is "The Shroud of Turin" for real?

There is really so much more that shows there never was real man called 'jesus':

Quote:

Mainstream biblical scholarship is far from achieving consensus in its ongoing attempt to separate the glorified Jesus of faith from the ever elusive Jesus of history. It remains to be seen how soon traditional academia will overcome its reluctance to take the plunge into the New Testament s final, uncharted territory: the theory that Christianity began with belief in a spiritual heavenly Son of God, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed...

The Gospels and Acts of the Apostles form one small portion of the early Christian documentary record. They reflect but one category of thought and witness to what that broad movement came to believe in. Modern scholars and believers alike view the world of early Christianity through the prism of this narrow handful of inbred writings, a chain of literary dependency and enlargement on the first one written, and it has distorted all that they see. The Gospels and Acts need to be put in their proper perspective, so that they no longer obscure a more clear-eyed view of what early Christianity constituted. That view can be found in everything from the New Testament epistles to the non-canonical documents, to the writings of the Gnostics and second century apologists. Until we allow ourselves to recognize what broader factors of the era brought the idea of a Jesus into being, and how he evolved over the first 150 years, the Western world will continue to live and perpetuate a fantasy...

Earl Doherty, through his website and first book, The Jesus Puzzle, is regarded by many as having given Jesus Mythicism its most legitimate and convincing expression in over a generation. Jesus: Neither God Nor Man is a new and revised expansion of that work. The product of almost three decades of study, it presents a case of unprecedented depth and lucidity for the non-existence of an historical Jesus. The original The Jesus Puzzle will continue to be available as a condensed version of that case.) In this age of the Internet and the increased dissemination of knowledge and ideas across a wide public constituency, the true beginnings of one of the world s major religions may finally be ready to emerge.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/096892591X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

1 Reply

@OldGrumpy,

I don't feel like buying/reading a book (or at least, not that book). Can you describe some of this other proof?

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@OldGrumpy,

OldGrumpy wrote:

oralloy wrote:
A non-existent person would be unlikely to convince a large group of people to become his followers.
well, that's why it didn't happen!

Except it did happen. Xtianity is one of the world's great religions.

OldGrumpy wrote:

Only later the story of the mythical jesus was invented.

As I recall, Roman records show their persecution of Xtianity pretty early in the history of the religion.

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@OldGrumpy,

OldGrumpy wrote:

Well, for some people maybe, but NOTHING was found in that time in books, writings, teachings etc etc. While the romans were very keen on writing mostly everything down. And don't you think 'jesus' was noticed?

I am not aware of the Romans attempting to record the identity of every person in their empire. Is there evidence that they kept such records?

1 Reply

@najmelliw,

najmelliw wrote:

I think the shroud of Turin is pretty much bullshit, but harmless at that. If people wish to believe in its origin story, kudos to them. They don't bother me, or harm anyone by doing so, in my book.

There is a good case to be made that it is the world's first photograph. That's pretty interesting.

The belief that it was a burial shroud came from assumptions made centuries after it was actually created. There is no reason to think that it was intended as a fraud.

1 Reply

Alan Watts commented that the early Christians didn't know how Jesus fit in with Christianity so they bumped him upstairs, i.e., they made the religion Supernatural, to its detriment.

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@oralloy,

There is every reason to think of it as a fraud, in fact it was a poor attempt. They made the image appear as if you were looking at a face head-on in two dimensions, whereas a true shroud would wrap around from ear-to-ear and would be much wider then looking at a face head-on. The true image on a shroud would not even look human because it would be much wider than looking at a face head on and would leave a greatly distorted image.

1 Reply

@coluber2001,

If someone has a delusion that the Shroud of Turin was a burial shroud, that does not make it a fraud. It merely means that the person who believes that it was a burial shroud is delusional.

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@oralloy,

Quote:

I am not aware of the Romans attempting to record the identity of every person in their empire. Is there evidence that they kept such records?

I didn't wrote they wrote down every identity.

1 Reply

I don't know what Oralloy thinks he "recalls" about Roman records. The first allegation of persecution of "Christians" comes in the Tacitus interpolation. That is unreliable for two very good reasons. The first is that Suetonius, who despised Nero, nevertheless praised him for his relief efforts, and because he did not seek to place blame for the great fire at Rome. Additionally, even the Christians did not call themselves that, either at the time of the fire, nor when Tacitus was writing his histories. Pliny asks Trajan in a letter what to do about followers of an individual called Chrestus. (Contratry to Christian sources, he does not call them Christians.) Trajan advises what is essentially a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In most early cases of alleged persecution of Christians, it is local people attacking them because their refusal to honor the civic religion made them fear reprisal. Jews were persecuted for the same reason. In fact, early Roman records about those whom you call Christians do not in fact distinguish between them and the Jews--almost nobody did, because they just considered them a variant flavor of Jew. We have a clear-cut record of official reprisals on Christians at the end of the second century, at the beginning of the reign of Septimius Severus. But that was political--they had backed his opponents.

People believed in Siddartha, the so-called Buddha, even though there was no contemporary record of his existence. In that case, and in the case of your boy Jesus, they were not the ones attempting to convince others to follow them.

As is almost always the case, you've got everything here wrong. What you know about reliable history would not fill a very small thimble.

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Measuring my face from an image in the mirror, it is about five and a half inch wide from base of ear to base of ear. But wrapping a piece of string around my face from base of ear to base of ear, it is about 11 inches. So you can see that the image flattened out would be a very distorted image of a human face. Now were you to construct a sculpture of a face in three dimensions and lay the shroud on it that would approximate a true image. Have they done that? It appears that the shroud is just lying flat and therefore not a realistic image that a shroud, wrapped around the face, would present.

1 Reply

@coluber2001,

That's only a problem for people who want to claim that it was a burial shroud.

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@OldGrumpy,

OldGrumpy wrote:

I didn't wrote they wrote down every identity.

Since they didn't record all identities, the absence of records isn't proof of nonexistence.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I don't know what Oralloy thinks he "recalls" about Roman records.

I was thinking of the "don't ask, don't tell" correspondence that you mentioned.

Setanta wrote:

As is almost always the case, you've got everything here wrong.

As is almost always the case, no one can point out a single fact that I am wrong about.

Setanta wrote:

What you know about reliable history would not fill a very small thimble.

Funny how nobody can point out any errors in my facts.

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You have to provide facts before anyone can point out which ones are not in actuality factual. I seriously doubt that you had the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan in mind--this is also typical of you, making claims based on what others post rather than anything you can come up with on your own.

Your bullsh*t about the shroud of Turin is a delusional and hilarious opinion, and it is entirely not fact-based. Come up with some honest-to-Dog facts, and we can discuss those.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

Quote:

Since they didn't record all identities, the absence of records isn't proof of nonexistence.

It seems anything goes, eh?! No proof exist means that someone existed

weird!!! to say the least.

1 Reply

@OldGrumpy,

No. No proof would mean that we don't know whether or not someone existed.

But note that we do have proof. The existence of a large group of followers proves that they had a leader who existed.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

You have to provide facts before anyone can point out which ones are not in actuality factual.

Very true. That is why I only say that someone is wrong when I can point directly to a claim about a factual matter and prove that the claim is wrong.

Setanta wrote:

I seriously doubt that you had the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan in mind--this is also typical of you, making claims based on what others post rather than anything you can come up with on your own.

The fact that I am correct nearly 100% of the time proves that I am the source of what I say. My extreme intelligence and vast knowledge is the only possible source of such a track record.

Setanta wrote:

Your bullsh*t about the shroud of Turin is a delusional and hilarious opinion, and it is entirely not fact-based.

The hypothesis that the shroud is the world's oldest photograph is neither BS nor delusional. And the hypothesis is very much supported by facts.

Setanta wrote:

Come up with some honest-to-Dog facts, and we can discuss those.

It is a fact that images produced by photographic methods are similar to the image on the shroud.

It is a fact that all other proposed methods of replicating the image, produce a result that is not consistent with the image on the shroud.

It is a fact that the "photograph negative" quality of the shroud would be unlikely to be replicated by any ancient method other than actual photography. Even if an artist in 1300 had been inclined to produce artwork that resembled a photograph negative, the odds of such an effort actually functioning like a negative and producing a detailed positive image when reversed, are nil.

2 Replies

@oralloy,

Quote:

No. No proof would mean that we don't know whether or not someone existed.

True, but you can only say someone has existed if you have proof.
Otherwise it is merely a fantasy. Until there is proof you can't say the person existed.

Quote:

But note that we do have proof. The existence of a large group of followers proves that they had a leader who existed.

wait a minute. what large group? who are they? And how did you know they followed who? And following someone isn't any proof of the existence of someone of course. They might follow a fantasy. As people do who still follow a non-existent 'jesus'. So that is no proof at all.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

Quote:

The fact that I am correct nearly 100% of the time proves that I am the source of what I say. My extreme intelligence and vast knowledge is the only possible source of such a track record.

I smell insanity here. Narcism with a touch of psychopathy.

1 Reply

is "The Shroud of Turin" for real?

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