TRANSPONDER wrote: ↑Mon May 22, 2023 6:20 am With hindsight and the eye of Faith, this talk of a painted icon can be reinvented to be a garbled memory of the faint negative image of the Turin shroud. But even though it makes a convenient dot on the journey of the shroud from Jerusalem to France, it requires a rather familiar element of Ecclesiastical exegesis – beginning with the Belief and fiddling the evidence to fit – to turn a painted icon into the shroud.We already saw some doubt that the shroud and Mandylion were the same relic, and if the Edessa image was a painted icon, that drops that dot as a link in the narrative. There is still the suggestive claim of an image ‘not made with hands’ but I’ll have to see if and where that fits in.
My argument is different from others. I am not using provenance as evidence the TS is authentic. I only use scientific evidence to demonstrate its authenticity, not historical textual evidence or art evidence. Given all the historical and art evidence I’ve so far presented, I’m only presenting a plausible provenance of the shroud. If the shroud is a medieval fake, then it’s up to skeptics to give a rational alternative explanation for all the evidence I’ve presented regarding the provenance:
Why the similarities of the Pray codex to the features of the TS?
What did Robert di Clari see?
What is the archetype of all the Byzantine art and coin images of Christ?
What exactly is the image of Edessa and where is it now?
What exactly is the Acheiropoieta?
Why are the Orthodox, Byzantines so infatuated with icons?
How and why did the legend of King Abgar V arise?
Sure, it’s possible to create ad hoc explanations for each of these. But the TS shroud answers these in one fell swoop without the need for hypothetical explanations.
https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1122337#p1122337