Yes. The author (whose identity I can’t find, sorry) was being rather charitable in saying “within two years”.
Also, @Giltil referring to “Dr. A. Whanger” without specifying that he is just a shrink, and not someone with any remotely relevant doctorate. SMH.
Ron was basically right when he wrote that we have not the slightest idea what Jesus of Nazareth looked like. There are no images anywhere near contemporary with the apostles. When images finally make an appearance in the Roman world, they are so obviously based on classical depictions of Zeus that without context archaeologists cannot really tell the intended subject.
So you have to ask yourself what happened at the end of the 4th century that suddenly the representations of Jesus changed completely to take on the appearance of the man in the Shroud? To answer that question, it may help to have in mind that the end of the 4th century coincides with the time when the Shroud may have first surfaced publicly in the city of Edessa.
For those interested, below is the answer I get when I ask the following question to ChatGPT: Is it true that the end of the 4th century coincides with the time when the Shroud may have first surfaced publicly in the city of Edessa?
The claim that the Shroud of Turin (or an early version of it) surfaced publicly in Edessa at the end of the 4th century is not definitively proven, but it is a widely discussed theory among historians and scholars interested in the Shroud’s origins. Here’s an overview of the context:
1. The Mandylion of Edessa: According to tradition, the Mandylion (or Image of Edessa) was a miraculous image of Christ’s face that came to Edessa (modern-day Şanlıurfa, Turkey). Some scholars argue that this could be linked to the Shroud of Turin, suggesting the Shroud was folded to display only Christ’s face, giving rise to the legend of the Mandylion.
2. Historical Sources: The earliest written record of the Mandylion comes from the Doctrine of Addai, a 4th-century Syriac text, though the text does not describe it as a burial cloth. The legend of the Mandylion as an image of Christ’s face reportedly brought to King Abgar of Edessa predates this and might have emerged earlier, but its details remain vague.
3. Public Appearance in Edessa: The Mandylion was said to have been rediscovered in Edessa around 544 CE, during the siege of the city by the Persian army. However, theories suggest the cloth could have been venerated privately or semi-publicly in Edessa prior to this, perhaps as early as the late 4th century.
4. Shroud Hypothesis: Some researchers posit that the Shroud of Turin and the Mandylion are the same object. They argue that the Shroud might have arrived in Edessa during this time and been interpreted within the framework of existing Christian traditions about miraculous images.
The Debate
• Supporters of the Shroud-Mandylion connection often rely on iconographic and historical analysis, as well as later accounts from Byzantine sources.
• Critics highlight the lack of explicit early references to a burial cloth and suggest the Mandylion was a separate artifact, possibly a painted or embroidered image.
In conclusion, while it is plausible that an object resembling the Shroud of Turin may have existed in Edessa by the late 4th century, there is no definitive evidence to confirm this. The connection remains speculative but intriguing, rooted in early Christian traditions and later medieval interpretations.
“Not definitively proven” is the understatement of the century. Can you point to any evidence that supports this identification other than the fact that both things portray Jesus’ face?
Do we have any evidence that representations of Jesus “changed completely”? If so, then from what?
A more likely view is that (i) Christianity became the state religion of Rome in the 4th century, and (ii) lacking any strong preexisting consensus of what Jesus looked like, they based their representation on that of Zeus/Jupiter – who Jesus was replacing in Roman religious life as the central figure.
I would suggest that this is not “plausible”:
It appears that the first version of the tradition, that of Eusebius, does not mention an image.
The first version to mention an image, the Doctrine of Addai, describes it as a portrait of Jesus painted by a court painter for King Abgar of Edessa.
When Hannan, the keeper of the archives, saw that Jesus spake thus to him, by virtue of being the king’s painter, he took and painted a likeness of Jesus with choice paints, and brought with him to Abgar the king, his master.[1]
So what we are left with is a highly-mutable legend that makes no mention of a burial shroud.
This is NOT “follow[ing] the evidence wherever it lead[s]”.
This is manipulating the evidence to try to force it to fit a predetermined narrative!
Or, in the words of The X-files’ Fox Mulder:
This claim was written by Evagrius Scholasticus about 50 years after the events, it makes no mention of a “Public Appearance” or that it was "rediscovered, but is fanciful in the extreme:
In this state of utter perplexity, they bring the divinely wrought image, which the hands of men did not form, but Christ our God sent to Abgarus on his desiring to see Him. Accordingly, having introduced this holy image into the mine, and washed it over with water, they sprinkled some upon the timber; and the divine power forthwith being present to the faith of those who had so done, the result was accomplished which had previously been impossible: for the timber immediately caught the flame, and being in an instant reduced to cinders, communicated with that above, and the fire spread in all directions.[2]
I would be curious as to what factual basis your “theories” of earlier viewings have, and how the results of these purported viewings were transmitted to the rest of the Roman Empire, without leaving any record.
I still don’t know why I should care if the Shroud is genuine. I’m already a Christian and no one has shown how this is supposed to impact my faith. No one has even shown how this is supposed to prove anything more than that Jesus is a person who died, which everyone here agrees with.
I think the way it is supposed to work is:
if you accept that the shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus; and
if you accept that no natural process could have caused the imprinting of the image on it;
you conclude that the image is physical evidence of a miracle; and
that this miracle was the Resurrection.
Though I’m not sure that all that is easier to swallow than the Resurrection simpliciter.
This is also the Vatican’s position.
This Wikipedia page may be useful in navigating some of the claims being made here:
The Shroud, by exposing the marks of the unspeakable suffering of Christ, makes the intensity of his sacrifice, hence his love for each of us, tangible.
Perhaps it is just a case of “if I can prove that the Shroud is genuine, I pwn the unbelievers”.
By the way, almost 25 years ago a team led by Richard Neave, retired forensic artist at the University of Manchester (look, credentials!) made an attempt at reconstructing the possible face of Jesus. It doesn’t look like the Shroud image at all, but this face would fit in much better with the local people of Palestine at the time.
Read about it here.
And that isnt accomplished just as well, if not better by the typical church sculpture of the cross with Jesus hanging on it? That certainly seems to communicate suffering better, in my view, than the rather peaceful shroud image.
I don’t know. My belief that Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player who ever lived is not based in anyway on the fact that the Hall of Fame has his shoes. However, it would be disappointing to learn these are not, in fact, his shoes. If there was any question, I would expect baseball historians and scholars to devote time and energy to finding out, and would be interested in the results.
OTOH, if it turns out they were not his shoes, I would just accept it. I wouldn’t make the sort of ridiculous excuses to reject this finding that we see among “shroud” believers.
It the carbon test was without reasonable doubt I would agree with you. I think there is now reasonable doubt that the conditions of the test could put this in doubt.
The image has not been explained and is challenging given there is no material identified that made it and it is microscopically thin.
The rare blood type samples match the sudarium which is mentioned in gospel of John. The odds of this are very small that we have documented evidence of this 2000 years after the potential event.
From this discussion I would agree with @vjtorley that there is not enough evidence yet that would sway a religious skeptic based on the shroud alone. The skeptic will lean on the carbon dating until more doubt of its accuracy has surfaced.
There is no reasonable doubt. There are lots of unreasonable ones, I won’t deny that.
It has been determined thru chemical analysis to be a painting, produced by materials commonly used by artists at the time consistent with the carbon dating of the cloth. Not much room for reasonable doubt there, either.
There are very reasonable doubts regarding the presence of blood on the cloth. There is no reason to suspect we have a sudarium that was wrapped around Jesus’s face. We don’t know Jesus’s blood type, and blood types are shared between people so commonly that having the same blood type in two differen samples does not in anyway demonstrate that the blood belonged to the same person. Please try to be serious here.
The “skeptics” are not the ones relying on junk “science” and fallacious logic to support their position. They are using simple, clear, accepted techniques like C-14 dating,historical records, and simple logic.
Nobody cares about who has how much doubt, or whether they subjectively consider it reasonable (it would frankly shock me to find someone doubting something without thinking they were reasonable in so doing).
Fact of the matter is, that date is an actual physical datum. Nobody is disputing that it came from at least some part of the shroud. There is, meanwhile, zero experimental data to indicate that the shroud is more than twice the age determined for that sample.
Your “reasonable doubt” is rooted not in data, but in speculation. You speculate that the only way a human face could end up on the cloth is if it was wrapped around Jesus’. You speculate that a blood type shared by every twentieth person is just too much of a coincidence to dismiss. But there is no actual measurement anybody has so far performed on the shroud to find that it was even remotely old enough to be Jesus’ burial cloth, let alone that it actually was just that.
The only data we have to go on indicates that it cannot actually be the real thing, and faced with evidence like that you and yours find it “reasonable” not only to abstain from the obvious conclusion, but in fact to draw the exactly opposite one, the one that is actually, as far as anybody knows based on the data, appears entirely precluded.
Hi Fazial
You have made some claims that are not well supported by the evidence. I think however we are beating the horse dead at this point. The iclaims are.
-There is no reasonable doubt…cotton fiber in the thread plus the level of variation in the raw data
-The chemical analysis to be a painting…the image is too thin for this theory to be viable.
-There is very good reason to suspect the sudarium was wrapped around Jesus face due to Jewish practices and the Sudarium mentioned in the Gospel of John. There is a lot of blood on the Sudarium of which the patterns match the shroud.
You have a claim that needs defending that there is lots of junk science here.
We have very good reason to believe Babe Ruth wore shoes when he played baseball. He wasn’t nicknamed “Shoeless George” or something like that.
I am willing to bet, however, that before the Baseball Hall of Fame accepted those shoes as genuinely belonging to Ruth, they needed more evidence than the fact that people back then were known to wear shoes when playing baseball.
Can you describe the fallacious logic in play here?
