SUPERNATURAL PHOTOGRAPHY

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"Nothing astounds like Truth."
~ Yoey O'Dogherty (internationally renowned, Peruvian poet)

Imagine this if you will:

You discover an ancient burial shroud containing the mysterious, anatomically correct image of a dead man in a state of rigor mortis. The man had been crucified and buried according to First Century Jewish custom, and his image, which shows no signs of body decomposition, takes on a three-dimensional appearance when photographed.

Unlike many crucifixion victims, this man’s legs were not broken to hasten his death by asphyxiation; forty-five of the fifty-eight pollens found on this shroud grow in Jerusalem; and the victim’s side was stabbed after death, creating a wound from which blood and water flowed. There are more than one hundred scourge marks on the man in the shroud, and those scourge marks contain real blood and blood serum – some of which requires a microscope to detect.

And suppose that the mysterious body-image fibers were made up of oxidized, dehydrated, degraded cellulose, indicating that the most likely explanation for them was that some form of radiation with qualities analogous to X-rays had emanated from the body. Perhaps the image was associated with some form of electromagnetic energy or corona discharge.

And what if a world-class scientist who had spent many years studying your shroud with the latest Twentieth Century equipment later confided to you that if he were given a budget of ten million dollars and told to make a replica of your shroud, he would not know how to go about it?

Who would you name if you had one guess as to the identity of the man whose dead body was once wrapped in that shroud?

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Now you understand some of the basic reasons so many researchers have come to the conclusion that the famous Shroud of Turin is indeed the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, and they suspect that the mysterious image on the Shroud was a result of some sort of energy that emanated from His body at the moment of His resurrection.

Last week I read for probably the third time one of my favorite books, ‘The Resurrection Of The Shroud’ published by lawyer Mark Antonacci in the year 2000. And like a good lawyer marshalling his evidence to present to a jury, Antonacci explains in great detail all the many anomalies that make the Shroud in Turin, Italy, one of the most studied marvels known to man. Nearly twelve years have passed since the publication of ‘The Resurrection Of The Shroud’, but the artifact remains as mind-boggling and unexplained as ever.

Since my boyhood I’ve been thrilled by great nonfiction mysteries, and so I took an interest in the Shroud long before I had taken an interest in the life of Christ; I was captivated by the mystery surrounding it even before I was captivated by the miracles and teachings of the Messiah Himself.

"The Shroud of Turin is either the most awesome and instructive relic of Jesus Christ in existence...or it is one of the most ingenious, most unbelievably clever products of the human mind and hand on record. It is one or the other; there is no middle ground."

~ John Walsh, ‘The Shroud’

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When the 1988 Carbon-14 test results were publicly announced, indicating that the Shroud was dated somewhere between 1260 and 1390 A.D. and thus supposedly "proving” it to be the work of some medieval hoaxer, a lot of us assumed that put the final nail in the Shroud's coffin, so to speak.

Aww, not so fast, NOT SO FAST!!

In ‘Resurrection Of The Shroud’, Antonacci spends considerable time explaining fully why the Shroud sample chosen for C-14 dating was “the most controversial location on the cloth”. Furthermore, laboratory experiments have established the fact that irradiating cloth and then heating it in a fire simulation (as the Shroud was exposed to fire in 1532), will cause new Carbon-14 to form and drastically alter the test results, making the samples seem much younger than they’re known to be.

In other words, even if the C-14 tests had been conducted as they should have been, using ideally chosen multiple Shroud samples - if the image was formed by radiation emanating from the body, as a number of scientists believe - the test results would have still been inaccurately skewed against a First Century A.D. dating of the Shroud. Even under the best of circumstances, the C-14 test was probably a “no win” situation from the get-go.

The public has been led to believe that C-14 tests are the final word in dating samples, but when a person has read many science-based books they eventually learn that there are myriad ways artifact samples can become corrupted and give exceedingly false C-14 readings. Therefore this form of dating must often be regarded as suspect. When every other process for dating an artifact is in controversy with the C-14 test results, it’s the latter which ought be discarded first, rather than the consensus based on the bulk of the study.

Every so many years, someone else comes forward claiming to have demonstrated how the Shroud was manufactured in the Middle Ages by a hoaxer. But most of the Shroud’s astounding anamolies have never been adequately explained, much less duplicated.

Furthermore, when a person comes to realize the implications of the facts that the natural blood flows were transferred onto the Shroud BEFORE the body-image was encoded on it; and that there are anatomically flawless wounds recorded on the Shroud that can’t be seen with the naked eye and had to wait for the development of 20th Century scientific instruments before they could be discovered, it makes the idea of the Shroud of Turin being a fabricated religious artifact seem preposterous. 

[I'll tell you one thing for certain: if the Shroud is phony, it was certainly faked a whole lot better than Barack Obama's birth certificate was!] 

There is a breed of cat that simply refuses to accept even the slimmest possibility that the Shroud of Turin could be a supernaturally produced photograph of the resurrecting Christ. Regarding the aforementioned blood, some skeptics argue that the blood flows on the Shroud are “unrealistically neat”, but is there really any doubt those same people would argue that the blood flows were “too irregular” to be real if they were LESS neat? No matter what it looked like, no matter what all the tests indicated, the Shroud couldn’t win over the hearts and minds of any pseudo-atheists. And as I’ve stated on this blog before, most self-professed atheists are intellectually dishonest and their words and behavior often betray them as being haters more than disbelievers.

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Of course it will never be proven that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of Christ until the day Jesus returns and claims it as His own. However, until His Second Coming, I stand firmly in Mark Antonacci’s camp:

“Instead of revealing how the image was encoded, science has been able to reveal only how it was NOT encoded. The more science has learned about the image, the more it appears to transced the laws of physics, requiring something very extraordinary to account for all of the Shroud’s unique features. … Extensive and unforgeable medical, scientific, archaeological, and historical evidence indicates that the Shroud is the burial garment of the historical Jesus Christ.”

~ Mark Antonacci

While it’s necessarily a tad dry at times (as most any science-based book will be) and tends to be slightly repetitive toward the end, I highly recommend Antonacci’s ‘The Resurrection Of The Shroud’. It’s probably the only Shroud of Turin book you’ll ever need to read – although I own other Shroud-related publications as well, because I can’t seem to get enough of this mystical mystery.

~ Stephen T. McCarthy

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