Have you heard about the news on the The Shroud of Turin lately? It might not be a fake afterall. The shroud bears the image of a man similar to the way negatives bear images. Many people believe that the face belongs to Christ and that the shroud was buried with him. But I do have a question: why the Catholic Church does not claim the Shroud?

I once saw in the news that there was a piece of toast with david beckhams head outlined in the burnt areas. This was sold on e-bay for lots of money. now the obious point to this post is people spend money on stupid things on ebay, but the real point is that this is just something that happend. i doubt that god (or david beckham) decided to make the ephigy on a piece of toast but it happened by pure chance.

The turin shrowd may just be the same as the david beckham piece of toast, i don't think i have ever seen anything that has been able to specify or prove one way or the other how it came into existance.

What I am saying is that if it proves to be true, it would be a great historical proof that maybe there's the Jesus figure in history. I mean it's not about the money. Even if the image may not be that of Jesus, it would still be a great piece of relic nevertheless.
Besides, these things don't just happen. Things never just happen for no good reason. Maybe we just don't know why even if we tried to understand. You simply cannot compare the shroud and the toast.

i do accept that ponit, however what i was trying to say is what is there? a piece of cloth with an image that happens to look like a man on it. does this really mean it is the piece of cloth that burried jesus? possibly possibly not. There is far more historical evidence for the exictence of a jesus character in history that the turin shrowed being even from the same pre 40BC time period.

I think the biggest issue with the shroud is that if it really did rest on the face of a person, it wouldn't look like it did. The face depicted on the shroud is of a man with an increadibly narrow face. Now, a peice of cloth laid over someones face would make them look bloated (its hard to show why without diagrams). So, I am disinclined to think it is legit, and the catholic church probably feels the same way. They really don't need any further embarassments over and above what they have suffered already in the last couple of years. I think they are playing it safe.

Yeah, obviously it's tough to tell if its a fake or the real thing.

Apparently the new theory is that Da Vinci created it; they claim this because the image on the shroud actually looks like a self-portrait of Da Vinci.

However, I think this is highly unlikely. First of all, it is claimed that the shroud was discovered before Da Vinci's birth. Also, the shroud carbon dates to around 1200 AD or something like that (some speculate that the reason it dates this far away from Christ's supposed death in roughly 32 AD is that it went through a fire and picked up carbon from that which distorted the dating), but this is still before Da Vinci. Some wonder if Da Vinci would have been smart enough to plant old carbon on the shroud.

I personally think that he did not create the shroud; I find it hard to swallow that Da Vinci knew about the carbon dating technique hundreds of years before it was discovered.

The other thing to consider, if it is a fake, is that it is a pretty elaborate fake. Some moron would have to spend countless hours in its creation just for some massive historical prank. It just seems no one would spend this kind of time to create a fake, and anyone who would is crazy.

So either its the real thing, or someone way back in the 1200s needed to get a life.

Don't forget the one with the Virgin Mary on the grilled cheese sandwich

About your first sentence quoted above, I think historical evidence has already proven that Jesus existed. This bit of history, (whether it's real or fake, it's old none the less) would help answer the bigger question of whether or not Jesus was truly the Son of God, or rather just a crazy prophet. I saw a show about this on TLC a couple years ago, and the carbon dating didn't match up, so I've been doubting it's real, but I haven't kept up with the news so some new developments may have arisen, so to speak hehe.

Here's an article I just found discussing whether or not Jesus was a real person. As it says on the top of the page, "This article does not debate the divinity nor the spiritual aspects of Christianity, but only the historical evidence that Jesus Christ did, in fact, exist."

http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/naij3.html

Stuff I recently saw on the Discovery Channel...
During the early centuries, it was customary to drape the dead with a shroud (as still is). For persons held in high esteem, a silver/bronze plate was carved with the likeness of the deceased in relief. Sometimes a second plate was carved in negative (like an inverse carving of a mould. The plate/ s would then be heated and the shroud would be then pressed against this. In pressing the cloth against heated material, a fine layer of the material would be singed giving an outline of the etched plate relief on the shroud. (when two plates are pressed together, this produces a singe on both sides of the material producing a 3D effect).

I event found some material on this HERE.

I do hope you find it of interest.

R. A.

Carbon dating may show that it's not that old, but people, you've gotta remember that carbon dating isn't infallible. How old is the oldest thing that we've carbon dated that we know for 100% sure when it was created? For all we know, it could only have a certain range of acceptable accuracy. And, it could be possible that a fire screwed up it's carbon or soemthing like that...

The interesting thing about the mary sammich is that it isn't rotting. but i'm not gonna say the g-man is responsible, dude rarely intervenes with stuff down here. the deal with the sammich is this, see, it's a grilled cheese sammich, with cheap syntehtic cheese. this means the cheese is very unlikely to mold. also, the grilled aspect of it means that most of the moisture is driven out of the bread, making it resistent to mold. so, while it's interesting, it's also very fundemental biology, nothing spiffy about it beyond that of normal science, which is rather spiffy.