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shadow shroud
Shadow Shroud Hypothesis of Nathan Wilson
Nathan Wilson, who teaches literature at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, ingeniously created an image that to the untrained eye looked something like the shroud. He wrote an article for Christianity Today. Wilson did not claim that he can prove it's a fake. What he said, as reported by the Discovery Channel, which also carried the story, was that it could have been easily forged by painting an image on glass. The glass was then used as a negative to selectively sun bleach a piece of unbleached linen, creating an image by making some areas lighter rather than darkening other areas. The Discovery Channel went on to report: Venerated by many Catholics as the proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave and dismissed by some scientists as a brilliant medieval fake, the shroud features the image of a man that is both three-dimensional and a photonegative. This gives a completely false picture of the controversy as being between Catholics and scientists. Who are these scientists? What about the scientists who think it might genuine? What about the Anglicans, the Protestants and the Evangelical Christians? The Discovery Channel did report on the Thermochimica Acta article by Rogers that argued that the 1988 carbon-14 dating actually used a sample cut from a rewoven portion of the shroud and not the original. This prompted an interesting conspiracy theory by Wilson that the new dating did not rule out his hypothesis of a forgery. According to Wilson. It is extraordinarily unlikely that a forger would use a cloth fresh off the loom. If I was some villainous Crusader, hoping to fake the burial shroud of Christ, the first thing I would do is obtain a burial cloth. And the best place to get one, as well as the cheapest, is from a tomb. Wilson never mentions how it might be that a shroud would not have decomposed in a tomb after several centuries. Nor did Wilson explain where a medieval forger would have obtained the 7 foot long panes of glass his forger needed. Such pieces of glass did not exist before the nineteenth century. The Discovery Channel also reported that, Wilson's experiment is also consistent with a 1970s analysis by the late Walter McCrone, a Chicago chemical microscopist, who maintained he had identified the pigment red ochre, and tempera, as the shroud's paint medium, placing it as a medieval painting created around 1355. But it is not consistent. McCrone argued that the images were painted. Wilson argued that they were not. It is moot. The chemistry of the shroud images is well understood. The image on the shroud, while it can be cleared with a reducing agent, it resists bleaching. By definition, Wilsons images could be bleached away. What Wilson created was chemically unlike the images on the shroud. Frank Chin, a chemistry professor at the University of Idaho, said of Wilsons so-called Shadow Shroud, You can make a glass of nerve toxin look like lemonade. That doesn't make it lemonade.
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