Michael Flynn's Blog, page 17

Shrouded in Mystery

Not an actual photograph of Last Supper!
Christ: All right, who made this mess on the table?
Apostles: Not me!  Surely not I, Lord!
Judas: Food fight!


One of those things that periodically shows up on one message board or another is the ever-popular subject of the Shroud of Turin.  It is one of those matters regarded as a done deal in certain quarters, though the deal done differs from one quarter to another.  For some, it has been shown -- usually by Science!™ -- to be a medieval hoax perpetrated by preternaturally clever medieval hoaxers.  For others, it has been shown -- usually by some nit-picking of those Science results -- to be the burial shroud of Christ.  A small cottage industry has grown up around it: the Shroudies. 

Coming down squarely in the We-don't-know camp is of course the Catholic Church.  She points out quite reasonably that an object need not be factual to be useful in focusing the mind on veneration.  (No one supposes DaVinci's The Last Supper to be a photograph of the actual event, but it is often found in altarpieces and the like.)  But neither is she prepared to dismiss the Shroud tout court. Even if it is a weird work of art, it is still a valuable and important indicator of a lost technology.

John Walsh in The Shroud (Random House, 1963) wrote:

"The Shroud of Turin is either the most awesome and instructive relic of Jesus Christ in existence... or it is one of the most ingenious, most unbelievably clever, products of the human mind and hand on record."

But there are, of course, other logical possibilities.

It is neither a relic nor a clever product, but simply a natural occurrence.
It really is a first century burial cloth, but it is Yussuf Schmoe, crucified in AD 80, not Jesus Christ.
It really is the burial cloth of Jesus, but it evidences only his death, not his resurrection.
And of course, that the Shroud may have a train of material causes that account for it does not preclude its being miraculous. The word for "miracle" is simply mirabilium, which means "marvel."

"We marvel at something when, seeing an effect, we do not know the cause.  And since one and the same cause is at times known to certain people and not to others, it happens that some marvel and some do not."       -- St. Thomas Aquinas. Contra gentiles

Is the production of a rainbow by double-refraction of sunlight through water droplets, as described by Bishop Theodoric of Freiburg in the 13th cent., any less marvelous than some mumbo-jumbo involving the goddess Iris?  Catholic and Orthodox Christians can get away with this since their notion of God as primary cause does not preclude secondary (or "intrumental") causes.  This is all much more clear in Latin, which possesses an instrumental case and in which no one could utter such absurdities as "I flew to Los Angeles," except perhaps a rational bird.  But we digress.






Shroud image at this link may be inspected in close-up zooms

A 1983 paper by archeologist William Meacham summarized the Shroud situation as follows:

From its first recorded exhibition in France in 1357, this cloth has been the object of mass veneration, on the one hand, and scorn from a number of learned clerics and freethinkers, on the other. Appearing as it did in an age of unparalleled relic-mongering and forgery and, if genuine, lacking documentation of its whereabouts for 1,300 years, the Shroud would certainly have long ago been consigned to the ranks of spurious relics (along with several other shrouds with similar claims) were it not for the extraordinary image it bears.
--- "The Authentication of the Turin Shroud:
An Issue in Archaeological Epistemology."
Current Anthropology, v.24 No.3 (June 1983)

The Face of Jaen Cathedral
is supposedly a copy of the
medieval Veronica Veil.  Clearly
a painting in medieval style.

The only "other" shroud mentioned in the article is the Cadouin Shroud.  It is a monument to the capacity of bumpkin Frankish knights to be taken in by Middle Eastern sharpies that they could believe a Fatimid era shawl with Qur'anic inscriptions was the burial shroud of Christ.  The Cadouin Shroud bears no image, so although clearly not genuine, it does indicate that medievals had no a priori expectation that such a shroud would have an image on it.

There are also a number of other art works purporting to be copied from the "Veronica Veil" kept in the Vatican; but they are self-proclaimed as copies, and are clearly paintings with the stylized features of the art of the time. The only close up inspection of what is supposed to be the original Veronica Veil in 1907 described it as "a square piece of light coloured material, somewhat faded through age, which bear two faint rust-brown stains, connected one to the other."

However, from the copies made of the original image, we can get an idea what an artist of that era would consider a good Face-O'-Jesus.  It is hardly the Modern Ages concept of representationalism in art!  The face is stylized and set in a metal matting cut frame the face.  The three points of beard and hair at the bottom is a common feature of all the copies, so the original was likely the same: an image within an opening.

This essay and the next make heavy, if tentative, use of a number of on-line resourses, which will be linked here and there, and summarized at the end.
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Scientism redux

Stick or switch?

Some years ago, reading Case Studies in Sample Design by A.C. Rosander and some other books on sampling practice by W. Edwards Deming, TOF was offered this particular nugget of information.  On any particular problem there will be statistical aspects and non-statistical aspects and the practicing statistician's task is to provide advice on the former.  The statistics is not the be-all and end-all of the problem in view.  There may be a wide number of other aspects to it.  A statistical analysis may shed light on some of these, and that is all to the good.  But the important thing to remember is that not all problems are simply statistical problems.

Consider the Monte Hall problem, which puzzled even pros because they forgot that the problem was not probabilistic.  Monte Hall did not use random chance to choose which door he would open.  Let us call this tendency to apply the rules of probability even in non-random situations probabilism .  Which serves as today's lead-in.
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At the Gates of Gath

A poem.  Something like the first line of this occurred to me when I lay in delerium after suffering toxic shock a while back.  I recollect composing a mighty fantasy epic while sundry doctors of the medical arte punched shunts in my right kidney and pushed catheters up where catheters ought not go.  That epic was a serious affair and ended with a pun of intolerable cruelty, all of which, save for the first line, whirled down the memory hole as my mind returned.  Recently, as that line reoccurred to me, sundry other lines also popped up, and I have arranged them here as a sort of rough draft of a rough craft.  The meter is a bit shaky as is the stanza structure, but it might serve for whimsy.
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Tidbits at the TOFSpot

Odds and ends

The Miscreants of Northampton County...

The Old Court House (kool)

...were spared for another three years by the reluctance of the ADA and defense attorney to seat TOF on a jury today.  No reason was given  Perhaps it was his overall disreputableness.  And he went to all that trouble to dude up in a tie and sports jacket.  Shoulda remembered the pants....
(OK, Internet, that was tongue in cheek.)  

The Juror's Oath in the Commonwealth runs (per 234 PA 6 2(c)) the prospective juror's raise their right hand and respond to:


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LULZ

The New York Times is running a "guess the quote" game:
How Recent Popes Differ on Key IssuesChoose the pope who said each quote on seven critical issues.where "key issue" means "an issue that gets the NYT editorial board hot and bothered."  (Hint: none are labeled as concerning Manicheanism or Transubstantiation or the Apostolic Succession.)  Unsurprisingly, two of the six "issues" are pelvic.  The sequence of the "issues" is also revealing of NYT priorities. However, TOF is unsure whether the quiz proves the ostensible point.  It depends on how clueless the NYT people are.   See what you think.  Perceptive TOFians should get high marks based on form rather than matter.

TOF and the Grinding Wheels of Justice

This next Monday TOF has been summoned by no less than Lady Justice her own self to come and possibly sit on a jury panel of someone's peers in order to sit in judgment upon him or her.  TOF looks forward to the spectacle with much anticipation, since the closest he ever got before was to be dismissed from a jury in another county for reasons unspecified.  Already he rubs his hands in glee in expectation of hanging the miscreants -- or setting free the unjustly imprisoned, whichever opportunity presents itself.  He has been watching many Perry Mason episodes in order to prepare himself for all eventualities, like people breaking down while on the stand and unexpectedly confessing to anything at all.

Sundry Quotes and Comments

On the TOFSpot

Happy Birthday!

Today is the 45th anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae.  In it, Pope Paul made four predictions consequent to artificial contraception:

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And We All See How Well That Worked Out

The same August 29 1966 issue of the Milwaukee Sentinel that carried the stories on the picketing at Judge Cannon's house had a story in Part 2, p. 11, quoted the new leader of the Church Music Association of America regarding a papal commission that had proposed banning "imitation folk songs," "hootenanny masses," etc. from Catholic rites.
Read TOF's Rule for church music