What is it about the shroud of Turin that short-circuits people’s critical thinking? A recently published paper by Catholic weirdos claims to have carefully scrutinized the piece of cloth, and that they can interpret some of the patterns there as an image of Jesus’ scrotum.
Yes. You read that correctly. There are peepers trying to get a look at Jesus’ twig & berries.
I can’t get at the paper itself, nor am I particularly interested — except, maybe, as another example of pareidolia. You might as well stare at medieval paintings of a naked Jesus and then claim that you’ve acquired deep insights into the biology of a person dead 2000 years ago. Oh, wait, gosh, that’s exactly what some people are doing. Some artwork shows Jesus in feminine poses, or with ambiguous sexuality, so it’s open season on speculation.
A late fifth/early sixth-century mosaic in what is known as the Arian baptistery in Ravenna, Italy shows Jesus, naked in the river Jordan, with genitals clearly visible to the viewer. The rest of Jesus’ body is ambiguously gendered. He is depicted as clean-shaven, youthful, and even slightly wide-hipped. Some have argued that he is androgynous. Regardless of how we assess Jesus’ gender in this scene, the mosaic is pointing us to the idea that Jesus really was a human being, not merely appearing as one.
There are no contemporary accounts or images of Jesus. The portrayals you seen now, or in the fifth century, or in the Medieval period, or during the Renaissance, were all artistic renditions that more reflected the culture and concerns of the artist than anything about the dead guy on a stick. It’s fine to talk about the values of 5th century Ravennans in the context of the art they made, but it is utterly bonkers to use that to discuss the biology of someone who died 500 years before, in another part of the world.
In 2014, Dr. Susannah Cornwall, who teaches at the University of Exeter, caused a stir when she published an academic article arguing that the sex of Jesus was simply a best guess. She wrote, “It is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we now define maleness.” Correctly observing that it is difficult to speak definitively about the genitalia of an unmarried person with no children, she added, “There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some ‘hidden’ female physical features.”
There is no way of knowing is the operative phrase there. I’m fine with the idea that Jesus’ masculinity was a rather irrelevant part of the myth, but annoyed with the baseless dissection of genitalia that aren’t there. But then, it’s also the case that we don’t know that Jesus had a beard, or long hair, or a fine Aryan complexion, so all we’ve got is cultural bias on those trivial details.
But now some unhinged people are excited that they might have a “photo” of Jesus’ crotch.
Newly published scientific investigations into the Turin Shroud have identified the outline of the scrotum and right hand thumb of the man outlined on the cloth. If the Shroud is authentic, this would seem to supply clear evidence that Jesus was, in fact, male.
If the Shroud is authentic, but, as the article points out, it isn’t. And if this picture were accurate, then Jesus rode a dinosaur.
The “ifs” are strong in this article.
An authentic foreskin relic would do a lot more than establish the sex of Jesus. If, in our twenty-first century, we had a piece of Jesus’ body, the problem would no longer be heretical claims about his gender or non-divinity, but rather the potential for sacrilege. If we had the DNA of God it would only be a matter of time before somebody wanted to clone him.
If we had a tiny scrap of human tissue from the first century, I’d think the first question to ask would be how you know it came from a specific individual (let alone one with magic powers), so I don’t see how any of this creative speculation allows you to say anything about the prophet who supposedly founded the Christian faith.
But then, this is a subject that does seem to scramble even relatively intelligent minds.
mamba says
The article goes on and on to talk about the image in the shroud…and then openly states that they know it is NOT THE REAL SHROUD, and then they go on MORE about the image seen…but they just said it’s a fake source?
Huh? They admit the facts they have chosen to use are not real, but they treat the conclusions based on those facts as real?
That’s it, we’re done, logic has left the building. I don’t deal with “alternative facts”, I prefer only true ones, thank you!
boof says
I once interacted with a shroud nut on the internet. Even if I conceded everything he asked about the evidence for the shroud, we were still left with a decorated cloth of unknown date and unknown production that might a have spent some time in the Levant. Based on this he claimed that we should think that there was a heightened probability that it was the burial shroud of Jesus.
richardelguru says
But surely it’s SHROUDED in mystery [runs away giggling, or possibly pursued by bear]
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says
The Shroud itself. What only atheists call a “short-circuit” is rather the divine inspiration of Gawd that is filling their brain rather than that ‘rational’ stuff. /sarcasm
seriously/ it is amazing how people will accept that as an argument behind “going off the deep end”, claiming science can’t understand miracles, by definition. IE: Miracles are what science can’t explain, and miracles happen, therefore gawd exists QED. I am not fabricating that, I’ve actually heard such dribble [Believe Me (to parodize 45speak)]
[aside] I thought I heard they carbon dated the shroud and dated it to medieval times. That caused such a controv they repeated it and it went back to zero century, they also examined all the pollen embedded and none traced back to Palestine, or uh vicinity.
————–
the mosaic is used to question and authenticate the existence of Jeebus? I’ve seen lots of drawings of Gandalf, and all show him wearing a cloak of wool. Does that mean he lived in the same area as sheep?
—
too silly
cervantes says
All you have to do is retrieve a communion wafer from the stomach of a Catholic and you’ll get his DNA. I don’t know why anybody hasn’t done that yet.
Siobhan says
Don’t get PZ started on the communion wafer.
congenital cynic says
Hey, if you need a piece of Jesus’ body to examine to see if he was male, maybe I can help. I’ve got three consecrated communion wafers from a Cat-lick ceremony sitting in a can in my room, and they are, according to the “Sophisticated Theology”, transubstantiated into the actual body of the god/man. Maybe one of them is part of the dude’s junk? Hang on, I’ll check.
…..hmmmm. Nothing but flour. Someone is having us on. /sarcasm
Marcus Ranum says
If we had a tiny scrap of human tissue from the first century
“It must be jesus… the mitichlorians are off the chart.”
Marcus Ranum says
Making shrouds was a cottage industry, and when the Turin shroud came up(1356), it was such a good fake that some of the other churches showing shrouds apparently complained. There were also sacred towels worn by various saintoids during their torture sessions – most of them look like “grade school refrigerator art” or Picasso from his early “relic” period.
A bunch of years ago I got into researching the shroud, because of a discussion with a true believer. First off, it’s obviously a fake because it’s made of a herringbone linen weave that hadn’t been invented in jesus’ time. It was carbon-dated to the middle ages multiple times, and apologists keep coming up with stories about how it’s probably a mistake of the process because of pollen, or whatever, thereby showing they don’t understand how carbon-dating works.
The pigment in the shroud is clearly pigment, not carbonization burned into the surface or any of that nonsense. It’s sepia and ochre tempera paint. ( http://mcri.org/v/64/the-shroud-of-turin )
I do have the actual underpants of Elvis, from before when the aliens took him. They are available for sale in a choice of sizes, M through XL. Contact me for pricing and transfer.
robro says
Marcus #9
I don’t know about a “relic” period, but I saw some of his early sketchbooks at the first showing of the French inheritance collection after his death. Some of those drawings were quite awkward, though I would say more as “boy’s bathroom” art than “grade school refrigerator” art.
dhabecker says
Two thousand years from now the offspring of these ‘relic twits’ will be looking at old Russian sheets to solve the riddle of whose pecker was bigger; Trump or Jesus.
Iris Vander Pluym says
Can you even clone from a haploid strand?
Iris Vander Pluym says
Wait a minute—they just might be onto something! A “virgin birth” is parthenogenentic…which means an XX genotype. Jeezus was genetically female.
microraptor says
Iris @ 13:
I’m pretty sure Jeezus was genetically fictional.
YOB - Ye Olde Blacksmith says
Richardelguru @3
Sastra says
Apologetics which are heavy on the “ifs” don’t impress me as designed to defend the truth of the faith by persuading the skeptical . They look more like believers are looking for permission to believe.
“Look, it’s not completely bonkers. It’s barely possible if a bunch of barely possible things are all true. They MIGHT be true. So I’m allowed to believe what I want. I’ve established that I’m allowed.”
It’s a lower bar.
handsomemrtoad says
You can’t have “sacrament” without “sac”.
heather says
boof @2: “I once interacted with a shroud nut on the internet.”
Given the title of this article and the topic of discussion, I had to read this a few times before I caught your real meaning.
anbheal says
Charlemagne theoretically drove the Moors out of Gaul and down into Andalucia with the Sacred Prepuce in his breast pocket. It was one of the most coveted relics of the medieval period. A BBC television crew heard a rumor of it being in tome village in Italy, a decade or two back, but they, em, rolled a snake-eye. But Aquinas and his lot believed that the only remaining part of Jesus, the one that crazy old Simeon snipped off on the seventh day, when Mary was finally let out of her Ruby Ridge bleeding-bitch shack, could not possibly have failed to ascend with Jesus, even if it went to another part of Heaven. So after a few hundred years of claiming it was not longer on Earth, and this dude named Galileo says that there’s a ring around the sixth planet, presto, a divine answer: the Holy Prepuce forms the rings of Saturn.
You may think I’m kidding. Sadly, no.
hotspurphd says
Sastra@16
Very good.
rietpluim says
So… Roman catholicism is cool with gender fluidity now?
Richard Smith says
Given the Real Authentic illustration of Jesus above, there’s a good chance there wouldn’t be anything to find a trace impression of in the shroud, considering the position of a lot of sharp and pointies…
Rich Woods says
@rietpluim #20:
Possibly, but I’m pretty sure they’ll still insist on checking future popes for the obligatory prescribed genitalia.
timgueguen says
Even if you could prove the Shroud of Turin is an actual 1st Century burial cloth you could never prove it was that of Jesus. Unless of course you take a leap from there and claim it has the power to produce miracles. Then again even if you accept the idea it produces miracles that still wouldn’t be proof that it a Jesus cloth, and not that of some other 1st Century person whose mystic powers somehow got imbued in the cloth.
ShowMetheData says
Say it t’aint so
rustiguzzi says
There is already a school of thought that maintains Jesus was a woman, offering as evidence:
1. He fed a large number of people at short notice, with very little in the way of ingredients and no cooking equipment. Something beyond the powers of any male prophet.
2. He was followed around by a group of men who failed to understand his teaching. They “just didn’t get it”.
KG says
Actually, if you look at images of the shroud, you’ll see that Jesus’s junk has gone missing. His right forearm and hand are absurdly long, covering part of the crucial area, but even so, if he had normal male genital anatomy, you’d expect to see something. The obvious explanation is that in terms of medieval convention, it would simply not be on to produce an image of Jesus’s twig and berries – hence why he always (AFAIK) has a loincloth in full-length paintings of the crucifixion, although actual victims of this form of execution would have been naked. So the article may actually be trying to support the shroud’s authenticity by claiming to find the missing scrotum.
Incidentally, I’ve seen the shroud itself – I happened to be in Turin on one of the occasions it was exhibited to the masses. I was deeply impressed by how unimpressive it is.
leerudolph says
Boof:
Based on my well-honed understanding of Bayesian inference (being honed since 1982, and by now nearly worn down to a sliver—but a really sharp sliver!), the claim you attribute to him is correct (for someone with my priors), thanks to the “might [] have spent some time in the Levant”.
Mind you, the amount by which (my assessment of the) ” probability that it was the burial shroud of Jesus” has been heightened is very, very small. But it’s positive! And this is, after all, a world in which our friends the (astro-?)physicists have been able to determine that bismuth—long thought to have the heaviest stable nucleus—actually is radioactive, with a “half-life of approximately 600 yottaseconds (1.9×1019 years), over a billion times longer than the current estimated age of the universe.”
cartomancer says
The Arian Baptistery in Ravenna is a genuine Ostrogothic place of worship – built by King Theodoric in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. It was, however, rebuilt fairly extensively during the 16th century, and very little of the original decoration remains. It is entirely possible that the famous ceiling mosaic is an accurate recreation of the original late antique piece, but it might just be a Renaissance piece done loosely in the style of late antique mosaic art.
At any rate, the whole schtick of Arianism was that Jesus was a real, mortal human being (albeit an ideal one), distinct from God the Father. As such Arian art tended to portray him in various stages of his life, rather than the more traditional Catholic depictions which invariably have him in his early 30s (at what was considered the default biological age for a human and the one people would be forever after the resurrection). There is very little in the Baptistery ceiling mosaic that is specifically androgynous rather than just a marker of youth in Roman art. We have plenty of examples of deliberate androgyny in Roman art (the most famous is the Maid of Anzio – a sculptural joke in the Greek style commissioned by Caligula for one of the Imperial pleasure gardens), and it tends to be a lot more deliberate than this.
kdemello1980 says
To be frank: Jesus’ nutsack would be a hell of a lot more helpful than anything Pruitt or Trump has in mind. That said, it’s lite the former is homeopathy, and the latter is Drano.
gijoel says
You almost owed me a new keyboard and screen.
wzrd1 says
Laughably, the only people who don’t believe that the shroud isn’t anything other than old art are Roman Catholic true believers, as the church considers it artwork from the 14th century.
Complete with carbon dating and examination of the pigments utilized. One advantage of both my age and my parents sending me to Catholic school was heavy exposure to something uncommon today, nuns. There was quite a bit of heresy out of those ladies!
But then, PZ further shows the cognitive dissonance in these non-rocket scientists, when they compare 5th century artwork with the shroud, to prove some validity.
As if a mosaic or a painted cloth is the product of a fucking camera!
Hint, oh faithful ones, my wife gets paid far more for the artwork she creates than Fotomat would get for printing a photograph, were they still in business.*
*Yeah, that kindof dated me, didn’t it?
John Morales says
[meta]
wzrd1, you do amuse me:
So, you believe that Roman Catholic true believers’ belief differs from the Roman Catholic Church’s belief, which implies that Roman Catholic true believers are actually heretics, and so can’t be true believers.
(Paradox FTW!)
And you further believe that Roman Catholic nuns exhibit quite a bit of heresy.
(Therefore, they are Roman Catholic true believers)
wzrd1 says
@John Morales, we used to have a few nuns over for dinner on a regular basis. You’d be surprised what that order spoke casually of!
Including stating as fact that the shroud was known to be art, not some magical artifact. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament has had some very unique members!
John Morales says
<snicker>
Yeah, those Brides of Christ who have undertaken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and are dedicated to the service of the Church have some very unique members.
Point being, you did claim that “the only people who don’t believe that the shroud isn’t anything other than old art are Roman Catholic true believer”; since you’ve reiterated that those unique nuns are not in that set, it follows that you’re claiming that they are not Roman Catholic true believers.
kaleberg says
Warner Sallman, who painted the famous ‘Head of Jesus’ that was reproduced maybe half a billion times, is probably laughing somewhere. (That is, if dead people could laugh.)
Holms says
Don’t forget his foreskin!
What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says
I’ll confess that I have trouble following the thread past one negative, but I think that wzrd1’s statement doesn’t preclude the possibility of being a true believer and believing that the shroud is just old art (it just precludes the possibility of believing the shroud is something more and not being a true believer).
I haven’t had much contact with nuns, Catholic or otherwise, but my wife was schooled by them, and from her stories it does sound like they were all true believers. But that was in Franco’s Spain, so I don’t know how representative that particular sample is.
wzrd1 says
Indeed, I am. Their religious faith and their actual beliefs were quite different, so they believe in God and Jesus, but not so much in church doctrine.
kevinalexander says
How do they know it’s His scrotum? Were they there?
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says
…yeah, this seems pretty nuts…
unclefrogy says
that has been my experience with Catholics generally I do not know enough about other christians nor other religions either for that matter but I would suspect that observation to hold true for them also.
the shroud is an interesting kind of art any way, it’s use as a tourist attraction is not something to overlook in its story. The church generally seems to be a little embarrassed by it and would rather it not be of interest.
uncle frogy
wzrd1 says
@UF, it’s been my experience that, overall, people are people, no matter where you find them or what faith they do or do not practice.
So, I use the “Good Catholic” term to refer to people in general, even Muslims. They say the right words on the right days, go to church at the right time and the rest of the time are smoking, swearing, drinkers.
Many an evening have I spent drinking the haram with Muslim men, with some being Saudis.
busterggi says
anbheal – and that is why the church has never been able to answer, “How many angels can dance on the end of a penis?”