The Shroud of Turin

Very simply, Jesus of Nazareth is the biggest celebrity in history.  For centuries individuals have been in awe of his life and his story and will go to great lengths to prove or disprove his immortal qualities with paintings, stories, and books.  Being that there are so many accounts of his life that include some variation it is hard to understand the truth.  The differences begin in the recent years following His death and continue into present day.  Also, there is the possibility that details are included or excluded intentionally to persuade the reader in favor of the author.  This is why it is so hard to watch a film like The Shroud.  In the forty-five minutes of screen time that includes information that supports and opposes the cloth being the shroud used to burry Jesus Christ I was left with many questions and conflicted as to which side I believed.

Being that this course is taking an ethnocentric perspective towards Christianity and its history I was thinking about the point brought up about the shroud being a forgery.  The argument was that it was not possible for artists two-thousand years ago to forge such a complex piece.  Is that just modern artists and scientist believing that earlier cultures were too ‘primitive’ to be capable of such work?  The pollen dust was a very convincing argument for the geographic regions that the shroud had been.  Is it possible that once people believed that this cloth was left for the ‘us’ by Jesus of Nazareth not that it was discovered at the burial location that it began its journey?  The blood stains that were identified (chemically by the scientists who performed the ‘theoretical autopsy’) were left in the motion of a body in a crucified position, but if the cloth didn’t come into contact with the body until after in was taken down from the cross shouldn’t the bloodstains be pooled as such? 

This film was very interesting and gave a lot of well researched information about the shroud, but after it was finished I was left with more questions than answers.  I love the story and the idea that such an important piece of history was able to be preserved but there is still the idea in the back of my head that this was a very successful forgery created by a clever artist about a man with the most recognizable face in history - even though his face hasn’t actually been seen in over two thousand years.