{"id":16775,"date":"2018-07-23T16:38:36","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T21:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=16775"},"modified":"2018-07-23T16:38:36","modified_gmt":"2018-07-23T21:38:36","slug":"gob-smack-of-the-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/07\/23\/gob-smack-of-the-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Gob-smack Of The Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Retraction Watch<\/strong><\/em> notes<\/a> that someone sincerely studied the long-debunked Shroud of Turin<\/em>:<\/p>\n

A year ago,\u00a0PLOS ONE<\/em>\u00a0published a study claiming that there was strong evidence that a person wrapped in the Shroud of Turin \u2014 according to lore, the burial shroud of Jesus Christ \u2014 had suffered \u201cstrong polytrauma.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, they retracted it.<\/p>\n

According to the\u00a0retraction notice<\/a>\u00a0for \u201cAtomic resolution studies detect new biologic evidences on the\u00a0Turin Shroud<\/i>,\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Concerns have been raised that the data presented in this article [1<\/a>] are not sufficient to support the conclusions drawn; the provenance, integrity and availability of the material used for the study have also been questioned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yes, they’re taking this old hoax seriously. Interested in an article or two on the subject? Skeptical Inquirer’s<\/strong><\/em> Joe Nickell has an article<\/a> that gives a quick sketch of the Shroud’s background:<\/p>\n

When the cloth first appeared in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, its owner could not, or would not, explain how he had acquired the most holy relic in Christendom. In 1389 a bishop reported to Pope Clement VII that it had been used in a faith-healing scam in which persons were hired to feign illness, then, when the cloth was revealed to them, to pretend to have been healed, \u201cso that money might cunningly be wrung\u201d from unsuspecting pilgrims. \u201cEventually,\u201d he said, after \u201cdiligent inquiry and examination,\u201d the \u201cfraud\u201d was uncovered. The cloth had been \u201ccunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it\u201d (D\u2019Arcis 1389).<\/p>\n

This sordid origin of the supposedly sacred relic is corroborated by much other evidence. According to Jewish burial practices, Jesus\u2019 body would have been washed and covered with burial spices, and the body wound in multiple cloths of plain linen. In contrast, the Shroud of Turin depicts an unwashed \u201cbody\u201d without any myrrh and aloes, is a single cloth woven in herringbone pattern (a medieval but not first-century weave), and shows an anachronistic under-and-over draping style.<\/p>\n

Moreover, there is no history of this cloth (there have been some forty True Shrouds) prior to its appearance in Lirey, and the image\u2019s elongated forms are those of French gothic art of that period. Iconographic elements also date the image to the middle ages. The radiocarbon date, obtained by three laboratories, was 1260\u20131390 ce, consistent with the ca. 1355 hoax and forger\u2019s confession. This is what is called corroborative evidence, and there is more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Regardless, the authors of the retracted article are not pleased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Retraction Watch notes that someone sincerely studied the long-debunked Shroud of Turin: A year ago,\u00a0PLOS ONE\u00a0published a study claiming that there was strong evidence that a person wrapped in the Shroud of Turin \u2014 according to lore, the burial shroud of Jesus Christ \u2014 had suffered \u201cstrong polytrauma.\u201d Today, they \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16776,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775\/revisions\/16776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}