And in Italy where the shroud first appeared, and many other places in the world.
In fact, Turin italy sits right smack on top of a giant belt of Pleistocene travertine: You can consult this nice geological map of italty for confirmation. Geological map of Italy.
Turin is the area marked by a square labeled TORINO near the upper left corner of Italy. It sits on a river in an area marked by a “2”. Which we can see on the infographic is “travertini”, aka Travertine limestone.
It is even used as a building material there, unsurprisingly.
This fact, which fits perfectly well with the account of the Gospels which report that Christ fell several times during his Passion, is totally incomprehensible under the forger thesis.
Or, someone in Turin with dirty fingers touched the cloth.
Indeed, why on earth would a medieval forger have placed these trace of dirt specifically at these positions when they would have been absolutely undetectable at the time?
Nobody has to deliberately place dirt on the shroud. Things unavoidably get contaminated with what people have on their fingers. Nothing fantastic about the cloth getting a bit dirtied with traces of local types of rock over the last 600 years. It is even possible the substance used to color the cloth surface originally contained traces of travertine.
Let’s stop right there. STURP contained not a single scientist, at least in a field relevant to the understanding of artifacts of this sort. They were a bunch of bumbling amateurs making up their own tests that are not standard in any archaeological or historic practice. Even dedicated Shroudies like yourself must admit this, since you claim that they botched the single most basic and fundamental test of their investigation: The carbon dating. (Of course, in reality, that is the only thing they got right).
Well, @Giltil disagrees, he is free to post the items from the CV’s of the STURP team members that indicates their expertise in the authentification of historical artifacts from 2000 years ago. Then he can explain why he denies the radiocarbon dating of the samples they provided to the labs, if they were such amazing experts.
Very good point. The idea that the image on the shroud “should be” some particular way implies there is some expectation from the mechanism by which it formed. But that assumes you already know how it formed and that you expect this sort of image from that process.
I suggest you an experiment; go to your bathroom, turn on the light and look at yourself in the mirror above the sink. Your face will appear to you as a normal, positive image, where the parts most exposed to light such as the tip of your nose will appear brighter while those less exposed will appear darker. Now, if you had an old film camera, you could take a picture of yourself and observe that the latent image formed on the film would be a negative image in which the normally light areas would appear dark and vice versa. Now based on this, the image on the Shroud is undoubtedly a negative image. Hope it helps.
You are confused here. I didn’t say that the image on the Shroud should be like this or that. I was only trying to explain what is a negative image. Here is the entire quote: That the image on the Shroud behaves as a photographic negative, in the sense that what should be dark is light and vice versa, is an undisputed fact both by proponents and opponents of the authenticity thesis.
No, that doesn’t help at all. I know what my face should look like. I am asking what an image created on a piece of fabric from the Middle Ages with the intention of deceiving people into believing it was the burial shroud of Jesus Christ “should” look like. How was it determined which parts of such an image “should be” dark, and which “should be” light?
To elaborate further: What you are claiming here is that the parts of my face that are projected further forwards are the ones that should be lighter. But if one was creating an image of a fake shroud, those are the very parts of the face that would make the stronger impression on the fabric, because they are pushed forward more strongly into the covering. So one would paint the tip of the nose, the chin, the forehead, etc. darker, rather than lighter. It’s similar to the process that occurs if one is creating a rubbing as in the video below. (As you can see, children in the first grade are able to understand this concept):
So it would seem your claim that the image is a “negative” contributes nothing to demonstrating the authenticity of the “shroud”.
