TURIN SHROUD: WHY THE BLOOD (?) WAS PRINTED/PAINTED ON
The Turin Shroud is the most famous relic in the world. Millions believe that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ bearing his crucified and bloodied image. The cloth is kept at Turin in Italy. The cloth is an enigma. Many say it is a miracle. But in fact the greatest mystery is who the cloth depicts for the man whose face is on the Shroud is not Jesus Christ.
The prints of blood on the Turin Shroud were made
on the cloth before the image of the body appeared according to page 153,
Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine. The blood did not come from a body in the
Shroud. The reason is, it is on all the points that you would expect to see it
if the image were a painting. If the image of the man is not a painting the
blood certainly could be.
If some force shot straight up out of the body onto
the cloth to make a mirror-image of the man that has no distortion then the
blood images should come from the contact between body and cloth resulting in
the blood being positioned away from the cuts on the body they allegedly emerged
from. For example, the bleeding from the crown of thorns should be across and
off the image of the head going too far on each side. Brown believes that the
blood was painted on the image of the Shroud man (page 153, Biblical Exegesis
and Church Doctrine,). If a Shroud image were made by pure luck a forger would
have bought it to create the greatest relic of all time.
If you smear paint all over a statue and then wrap it
in a cloth the image will be distorted as in being wider than the statue. This
is the kind of image the Shroud would bear if it were genuine. God had no need
to miraculously make the image undistorted. That would have been an absurd
miracle and giving a reason for scepticism. If God does such miracles then we
can trust nothing.
The wounds on the head and arms shed the blood down
the body indicating that the Shroud print was not made when the man was lying
down but when he was held up straight (page 152, Biblical Exegesis and Church
Doctrine). The feet and the side contradict this for they make the blood flow as
if the body were lying down. Somebody had been painting and/or printing blood on
the Shroud with blood. And had been printing it on as well from a body or
something. The positions tell us it was made deliberately.
There are long trickles of unsmudged blood that flowed
about the lumber arch in the back. These rivers are inexplicable or the blood
should have made a pool and then short trickles when the pool is too full and
there is no pool. And the trickles would not be so clear and stringy. And most
of them are like lines. True blood soaks into cloth leaving wide stains. The blood
was painted or printed on and whatever this was it was treated blood or fake
blood or something else. Trickery was afoot.
Some think the blood should have ran along the linen
fibres if it were liquid and soaked into the cloth. But that could indicate that
it was mixed with something perhaps paint or a chemical? That would alter its
molecular structure and behaviour.
The blood should be smudged on the back but it is not.
It would have been if there had been a bleeding man lying on top of it. The
blood was liquid enough to make an image according to the Shroud and there is
just no way smearing and smudging could have been avoided. The body was not
carried from the cross to the tomb in the Turin Shroud for the movement of the
people carrying it would have caused the corpse to rub a lot inside the cloth
and cause lots of smears. The blood contradicts the gospel account that Jesus
was borne to the tomb in his winding-sheet or whatever. The gospels, terrible
and all as they are, have more weight than a piece of cloth that cannot be
conclusively traced back to the demise of Jesus.
Now, the Shroud tells us that the man it depicts was
never carried in it for there is no smearing. But he had to have been laid in
the cloth and being a big man and heavy he had to be positioned on the cloth so
that there would be enough to fold over the top of him. The shroud is fake for
there is no evidence of this positioning.
Brown cannot believe that the Shroud could be real
when there is no smudging (Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, page 152).
Some say that there was no smudging because Jesus was taken to the tomb without
being removed from the patibilum, the part of the cross that the arms are nailed
to. This is extremely unlikely. It is gruesome and frivolous and unnecessary and
besides the Romans needed the patibilum to nail others to. It would be easier to
get Jesus to the tomb without it and the longer his arms were kept outstretched
the more likely they could have stiffened into that position. The Shroud must be
a forgery when it requires such a daft explanation for the absence of smudging.
Blood that should have been dried like the scourge
wounds and many others should not be on the cloth and certainly not on it so
clearly.
If the blood did come from a body then the Shroud man
was nailed up and crowned with thorns and scourged about one time and then fired
into the cloth. Brown sees that there is nothing to show that the blood came out
at different times but the wounds seemed to have been inflicted at the one time
(page 152). Thus, he could not have been Christ. He would only have been treated
that way to get the blood on the cloth in a convincing way. He would only have
been treated that way if the cloth were a fake.
Wilson admits that the blood of the crown of thorns
should have dried up before the other wounds but this is not what the Shroud
says (page 36, The Blood and the Shroud). Perhaps the crown was taken off
causing more blood to flow? But dead men do not bleed and there is too much blood
for it to have been gravity. Either the man was crowned with thorns just seconds
before contradicting the gospels or he was alive or that blood must have been
painted/printed on with blood and perhaps paint. Somebody could have discovered
that a crucified image of a man had transferred to the Shroud and decided to make
it seem that the individual was Jesus by painting on the marks of a crown of thorns.
This is possible because Wilson says the blood and the image of the man were
created differently. The blood simply rubbed off on the cloth (page 46, The
Blood and the Shroud) so it could have been rubbed on with a touch of paint to
keep it red looking. The scourging wounds were made long before the crucifixion
and should have been dried so they could not have transferred to the cloth (page
59, Turin Shroud). Yet they are there. These cuts should overlap but they do not
(page 136, The Sacred Virgin and the Holy Whore) suggesting that they are
artificial.
The Holy Shroud and Four Visions maintains that dried
blood can transfer if there is plenty of sweat or the relevant chemicals that
compose sweat in the blood. But that transference takes time but waiting too
long is as bad as not waiting long enough. But when the image is ready the cloth
has to be removed slowly and with extra-caution from the blood and no folding
must take place for a long time so that the image is not damaged (page 13). This
would suggest that somebody had been experimenting years ago to learn this in
order to make the Turin Shroud. Some would say it means that the Jesus body just
gently dematerialised inside the cloth resulting in an undamaged image. Experts
deny that Jesus would have produced enough sweat. He would not even take a drink
so he had no liquid in him.
The Jesus Conspiracy says that there are three lines
of blood relating to the wrist wound and tries to argue that two of them dried
up and were made liquid again by the oils in the cloth because the outline is
not as sharp as that of the third. But if you look at photograph no 57 some
parts of the two traces in question have just as much lack of outline as the
third.
The blood on the Shroud did not behave like ordinary
blood so it tells us that the cloth is a fake.
God forbade all kinds of religious fraud in
Deuteronomy 18. He said that it was not to be tolerated and that occult items
and pagan idols were to be destroyed. In the past before science got to the
level of seeing that the Shroud was very strange indeed, Catholics on seeing the
red blood on the Shroud would have perceived that it had to be a painting for
blood that old should not be that colour. They might have put this out of their
minds but their duty was to destroy it. The Shroud opposes the supposed law of
God and so it
is not the winding sheet of Jesus at all.
I believe the image is a scorch or something because
the forger knew the Church might test the shroud by laundering it to see if the
image would remain fixed. If the blood was washed off, the current blood may
have been painted on.
The first cause for suspicion regarding the cloths
authenticity is how it has never been proven that the bloodstains on it are
really blood. Whatever the stains are, there is reason to believe that they got
a touch up in recent centuries. It is foolish to take the Shroud seriously when
the main thing, the blood, cannot be proven to be blood. That matters more than
any strangeness of the image on the cloth.
We conclude that there is no evidence that the red
marks on the shroud are blood and there is even less evidence that it is the
blood of Jesus! They are theatrical blood then? Think about how
theatrical they actually are!