The (The image of and or the Holy Mandylion) My Summary I have concluded that there are several data points proving that The Shroud of Turin is legitimate and was created in the first century in actually 33AD (carbon dating aside.) The only thing taken on faith is that, is this cloth the burial cloth of the man called of Nazareth. The first data point is of a 10 th century codex, Codex Vassianus Latinus located in the , found by Gino Zaninotto. The other location for the same documents is held in the University of Leiden, Netherlands. This codex has an 8th century account of a man named Smera of . He recorded a story which had occurred around the time of the crucifixion of Jesus. “King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body. In Latin [non tantum] “faciei figuram sed totius corporis figuram cernere poteris.” The story goes that King Abgar of Edessa was ill and requested from Jesus a cure to his life ending illness. He supposedly received a holy letter from Jesus via one of 72 diciples named Thaddeous of Edessa and is cured. This creates the Christian legend “The ” In eastern Orthodoxy “The Holy Mandy-lion.” King Abgar who was actually named Abgarus V of Edessa was called Abgar because the Greeks and Assyrians could not articulate his real name. The first account of an image on a cloth is of a court historian named Porcopius of Caesarea after a 525 AD flood of the Daisan tributary next to Edessa. He records the discovery of a cloth bearing the facial features of a man discovered hidden in a wall above the gates of the city. The next recorded account of this cloth is by Evagrius Scholasticus in his Ecclesiastical History of 593AD. He attributed the repelling of the Persians in 544 to a “God-made image.” The cloth was moved to Constantinople in the 10 th century and then was removed by the 4 th crusade in 1204 AD and given to the king of France, King Louis the IX (9 th ). It disappeared in the French revolution. A priest and the Vatican feared it’s destruction during the revolution and moved it to Turin, Italy. Why the drawn out following of a cloth from the 5 th to 12 th century. The people believe this is the burial cloth of Jesus. There accounts for the image that eludes general descriptions used for paintings at that time. I believe it lead to the ancient’s use of the terms such as “God-made image” “not made by hand.” I suspect while not provable these are the early accounts of the Shroud of Turin aka The Image of Edessa aka The Holy Mandy-lion, as put forth by the Journalist who believed the cloth was folded in four thereby only showing the face in a wooden framed container.

The second data point, which supports the first data point, is from a Swiss criminologist Max Frei. He was a forensic criminologist and secured pollen samples from the shroud during the STRUP investigation. He identified fifty-eight different types of pollen and found forty-five were from the Jerusalem area, six were from the eastern Middle East. One pollen sample grows exclusively in Constantinople, and two are native to Edessa , (now known as , Turkey). The Nordic people (Switzerland , Netherlands and Belgium etc..) were the first to do Pollen analysis until Lennart von Post in 1916 laid the foundation for modern pollen analysis. Which would later become palynology, which was coined in 1944 by Hyde and Williams following a correspondence with a Swedish geologist named Antevs.

The third and subsequent data point is dirt particles removed from the Shroud. The particles were examined by Joseph Kohlbeck of Hercules Aerospace Company and Richard Levi-Setti of The Enrico Fermi institute. They found using a high resolution microprobe that the spectra of the chemical signatures between travertine aragonite limestone found in the shroud were the same as the limestone in the ancient tombs of Jerusalem. This data point places the shroud in the 1 st century Jerusalem tombs.

An interesting data point is the blood stains on the shroud. There are some who have tried to make them out as painted on using some simple medieval iron base pigment. However Alan Adler and Heller studied the redden spots and found with scientific certainty that Porphyrin, bilirubin, albumin, and protein made up the red spots all components of hemoglobin. Pier Luigi Baima Bollone working independently concurred with Heller and Adler identifying the blood as AB. STURP sent blood flecks to State University of New York (SUNY), Binghamton. Dr. Andrew Merriwether, who does the ancient blood analysis in this laboratory at SUNY, said he was almost certain the stains were blood but the DNA was badly fractured and he could not type it or identify the nature of providence i.e. male or if it was from middle-east. Skeptics argue someone probably left the blood sample while handling the cloth. They also argued that the blood stains are unrealistically neat. I really think the skeptics are stretching the hypothetical to ridiculousness in opposition to the stains on the shroud as being real blood.

Although doubters seeming think that the carbon dating is the final word on the cloth’s legitimacy. One can see that there is evidence that this cloth is from the first century and did in fact wrap a badly tortured man. Is this man imprinted in the Shroud of Turin Jesus of Nazareth? That is where faith makes its entrance into all of this. I think one could discount opposition to this cloth being around at the time of Jesus Christ and embraced said faith that the Shroud is real. I believe more so than ever before since rummaging around all the investigations that have been done to the Shroud. The carbon dating may have been skewed by bacteria kill in the 13 th century fire after all it’s how we in the country smoke meat to preserve it from bacteria. The other idea supporting a carbon dating anomaly could be that a piece of the 13 th century patch cloth may have been sampled (by accident) thereby skewing the date.

In conclusion I think Jesus would not care if one believes in the cloth or not, being one who did not seek personal recognition. I think he would want us to understand and follow God’s teachings as a way to live a peaceful fulfilling life. Yes that would be a way of honoring Jesus sacrifice and suffering.

'Long is the way , and hard , that out of hell leads up to light.' (Milton, the Divine Comedy)

Eduardo Flores © February 8 th 2014