New image found on Turin Shroud

MILAN (Reuters) - Italian scientists have found a matching image of a man's face and possibly his hands on the back of the Turin shroud, believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, one of the researchers said on Thursday.

Experts over the years say they have found traces of blood, pollen or soil typical of Jerusalem, where Christians believe Jesus was crucified.

ok, deal with this, then. As I was typing my response, a female voice with a slight British accent came through my speakers saying,"What do you want me to say. Type anything". UhOh

Can I assume then hobitbob, that you have read 'Hermes Unveiled' by Roy Norvill? I sucked that book up in about two days. I had a similar experience with 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.' Nothing gets me going like a well-argued conspiracy theory.

ok, deal with this, then. As I was typing my response, a female voice with a slight British accent came through my speakers saying,"What do you want me to say. Type anything". UhOh

Wrapped in the shroud
By Steve Tomkins

The discovery of a second face on the Turin Shroud has again divided opinion. Does this mean it is real after all? Or does it mean it's an even better hoax than was previously thought? Some people, and not just the faithful, never stopped believing in the first place.

Easter could not have been better timed this year for publicity purposes.

First, it coincided conveniently with The Passion of the Christ which attracted audiences several million times bigger than the original crucifixion. And now the Turin shroud - the supposed burial cloth of Jesus, ever-wrapped in controversy - has been showing its contentious face again.

The Passion of the Christ: Top Easter box office
A textiles expert working on the restoration of that countenance divine has claimed that the cloth is from the 1st Century.

Though carbon-dating performed in 1988 suggested that the shroud dates from between 1260 and 1390, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg found that the fabric was woven in a three-to-one herringbone pattern, used for high quality cloths in the ancient world.

Speaking in a programme broadcast in the US in Holy Week, she said that she also saw stitching patterns surprisingly similar to material from Masada, the Jewish fortress destroyed in AD 74.

Fake features

Then, within days, Italian scientists announced that they had found a second facial image on the opposite side of the shroud, usually hidden by a large safety patch. They ruled out the possiblity that it was the forger's paint seeping through: it was only on the two outer surfaces of the cloth, not in between.



Turin shroud 'shows second face'
Instead the scientists are now talking about electrical fields and corona discharges. "It is extremely difficult to make a fake with these features," they say. Other scientific investigations have also been undermining the carbon-dating conclusions.

So, having been discredited by its apparently fatal blow from carbon-14, the shroud seems to be coming back from the dead.

For many, these latest developments only confirm what they have believed all along. There is a vast international Turin shroud culture and industry. It has its own ology - sindonology, the study of the shroud. Shroud.com lists 29 centres of sindonological research and information in the US alone. There are international conferences, journals and newsletters in several languages, and you can buy CDs and CD ROMs, books and videos, and framed prints up to life size. The Catholic church has prayers and liturgy for shroud-related worship, and it even has its own feast day, 4 May.

Believers - not all Catholic by any means - point to many features of the mysterious linen that are hard for sceptics to explain:

* Why are the bloody nail prints on the wrists, when all medieval art depicted Jesus nailed to the cross by his hands?
* How did the 12th Century Hungarian "Pray Manuscript" come to depict Jesus being wrapped in the shroud - with authentic herringbone pattern and burn marks - 100 years before carbon-dating says the material originated?
* What would possess a 14th Century forger to design the fabricated face in negative - a fact that only emerged when it was first photographed in 1898?
* Doesn't the evidence for medieval repair of the cloth and sooty deposits from a 1532 fire challenge the carbon-dating?

Shroud enthusiasts come from all walks of life, and all Christian denominations. Those who have written and lectured about its authenticity include professors of archeology, philosophy, history, chemistry, engineering, and surgery, though not sindonology.

It is not surprising to find priests in their midst, but more surprising that believers included the controversial liberal Bishop of Woolwich John Robinson, of Honest To God fame.

Of course there are conspiracy theorists and far-fetched mystics too, but they seem to be outnumbered by scientists. Judging by the three million who queued to see the linen when it was exhibited in 2000, it seems the average shroud fan is simply an ordinary Christian believer.

Religious aid

On the other hand, Roman Catholic authorities themselves remain agnostic about the shroud. "The Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions," said Pope John Paul II. "She entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate."

The custodian of the shroud, Cardinal Severino Poletto of Turin, encourages believers to appreciate it as a religious aid rather than a definite historical relic: "It a sign which must help our faith make that journey which leads us to see Christ."

The 14-foot long cloth, as exhibited in Turin in 2000
And even before the carbon-dating, the Catholic Encyclopedia, conservative though it is, argued that the shroud was probably not authentic. It quoted medieval documents that talk of its blood stains still being bright red, though they have since darkened unrecognisably.

It's ironic that the Church's scepticism towards its own sacred laundry is being challenged by scientists, and a Lutheran textile restorer.

The only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to be shrouded in mystery and to provoke controversy. And as one researcher working on it has pointed out, whatever future investigations reveal, it will always leave plenty of room for faith and doubt: "There's no test for Christness".