Your entire posting history shows you do not understand most the arguments here in order for your claim to have any validity.
We all can make assertions about each other isn’t it better to try and find common ground?
I would have thought “Sea lions are cute” would be one possible source of common ground. But sadly, no, not even that.
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Sea lions are cute. One point of consensus 
Because at a time when the faith is weakened, even shaken, often mocked or even scorned, if, as I think they do, the recent developments concerning the Shroud of Turin pointed to its authenticity, this would be providential for this new state of affair would certainly have the power not only to keep believers’ faith firm, but also to attract new sheep into the Lord’s flock.
Don’t forget that many people, like Saint Thomas, need to see in order to believe.
But why? I believe that is the question you were asked. Let’s say this is the burial shroud of Jesus. So what? There are a small number of people who doubt that Jesus even existed. But, apart from them, how does it matter one way or the other if we knew Jesus had been buried in a shroud which we now have, in terms of supporting the truth of Christiainty?
OTOH, if there was no such shroud, would that drive people away from the religion?
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And many people believe what is shown.
Luther, as a Catholic and as a Reformer, mocked and scorned relics.
Right now, one of Thomas Aquinas’ skulls is touring the US, while his other skull resides in Italy.
Skull of St Thomas Aquinas arrives in US, offers rare chance to view first-class relic
St. Thomas Aquinas’ skull traveling to Washington, seven Eastern states
Besides the skull in Toulouse, another skull thought to be that of St. Thomas was found in Fossanova in 1585 and is kept nearby in the town of Priverno.
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The issue can be resolved simply: blame it on the Fossanova.
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Hi Faizal
This is a great question.
The shroud and the face cloth known as the sudarium are mentioned in the gospel of John as he describes what was seen in the empty tomb. The tomb was described as being empty 3 days after the crucification. The empty tomb 3 days after the crucification is evidence for the resurrection. The 3D image of Jesus face and body being left on the cloth is also hard to explain as something man made. Did God leave us the evidence to discover through science? Maybe for the doubting Thomases of the world as @Giltil mentioned.
John Chapter 20
3 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4 Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7 as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen
God was like
Oh damn, now these monkeys are patching the cloth now… Do I stop them? Manipulate them like I did the scribes who wrote my Word down? Or Manipulate them like the characters in said Word whose hearts I liberally played with before some scholars will decide a couple centuries from now that I somehow gave a crap about free will all this time?
Nah. It’ll be fine. In fact, it’ll be finer than fine.
Not only will I do nothing to prevent the cloth from being tampered with enough to where dating it will unambiguously reveal an age a millennium too young, I’ll make sure that when my devout followers are going to be asked for a sample to date, they’ll be given the one fibre on the entire sheet that happens to give a false age.
See, in my kingdom I only want
stoogesthose whose faith cansee through my deceptionovercome earthly doubts.
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If the shroud is real - if - it is physical evidence for the death of Jesus, and for some weird event afterwards that could be a resurrection, but doesn’t have to be a resurrection, not least because we don’t have any resurrections to compare it to.
(More on the dates later)
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OK. But they would have been there even if someone’s body was still there, as well. Right?
But the existence of a shroud is not evidence for an empty tomb.
Of course, there is no good reason to think this image is anything other than something that was painted on by someone. But, even if that were not the case, how would we know it was Jesus’s face? Maybe it was a artifact left by visiting extraterrestrials?
Like @Puck_Mendelssohn , I find it interesting how little attention authenticists pay to the historical documentation regarding the “shroud.” Do you think it is of no importance that high-ranking Church officials concluded it was a man-made forgery (like so many other religious relics)?
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I had not noticed any such weakening. Yes, cultural trappings of Christian culture and popular thought may wax and wane in this country or that—but the trends of the kind of faith which Jesus talked about are a very different matter. And in any case, Jesus himself said that very few (whatever the culture or era) would be of the true faith:
Matthew 7:13-14 (NASB)
Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
And Jesus said that this would always be the case. So that’s nothing unexpected or shocking. And the secondary cultural trappings of Christian influence are not as important to me. (Indeed, I find so many of those so-called “Christian” elements of the culture often to be poor imitations of what Jesus taught—if not outright contradictory to them. The recent presidential election in the USA was heavily driven by the “evangelical” demographic but the word has become a political label that has little to do with the evangeline of Jesus.)
It has been a number of years since I really dove into the literature describing the Shroud and discussing its significance but I must say that I felt more confusion than definitive conclusion. Some claimed that there was absolutely no evidence of paint pigments but, instead, there was some sort of chemical change on the very shallowest penetration of the Shroud’s surface. And some said whatever was on the fibers was evidence of biochemical activity from microbes. Other said it was from some kind of burst of radiation. Others claimed that it showed evidence of a very primitive “paint” which was nothing more than diluted iron oxide mixed with gelatin—most of which had broken down over time to leave only the very barest trace behind. (And that is why many have said that what is there doesn’t really qualify to be called “paint” in the traditional artists’ sense.)
Long story short, I found the Shroud to be an interesting mystery, though perhaps one which, with additional diligence, I might reach a conclusion but which didn’t seem to merit that much effort. After all, EVEN IF there was compelling evidence that the Shroud was once wrapped around Jesus’ dead body, it would ONLY suggest that Jesus died and got wrapped in a shroud. Nothing I’ve ever read about the Shroud described in any compelling way that Jesus was resurrected and left the Shroud behind for someone to preserve and venerate. Thus, even in the “best case”, I don’t see how the Shroud somehow keeps “believers’ faith firm.” Yes, I suppose some people would find it confirming in some way----the “liver shiver” way is probably may favorite description of that—but I don’t confuse that kind of confidence with the Holy Spirit-based faith that Jesus and the Apostles talked about.
And Jesus contrasted that kind of “faith” in John 20:29:
Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and have yet believed.”
Of course, Thomas could see Jesus face to face—but Jesus was speaking of those who would follow him who would not have that opportunity.
And in John 14:26, Jesus said nothing about sacred relics being the remedy for any alleged waning faith:
The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and make you remember all that I have told you.
I seriously doubt that the Lord has decided that the kind of faith he talked about in the first century is no longer effective so relics are needed. And if the Lord decided to use a new strategy, I believe the evidence would be much less ambiguous and far more compelling.
There’s much more I could write on this topic but it is time for me to experience a physical persecution of my own that I call my thrice weekly gym workout—and with my aging arthritic joints it is ever more grueling.
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And, of course, even if the shroud is of appropriate age and if the image on it is somehow the product of a body being in it, we still have no good basis for thinking that the person in it was Jesus.
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The shroud if real validates the claims in the Gospel of John that there was the linen and the face covering with no mention of a body. Here is the prior paragraph of John 20.
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
This was the original hypothesis that was ruled out during the 1978 examination of the cloth. If this had been established we would not be discussing this now.
The opinions have changed over time based on the evidence. There was good momentum for the forgery theory after the carbon dating in 1989. There is now supporters for authenticity in the Catholic Church. How many I don’t know.
From a Catholic publication:
The authenticity of the shroud has not gained any acceptance at AiG or CMI either.
Answers in Genesis - Testing the Shroud of Turin
God reveals what He wants us to know, and since He does not mention a shroud in the grave with Christ, this should settle the issue for Christians.
Creation Ministries - Is the Shroud of Turin authentic?
After weighing the relevant information, we must draw the conclusion that the Shroud of Turin is probably not the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
EDIT: Broken link(2) fixed.
But because the forgery now serves as a relic to be invoked to “keep the faith firm”, it must be defended at all costs. The actual truth is irrelevant. It’s what the shroud is used for that drives this. I don’t get how these people are able to allow themselves to be so extremely gullible just because they can tell themselves some story about how the shroud can serve their faith. It’s difficult to think of a more obvious concession that the belief isn’t really based on a rational consideration of the evidence. They might as well say that “I concede that I am so biased I can’t consider this subject in a dispassionate, rational way.”
The evidence that it is a mere work of artistry is overwhelming. The shape of the imprint makes no sense, as it’s simply a picture of a person seen from the front, as any mediocre painter would paint it, which doesn’t make sense for a cloth supposedly wrapped around a corpse.
Worse, dead people generally don’t produce imprints on cloth they wear unless it’s literally stained by fluids leaking out of their rotting bodies (in which case you’d expect the image this would produce to be most intense where fluids leaked out and collected beneath the corpse), and there is no reason to expect Jesus to have supernaturally beamed his likeness on to it. Do divine persons that die generally just have that sort of effect, or what? When was that established?
That it first turned up in the middle ages, that it’s been carbon dated to the middle ages, and we have direct testimony from people at the time it turned up who were actual Christians themselves, not only claiming that it is a fraud but to have spoken with the artist that made it.
And look at the sheer amount of pathetic pseudoscientific nonsense is constructed around it. In response to all the perfectly good evidence that it’s a work of fraud, we basically get Carl Sagan’s garage dragon. Anything is dismissed with ad-hoc stories. The most obvious is the purported medieval repair excuse, and yet they refuse to send other material to dating to settle the matter (and why? Well we just get more stories and bad excuses in response to that), leaving instead the defense of it’s authenticity to all sorts of “novel” methods of dating generally not accepted by the scientific community.
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The Gospel of John makes no claims about “face covering” – only “strips of linen”. Also, given that the Shroud of Turin is more than ten times the size of the Sudarium of Oviedo, and the latter is nearly as wide as it is long, it seems strange that they’d be described this way – as though they were homogeneous, uniformly-elongated pieces.
Additionally, if the Sudarium covered Jesus’ face, then why does the Shroud give an undistorted image of his face?
And if the shroud were indeed evidence of resurrection and had been preserved by Jesus’s followers, why did Thomas need to see him in person to be convinced?
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And why wasn’t its existence trumpeted thereafter by the many apologists of the early church as evidence of the resurrection?
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Further on the topic of “strips of linen”, I came across this:
When a person breathed the last breath and the heart stopped beating, the eyes of the deceased were reverentially closed, the entire body was washed and anointed with oil, and the hands and feet were then wrapped in linen bands. The body, clothed in a favorite garment, was then wrapped with winding sheets. Spices of myrrh and aloes were placed in the folds of the garment to perfume the body. A napkin was then bound from the chin to the head. The family took the body on a bier to be buried within hours of death, not days. During the first century, many people were laid to rest in rock-hewn tombs, one of the most prominent features of the hill country of Galilee and Judea; others were buried in the ground.[1]
This wrapping would seem more in keeping with “strips of linen” than a singular, large “shroud”.
It is therefore not at all clear to me that the Shroud of Turin is consistent with either the description in the Gospel of John, or with 1st Century Jewish burial practices.
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