The Shroud Codex Revisited
Jeffrey Mirus doesn’t like Jerome Corsi’s The Shroud Codex. In Catholic Culture he wrote:
Jerome Corsi’s novel The Shroud Codex is a sustained examination of the evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. Unfortunately, this evidence is presented in a work of fiction, so the reader has no way of knowing if the evidence is real or fanciful. This is a dubious way to promote the Shroud, and it is a complete failure as a novel.
I disagree. Too bad that MIrus is just getting around to this. Way, way back in April, I wrote, Big Recommendation as follows:
The Shroud Codex is a novel, but a novel you can learn from. Just as you can learn a great deal of history from well-written historical novels, you can learn a great deal about the Shroud of Turin from The Shroud Codex. If you know everything there is to know about the Shroud, it is still a wonderfully gripping, enjoyable novel. Read it for fun. You will be glad you did.
After writing a review I went to the web to read other reviews. There are not many yet since the book was just released yesterday. But what I found was completely positive. One review said what I had to say so much better than I could do so that I decided to quote from it and throw away what I wrote. Jean Heimann in Catholic Fire wrote:
The Shroud Codex is a compelling and intriguing mystery, which mesmerizes the reader from the very first page. It is a book that is hard to put down, as the reader is driven to learn the truth about the Shroud of Turin and the impact that it has on the lives of the characters.
What seems most interesting and unique to me about The Shroud Codex is the fact that it contains a variety of genres, thus, making it appealing to a wide audience. It could be included in all of the following categories: religion and spirituality, history, science, science fiction, the paranormal, and mystery. Because of this, I believe that it will attract believers as well as non—believers alike who want to learn more about this ancient, fragile, bloodstained cloth, that many believe to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
Read it yourself. Draw your own conclusions:
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
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