Holy Shroud! Was resurrection story inspired by the cloth?

[FarCenter]

The Shroud of Turin has been seen as many things over the past 620 years, ranging from true burial cloth of the risen Jesus to clever medieval fake, but Cambridge art historian Thomas de Wesselow puts together a 448-page-long case for one of the lesser-known theories in his new book, "The Sign": that the shroud's negative image of a naked, bloodied man was really produced by Jesus' decomposition, and that the stories of his resurrection were inspired by the display of that cloth to his earliest disciples.

"The message really is that the Shroud of Turin is authentic," de Wesselow told me. "This is the only rational way of understanding this image. It can be understood entirely naturalistically. There's no reason to invoke a miracle to explain the image."

De Wesselow acknowledged this could be a hard sell for believers as well as for skeptics. "There are two big things I am arguing against," he admitted.

He's already taking flak from both sides.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/04/11020390-holy-shroud-was-resurrection-story-inspired-by-the-cloth

[arcane1]

1. "This is the only rational way of understanding this image"

Umm...

[unblock]

2. mythical resurrection stories go waaay back, long before jesus.

it's not at all necessary for a shroud to exist or be "real" in any way for a resurrection myth to be attached to jesus.

[provis99]

3. the guy's a crackpot. the Shroud is a medieval fake.

[Eddie Haskell]

4. It's real

and it's spectacular.

[rurallib]

5. but it actually belonged to MITHRA

[mr blur]

6. What's the chance that a Jewish middle-Eastern man

died looking remarkably like a white, Western-European?

[rug]

7. Looks Belgian to me.

[Nihil]

8. I'd say French ...

... from Burgundy or what later became Franche-Comté ... but, as always, it is merely MHO ...

[rug]

9. Let's split the difference, Luxembourg!