Sunday, May 6, 2018

"Editorial and Contents," Shroud of Turin News, April 2018

Shroud of Turin News - April 2018
© Stephen E. Jones
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[Previous: March 2018, part #1] [Next: May 2018, part #1]

This is the "Editorial and Contents," part #1, of the April 2018 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. I have listed below linked news article(s) about the Shroud in April as a service to readers, without necessarily endorsing any of them.

Contents:
Editorial
"Mounting evidence for the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity," Denver Catholic, Jared Staudt, 16 April 2018


Editorial
Rex Morgan's Shroud News: My scanning and word-processing of the 118 issues of Rex Morgan's Shroud News, provided by Ian Wilson, and emailing them to Barrie Schwortz, for him to convert to PDFs and add to his online Shroud News archive, continued in April up to issue #100, February 1997. [Right (enlarge)]. This was a special 80 page issue, which I am emailing to Barrie in ~20 page quarters. By late April, I had emailed him up to page 39, i.e. about half-way. Issues in the archive are still up to #93, February 1996.

News: In April I continued preparing a previously mentioned media release, outlining my hacker theory which I will post here when it is completed. I may then email a copy of it to news outlets in anticipation of an upsurge in media interest in the Shroud's radiocarbon dating as the thirtieth anniversary of the announcement on 13 October 1988 [see 23Jul15] that the Shroud's radiocarbon date was "1260-1390" draws near. I received an email reply from the "well-known Shroud author" (see previous) regarding the April 1989 phone call he received from a male with a German accent who said had committed "espionage" in falsifying the results of the 1988 dating. He said he is too busy to start dealing with the queries he would inevitably receive if his name was attached to this event. He also said that, "the connection is still too tenuous to me to be written off by others as anything more than a coincidence." I replied to him:

"I thank Jesus (the Man on the Shroud) who is ruling over all (Acts 10:36; Rom 9:5; Eph 1:21-22; Php 2:9), for your original telling Joe [Marino] of your phone call and him telling me. If you ever get past your deadlines and have time to answer queries about the phone call, please let me know. You don't have to say you believe it was Karl Koch, just that it was a phone call you received."

Posts: In April I blogged only 3 new posts (latest uppermost): "Chronology of the Turin Shroud: Fourteenth century (2)" - 13th; "Water stains #28: Other marks and images: The evidence is overwhelming that the Turin Shroud is authentic!," - 5th; "Editorial and Contents," Shroud of Turin News, March 2018," - 2nd.

Updates There were no significant updates in the background of past posts in April.

Comments: In April I deleted 3 posts as sub-standard, 1 of which was incomprehensible, 1 made bare assertions without evidence or references, and 1 was in a foreign language.

On 16 April I published a comment under my recent "Water stains #28 post in which the anonymous commenter had "expected" me to add "a further ... problem ... with the forgery theory ...For the relic to have ever been stored in such a way" (i.e. in an earthenware jar) "suggests that it was in peril." I responded that:

"I deliberately did not speculate why the ancient earthenware jar containing the Shroud, at some point in time had been partly filled with water, because no one knows. It most likely was the result of an accident, because partly filling the jar would not have hidden the Shroud."
However, today (7 May 2018) I am about to post a further comment (when it can be linked to this post), admitting that, "I had missed the commenter's point, thinking only of the water, not the fact that this would indeed "suggest" that the Shroud was stored folded tightly in an earthenware jar at a time when "it was in peril," namely in the early first century when the tiny Christian church was under threat of persecution by ts far more numerous enemies, the Jews and Romans":
"I later read in Barbara Frale's 2012 book, "The Templars and the Shroud of Christ,"

[Left: I definitely do not endorse Frale's thesis that the Shroud was "The mysterious idol of the Templars" (p.19)!]

that "Whoever raised the lid [of such an earthen- ware jar] would not have seen anything but a featureless mass of cloth, too tightly turned in on itself to show even the abundant marks of blood":

"Rather, it was a container designed for other purposes, where the Shroud was perhaps only provisionally housed. The shape of the object is exactly like that of the terra-cotta amphoras found in Qumran, which held the 800 or more manuscripts of the Essene library. In effect, amphoras were very versatile containers in which anything could and would be stored, from oil to grain to books. At the very bottom of that container there must have been some water, a small amount but enough to dampen the lower part of the cloth. This reconstruction seems to open a new and promising path of research. No doubt that kind of earthenware container was a highly commonplace object, made all over the Middle East and certainly not only in Qumran, but the community that lived in isolation on the Dead Sea shore had several features that might have made it a safe refuge for the earliest Christians, persecuted by the Jerusalem authorities almost from the time of Jesus's death. At any rate, if Salcito and Guerreschi's reconstruction is correct, it argues for a phase in the Shroud's history in which this object was not exhibited to the veneration of the faithful, but, on the contrary, hidden: Whoever raised the lid would not have seen anything but a featureless mass of cloth, too tightly turned in on itself to show even the abundant marks of blood. As is known, Jewish tradition held blood in horror and saw it as necessary to destroy anything that had come into contact with corpses, being in the highest degree impure and able to pollute people, things, and places." (Frale, B., 2012, "The Templars and the Shroud of Christ," Skyhorse Publishing: New York NY, p.171)
I then realised that I had missed the commenter's point, thinking only of the water, not the fact that this would indeed "suggest" that the Shroud was stored folded tightly in an earthenware jar at a time when "it was in peril," namely in the early first century when the tiny Christian church was being persecuted by its far more numerous enemies, the Jews (Acts 8:1-3; 11:19; 12:1-3)."
On 23 April I published a comment under my 2015 post, "The man on the Shroud #8: The evidence is overwhelming that the Turin Shroud is authentic!" from a Bob Mullins who is an Elder in a Surrey UK Christian church. His first line was: "Stephen... youclaim [sic] that the shroud is genuine, yet this is contrary to scripture which surely must be the final authoratative [sic] evidence." My interim reply was:
"Bob. Thanks for your comment. I am very busy with my current post, so I will reply to your comment when I have time. In the meantime, see my post of 11 July 2012: "`according to John chapter 20, Jesus was wrapped in linen cloths (plural) ... If Scripture is correct ... lets throw out the shroud'" in response to a comment of 31 May 2012 under my post, "My critique of `The Pray Codex,' Wikipedia, 1 May 2011," where a reader made the same logical error as you, that if there were two (or more cloths) in the Tomb, one of them cannot be the Shroud."
I had since decided to respond to Bob's comment in a separate post, which will be next after this one.

My radiocarbon dating hacker theory: As can be seen above, I did not blog about my hacker theory in April.

My book: In April I completed the "Sixth century" and "Seventh century" of "Chapter 6, "History and the Shroud," in the dot-point outline of my book, "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Sheet of Jesus!" (see previous).

Pageviews: At midnight on 30 April 2018, Google Analytics [Below (enlarge)] gave this blog's "Pageviews all time history" as 885,877. This compares with 735,259 (up 150,618 or 20.5%) from the same time in April 2017. It also gave the most viewed posts for the month (highest uppermost) as: "The Shroud of Turin: 2.6. The other marks (5): Coins over eyes," May 10, 2013 - 329; "The Shroud of Turin: 3.3. The man on the Shroud and Jesus were scourged," Jul 15, 2013 - 185; "Re: Shroud blood ... types as AB ... aged blood always types as AB, so the significance of this ... is unclear," Mar 18, 2011 - 154; "Three-dimensional #20: The man on the Shroud: The evidence is overwhelming that the Turin Shroud is authentic!," Feb 5, 2017 - 138; and "X-rays #22: The man on the Shroud: The evidence is overwhelming that the Turin Shroud is authentic!," Apr 20, 2017 - 112.

As can be seen on the map above, China is white, indicating little or no pageviews of my blog from there when once China was dark green, indicating many pageviews. So presumably the atheistic Chinese government has blocked my Shroud of Turin blog as a threat to their shaky anti-Christian worldview! However, see 08May18 where on a different day and/or time, China was light green on Google Analytic's map for my blog, indicating it is not being totally blocked.

Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]

Posted: 6 May 2018. Updated: 4 June 2018.

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