I don't know what to make of the Shroud of Turin, the famous burial cloth that bears the scientifically inexplicable imprint of a man whose wounds appear consonant with those which Jesus is described as suffering during his execution.
The Shroud is believed by many to be the actual burial cloth of Christ and the imprint is believed to have been preternaturally impressed into the fabric. Perhaps. I'm not in a position to say. What I can say, however, is that arguments like the one below which purport to debunk the Shroud as spurious are risibly dumb.
According to an article in Science Daily another burial shroud has been unearthed in Jerusalem dating to the first century. The shroud is apparently that of a man who was a leper and who died of tuberculosis, all of which is pretty interesting, but then the article quotes the researchers as claiming that the leper's shroud proves that the Turin Shroud could not be that of Jesus:
This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, hitherto assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as the textiles historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to show.
Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.
In other words, we can assume that the leper's shroud had a weave typical of the period and since the Turin Shroud had a more sophisticated weave it must have dated from a more recent era or a different place.
If the researchers are being accurately represented in the article theirs is a remarkably shallow argument. What reason is there for making the assumption that the weave of the leper's shroud is typical? How many such linens have we discovered that we can make such a determination? And even if it were typical of the common folk to use such shrouds do we know that the more expensive weave was not preferred by the well-to-do? Why could it not be that Jesus was buried in a fabric typically imported for purchase and use by the wealthy from outside Jerusalem? Why could it not be that the rich man who donated the grave for Jesus' burial also donated the shroud? It was also typical of that time that the garments people wore were stitched together from numerous strips of cloth and thus had many seams, but Jesus' garment was seamless and thus considered unusual enough by his executioners for them to gamble for it. Should we assume that this story is false because it suggests that Jesus wore a garment not typical of that worn in the region at the time?
Sometimes in their eagerness to discredit Christian belief skeptics resort to the most desperate reasoning and wind up saying the silliest things. The Shroud of Turin may not be what its devotees believe it to be, but it'll take a lot more than the reasons offered in this article to convince them of that.
RLC
