The Shroud of Turin
A new resurgence has been made with the Shroud of Turin recently. This even includes AI image of what Jesus looked like. Such articles can be found with just about all major news sources, including the Catholic Herald, Daily Mail, The US Sun, Fox News, Al Jazeera, Newsweek, The New York Times… etcetera, etcetera. These stories are only as good as the evidence it has, and here are a couple pieces that you may not have heard before that turns this image of Jesus on its head.
According to a discussion on the Gaia channel, by forensic geologist Scott Wolter and Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Timothy Hogan, there are documents from the Knights Templar regarding the Shroud of Turin.
It has been documented and known that in 1453, a lady of royal descendent named Margaret de Charny deeded the Shroud of Turin to the House of Savoy, which was said to have been the blood stained burial cloth placed over the body of Jesus Christ. As you can imagine, this caused a lot of resurgence in the Catholic Church, which it desperately needed due to the competing scientific revolution of the Renaissance era.
The key to solving this mystery was from a true Renaissance artist, named Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was acquainted with various Pope’s, simply because he was commissioned for many paintings. This era marked a public relation problem for the Catholics with the emergence of the scientific revolution and competing Christian denominations. In 1307, a group onced tied to Catholicism, known as the Knights Templar had to go underground, meaning it became a secret society- because the Pope at the time, along with King Philip IV, sought to arrest and kill all members of this order, for financial and political gains.
In order for Leonardo to persuade the Pope to let scientists (natural philosophers, alchemist, and astrologers, to cohabitate, he proposed a deal. In a move to strike a deal with the Pope, da Vinci offered a plan so that the Pope would benefit from a resurgence for his Church, so as long as they let alone others who wanted to pursue their work in natural philosophies, such as Galileo and the Templar Order. This is were the Shroud of Turin came in.
The cloth known as the Shroud of Turin itself according to Timothy Hogan, was a cloth acquired by the Templars was from a sect called the Druze. Like the Templars, the Druze were a Gnostic group that combined elements of Mandaean, Christianity, Islam, and classical Greek philosophy. At the time of Christ, the Druze wore a waistcoat and a large cloak. Likewise the Templars also wore a cloak called a poor habit, which represented the noble armour of obedience. The common beliefs of these groups involved freeing oneself from attachments, to pursue purity by renouncing the world and living a communal life.
The first photograph in modern history-
In order for the Pope to stop suppressing science, Leonardo devised a plan that would give a resurgence to the Catholic Church in the way of producing the proof they wanted to show Jesus died. He did this by hiring German lens makers in a concept that he had come up with. This involved what is called camera obscura[1], which is projecting an image through light, onto the Templars cloth. This was the first instance of photography recorded, but can actually be linked back to 330 BC, from Aristotle. The image from the camera obscura would burn an image via an alchemical process with silver salts on the cloth itself, which is laid out in Leonardo’s notebooks regarding his study of optics.
As seen below, there is a dividing line separating the head from the body. This is believed to have been the result of two exposures on the same cloth. The first was the body of a cadaver, and the second image is the face of Leonardo da Vinci. A common thing he is known for. Some speculate that the demarcation was intentional in veneration to St. John the Baptist, who was beheaded. Pictured below is a portrait of Leonardo next to the face on the Turin and one with image enhancement. As you can see for yourself, the identical physical resemblances to the portrait of Leonardo.
Science as proof-
Modern day scientists have figured out that the image was created by some sort of light emanation. Naturally, if a dead person covered in blood was pressed on the cloth, it would have left organic material which can now be analyzed. And test have been performed as seen in the results printed in 2015. The only DNA found on the cloth was from haplogroup H33- a rare DNA mainly found among Druze, a minority population of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. So it has been confirmed that the shroud likely belonged to Druze. The date of the cloth reported by Scientific Review was the year 1353. This date is known to be when the Templars were associated with the Druze.
Furthermore, the de Charny family, who revealed the Turin were descendants of Geoffroi de Charny, a Templar who was burned alive alongside the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, in 1307. The agreement of having the de Charny family revealing the ‘burial cloth’ was made to somewhat reconcile a wrong doing to the name of this family, whose ancestor was wrongly accused of heresy and brutally murdered. Since this family revealed the shroud, it has been seen as a religious icon ever since. Now, the veil of ignorance is being lifted, uncovering a deeper knowledge of truth, and a lineage of the Gnostics.
[1] Camera Obscura; from Latin camera obscūra 'dark chamber'. The natural phenomenon in which the rays of light passing through a small hole into a dark space form an image where they strike a surface, resulting in an inverted (upside down) and reversed (left to right) projection of the view outside.
[2] –Scientific Reports www.nature.com/scientificreports “Uncovering the sources of DNA found on the Turin Shroud. Published 05 October 2015.