Update: The following appeared briefly, but has now disappeared. No doubt I failed the audition. Never mind. We'll try again another day.
Shroud researcher Colin Berry (mentioned earlier) has recently made a significant modification to his belief that the body image was imprinted onto linen as a scorch from a heated template. He had originally speculated that the scorch technology had been chosen deliberately to represent either Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay or Geoffroi de Charney midway through being slowly-roasted to death at the stake in Paris, with a fanciful imprinting of hot tissue onto a burial shroud. In that view the de Molay image was later‘re-invented’ as that of the crucified Jesus by additions of blood at the appropriate wound locations described in the New Testament accounts.
The Templar link has now been abandoned. While Berry still considers the TS image to be a contact scorch, he proposes that it was intended to be seen by the very first cohorts of pilgrims at Lirey in 1357 as the genuine sweat (and blood) imprint left on linen by the recumbent crucified Jesus. In other words, the scorch technology was designed to simulate the appearance of an ancient sweat imprint, yellowed with age. That interpretation may have found a resonance with mid-14th century pilgrims, given that the highly venerated Veil of Veronica had been attracting large numbers at the same time, notably in the ‘Holy Year’ 1350, just 7 years prior to the first known Lirey display. The ‘Veronica’ too, according to legend, was initially a body imprint, solely of the facial features of Jesus, captured onto a bystander’s veil as she stepped forward in a charitable gesture to wipe sweat and blood from the face of Jesus as the latter passed by, bearing his cross to the site of execution at Calvary. Might this idea of sweat/blood imprinting have served as the inspiration for a medieval ‘thought experiment’ combining art and technology, imagining how a similar whole body imprint, both frontal and dorsal sides, of the recently deceased and traumatized (bloodied/sweat-soaked) Jesus might look after 13 centuries of ageing and yellowing?
Links to Berry's 'simulated sweat imprint' hypothesis
http://shroudofturinwithoutallthehype.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/the-shroud-of-turin-probably-not-miraculous-just-a-simulated-sweat-imprint-a-triumph-of-medieval-joined-up-thinking/
http://colinb-sciencebuzz.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/checklist-of-reasons-for-thinking-turin.html
Edit contributed by Colin Berry, Nov 23, 2014
Hopefully someone will be able to review and edit it soon, if deemed suitable, and even assist with inserting numbered references into text
Update: 10:25
Tried re-submitting my screed, but this time logging into wiki, which had fortunately remembered me from a long time ago, attempting to edit something or other (non-TS related).
My piece now appears like an old-fashioned ticker tape/ telegram at the end of the Recent Developments section, and I'm still none the wiser about how to format in wiki.
Update: 12:38
Was gradually getting my screed to appear in standard font, more by trial and error than anything else, when this message appeared:
November 2014
Hello, I'm McGeddon. I noticed that you made a change to an article, Shroud of Turin, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so! If you need guidance on referencing, please see the referencing for beginners tutorial, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Blogs are not reliable sources. You also shouldn't be writing about your own work in Wikipedia, per WP:COISELF. McGeddon (talk) 12:30, 23 November 2014 (UTC)OK, McGeddon, receiving you loud and clear. Yes, you're right: blogs are not reliable sources, and no, I shouldn't be writing about my own work. But if I don't, then who will? Why not provide a list of accredited editors to whom one can submit one's ideas for possible inclusion? Maybe that directory exists already, but for now I'll take a break from the Byzantine complexity of wiki. At least folk will in time know what I think ought to be seen in wiki - given I've supplied an easy-to-grasp perspective that may or may not be right, but took close on 3 years, much original experimentation with the scorch hypothesis and 250 or so blog postings to communicate, most of those picked up in the wider blogosphere. There are blogs and there are blogs...
13:30 Halleluja. That summary of my current position now looks approximately right.
How long it remains on view is anyone's guess. As I say, it should by rights be on view, being at least as valid - if not more so - than most of the other ideas that circulate in the world of shroudology.
"The Shroud of Turin image depicts a simulated sweat and blood imprint on linen of the crucified Jesus. The Shroud of Turin is a medieval fake". Just 26 words... No risk of sensory overload there.
14:00 Ideas are, needless to say, the academic's stock-in-trade. Without those ideas one might as well collect antiques or play golf or bridge. If one generates an idea that has occurred to no one else previously, then the important thing for the academic is to waste no time in establishing priority. Idea that are left lying around, with no obvious owner, can all too often be hoovered up by others!
Here's a rough-and-ready way of doing that, establishing priority that is, simply by entering (shroud turin sweat imprint) into Google, and finding one's own postings dominate the returns.
Narcissism? Maybe, but I see it as an expression of the competitive spirit (same as that golf, bridge etc).
14:20 The wiki entry has now disappeared into cyberspace. It will be back, sooner or later, such is the nature of ideas (previously compared with genies that escape from bottles). I'm a patient man. I can wait. This science bod has lots of other interests in the world of ideas. New unconventional ideas take a while to bed in.
14:50 Here's the wiki page on editorial interventions and revisions:
"Self promotion"? They don't mince their words, do they? Who are these people?
17:53 A few days ago I was saying that scorching off a heated template, like a brass crucifix, gave scarcely any so-called lateral ("wrap-around ") distortion, and while suggesting a reason for that did not provide any supporting data.
I've just done a comparison between imprinting off the heated crucifix, and imprinting off the same crucifix that has been coated in a sticky paint-like food stuff. The results confirm my hunch - the second of those shows serious wrap-around distortion, unlike the contact scorch.
 |
| Left: brass crucifix coated in "paint". Right: imprint left by coated crucifix on linen. Centre: a scorch imprint from the crucifix. Note the much greater lateral distortion of the paint image than the scorch. |
Reasons? Almost certainly to do with the greater tendency for "paint" to stick to linen, even at oblique angles round the sides, than for scorching to occur at those same locations where the cloth is not square on to the template.
Relevance to the "simulated sweat imprint" hypothesis? Quite a lot perhaps. Our medieval "shroud" forgers , deciding to create a sweat imprint on cloth may have originally experimented with liquid, pasty or tarry substances designed to simulate sweat imprints, but quickly found there was unacceptable lateral distortion. Then someone had the idea of scorching onto fabric, and found the distortion was then scarcely apparent for the reasons mentioned.
This blogger's initial thinking was that the TS image had to be a contact scorch, simply to accommodate so many of the Shroud characteristics, notably yellow colour, negative image, superficiality, and 3D properties especially. But might there have been a special reason for employing scorch technology? That led to the idea that the initial image was that of a semi-roasted Templar, a memento of events occurring in 1314 with the burning, or rather slow-roasting at the stake in Paris. Once the idea of simulating a sweat imprint occurred to this blogger, there was no longer any need to make a link with the Templars. The scorch technology was chosen as the simplest way to simulate a sweat imprint. Note that the scorch hypothesis has not been modified in any practical sense - merely the reasons for it having been deployed. The contact scorch was simply a simulated sweat imprint. What could be simpler than that?
18:25 This has just appeared (my bolding):
Charles Freeman commented on How to Become Famous.
in response to Dan:
Shall this become the future of the Shroud of Turin entries in Wikipedia, where every person with an idea posts his own theory out there? What about the guy in Australia who has discovered that if he tilts his laptop screen at a certain angle he can make Jesus’s eyes open, thus proving he is […]
I, for one, can hardly complain if Colin wishes to provide material to the Wikipedia site but I have provided a link to an article that was published in a respected history journal and which has, according to the Editor, had 20,000 hits. The article was read by expert advisers at my request and I assume, from the two month delay after I submitted the article to History Today before acceptance, peer- reviewed by their advisory committee. It is entirely up to the editor of the Wikipedia article ,of course, but might I suggest that Colin provides some evidence that he has academic support for his theories or we will have Stephen Jones joining in too.
What I wrote for wiki was not a theory. It was a simple all-embracing idea that explains HOW the TS image was made, i.e. as a thermal imprint on linen, and WHY it was made, i.e. to simulate a sweat imprint.
Note that it's an idea, an hypothesis. Hypotheses are there to be tested, not only by me, but others too.
There is no need for my IDEA to go to peer-review. It is JUST AN IDEA (and I happen to think a good one, though I say it myself).
19:30 An hour or two ago, I had been toying with the idea of pointing out the inconsistency of wiki editing, pointing out that my name had previously appeared in the 'Shroud of Turin' entry for observations that supported the scorch hypothesis - namely that the 1532 scorch marks showed 3D properties. That was accompanied by two references to my BLOGS, not peer-reviewed work. I now discover that someone has deleted me from the wiki page, along with the new submission, presumably to forestall the charge of inconsistency. Meanwhile 'anti-scorch' references remain, ones that also rely on non-peer reviewed work. Had I engaged in "self-promotion" to get that initial mention? Nope. It's my ideas I promote, not "me". But I wouldn't expect the blue-pencil censorship mentality to know that. I wouldn't expect the blue-pencil censorship mentality to know much at all about real people and the real world, in or out of academe.
I made a decision some years ago to avoid the activist side of wiki - so no writing new entries or (with one lapse of resolution, the attempt to correct existing ones. I'm hugely relieved now I did so. What a jungle! What a platform for control freakery, for over-blown egos!
23:20
My miffed response to some of the feedback via wiki's "Talk" facility:
I concluded my account with:
"Links to Berry’s ‘simulated sweat imprint’ hypothesis"
Note the term "hypothesis", meaning idea. So where's the conflict of interest in expressing an idea? Where's the self-promotion in expressing an idea? Why bandy around these silly terms in a way that totally misrepresents this researcher's interest in the Shroud? Are you aware that I have published over 250 postings on my science buzz and specialist Shroud sites, many with original research findings you will not find elsewhere? As for deleting the earlier reference to my scorch findings that someone else, not I, chose to publicize, that is just small-mindedness.
My IDEA is any original one, as you can check for yourself by googling, that can be expressed in a few words, and which does not need "peer review" to which incidentally I am no stranger:
The faint yellow Shroud body image was almost certainly an attempt to simulate a sweat imprint on linen, as if from a recently crucified man. In reality it was probably a thermal imprint ("scorch mark") from a heated 3D or bas relief template.
Do you not consider that folk who consult wiki have a right to be informed of the latest thinking? Do you not understand the difference between hypotheses that invite further experimentation and tendentious claims?
Colinsberry (talk) 23:07, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
Colin Berry PhD
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