As Christmas is a time that celebrates the birth of Christ I thought we might ponder a moment on his death....under the guise of recent evidence that has emerged about the Turin Shroud.
For those who dont know, the Turin Shroud is the cloth many believe was the cloth Christ's body was wrapped in when it was taken down from the Cross.
At this point I will upload a picture...
A decade or so ago a section of the cloth was analyzed after a great fuss was made by scientists that it might be a fake. This info is from a documentary last night on C4. A tiny piece of cloth was extracted from the bottom extreme corner of the shroud. When the cloth was carbon dated it was found to be from the 14th century, thereby indicating that the whole thing was a fake, a very good fake, but a fake.
The tests were carried out here in Oxford, in Zurich, and in California..and all concurred. However recently a couple carrying out research also, as I remember, in California, found some anomalys in the carbon dating process which led the Californian scientist Prof Raymond Rogers to look again. He concluded, just before his death, that the cloth sample was part of a repair that was carried out in the 14th century and not totally the original cloth but a joint repair weave. This has therefore led some communities to believe that the carbon dating was null and void, that it basically gave a wrong dating, the date of the added weaved-in fibres.
So we are back again in a situation where the Turin Shroud can possibly be the genuine article. The Shroud has at times suffered considerable damage and how it survived at all is something of a miracle, but as a consequence of this damage has been repaired many times.
Tests have found that the splashes on the crown definitely contain blood serum from a real human, there is no trace of paint or any other substance that would have produced a design, or an image. The imprint is indeed from a human body, and perhaps very likely to be that of Christ.
