A couple of years ago there were two documentaries on Brit TV that were shown several weeks apart. They purported to be totally individual programmes; there was supposedly no connection between them. And yet the first half of both featured many of the same interviews with the same people. The second halves featured different interviews with different people, and they came to opposite tentative conclusions. One favoured the belief that it was the burial cloth of Jesus, the other that it wasn’t.
But... This is the bit that leaves me floundering. Both documentaries presented two facts that I’d already heard in other programmes.
1) If the cloth really had been the burial shroud of a person and an image of that person had somehow come to be imprinted on it, the image would be disproportionately wide because of the three dimensional effect of the wrapping. As we all know, it isn’t. It’s perfectly proportioned.
2) The cloth is in two halves – the bit that supposedly covered the front, and the bit that covered the back. On both halves the figure is perfectly proportioned, but the one on the back is taller than the one on the front.
Now, am I being dumb here? Don’t both these facts even taken separately, let alone together, amount to conclusive proof that the image on the cloth can’t be an imprint of somebody buried in it, be it Jesus or anybody else? So why are people still arguing about it?
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