One Very Simple Clue Proves The Shroud of Turin A Fraud

Even if the Shroud [of Turin] dated to [the time of Jesus], that would not mean that it was necessarily the Shroud of Jesus, or even, for that matter, a shroud. The cloth seems to have a human impression, perhaps like a man crucified. However, it is widely accepted that crucifixion was the most common way to execute people in the first century CE.

The man depicted on the Shroud strikes many people as being Jesus because it “looks like Jesus”. That’s because it “looks like” traditional representations of Jesus that have dominated western art for centuries: a man with flowing, shoulder-length hair and a neat short beard. [In fact], the face on the Shroud image looks exactly like late thirteenth/early fourteenth century depictions of Jesus: the hair flows in slightly stylized locks and the beard is fashionably forked in the style of that time.

But this is nothing like what we know about how a devout Jew of Jesus’ time would have looked. First century Jews kept their hair and beards short, since longer hairstyles were considered too “Hellenic”. …A devout Jew like Jesus would not have had long hair or a fashionable beard at all, but would have kept both trimmed to avoid association with paganism.

–Michael Alter, Jewish counter-missionary, in his book, The Resurrection and Its Apologetics: Jesus’ Death and Burial, Volume 1, excerpts from chapter 9

Gary: No matter what evidence you present to Shroud of Turin believers, they will reject the evidence as false. (Sounds like the MAGA crowd!) Present evidence that in 1988 three internationally known and respected research laboratories dated the Shroud to 1260-1390 CE and believers will say the companies made errors or were involved in a conspiracy to embarrass the Church. Present documents that Church officials in the fourteenth century branded the Shroud a fraud, declaring that the aristocratic family which owned the Shroud was only interested in monetary gain, and believers will claim that these reports are fabricated.

But there is one piece of evidence believers in the Shroud of Turn cannot explain away:

There is no evidence that the Shroud existed before the mid 1350s.

For more than 1,300 years Christian apologists had evidence of Jesus’ death, his burial cloth, and never said a word about it? Papias, Origen, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine, etc., etc., were aware that the Church possessed the very burial cloth of Jesus yet never said a peep about it??

Not believable!

Thirteen hundred years of silence on this issue is all any rational persons needs to know that the Shroud of Turin is another Christian lie; another lie told to dupe the gullible masses into believing their silly superstitions.

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End of post.