Stone Age People Not Ignorant: Challenge to Evolutionary View



Taken from: http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Earth/OldStarCharts.html



The Planet Earth:


Carved and Drawn Prehistoric Maps of the Cosmos





Ancient star chart carved in ivory mammoth tusk

[Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

A European researcher has interpreted carvings in a 32,500-year-old ivory tablet as a pattern of the same stars that we see in the sky today in the constellation Orion.



The tablet is a sliver of ivory from the tusk of a mammoth — a large woolly animal like an elephant. Mammoths are extinct today.



Carved into the ivory is what appears to be a carving of a human figure with outstretched arms and legs. The pose suggests the stars of Orion, according to Michael Rappenglueck, formerly of the University of Munich, known for his interpretation of ancient star charts painted on walls of prehistoric caves.



The ivory tablet has notches carved on its sides and back, which are not understood but might be an ancient pregnancy calendar to estimate when a woman would give birth.



The tiny piece of ivory was in a cave in the Ach Valley in the Alb-Danube region of Germany when it was discovered in 1979. Scientists used a process known as carbon dating to check the age of bone ash found next to the tablet. Carbon dating is used to determine the age of an old material by measuring its content of carbon 14. Results of carbon dating tests on the nearby bone ash suggested that the tablet might be between 32,500 and 38,000 years old. If correct, that would make it one of the oldest drawings of a human ever found.



Stone Age people. The tablet probably was carved by a member of the Aurignacian people. Little is known about Aurignacians, except that they moved into Europe from the east replacing the Neanderthals who had been living there.

Neanderthals were the original Stone Age "cavemen" who occupied Europe and parts of Asia and north Africa for 150,000 years before modern humans arrived. They made stone tools and other artifcats. Neanderthals now are an extinct human species.

Aurignacians were similar early humans. Like Neanderthals, they made stone tools as well as figures of stone and bone, graphic artwork, and clothing with adornment.

The Stone Age was a time when the earliest chipped stone tools were made, from about 750,000 years ago to about 15,000 years ago. That was a time when northern glaciers appeared and receded. Species related to humans were widespread. By the end of the period, numerous land mammals, such as mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, had become extinct.

A tiny artifact. The ivory tablet is small, measuring a mere 1.5 x 0.5 x 0.2 inches. The archaeologists working with it say they think that was its original size and that it is not a fragment of a larger artifact.

A human figure with legs apart and arms raised is on one side of the tablet. The figure's waist is narrow and its left leg is shorter than the right. Between the legs may be a sword.





The human figure could be a person praying or dancing. It could be half-man, half-cat. It might represent a god. By the very definition of pre-history, archaeologists don't know the myths of those ancient peoples who lived before humans started keeping records — before they started recording history.

Orion. Orion is one of the most noticeable constellations in Earth's sky. Betelguese is one of two prominent stars in Orion. Ancient Egyptians identified their god Osiris with Orion. In fact, Orion has had special significance for many cultures throughout history.



The Orion constellation is known to stargazers today as "the hunter." Does the ivory tablet depict the constellation of Orion as it was 32,000 years ago? Did the Aurignacian people also call it the hunter?



Michael Rappenglueck sees in the proportions of the human figure on the table a pattern corresponding to the pattern of stars that form the Orion constellation. He points out the slim waist, which corresponds to a belt of three stars crossing Orion. And, the left "leg" of the hunter in the constellation is shorter. The sword, which may hang between the legs of the figure on the ivory tablet, might correspond with a feature of the Orion constellation.



Pregnancy calendar. The 86 notches on the tablet may relate to the human gestation period.



The number 86 might have two significant meanings:

First, 86 is the number of days that must be subtracted from a year to equal the average number of days of human gestation.





Second, 86 is the number of days that the Orion star Betelguese is visible. Could this have linked human fertility with gods in the sky in the minds of the Aurignacian people?



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Ice Age Map of the Night Sky Painted in French Cave





Lascaux Caves ancient painted star map

[Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

A painted map of the prehistoric cosmos is on the wall of a famous Ice Age cave at Lascaux in central France.



Cro-magnon man — distant ancestors of humans living much later than the earlier Neanderthals and Aurignacians — painted the Lascaux caves with drawings of bulls, horses and antelope some 16,500 years ago. Thus, the map may be 16,500 years old.



The Ice Ages were cold periods in ancient history when glaciers descended across the northern continents and then receded. The temperatures experienced by humans and their ancestors alternated between cold and warm. Scientists say there have been at least four Ice Ages. Today, when people speak of "the Ice Age," they usually refer to the most recent glacial period, which ended about 8,000 years ago.



Summer Triangle. The painted walls of the Lascaux caves were discovered in 1940. The sky map was identified year later in a region of the Lascaux caves known as the Shaft of the Dead Man. Painted on to the wall of the shaft is a bull, a strange bird-man and a mysterious bird on a stick.



Since it was in the time we call pre-history — before people started recording history — no one knows if a cave could have been used as a kind of planetarium where stars were charted.



European researcher Michael Rappenglueck, however, suggests that it is a map of three particular stars — Vega, Deneb, Altair — that astronomers today refer to the Summer Triangle. Those stars are among the brightest objects in the sky during the middle of a northern summer. Rappenglueck sees the eyes of the bull, bird-man and bird as representing Vega, Deneb and Altair.



More palaeolithic shamanistic cosmography. A map that looks like the Pleiades star cluster also has been spotted among the Lascaux frescoes. Another pattern of stars, drawn some 14,000 years ago, has been found in a cave in Spain.





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Oldest Lunar Calendar Painted in a Lascaux Cave





Lascaux Caves ancient painted lunar map

[Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

A dappled brown horse with dark mane painted on the wall of the prehistoric Lascaux caves in France 15,000 years ago might be part of the oldest lunar calendar.



German researcher Michael Rappenglueck has interpreted the painting as symbolic of the phases of the Moon. He sees groups of dots and squares painted by Cro-magnon man alongside images of bulls, horses and antelope as depicting the 29-day cycle of Earth's natural satellite.



Cro-magnon man. Cro-magnon man thrived during the Ice Age by living in the temperate Dordogne Valley while the rest of Europe was held in the grip of an ice age.



Dordogne is a river flowing from the Auvergne Mountains of south-central France 300 miles southwest to the Garonne River north of Bordeaux.



To protect the Lascaux caves from trampling by 21st century tourists, only a replica called Lascaux II is open to the public.



Phases of the Moon. One Lascaux painting of a deer is above a line of 13 dots. Rappenglueck sees those dots as picturing half of the Moon's monthly cycle. Thirteen dots would be one for each day the Moon can be seen in the sky. At the new Moon, when it vanishes from the sky, there is an empty square, symbolizing the absent Moon.



Beneath the dappled brown horse is a row of 29 dots — one for each day of the Moon's 29-day cycle as it passes through its phases in the sky. A series of dots that curve away from the main row might represent the time of the new Moon, when it disappears from the sky for several days.





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Seven Sisters are Mapped in a Lascaux Cave





Seven Sisters star map in Lascaux cave [Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]

Dots near a drawing of a Bull in the Lascaux cave may chart the cluster of stars modern astronomers call the Seven Sisters. Inside the bull are more spots that may represent other stars found in the same region of the sky.



Is the bull significant? Modern astronomers say this part of the sky is the constellation known as Taurus the Bull. Could ancient relatives of humans also have seen a pattern of stars that looked like a bull in that area of the sky 14,000 years ago?



Ancient Spanish star map. A map that may depict the Northern Crown constellation is painted on the wall of the Frieze of Hands area of the Cueva di El Castillo cave in the mountains of Pico del Castillo in Spain.







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Moon Stone Lunar Map in Ireland



What may be the oldest map of the Moon ever made is inside a 5,000-year-old Neolithic burial mound at Knowth in County Meath, Ireland. The few who have seen them in modern times say the crescent shapes seen in the pre-historic tombs are images of the Moon.



The burial complex at Knowth is the largest ancient monument in Ireland with many stone engravings and artifacts. It has the largest collection of megalithic art in Europe, including the circular and spiral patterns that may be lunar symbols. The mound's two tunnels are the longest cairn passages in Europe.



A tall chamber at the heart of the mound houses the map of the Moon that is reputed to be ten times older than any other.



The Neolithic lunar map was etched in the stone, named Orthostat 47, by pitting the rock with a lump of quartz. Carved into the rock are dark spots like those seen on the face of the Moon with the naked eye.



Stars and crescents representing the Moon also are on a large stone basin in a recess off the central chamber.





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Learn more:

Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies



Michael A. Rappenglueck, M.A.



The Cave of Lascaux



Paleolithic Shamanistic Cosmography: How is the Famous Rock Picture in the Shaft of the Lascaux Grotto to be Decoded? by Michael A. Rappenglueck, M.A.

Shroud of Turin Is Real, Scientists Claim, Citing New Evidence



Taken from:
http://www.christianpost.com/news/shroud-of-turin-is-authentic-scientists-claim-new-evidence-reignites-debate-video-65284/

inShare.0By Stoyan Zaimov , Christian Post Reporter


December 22, 2011
11:39 am

The Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the burial robe of Jesus Christ – is likely to be authentic in nature, Italian scientists have recently claimed.



Photo: (REUTERS/Claudio Papi)

A negative version photo of the Shroud of Turin, Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, revealing a face commonly associated with Jesus Christ, taken in August 1978.

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The ancient 14-foot long piece of cloth is said to hold remarkable imprints of a crucified man with long hair and a bearded face. However, critics insist the shroud in question is a forgery created in the Middle Ages, somewhere between 1260 and 1390.



Radiocarbon tests conducted in 1988 in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich seemed to prove that theory to be true, but were disputed due to claims that fibers from the cloth were used around that time period simply to repair the shroud, which would explain the skewed findings, The Telegraph reported.



Attempts in the past had been made to replicate the relic in order to prove that it is a fake, and although scientists from Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Development managed to create such a duplicate, they concluded that it would be impossible for anyone to have done the same with technology available in the Middle Ages:



"The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining ... is impossible to obtain in a laboratory," the experts said.



The leader of the project, Prof Paolo Di Lazzaro, explained that their research was based purely on the scientific evidence at hand and left theological interpretations up to the "conscience of individuals."



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Between 1978 and 1981, a group of 31 American scientists, called the Shroud of Turin Research Project, conducted 120 hours of X-ray and ultraviolet tests that arrived to the same conclusion.



"There are no chemical or physical methods known which can account for the totality of the image, nor can any combination of physical, chemical, biological or medical circumstances explain the image adequately," they said, according to the Telegraph.



A professor of chemistry at Pavia University, Luigi Garlaschelli, shared with The Independent: "The implications are... that the image was formed by a burst of UV energy so intense it could only have been supernatural. But I don't think they've done anything of the sort."



Shroud of Turin Not a FakeThe Shroud of Turin is kept in the royal chapel of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, and preserved in a temperature-controlled case. The relic, visited by millions of people each year, has never been formally denied or accepted by the Catholic Church.

Mystery solved? Turin Shroud linked to Resurrection of Christ



The Turin Shroud has baffled scholars through the ages but in his new book, The Sign, Thomas de Wesselow reveals a new theory linking the cloth to the Resurrection.



Black and white: The haunting face is now the most familiar image of the Shroud, representing for many the true face of Jesus By Peter Stanford



7:00AM GMT 24 Mar 2012



For centuries the Turin Shroud, regarded by some as the burial cloth of Jesus, by others as the most elaborate hoax in history, has inspired extraordinary and conflicting passions. Popes, princes and paupers have for 700 years been making pilgrimages the length of Europe to stand in its presence while scientists have dedicated their whole working lives to trying to explain rationally how the ghostly image on the cloth, even more striking when seen as a photographic negative, and matching in every last detail the crucifixion narrative, could have been created. And still a final, commonly agreed answer remains elusive, despite carbon-dating in 1988 having pronounced it a forgery.





















“That’s what first attracted me,” says Thomas de Wesselow, an engagingly serious 40-year-old Cambridge academic. “I’ve always loved a mystery ever since I was a boy.” And so he became the latest in a long line to abandon everything to try to solve the riddle of the Shroud.





















Eight years ago, de Wesselow was a successful art historian, based at King’s College, making a name for himself in scholarly circles by taking a fresh look at centuries-old disputes over the attribution of masterpieces of Renaissance painting. Today, he still lives in the university city – we are sitting in its Fitzwilliam Museum café – but de Wesselow has thrown up his conventional career and any hopes of a professorial chair to join the ranks of what he laughingly calls “shroudies”.





















“In academia, the subject of the Shroud is seen as toxic,” he reports, “and no one wants to open the can of worms, but try as I might I just couldn’t resist it as an intellectual puzzle.”





















For most “shroudies”, though, it is more than just intellectual. It offers that elusive but faith-validating proof that Jesus died exactly as the gospels say he did. But again it gets complicated, for the Vatican, since 1983 the owner of this hotly disputed icon, disappoints “shroudies” by limiting itself to declaring that the burial cloth is a representation of Jesus’s crucified body, not his actual linen wrap. And it has accepted the carbon-dating tests as conclusive.





















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De Wesselow dismisses those tests as “fatally flawed”. So, although he describes himself as agnostic, he now finds himself in the curious position of being more of a believer in the Shroud than the Pope. His historical detective work has convinced him, he insists, that it is exactly what it purports to be — the sheet that was wrapped round Jesus’s battered body when it was cut down from the cross on Calvary.





















But that isn’t the half of it. His new book, The Sign, the latest in a long line of tomes about the Shroud, makes an even more astonishing claim in its 450 pages (including over 100 of footnotes). It was, suggests de Wesselow, seeing the Shroud in the days immediately after the crucifixion, rather than any encounter with a flesh and blood, risen Christ, that convinced the apostles that Jesus had come back from the dead.





















If true, I point out, he is overturning 2,000 years of Christian history. But he doesn’t even blink over his teacup. He’s either a very cool, calculating chancer, single-mindedly out to make a quick buck with an eye-catching theory that caters for gullible readers of the likes of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail or Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, or he’s absolutely sincere. “I am an art historian,” he responds calmly, “not a theologian, so I can approach the problem from a new angle.”





















It feels like we’ve reached a moment for laying our cards on the table before we start examining the details of his theory. The exact nature of the Resurrection troubles me, as it does many Christians. Was it physical, against all the laws of nature but as the Church claims, or was it “symbolic”, as the Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, famously suggested in 1984?





















Jenkins’s use of the phrase “a conjuring trick with bones” may have caused outrage – and was, he said later, a misquotation – but his willingness to question a “literal” resurrection did not put him so far outside the Christian mainstream as is often suggested.





















“For my part I come from a standard Church of England background,” says de Wesselow (who was raised in Winchester; his exotic surname results from his Frenchified Russian ancestry). “Church was a familiar, likeable institution but it hasn’t impinged on my life too much.” The first challenge he faces is how to place the Shroud in first-century Jerusalem. The standard historical record of the Shroud – broadly endorsed by carbon-dating – traces its first appearance back to the 1350s in rural France, when a knight called Geoffrey de Charny put it on display in his local church. “But where did he get it from?” de Wesselow asks, perfectly reasonably.





















He highlights a connection between the French knight and the Crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204. “And we have a description of a cloth, that sounds very like the Shroud, that had been seen before that in Constantinople, described as the burial cloth of Jesus, that then goes missing and is never heard of again.” So, de Wesselow’s theory is that it was taken to France by the Crusaders as looted bounty.





















But what were the origins of the cloth in Constantinople? This brings us to the oddly named “Holy Mandylion” (man-dill-e-on), a long lost relic in Eastern Christianity, said to be the imprint of Jesus’s face. “The Mandylion was brought to Constantinople in 944,” says de Wesselow. “That is recorded. It was an object of fascination, said not to be made of paint but of blood, and described as a landscape shape, rather than a portrait.”





















The legend of the Mandylion is also given a reworking by de Wesselow. That cloth looted in 1204 was, he proposes, also the Mandylion. Its landscape format, he suggests with the aid of diagrams, was the result of it being the top fold of a bigger cloth – what we know as the Turin Shroud.





















It is an intriguing theory, with plenty of circumstantial evidence in those 100 pages of notes, and even mention of possible sightings back in the mid-sixth century, but nothing more precise. At the risk of sounding like an accountant, that leaves us 500 years short of first century Jerusalem.





















“Yes,” de Wesselow replies, with just a hint of impatience, “but we are sitting here in the Fitzwilliam Museum and in its display cases are plenty of objects whose exact provenance includes long gaps. That happens very often in art history. A Caravaggio turns up in the 19th century and we have no idea from where, but we can use science and detective work to attribute it to him.”





















In the case of the Shroud, that science includes two tests: one for pollen in the fibres that shows the cloth to be more than 1,300 years old, published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2005 “but ignored despite being good science”: and another by a textile expert, during a 2002 restoration, that found parallels between the Shroud’s warp and weave and those of first century Jewish cloths.





















What is becoming plain in our discussion is that in making his claims, de Wesselow has done very little first-hand research himself. His contribution has to be to gather up the work of others, re-examine past investigations (he draws heavily on the digging done by British author, Ian Wilson, a key figure before the carbon-dating tests, now living in retirement in Australia), and then tease out new conclusions. He is, essentially, taking existing pieces of a jigsaw and assembling them in a new and startling pattern.





















It is not a description he particularly likes when I put it to him, but neither does he substantially contradict it. Instead he admits to a dislike of the popular “personal quest” genre of books that walk and talk their way through whole continents attempting to solve, among other subjects, the mysterious configuration of the pyramids or the fate of Atlantis.





















“That always seems to me a very artificial way of going about it,” says de Wesselow, whose research by contrast was largely done at his desk or in libraries, save for one episode he recounts in the book when the connection between the Shroud and Resurrection came to him in a kind of eureka moment in the garden of his Cambridge house.





















Having established – at least for the purposes of argument – the Shroud in first century Israel, it is now time to turn to his potentially even more earth-shaking theory, namely that the Resurrection was a kind of optical illusion.





















Christianity teaches that Peter, James, Thomas, Mary Magdalene and up to 500 other disciples saw Jesus in the flesh, back from the dead, in the ultimate proof that he was God. De Wesselow rejects this “divine mystery” in favour of something that he believes is much more plausible.





















What the apostles were seeing was the image of Jesus on the Shroud, which they then mistook for the real thing. It sounds, I can’t help suggesting, as absurd as a scene from a Monty Python film.





















“I quite understand why you say that,” he replies, meeting me half way this time, “but you have to think your way into the mindset of 2,000 years ago. The apostles did see something out of the ordinary, the image on the cloth.





















“And at that time – this is something that art historians and anthropologists know about – people were much less used to seeing images. They were rare and regarded as much more special than they are now.





















“There was something Animist in their way of looking at images in the first century. Where they saw shadows and reflections, they also saw life. They saw the image on the cloth as the living double of Jesus.





















“Back then images had a psychological presence, they were seen as part of a separate plane of existence, as having a life of their own.”





















I am struggling. I have this picture in my mind of the apostles, gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem, being inspired to go out on missionary journeys that resulted in a Church that now numbers a third of the planet in its ranks. And they are looking not at the astonishing sight of Jesus himself, back from the dead, but at a cloth. “If you think yourself into the whole experience of the apostles,” de Wesselow persists, “going into the tomb three days after the crucifixion, in the half-light, and seeing that image emerging from the burial cloth…”





















But, I interrupt, if his logical approach is to be taken at face value, wouldn’t they also have seen the decomposing body of Jesus, and know that far from coming to life again, he was well and truly dead?





















“But that isn’t how they understood resurrection. The earliest source we have on Jesus is Saint Paul [his epistles predate the writing of the gospels] and there in 1 Corinthians 15-50 — the reference is seared on my memory — you have him saying explicitly that resurrection is not about flesh and blood.”





















De Wesselow can quote the relevant gospel passages as readily as any Christian preacher. In the book, he takes each and every New Testament reference to the risen Christ – plus a few from the extracanonical texts of the first and second centuries that were excluded from the Authorised Version of the Bible – and rereads them to fit in with his thesis.





















After eight years working on it, Thomas de Wesselow could go on and on into infinite detail, far too much to take on board at one sitting. Yet for every answer – or “new way of understanding” as he prefers to put it — another question inevitably arises.





















That, of course, has long been the pattern with all attempts to explain the Shroud. So when, for example, carbon-dating located it between the 13th and 14th centuries, scientists then tried – and so far have failed – to show how any medieval forger could have made such an image, with its effect of a photographic negative anticipating the invention of the camera by 500 years.

Perhaps, I venture, the Turin Shroud is destined always to remain a mystery “No,” replies de Wesselow, suddenly fierce and passionate. “I’m an optimist. I think we have to try our best to understand things. I don’t believe in just leaving problems alone.”


....







Taken from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9162459/Mystery-solved-Turin-Shroud-linked-to-Resurrection-of-Christ.html

Pope’s Easter Vigil Sermon: Technology Without God Dangerous

Saturday, 07 Apr 2012 05:47 PM

....



VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict, leading the world's Catholics into Easter, said Saturday that technological progress, in the absence of awareness of God and moral values, posed a threat to the world.



Benedict presided at a solemn Easter vigil Mass in St Peter's Basilica to usher the 1.2 billion-member church into the most important day of its liturgical calendar.



The basilica, the largest church in Christendom, was in the dark for the start of the service to signify the darkness in Jesus' tomb before what Christians believe was his resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion.



The some 10,000 faithful in the basilica lit candles as the Pope moved up the central aisle on a wheeled platform he uses to conserve his strength. The basilica's lights were turned on when he reached the main altar.



Wearing gold and white vestments at the Mass, his last Holy Week service before Easter Sunday, Benedict wove his sermon around the theme of darkness and light.



"The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil," he said.



"The darkness enshrouding God and obscuring values is the real threat to our existence and to the world in general," he said.



Benedict, repeating one of the central themes of his pontificate, said man was too often in awe of technology instead of being in awe of God.



"If God and moral values, the difference between good and evil, remain in darkness, then all other 'lights,' that put such incredible technical feats within our reach, are not only progress but also dangers that put us and the world at risk," he said.



"With regard to material things, our knowledge and our technical accomplishments are legion, but what reaches beyond, the things of God and the question of good, we can no longer identify."



The Pope, who returned from a gruelling trip to Mexico and Cuba last week, looked fatigued at the long service, during which be baptised eight adults from Italy, the United States, Slovakia, Turkmenistan, Albania, Germany and Cameroon. He turns 85 on April 16.



On Sunday the Pope will preside at an Easter day Mass and then deliver his twice-yearly "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message from the central balcony of St Peter's Basilica.



© 2012 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.



Read more on Newsmax.com: Pope's Easter Vigil Sermon: Technology Without God Dangerous

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“The Sign of the Cross Is Inscribed upon the Whole Cosmos”

So do we read in Pope Benedict XVI’s The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000 Ignatius Press). And we thank The Adoremus Bulletin (February 2012), sent from St. Louis Missouri, for providing this excerpt.

The Fathers belonging to the Greek cul¬tural world were more directly affected by another discovery. In the writings of Plato, they found the remarkable idea of a cross inscribed upon the cosmos (cf Timaeus 34ab and 36bc). Plato took this from the Pythagorean tradition, which in its turn had a connection with the traditions of the ancient East.

First, there is an astronomical state¬ment about the two great movements of the stars with which ancient astronomy was familiar: the ecliptic (the great circle in the heavens along which the sun appears to run its course) and the orbit of the earth. These two intersect and form together the Greek letter Chi, which is written in the form of a cross (like an X).

The sign of the cross is inscribed upon the whole cosmos. Plato, again following more ancient traditions, connected this with the image of the deity: the Demiurge (the fashioner of the world) "stretched out" the world soul "throughout the whole uni¬verse".

Saint Justin Martyr (d. ca. 165), the Palestinian-born first philosopher among the Fathers, came across this Platonic text and did not hesitate to link it with the doctrine of the triune God and His action in salvation history in the person of Jesus Christ. He sees the idea of the Demiurge and the world soul as premonitions of the mystery of the Father and the Son - premonitions that are in need of correction and yet also capable of correction. What Plato says about the world soul seems to him to refer to the coming of the Logos, the Son of God. And so he can now say that the shape of the cross is the greatest symbol of the lordship of the Logos, without which nothing in creation holds together (cf I Apo1. 55).

The Cross of Golgotha is foreshad¬owed in the structure of the universe itself. The instrument of torment on which the Lord died is written into the structure of the universe. The cosmos speaks to us of the Cross, and the Cross solves for us the enigma of the cosmos. It is the real key to all reality. History and cosmos belong to¬gether. When we open our eyes, we can read the message of Christ in the language of the universe, and conversely, Christ grants us understanding of the message of creation.

From Justin onward, this "prophecy of the Cross" in Plato, together with the connection of cosmos and history that it re¬veals, was one of the fundamental ideas in patristic theology. It must have been an overwhelming discovery for the Fathers to find that the philosopher who summed up and interpreted the most ancient traditions had spoken of the cross as a seal imprinted on the universe.

Saint Irenaeus of Lyons (d. ca. 200), the real founder of systematic theology in its Catholic form, says in his work of apologetics, the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, that the Crucified One is "the very Word of Almighty God, who penetrates our universe by an invisible presence. And for this reason He embraces the whole world, its breadth and length, its height and depth, for through the Word of God all things are guided into order. And the Son of God is crucified in them, since, in the form of the Cross, He is imprinted upon all things" (I, 3).

This text of the great Father of the Church conceals a biblical quotation that is of great importance for the biblical theology of the Cross. The epistle to the Eph¬esians exhorts us to be rooted and grounded in love, so that, together with all the saints, we "may have power to compre¬hend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge" (3:18f).

There can be little doubt that this epis¬tle emanating from the school of Saint Paul is referring to the cosmic Cross and thereby taking up traditions about the cross-shaped tree of the world that holds everything to¬gether-- a religious idea that was also well known in India.

Saint Augustine has a wonderful inter¬pretation of this important passage from Saint Paul. He sees it as representing the dimensions of human life and as referring to the form of the crucified Christ, whose arms embrace the world and whose path reaches down into the abyss of the under¬world and up to the very height of God Himself (cf De doctrina christiana 2,41, 62; Corpus Christianorum 32,75f).

….

[End of quotes]

The Eastern Orthodox Church has traditionally understood the tree of life in Genesis as a prefiguration of the Cross, which humanity could not partake of until after the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus.[4]

One of the hymns chanted during the forefeast of the nativity of Christ says:

“Make ready, O Bethlehem, for Eden hath been opened for all. Prepare, O Ephratha, for the tree of life hath blossomed forth in the cave from the Virgin; for her womb did appear as a spiritual paradise in which is planted the divine Plant, whereof eating we shall live and not die as did Adam. Christ shall be born, raising the image that fell of old”.[5]

The cross of Christ is also referred to as the tree of life, and in the service books, Jesus is sometimes likened to a "divine cluster" of grapes hanging on the "Tree of the Cross" from which all partake in Holy Communion.

This theme is also found in Western Christianity. By way of an archetypal example consider Bonaventure's "biography" of the second person of the Trinity, entitled "The Tree of Life." [see Cousins, The Classics of Western Spirituality Series] ….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chotyniec4.jpg

The Holy Shroud of Jesus Christ



A Shroud Of Mystery!


An amazingly detailed picture of a bearded man who had been beaten about the body, crowned with thorns & pierced with nails through the wrists & the feet," is how Newsweek magazine described the Shroud of Turin. For centuries, this unique burial cloth has generated intense controversy. Many scholars, historians, scientists and theologians have been convinced that it is the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion, and that by some unknown process his image was transferred onto it.



In 1889, something extraordinary happened. Technical progress had made it possible for the first photograph of the the Shroud to be taken. As the photographer, Secundo Pia, examined his first glass-plate negative, he almost dropped it in shocked excitement. What he saw was not an unrealistic and confusing photographic negative, but a clear positive image. Highlights and shadows were reversed from those on the cloth, & were far more lifelike & realistic, & the positive image of a man's face was clearly visible. Pia's sensational photograph showed that the actual image on the Shroud was a negative image!

How could a negative image be produced on a piece of cloth centuries before the invention of photography? Scores of specialists from all over the world began to earnestly study the mysterious Shroud. Attempts made by skilled painters showed that no artist was able, even when using a model, to convert a human face by the process of the mind into a negative image, & paint it. Leo Vala, a noted photographic expert who pioneered the development of 3-D-photography, recently told Amateur Photographic magazine,

"I can tell you that NO ONE could have faked that image. NO ONE could do it today, even with all the technology we have."



The educational magazine, National Geographic, reports that the face on the Shroud, hauntingly serene in death, would grace a masterpiece of art. The body, anatomically correct, bears the frightful marks of scourging, crucifixion, & piercing--perhaps by thorns & lance. It would appear to be a portrait, uncannily accurate when matched against the Gospel accounts, of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, many believe that this stretch of ivory-coloured linen is the very cloth that Joseph of Arimathea placed under and over the body of Jesus in the rock-cut tomb of Golgotha nearly 2.000 years ago. (See Mark 15:46).



In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) came into being. Scores of the World's top scientists, pathologists, textile experts, chemists, physicists & photographic specialists obtained permission to spend five days thoroughly examining the mysterious cloth in Turin, Italy.

National Geographic reported, "Perhaps never before had an object of art or archeology been subjected to such exhaustive examination. The scientists bombarded the relic with ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and examined it microscopically & took photo micrographs. With sticky tape & a vacuum device, bits of dust, pollen & other particles were captured for analysis." Their conclusions were startling.



"I was convinced it was a forgery"



confesses Dr, John Heller of Yale medical school, the blood expert of the team. Today he admits,



"NO QUESTION IN MY MIND! There was a scourged, crucified man in the Shroud."



STURP team member, Dr. Robert Bucklin, chief pathologist of the Los Angeles city morgue, states:



"If I were asked in a court of law to stake my professional reputation on the validity of the shroud of Turin, I would answer very positively & firmly that it is the burialcloth of Christ. It's Jesus Whose figure appears on the Shroud. It is not a matter of faith to me, it's just a matter of common sense. Knowing what we know, who else could this have happened to?"



One of the World's top investigative dentists, Dr. Max Frei of the University of Zurich, a specialist in tracing where a fabric has been, through microscopic pollen analysis, declares:



"My tests have convinced me that this Shroud is IN FACT the cloth in which CHRIST'S BODY was wrapped. I have isolated from the Shroud more than a dozen pollen grains from plants that grow only around Jerusalem & its deserts."



The STURP scientists concluded that the image on the Shroud could not be the work of a painter or artist, for it is too thin, & lies only on the very topmost surface of the threads, nor has it soaked into or left any deposits between the threads as would happen had it been painted. The scientists also agreed that the dark stains that permeated the image were human blood. But the question that haunts them & that has eluded their grasp is, what then could have created this mysterious image?

The general consensus is that the molecular composition of the image is similar to faint scorch of some kind, yet the scientists cannot determine by what means such a delicate image could have been made. It is now being suggested that an unknown energy force was applied to the lifeless body wrapped within the Shroud, & that a burst of extremely high intensity heat or light for an extremely short duration--probably milliseconds--somehow caused the Shroud to become a primitive polaroid film. Robert Dinager of the Los Alamos scientific laboratory in New Mexico stated,



"It seems as if the image possibly came from some short-term pulse of energy. You could say it was instantaneous. It would have had to be a pretty good amount of energy, but not too much or it would have destroyed the cloth."



For those who believe the Bible, the answer to this riddle is apparent: At the climactic moment that Jesus dead body was quickened to life, this "photograph" was left behind on His burial cloth as a silent witness of the greatest miracle that ever took place: The resurrection of Christ!



NEW EVIDENCE THAT THE SHROUD IS REAL



National Enquirer 20/11/79



The image of a coin placed over the right eye on the figure on the burial cloth actually shows the coin was minted near the time of Christ's death, according to Rev. Francis L. Filas, S.M., a top expert on the Shroud. With the assistance of coin expert Michael Marx, Father Filas has identified the image of a coin imprinted on the shroud as a coin minted only between A.D. 29 and 36. Christ died in A.D. 30. Placing coins on the eyes of the dead was an ancient burial custom in Christ's time, according to Father Filas, professor of theology at Loyola University of Chicago.



Using high quality, high contrast photos of the shroud, Father Filas and Michael Marx deciphered that the coin clearly features a tiny staff, called a "lituus," bordered by four Greek letters. That staff and the Greek letters were found only, on coins minted during Pontius Pilate's governorship of Judea, from A.D. 29 until A.D: 36.



"All coin experts agree that Pontius Pilate alone issued a coin with the staff on the back of it." Said FATHER Filas.



Marx, a coin expert for more than 35 years and owner of M. and R. Coins and Stamps in Oak Lawn, Ill. Concurs with the theologian.



"As a coin expert, I can confirm that the coin that appears on the cloth is one of the coins issued only during the last seven years that Pontias Pilate was governor of Judea--A.D. 29 to 36," he said.



"The markings on the coin date the shroud within that seven years period. The shroud is obviously real."



And Dr. Nancy Waggoner, curator of Greek coins at the American Numismatic Society, confirmed that the coins with the lituus on one side fall within the time of Pontius Pilate's governorship.



DNA Tests Find Jesus' Blood On Turin Shroud





Electronic Telegraph



The Turin Shroud will be at the center of fresh controversy when a scientist details his claims to have isolated DNA from the "blood of Jesus." In his book, The DNA of God?, DR Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a former professor of microbiology, describes tests carried out by colleagues at the University of Texas which show that the "red" areas on the cloth, far from being paint, are ancient blood stains of a group consistent with a Jewish male. The book details the experiments which show that the "blood" on the shroud is ancient and contains XY chromosomes--which establishes it as human and male. The tests were conducted by a team headed by Dr Victor Tryon, director of the Center for Advanced DNA Technology at the University of Texas Health Science Center.

Gene segments from the stains showed that the blood came from a male with an AB blood type, common among Jewish people. Dr Garza-Valdes, a practicing Catholic, said that the placing of the blood traces strongly indicated that the body was that of Jesus.



"Not many people in the first century suffered all those lesions, the crucifixion wounds, the crown of thorns, the spear wound in the right side of the chest, the flagellations," he said.



A list of definitive results from research carried out this century:



The image is not a painting, and it was left by the corpse of a man who was beaten and crucified. Computer processing has shown that the image has three-dimensional properties, something which neither paintings nor standard photographs possess.

Pollens have been found on the cloth, strongly supporting the view that the Shroud spent time not only in Europe but also in the Near East.

Tests on traces of blood from the Shroud have revealed the presence of human blood from blood group AB.

In 1988, carbon-14 dating was carried out on a fragment of the Shroud. The results date the fabric to between 1260 and 1390 AD

The scientific community itself now questions these results, and more recent experimental studies have reopened the debate.



Characteristics of the Shroud image include:



"CLEAR IMAGE. The body image is so well resolved that even features as detailed as the lips are discernible. This remarkable property revealed by photography is way beyond all attempts at artistic imitation or laboratory reconstitution.



SUPERFICIAL IMAGE. The body image penetrates the cloth no more than a few fibrils and is limited to the crowns of the threads. The body image fibrils are individually colored but their coloring does not follow the bends or crevices connected with the intersecting threads of the weave. Furthermore, the fibrils are not cemented and there is no additional pigment to account for the macroscopic image color.



THREE DIMENSIONAL IMAGE. The intensity of the frontal body image correlates overall with expected separation distances between an assumed body and the enveloping cloth. This correlation is independent of implied body surface composition such as the skin, hair, etc.



ABSENCE OF SIDE IMAGES. There are no side images to be seen surrounding the front and back body images, not even in the region the two heads.



OXIDATION. The chemical formation of the body image is due to a change in the cellulose of the cloth, in particular a conjugated carbonyl structure associated with dehydration.



BLOOD. The red image stains are formed of blood and/or blood derivatives.



VERTICAL ALIGNMENT OF THE IMAGE. The Shroud is draped naturally over a body lying horizontally, but the frontal body image aligns vertically over corresponding features on that body.



WEIGHTLESSNESS. Maximum intensities of the front and back images are practically equal."

- Bruno Bonnet-Eymard, "Physics and Chemistry of A Glorious Body and of A Glorious Blood"



"The arms would be too long if the Shroud Man would be flatly reclining. The arms, however are entirely parallel with the surface of the Shroud and we see them in linear full length. The torso, the thighs, the lower legs on the other hand we see shortened by geometric perspective and not in full length. They stand at an angle to the surface. "

- Isabel Piczek, "Is the Shroud of Turin a Painting?"



Height calculations of the figure on the Shroud vary greatly due to the difficulty of taking into account factors such as the foreshortening of the legs, the extended position of the feet, and any possible stretching in the cloth. The most common estimate is 6 ft 11 in. Proportionately, however, the head on the Shroud is 1/9 of the body instead of the average 1/8. Using this as a basis for estimation of height, Picknett and Prince concluded:



"Our calculations put the height of the man on the Shroud - at the front - at 203cm...Put in imperial measurements we calculate that the front image is 6 ft 8 in and the back 6 ft 10 in"

- Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)



If Jesus was treated according to Jewish burial practices, "signs of the bandages around the hands, feed and head ought to appear on the Turin Shroud.

"They do not. If the shroud had been tied down there would be clear crease marks, which there are not. It did not fall closely over the sides of the body, and this agrees with the temporary nature of Joseph's and Nicodemus' attentions, for they expected the final burial to be made after the Passover. Then the body would have been more securely wrapped."

- Alan Millard, Discoveries From the Time of Jesus





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Taken from: http://users.belgacom.net/gc674645/shroud/shroud1.htm

Great Lighthouse CD on Shroud of Turin

The Passion of Christ In Light of the Holy Shroud of Turin

Fr. Francis Peffley



The Holy Shroud of Turin was called the greatest relic in Christendom by Pope John Paul II. In fact, the Shroud is the most studied scientific object in the entire world. Fr. Peffley presents new and detailed scientific and medical evidence for the authenticity of the Holy Shroud. This presentation brings greater clarity as to the depth of the agony of our Lord's sorrowful Passion, which he voluntarily took on for love of us.



And, at: http://friendsforjesus.com/viewtopic.php?t=4545&sid=b467c60a38e1aa310724c04eb783dd6a



The talk is given by a Priest who has studied a lot of the scientific research and findings of the Shroud.



The cloth is long and is the size of those commonly used at that time for covering a table...also they could tell because of the fine-ness of the linen, which is much nicer than the things usually used to bury people in at that time.



Also, along one side of it there are some kind of markings, oil stains, etc. left behind from people having eaten on this cloth. It was common at that time that the people being served would sit on just one side of the table and they would be served from the front. Something in Jewish practice made it such that food was not to be passed behind people, only in front of them. The stains are possibly from people dipping bread in oil, etc. just like today.



It is a beautiful talk, get this CD if you can! It is called



The Passion Of Christ in Light of the Holy Shroud of Turin.



By Fr. Francis Peffley



Lighthouse Catholic Media.



_________________



For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes.



1Cor.11:26