DID JESUS SEEM TO EXPIRE ON THE CROSS AND END UP BURIED ALIVE?
In the Cathedral of Turin what many people hold to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ is enshrined. The Shroud is around fourteen feet by three and a half feet. It is a sheet of linen. It looks like a big strip that covered the back and front of a man completely. The image it bears is supposed to be the imprint of the dead wounded body of Jesus.
The believers say that the man in the cloth is definitely
dead for his legs were not broken. The gospels say that the Bible
predicted that not a bone of Jesus' would be broken. The men nailed with
Jesus had their legs broken but he was spared as he was already dead. But
that is an odd argument. If the shroud man is not Jesus it is not
surprising his legs are not broken. You can't argue, "The shroud may be
real for its legs are fine and it may be real for the gospel says Jesus' legs
were not broken." That is a circular argument.
John's gospel says that Jesus had a big enough gash in the side for a man to put
his hand in for he appeared to Thomas and asked him to put his hand in. Thus the
gospel refutes the Shroud where the man has a small neat slit. If you want to
hold that what Thomas saw was not the real Jesus but a hallucination that is up
to you. Shroud man has a small slit from a spear wound. Nothing
fatal about that!
Almost half the children in Israel died before they reached five years of age.
The adults lived in great hardship and near-starvation. Yet if we look at the
Shroud we see a well fed man with muscle who appears to have been doing the
equivalent of the modern Body for Life body building programme. This man was not
Jesus. If he was then Jesus was exceptionally wealthy and well off and in that
case the gospels are lies and we cannot rationally derive religious beliefs
about Jesus from them. Then it would be foolish to trawl them looking for
evidence that the resurrection was a real event.
Shroud science is divided between unbelievers and believers. The unbelief side
talks the most sense.
The believers ignore the fact that the shroud man was supposed to be lying down
in the cloth and yet his face and hair are arranged as if he were standing up.
They imagine some kind of band must have been put on him that caused this
effect. There is no evidence for this band and it is far fetched. It would still
mean that whoever put it on went to great lengths to make Jesus' hair look like
it would be if he were standing up!
Charles Foster in The Jesus Inquest notes how "the position of the arms is
unnatural but entirely what one would expect if one was forcibly folding arms
that were locked in rigor mortis." That is just an excuse for there is no
evidence that the arms were tied together. It is clear that they were not.
Some ancients believed that dead men did not bleed (eg. Origen (185-254 AD) so
whoever forged the Shroud wanted it to say that Jesus bled even after being put
on his back in the cloth after being removed from the cross and so was not dead.
By the way, when top Christians were acknowledging that corpses don’t bleed it
shows that there was no Shroud around in those days. It didn’t exist.
The man in the Shroud was either not washed for he has too much blood or he bled
after being put in the cloth meaning he was alive. The bodies of criminals were
buried unwashed so you can’t blame the washing for the fresh blood. It is not
known if Jesus was washed.
If there was a man in the cloth, he bled after being covered up. A little blood
can trickle out of a new corpse but it is easy to tell the difference between
that and bleeding. Quantity for one thing!
Christian believers in the Shroud and the death of Jesus say that the blood is
just the oozing of blood that takes place after a man has had a long and very
cruel death. This is far fetched. And besides there is still too much blood. A
big gash can perhaps seep blood after death but most of the Shroud man’s bloody
wounds are not big enough to facilitate a seepage and even the tiny pricks from
the crown of thorns bled into the cloth.
Prof. Wolfgang Bonte is the former head of the Forensic Medicine Institute at
the University of Dusseldorf. He was president of the International Organization
of Forensic Scientists (IAFS).
He determined the truth about what the apparent blood on the Shroud says. To
keep it neutral, he had to deliberate without knowing that it was the Shroud.
Let us look at what he says about the side wound. The lack of smearing and its
trickling downwards as if the man was standing up shows we are meant to believe
it came out after the man was laid down in the Shroud even though the artist has
got the direction wrong. The blood would go out sideways.
His conclusions were:
The wound on the right side could not have a blood flow after death for the
wound was on a high point of the body. The level of any blood would have been
further down in the body and could not seep out.
Now to the lower back.
He wrote, "A blood flow in the proportions described by you, including the
direction of the flow, would agree with the idea that the individual involved
was still alive at this time . . . this applies especially then, when larger
arterial vessels are opened and when involved was still alive at this time . . .
this applies especially then, when larger arterial vessels are opened and when
the blood pressure produces the necessary pressure against gravity for the blood
to leave the body."
Though he was informed that it was a corpse during burial he stood by his
analysis, "I will not repeat my earlier arguments. In my opinion, everything
speaks to the fact that the blood circulation activity had not yet ended."
Believers argue that the body was put in the cloth only in the tomb which is why
there were no smears. That does not help at all. There should still be smears.
And when the body would sink more into the cloth there should be huge smudges.
Their only hope is to argue that the man was carefully laid out in the cloth and
that he miraculously rose again when the tomb emptied and that would mean a few
minutes. This scheme makes the burial too careful for comfort and too
deliberate. It is so perfect that it is clear that it is not truly a burial
cloth. And their scheme contradicts the doctrine that Jesus did not rise again
shortly after dying - he waited nearly three days.
There is no evidence at all that if it is blood then the blood is corpse blood,
the blood that might seep out of a dead man. So the professor tells us, "It
cannot be concluded from any results that the one or the other type of blood is
involved."
Rivers of blood ran along the cloth below the Shroud man's back and from the
back of his feet. They ran wide in a variety of directions. That alone is
unnatural for you would see something more like a pool. If he was Jesus then
Jesus did not die on the cross and the Shroud refutes the gospels which assert
that Jesus gave up the ghost on the cross and was not by any means buried alive.
However, that was only their assumption. The gospels give no proof that Jesus
really was dead. They only gave hearsay and their own interpretation. None of
them tested him for a pulse.
The bloodstains on the shroud look as if they were made all at the same time.
This contradicts the gospels where Jesus was wounded at different times. There
are no congealed wounds at all and there should be. If anything, and if real,
the shroud suggests that there was some kind of hoax taking place maybe a
fraudulent crucifixion. There were some Docetist Christians who believed that
the historical Jesus was not a real man but a vision appearing to be a man. They
might have pointed to the unusual features of the shroud as showing that this
theory is true. For example, if Jesus was wounded at different times but the
cloth was showing he was wounded at the same time it might imply that Jesus was
not a normal man but possibly a vision. Another example would be how the
trickles of blood from the crown of thorns at the back of the head look like
trickles when they should have matted the thick hair and made smudges instead.
In fact all the "blood" is clearly defined - no smudges smacks of forgery. They
look like they levitate.
If the blood did come from a body then the Shroud man was nailed up and crowned
with thorns and scourged all about the one time and then fired immediately 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
(Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, page 152). Thus, the Shroud man 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
If the Shroud depicts Jesus Christ then the Christian and biblical message that
he died on the cross is false. Nothing that the Shroud man went through need
have killed him, he showed no sign of death, he bled after being put in the
cloth and showed signs of circulation, and it is more likely that the image came
from a live body than a dead one assuming a body was in the cloth. Many forensic
scientists who believe that the Shroud is authentic also are insistent that the
man in the cloth was not dead but alive.
Though it is true the injuries the man got could have killed him nobody knows if
they should have done. Nobody claims that it is proven that from the nature of
the injuries he must have been dead when he was put into the cloth (allegedly
put in). There are indications that they did not kill him.
Even if the cloth is strange and inexplicable and even if there is real blood on
it it cannot be used as evidence that Jesus rose again miraculously from the
dead.
The assumption that the body was dead is the main reason why scientists claim
that the making of the image was inexplicable. Their tests are based on
cadavers. They obviously cannot torture a living man and put him in a tomb like
Jesus was in. If they could they might get some answers. But until then they
have no business setting it up to make it look like the Shroud is beyond natural
explanations.
Even if the cloth is strange and inexplicable and even if there is real blood on
it, it still does not give us any reason to think these effects came from a
body. The image does not carry the huge distortions that would be seen if a body
had lain in it and imprinted the images. The image has nothing to do with
proving the existence or resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is better at proving
that Jesus did not die on the cross than that he did!
FINALLY
If Jesus did not die on the cross then his promise that he would and rise again is false.
People say that people don't suffer for lies and die for them. But they do for half-truths. What if Jesus was found alive in the tomb a few days after he was laid there? They were expecting a corpse to have started rotting and here he was like he was sleeping, They might even find him a bit warm if he was not dead yet. That was only a short step to lying that he was conscious and well again. He was alive - that bit was true.
http://www.sillybeliefs.com/shroud.html
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/another_easter_for_the_turin_shroud/
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