Death certificate is imprinted on the Shroud of Turin: scholar

25-11-2009

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A Vatican scholar claims to have deciphered the "death certificate" imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, saying she has reconstructed the text from fragments of Greek, Hebrew and Latin writing imprinted on the cloth.

Dr Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican secret archives, said "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth," The Times reported.

Dr Frale, who is to publish her findings in a new book, La Sindone di Gesu Nazareno (The Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth) said the inscription provided "historical date consistent with the Gospels account."

The letters, barely visible to the naked eye, were first spotted during an examination of the shroud in 1978, and others have since come to light.

Some scholars have suggested the writing is from a reliquary attached to the cloth in medieval times.

But Dr Frale said the text could not have been written by a medieval Christian because it did not refer to Jesus as Christ but as "the Nazarene". This would have been "heretical" in the Middle Ages since it defined Jesus as "only a man" rather than the Son of God.

Dr Frale told La Repubblica that under Jewish burial practices current at the time of Christ in a Roman colony such as Palestine, a body buried after a death sentence could only be returned to the family after a year in a common grave.

A death certificate was therefore glued to the burial shroud to identify it for later retrieval, and was usually stuck to the cloth around the face. This had apparently been done in the case of Jesus even though he was buried not in a common grave but in the tomb offered by Joseph of Arimathea.

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=17889