Antonio Lombatti - the Shroud is fake and Not Unique

The Daily Mail (caution - typical racy stories in the sidebars) has posted a story mentioning that Antonio Lombatti views the Shroud of Turin as a fake, and notes that it is not unique.

He said the Turin Shroud itself – showing an image of a bearded man and venerated for centuries as Christ’s burial cloth – appears to have originated in Turkey some 1,300 years after the Crucifixion.

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Lombatti, of the Università Popolare in Parma, Italy, cited work by a 19th century French historian who had studied surviving medieval documents. ‘The Turin Shroud is only one of the many burial cloths which were circulating in the Christian world during the Middle Ages. There were at least 40,’ said Lombatti.

‘Most of them were destroyed during the French Revolution. Some had images, others had blood-like stains, and others were completely white.’

The article itself is nothing amazing, but check out Lombatti's own website which combats what he calls the problem of "fantarchaeology".

Perhaps the most interesting part of that website is his bibliography on the topic, including some interesting articles. In one of them, Lombatti seems to sum up the matter well:

The behavior of professional Bible scholars on this relic has been deplorable. It's true, the Turin Shroud may be seen as a ridiculous topic to deal with. So, apart from Joe Zias, James Tabor, Rachel Hachlili, Shimon Gibson, and Levy Rahmani - experts on Second Temple Jewish burials and Early Christianity - scholars have rarely tackled the fancy claims made by the Shroud authenticity supporters. And this has left room for popular quackery both on library shelves and, above all, on the web. Lurid falsehoods and distorted reasoning have been repeated so many times that the common people and some scholars too may think they are facing the real burial cloth of Jesus. The method used by these "shroudologists" bends the mind the wrong way, an insidious and real corruption, and it has nothing to share with scholarly analysis and philological tools.


The Gospels don't mention this double full-length image of Jesus left on his burial cloth. The Second Temple Jews used to bury their dead in a completely different way. There's no historical record on the relic until 1355. When it was first displayed in France, the owner, the diocese bishop and even the pope called it a «representation» of Jesus' burial shroud. Finally, when the linen of cloth was carbon 14 dated in 1988 it turned out to be from 1325 circa. So, despite the fact that the historical and scientific data do match, the Turin Shroud enthusiasts, usually pushed by their faith, couldn't stop and admit that the relic was a medieval forgery. They kept on finding all sorts of causes responsible for a wrong radiocarbon date: fire, smoke, fungi, bacteria, and even Jesus' miraculous radiation emitted during his resurrection. As you can imagine, no scientist who performs carbon dating as a profession has ever imagined questioning the validity of the medieval date of the Turin Shroud.


Despite the fact that the Vatican has never officially affirmed that the Turin Shroud is the real burial cloth of Jesus, the way it has been used and displayed inside the city cathedral has given the people just the opposite view. The Epistle to the Hebrews says that «faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen»: however, the contemporary faithful, like the illiterate folk of the middle ages, are still looking for material and visible evidence of Jesus' earthly life. And they don't seem to care if the relics are evident forgeries. Above all, they don't seem to understand that the Bible, a sacred book and divinely inspired text - as it is considered by Christians - shouldn't need to be proven historically accurate and reliable. Even if archaeologists will find the real burial cloth of Jesus, there would be no way to determine that he was the son of Yahweh or that he was raised from the dead. This is why the Turin Shroud should be placed in a museum and not inside a church.

(source)