h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My favourite explanation for this is thatthe proximity to Jesus of the cloth caused the cloth to come back to life and start respiring/photosynthesising. This apparently lasted for just the right length of time before the cloth died again. And yes, there were bible verses to back this up, but I don't remember what they were. Anyone beat that?

I cannot explain what happened way back then.
I am a christian but I do not think that the shroud is real.
It might be a real replica.

Yeah, when I was xtian I thought it was a fake, too.... *shrug*
But what's a real replica??

Ok I'm not a religious person but can anyone tell me why it should be of any interest if it's real real or just real replica(whatever that means)! Is it more boring when you stare at something which is more old?!

By 'real replica' I presume one means a replica of an original, which actually came from 'The Man Himself.'

How do we know it was the big JC and not some other poor sod with a beard that was cruxified

And how do we know that JC had a beard? In the earliest Christian art found in the catacombs of rome JC is never depicted as having a beard. He appears as being clean shaven...

The shroud is a historical relic with no provenence which has for many years proven to be a good little earner for the city of Turin.

One of the reasons Jesus did not have a beard is because, in common with other black men, he would have had a hard time growing one.

Jesus probably had a beard because it was the thing at the time among Jewish men to have beards, to prove they weren't Roman. The reason he was depicted clean-shaven is because all the Romans were clean-shaven. We know the shroud is meant to be an image of Christ (and if a fake a damn clever one) because he has marks on his forehead that resemble having had a lot of thorns shoved on it (not a crown, more an afro. What self-respecting Roman soldier was gonna spend the time making a little wreath? He'd just get tetanus). This was a torture they devised for Jesus and for Jesus alone.

Jesus was a Palestinian Jew and he probably looked a bit like a young Yasir Arafat. Swarthy appearance, scraggly beard, dark hair.

Crown of Thorns is a household and garden ornamental, native to Madagascar. It is named for a legend which identifies it as the plant from which Roman legionaries made the mock crown placed on Christ's head at His Crucifixion. In remembrance of the legend, the long stems of Crown of Thorns are sometimes deliberately trained to grow in a crown-like shape.

Because these plants are so prickly, accidental poisonings are rare, but it is worth wearing gloves while tending them, not only to avoid the thorns, but also to prevent direct contact with the milky sap, which contains the greatest concentration of poison. A thumb-prick from the thorns is NOT dangerous, provided the usual precautions for minor wounds are taken.

There's a flaw in the logic here. If the image was made by the cloth lying on top of a human being, why hasn't it got wraparound distortions?

If it's a fake why do you think it's so clever? So they put a 'crown of thorns' in the picture. Whoopee.

They did a lot of things that they wouldn't have known about in Medeival times. Like put the nails in the right places. And there was something else really old and technical, but I can't remember it now.

I understood that the main reason the shroud was considered to be from HIS body was that the dimensions of the body depicted were an absolute ideal. None of us is built perfectly. One of our eyes is higher than the other, one of our arms is longer etc. whereas this had perfect symmetry.

Well it does depend what you mean by "perfectly"...

*looks around to see if there are minors or royalty present*

For example, in men, one testicle always hangs lower than the other. This is not an aberration from perfection, it is to ensure that they are less likely to get squashed, and don't bang together too much. There may be similar explanations for our lack of symmetry in some other ways, though I'm no biologist. I don't *think* this applies to the face, but it might be worth mentioning for completeness.

As far as differences in eye height, etc, as far as I know, in any one population it's a bell-shaped curve. Some are perfectly symettrical to the naked eye (you see them on adverts for beauty enhancers), while some are very unsymmetrical (*looks in mirror*). That the Turin shroud appears symmetrical shows that the person in question was towards the good end of that curve with respects to his face, but nothing more.

What I mean by "real replica" is a replica made of the original.
There was a real shroud but this one isn't it.
The shroud was lost over 2000 years ago when Christ rose form the dead.

Hmm, so you need to explain the Disciples losing the sacred original, at around 12th century. The process of cloth-scarring mentioned in the article requires somewhat more than 3 days, so you'd need another process there, too.

You also need an explanation of how the replica was made. Off the top of my head, I guess you could hold a candle under it at the right places to create the carbon, but that would leave tell-tale residues from the candle. Bear in mind this has to be done using 12th century technology, so laser-burning the image on isn't really acceptable.

As a bonus, explain why the Pope, with a direct line to God, was unable to tell us all this in advance. Or why it suited God' purpose to prove a whole load of theologists wrong...

I just wanted to say that my entry was originally much larger, and that I had to split it in half, as people were dying of old age before they even got half way through.

The 'missing' half refers to a theory I discovered in a book by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. As far as I know it hasn't received a great deal of publicity, which is a shame as it seems highly plausible (note that I use the word 'plausible' rather than truthful'!)

http://www.h2g2.com/A256934

I just wanted to say that my entry was originally much larger, and that I had to split it in half, as people were dying of old age before they even got half way through.

The 'missing' half refers to a theory I discovered in a book by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. As far as I know it hasn't received a great deal of publicity, which is a shame as it seems highly plausible (note that I use the word 'plausible' rather than truthful'!)

http://www.h2g2.com/A256934

Really interesting!!

http://www.h2g2.com/A339743