[Vision2020] The Shroud is a Total Hoax!

[Donovan Arnold]

Nate, Dr. Cheng, and Visioneers,

I do not need a doctor or scientist to confirm for me that the Shroud is a 
total hoax. This clearly is just a piece of art or a fraud. Anyone that 
really believes this could really be an image of Jesus, or any other person, 
need only understand the following.

Look at the images from the following site, although the site is a 
conspiracy site, it has good photos of the Shroud. 
http://home.hetnet.nl/~shroud_turin/


1)	The person portrayed in this image has arms way too long for his body. It 
is true that different people have different lengths of arms. However, no 
person has arms so long they can grab their knees standing straight up. If 
you look at the whole image of the man you will see that his arms extend 
outward, bend at the elbow, then back toward the body again and are still 
long enough to modestly cover his groin area. No other person has been able 
to accomplish this feat in the way it is demonstrated in this image. In 
fact, I wonder how much difficulty he would have eating with arms that long. 
Now, I am not saying you cannot cover your groin lying down. But not with 
the elbows that far out at that angle, and certainly not without raising 
your shoulders off the ground (using muscles while conscious). If you do not 
believe me, try it. Lie down just like the image is shown, make sure your 
elbows are to the side of your body, not over your abdomen, and cover the 
groin area of your body, and then relax all your muscles like you would be 
if you were dead.  Can you do it? If so, your name is probably Gumby or you 
are not doing it the same way that is demonstrated in the image.

2)	If a man did fit in that cloth he probably would have been noticed by 
everyone being that he would be 6 foot 8 inches tall but only 2 ½ inches 
thick. First, I am not going to argue that Jesus could not have been 6 ft 8 
inches, it is possible even back then and to not have it even mentioned in 
the Bible. Although this should put some doubt into some people’s head. What 
I am going to strongly argue though is that Jesus Christ was not just a few 
inches thick. The shroud shows the image of a man from the front and the 
back. The image of the front of the man and the image of back of the man are 
next to each other, head to head. The space or gap is not wide enough on the 
cloth to wrap around top of a human’s head, they are just a few inches 
apart. This means that if a man was in that shroud, they would have to be 
thinnest man in existence.


3)	Gravity seems to not have an effect on the man in the cloth.  First, his 
arms, as big and long as they were, would fall to his sides. Second, his 
hair would fall back, not look like it had 24 ounces of ultra hold styling 
gel in it. Third, blood appeared to still be pumping in his body despite 
being dead because he was bleeding out of his forehead and blood was not 
pooling in the bottom of his back, legs and head like all other corpses. I 
would tend to believe that if they were going to fix his hair and rap him in 
clean expensive cloth they would wipe away all the blood around all the 
wounds, not just some blood around some of the wounds.

Yes we can argue about the radio carbon dating, the flora in the shroud, the 
weave of the cloth, and the blood type all we want. But the bottom line here 
is that the image of the person is not a real person because it is 
anatomically incorrect. While I am not an artist, or a chemist, and thus I 
do not know the chemicals and oils used to best recreate this image, I am 
willing to bet it went something like this.

A person or group of people wanted to create a shroud that demonstrated the 
wounds of Christ. This was either done for artistic reasons or fraudulent 
reasons. My guess is it was done for fraudulent reasons because the author 
might otherwise want to be known. It was probably made by the Church, large 
in size 15 ft long, to carry from village to village to get peasants to 
confirm their faith in Christ and give money to the Church.

First, the artist(s), or conmen read the Bible and documented all the wounds 
that Christ would have received. They painstakingly made sure every mark and 
wound that was known that Christ received, right down to the number of 
whippings, could be seen on the shroud. They did one side of the shroud, and 
then later they did the other side. Had someone actually been inside the 
shroud, they would have realized the error that the head imagines were too 
close. But this is not why the heads are too close to each other.  The head 
is also too small for the body. Put these two facts together and it makes 
total sense. They did the body first, realized there was not enough space 
between the back of one head and the front of the head to actually wrap 
around a head. So they were forced to make the head even smaller in 
proportion to his body and hope that nobody would notice the lacking space 
between the two images and the small head for the body. There has recently 
been a discovery of a second image of the face on shroud, most likely a 
practice face or error in production, that is unless you think Christ was 
two faced (Ahh, bad joke I know).  They did not redo the image with a 
different cloth because the cloth they used was extremely expensive and work 
was  difficult and far progressed before they made the major errors.
	The second major factor they had to deal with was the modesty of the body. 
They needed to be able to have an image that showed details of a slash from 
a whip and a puncture wound from a thorn, but not other parts of the body 
they could not display in public (the naughty parts). The answer to this was 
to put the image into the traditional Adam and Eve pose, the hands crossing 
the groin area. The trouble with this is that an anatomically correct person 
could not do this lying down relaxed and look at all natural. So the 
artists, or con men, drew out the arms really long and crossed them so they 
could display their work of art, or fraud, without publicly shaming Jesus. 
Of course the other problem with this pose is that it is really hard to hold 
your wrist and keep it from falling to the sides when you are dead.
	I could go on with more and more errors that were made on this that make it 
all the more suspicious.  What are the odds of every wound mentioned in the 
Bible being so apparent? The miracle seems to be the Shroud, not the 
resurrection. In either case, I am not going to worship a 2 ½ inch thick 
man, he is way to shallow for me. :)

So that is my take on the Shroud of Trouble.

Take Care,

Donovan J Arnold



>From: Frank Cheng <ifc_2000 at yahoo.com>
>To: Vision2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com>
>Subject: [Vision2020] Shroud
>Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 17:18:29 -0800 (PST)
>
>Hello All,
>
>I posted this at a Christian blog site that had much
>debate about Nathan Wilson's Shadow Shroud. So it's
>mostly critical of his method but does discuss recent
>aspects of the Shroud of Turin.
>----------------------------------------------
>Hello,
>
>Mark K let me know of the debate going on here. I am
>chemist at the University of Idaho and know about the
>chemistries of the Shroud of Turin (ST) and something
>about Nathan Wilson’s shroud. Nathan has produced a
>good looking copy. However, it doesn’t match the
>scientific results of ST examinations. Nathan used a
>flax cloth. Flax and many plant materials contain a
>pigment called lignin. Lignin sun-bleaches to a
>lighter color. The ancient Egyptians knew about this:
>
>http://schools.lwsd.org/ICS/ISProjects/ivy6hathi/clothing.htm
>
>And used the sun-bleaching process to produce white
>linen from flax. The problem with Nathan’s approach is
>many-fold.
>
>1. The color hues on the ST is not due to lignin. It
>is a very superficial oxidation of fibers themselves.
>And only those supposedly in contact with the body
>(and the opposite side see below #2). What is very
>interesting is that only the outermost fibers have any
>color, about the width of a bacterium. Nathan’s work
>would not do this. See also:
>
>http://www.shroudstory.com/faq/turin-shroud-faq-12.htm
>
>2. The ST has a backside mirror image of the body
>(very faint) discovered by the same imaging techniques
>used by the spy satellites and magnetic resonance
>imaging machines. Nathan called this “ad hoc” on his
>web site but it is hardly so. His shroud won’t have
>that feature. The discover's web site:
>
>http://www.dim.unipd.it/misure/fanti/fanti-ingl.html
>
>the publication in a good quality peer-reviewed
>journal:
>
>http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1464-4258/6/6/001/
>
>Fanti is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at
>University of Padua.
>
>3. Lignin color isn’t stable, Nathan’s shroud image
>will be long gone in 100 years and the ST’s image has
>persisted for at least 700 years or more.
>
>4. There were no flat panes of glass of the size
>needed to fake ST using Nathan’s method in the years
>1200-1400 AD when it was supposedly faked. I am not a
>glass expert but I talked about this with medieval
>historians. Glass 2-3 feet in diameter was available
>but they were very wavy, full of bubbles, and had
>variations in frostiness across each pane. Overlaying
>several panes of this type of glass would not produce
>a clean figure. Lines and waviness would appear in the
>Wilson method of producing the ST fake. Glass of the
>type he would need did not appear until about 1700 AD.
>
>5. The ST is not a medieval fake. It might be an
>ancient one though. Recent chemical dating on the
>parts of the ST not rewoven by medieval hands put the
>date of the ST back to Roman times.
>
>Those are just a few of the problems. It is very
>disappointing to see the press runaway with this. They
>did not ask him any hard questions. He is not
>answering them at his web site either. He tends to
>blow off any science that conflicts with his shroud.
>
>If you are wondering as a scientist I cannot prove the
>ST as genuine nor can I prove it's forgery. Whimpy
>answer but that's the best I can do for now.
>
>If you have any questions just contact my office.
>
>All the best.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Also a recent exchange at a blog site:
>
>http://right-mind.us/archive/2005/03/25/2718.aspx#FeedBack
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Also you may want to least glance over the chemical
>dating paper that indicates the Shroud to be between
>1300-3000 years old not 700 as done by radiocarbon
>work in 1988:
>
>http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6THV-4DTBVHC-1&_user=10&_handle=B-WA-A-W-WE-MsSAYWA-UUA-AAUYDUBWCC-AAUZWYVUCC-YZVWZVCUC-WE-U&_fmt=full&_coverDate=01%2F20%2F2005&_rdoc=26&_orig=browse&_srch=%23toc%235292%232005%23995749998%23553672!&_cdi=5292&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=81e06062c69f518054be93094e326cda
>
>It is in a peer-reviewed journal. It was done by Ray
>Rogers, Ph.D. of Los Alamos National Lab.
>Unfortunately he died only a few weeks ago. I’m afraid
>he took a lot of expertise with him.
>
>Nathan Wilson could forward to me samples of his
>shroud and original material. I’m not a textile expert
>but I would be able to send them along to people that
>specialize in that field. He might be proven right
>about his hypothesis after all. I asked him last week
>and haven’t heard back. He did get back to me with
>high quality jpg’s. I had them sent along to an
>imaging expert who will examine them for 3-d
>characteristics. Nathan’s 3-d pictures at his web site
>are very noisy and really don’t show any such
>characteristics.
>
>http://www.shadowshroud.com/images.htm
>
>BTW the real Shroud has 3-d characteristics because it
>is basically a negative of a photograph. A painting
>wouldn’t do that. How that photograph got there on a
>flax shroud is a mystery.
>
>A recent National Geographic article:
>
>http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0409_040409_TVJesusshroud.html
>
>
>
>
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