On the other end of the religious spectrum, former high-school teacher and Catholic religious speaker David Roemer believes in Jesus' resurrection, but not the shroud's authenticity. Noted skeptic Joe Nickell told MSNBC's Alan Boyle that de Wesselow's ideas were "breathtakingly astonishing," and not in a good way Nickell has argued on multiple occasions that the shroud's spotty historical record and too-perfect image strongly suggest a counterfeit. These ideas are already receiving pushback, though de Wesselow says he's yet to get responses from people who have read his entire book. "The original conception of the resurrection was that Jesus was resurrected in a spiritual body, not in his physical body," de Wesselow said. He cites the early writings of Saint Paul, which focus on a spiritual resurrection, over the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, which were written later and invoke physical resurrection. When the Bible talks about people meeting Jesus post-resurrection, de Wesselow said, what it really means is that they saw the shroud. When they lifted the shroud to complete their work, they would have seen the outline of the body and interpreted it as a sign of Jesus' spiritual revival.įrom there, de Wesselow suspects, the shroud went on tour around the Holy Land, providing physical proof of the resurrection to Jesus' followers. It's likely, he says, that Jesus' female followers returned to his tomb to finish anointing his body for burial three days after his death. According to de Wesselow, there's no need to invoke a miracle when simple chemistry could explain the imprint. If de Wesselow's belief in the shroud's legitimacy is likely to rub skeptics the wrong way, his mundane explanation of how the image of Jesus came to be is likely to ruffle religious feathers. "From an art historian's point of view, it's completely inexplicable as a work of art of this period," de Wesselow said. Similarly, the body image is in negative (light areas are dark and vice versa), a style not seen until the advent of photography centuries later, he said. No one was painting that realistically in the 14th century, he said. "There's just nothing like it." Īmong the anachronisms, de Wesselow said, is the realistic nature of the body outline. "It's nothing like any other medieval work of art," de Wesselow said. That controversy still rages, but de Wesselow is convinced of the shroud's authenticity from an art history approach. This is also the same time period when records of the shroud begin to appear, suggesting a forgery.Ĭritics have charged that the researchers who dated the shroud accidentally chose a sample of fabric added to the shroud during repairs in the medieval era, skewing the results. Radiocarbon dating conducted in 1988 estimated the shroud to medieval times, between approximately A.D. Perhaps more problematic is the authenticity of the shroud itself.
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