, he said, are "consistent with the notion that there may have been a momentary flash of radiant energy from the body that was once wrapped in the Shroud.
" If this is the means by which the image was created, Silverman pointed out that, based on the position of the body in the picture, it would have actually been levitating* at the time when it occurred.
(*the process by which an object is suspended by a physical force against gravity, in a stable position without solid physical contact).
This was actually stated and brought to the attention of the world before by a Italian woman physicist in early 2010 who said that the body in the shroud did levitate (by her calculations) at the time of the image's creation by something called an "event horizon" (a term used in general relativity), an event horizon is a boundary in space-time (that combines space and time into a single interwoven continuum) beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. In layman's terms, it is defined as "the point of no return".
In 2010 a more intensive study was conducted of how the image may have been formed by the "burst of radiation" theory taken further. Instead of a one directional burst of energy (which testing shows leaves a distorted image) they concluded the only way the 3 D (encoding) effect was achieved on the cloth was a scanning of intense light that traveled from one end of the body to the other-just as we scan a photo or an object today in digital imaging-and it left the image.
I find this a very plausible answer as a person who has been involved with scanning in the photographic field for 18 years out of my 35 years in photo-restoration and digital imaging, and agree with the findings.
So, Is this the face of Jesus of Nazareth—the ingenious work of an artist, or the true shroud of Christ?
For those who don't believe it there will never be enough scientific evidence to prove this to be the real burial shroud of Jesus.
For those who believe it is-it requires a leap of faith over unanswered questions and for them no definitive proof is necessary.
HAPPY EASTER!
