|
|---|
Friday, April 22, 2011
Sometimes it seems to me that everything is related to
Polish-Jewish relations.
Of course to a mathematician everything
revolves around equations, and to a politician, everything is political.
In April of 2000 my friend Don Freidkin (Polish-Jewish ancestry,
now married to a Polish Catholic) was kind enough to give me a documentary about
the Shroud of Turin. I was so fascinated I watched the documentary several
times, back to back.
The many extraordinary features of
the Shroud defy easy explanation. Swiss criminologist Max Frei identified pollen grains from Israel on the
shroud.
German master textile restorer, Mechthild
Flury-Lemberg, reports shroud features that date it to first
century Israel.
Secondo Pia's 1898 photographs
confounded the world – these photographs discovered a shroud feature that had
previously been invisible. The shroud is a photographic negative. These
images were so shocking, Pia was accused of fraud.
Artist
Ray Downing claims that the shroud contains three dimensional
information.
The man on the shroud shows what appear
to be marks left by a Roman whip. (Discussion here. Photo here.)
One could go on, and on, and on. Science has been over the
shroud with numerous technologies and instruments and yet no universally
accepted explanation for it has emerged.
What I saw on
that documentary that Don sent me, though, was that the humanities had been all
but ignored. The hard sciences were offering their questions, and answers, but
the humanities should be heard from, too.
I drew up a
list of questions that a humanities scholar might ask about the shroud. I sent
my questions to Barrie M. Schwortz,
one of the talking heads on the documentary. I was astounded when Mr. Schwortz
wrote back to me, and offered to place my post to him on his award-winning,
essential website, www.shroud.com. I
include my comments, in full, below. You can also see them on this page, almost halfway down.
I still have these questions. As far as I know, no shroud
debunker has even tried to answer them.
***
Barrie M. Schwortz is the go-to expert on the shroud. He
maintains an award-winning website that archives the full-text of countless,
detailed, published, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. This library is a
priceless gift to humanity. We all owe Barrie Schwortz our gratitude.
In August of 2009, I emailed Barrie and asked him a question.
You identify yourself as an Orthodox Jew, but as someone who believes that the
Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. How do those two features
fit into your one life?
Barrie told me to phone him with
this question, and I did. We talked for an hour and a half.
It was a private conversation, and I never received permission to repeat
what we said to each other, so I won't repeat anything Barrie said here. I will
say, though, that I discovered that Barrie is of Polish-Jewish descent. Needless
to say, as soon as our phone call was over, I sent Barrie the chapter of "Bieganski"
that appeared here.
Since today is Good Friday, I post, below, the questions that
someone in the humanities, rather than the hard science questions that have
been focused on so far, might ask about the Shroud of Turin.
***
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 18:02:40 -0500 (EST)
From: danusha veronica goska
Dear Barrie Schwortz:
The shroud has been subjected
to imaging analysis by NASA scientists, to carbon dating, and to analysis,
performed by criminologists and botanists, of the pollen particles found on its
surface. Forensic pathologists have analyzed the death depicted on the shroud.
At least since Descartes, the West has come to regard religion and hard science
as polar opposite disciplines. It is this very intersection of religion and
hard science that intrigues, delights, and perhaps even threatens many, and
attracts many to the Shroud story.
In truth, though, and
perhaps counterintuitively, the hard sciences are limited in their ability to
crack the mystery of the shroud. This sounds contrary – science has come to be
understood as *the* source of definitive truth. In this case, though, hard
science has failed to provide an answer that satisfies the demands of Ockham's
razor.
William of Ockham (1285-1347/49), positied that, "Pluralitas
non est ponenda sine necessitate;" that is, "Plurality should not be
posited without necessity." In other words, Ockham's razor demands that,
of two competing theories, the simplest explanation is preferred.
The shroud compels exactly because there *is* no simple or
easy explanation. None of science's tests, including carbon dating, has changed
that. None have produced a simple explanation that meets the demands of Ockham's
razor.
One might argue, based on carbon dating, that the
shroud is a simple forgery, dating from the middle ages. That theory is not
best tested exclusively by hard science. Rather, insights from the social
sciences and the humanities are necessary in cracking this mystery.
I am not a hard scientist. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the
Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Folklore, like its fellow social
sciences, has demonstrated that human expressive culture follows rules, just as
surely as carbon decay follows rules. One does not need to be a social
scientist to understand this.
Suppose an archaeologist
were to discover, in an Egyptian tomb, a work of art that followed the
aesthetic prescriptions of Andy Warhol's 20th century American portrait of
Marilyn Monroe. Certainly, hard science would argue that ancient Egyptians
possessed all the technology necessary to produce such items of expressive
culture. Ancient Egyptians had pigments; they had surfaces on which to draw. Hard
scientists might see no mystery in a pharaonic Warhol Marilyn.
A non-scientist would have every reason to find such a blasé
attitude bizarre. Of course the ancient Egyptians could produce Warhol-like
art. The fact is, though, that they simply never did. Ancient Egyptians, like
all artists everywhere, followed the artistic mandates of their time and place.
True, art does change, but it changes organically, slowly, and
after leaving vast bodies of evidence of change in intermediary forms. For
example, as different as it is, art from Greece's Golden Age can be seen to
have grown from Egyptian art, in intermediary forms like Kouroi figures. The
shroud is as much an object of wonder and worthy investigation, in spite of
carbon dating, as would be an isolated pharaonic Warhol, or a rock song that
had been composed during the period of Gregorian Chant, or a Hopi vase that
someone somehow came to make during the high point of peasant embroidery in
Czechoslovakia. Yes, in each case, technology was available to create these
anomalous forms; however, as any layman might well point out, humans did *not*
choose to use available technology in order to create anomalous forms.
There are two consistently unaddressed flaws in the arguments
of those who contend that the shroud must be of medieval origin, created by
contemporaneously available technology. The first flaw is that even if
technology had been available to create an image with all the remarkable
features of the shroud, there is no way to explain *why* an artist would have
done so.
This question must be explored not via carbon
dating, NASA imaging, or pollen tests, but, rather, by comparison with other
relics from the medieval era. I have not seen research by experts in medieval relics
that attempts to compare and contrast the shroud with comparable artifacts from
the medieval era. Does the shroud look like other relics, or does it not? If,
as I suspect is true, it does not look like other relics from that era, then it
behooves anyone who argues for a medieval date to explain exactly why. Those
who argue this position must tell us why the equivalent of a Warhol portrait
has been found among Egyptian artwork where the laws of human expressive
culture dictate that it plainly does not belong.
In the
writings of church reformers like Erasmus and Martin Luther, one can read
descriptions of medieval relics. In fact, many relics once popular in the
medieval era can be visited even today. Reformers like Erasmus and Luther
expressed open contempt at the gullibility of the Christian masses. Bones that
were obviously animal in origin were treated as if the bones of some dead saint.
Random chips of wood were marketed as pieces of the true cross; random swatches
of fabric were saints' attire.
Why, in such a lucrative
and undemanding marketplace, would any forger resort to anything as detailed
and complex as the shroud? Why would a forger resort to an image that would so
weirdly mimic photography, a technology that did not exist in the Middle Ages?
Well, one might argue, the forger created the highly detailed,
anomalous shroud in order to thoroughly trick his audience. This argument does
not withstand analysis. The relic market is profoundly undemanding. It was
profoundly undemanding in the Middle Ages; it is barely more demanding today.
The Ka'bah of Islam, the millions of Shiva lingams found
throughout the Hindu world, the venerated sites of Buddha's footfall or Buddha's
tooth, the packages of "Mary's Milk" on sale to Christian pilgrims in
Bethlehem, are all contemporary relics that attest to the willingness of
believers to believe in items that might look, to others, like simple rocks or
standard, store bought powdered milk.
The faith in
relics is not limited to the large, world religions; New Age is similarly flush
with relics of a provenance, that, to non-believers, may seem comical at best. For
example, a speech well beloved by New Agers, titled "Chief Seattle's
speech," has long been known to have been written by a white Christian man
living in Texas. This knowledge has not stopped many New Agers from believing
that the speech issued, miraculously, from Chief Seattle.
The shroud does more than not follow the simple rules of relic hawkers. The
shroud not only does not follow the laws of the expressive culture of medieval
relics, it defies them. For example, blood is shown flowing from the man's
*wrist,* not his hands. It is standard in Christian iconography to depict Jesus'
hands as having been pierced by nails. This was true not only of the medieval
era, but also today. What reason would a forging artist have for defying the
hegemonic iconography of the crucified Jesus? Anyone who wishes to prove a
medieval origin for the shroud must answer that question, and others, for
example:
Items of expressive culture are not found in
isolation. They are not found without evidence of practice. If one excavates an
ancient site and finds one pot, one finds other pots like it, and the remains
of failed or broken pots in middens.
If the shroud is a
forgery, where are its precedents? Where are the other forged shrouds like it? Where
is there evidence of practice shrouds of this type? If the technology to create
the shroud was available in medieval Europe, where are other products of this
technology? Humankind is an exhaustively exploitative species. We make full use
of any technology we discover, and leave ample evidence of that use. Given the
lucrative nature of the forgery market, why didn't the forger create a similar
Shroud of Mary, Shroud of St. Peter, Shroud of St. Paul, etc.? And why didn't
followers do the same?
I'm not attempting here to prove
the shroud to be genuine. I am insisting that hard science alone cannot tell us
the full truth about the shroud, and that ignoring the obvious questions posed
by the humanities and the social sciences leaves us as much in the dark about
the shroud as ever.
0 Comments:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
LinkWithin
