the sudarium of oviedo  - evidence for the authenticity of the shroud of Turin?

Believers that the Turin Shroud is really the winding sheet of Jesus Christ, argue that the Sudarium of Oviedo corroborates their belief.
 
The central cause for suspicion is how it has never been proven that the bloodstains on the Shroud are really blood. Whatever the stains are, there is reason to believe that they got a touch up in recent centuries. It is foolish to take the Shroud seriously when the main thing, the blood, cannot be proven to be blood. That matters more than any strangeness of the image on the cloth.
 
The Sudarium is a cloth that has been kept in Spain since the beginning of the seventh century. There are bloodstains on it as if it were put over the head of a crucified man.
 
By examination of the blood stains on it, it was pinned to the back of the head of a crucified man whose head was stuck to his arm which was still held out and up to the side in a crucifixion position so the cloth couldn't be put all the way round. At the same time, when they couldn't prise the head away from the arm it shows that both were affected by rigor mortis. The shroud man looks very flexible for his head is straight up and they were able to move his arms. One of these or both cloths is a forgery.
 
Examining the head and arm of the Shroud man shows no evidence that his bloodstained head was stuck to his upper arm.
 
The Jews believed the soul was in the blood and they collected the blood of a man who died violently. It is said that Jesus died this way so that is what the Sudarium cloth was for. Commonsense says there could be no other point in putting it over Jesus' head.
 
There is evidence that the blood on the Sudarium came out and stopped and came out again a number of times. How could a man that was dead and in rigor mortis still bleed? The Sudarium is a fake or not a relic of Jesus at all. Or did Jesus really die?

The Sudarium and the Shroud are supposed to have the same blood type, the rare blood group AB. But it has been shown that 7% of people in Palestine in the time of Christ would have belonged to this group (page 253, The Divine Deception) so it does not provide convincing support for the Christian lie that the two cloths have the blood of the same man on them. Plus we don't have any evidence that the blood on the Shroud is all from the same person. The maker of the Shroud might have used different blood samples for his creation. We can't be sure of the Sudarium either that it has all one group of blood on it.

The forensic experts who said that the Sudarium shows it must have been on the face of a person with Semitic features are talking nonsense for anybody could look Jewish and it is only their opinion. Other experts would either say it cannot be known what race the person was or even that it was somebody of a different race. Plus the stains would have been disturbed and the cloth moved as the body moved as it was removed from the cross so that you can't read much into their position. You certainly cannot be sure that the nose size was and yet some say they can and it is the same size as the Shroud man's nose. Where are the hairs on the Sudarium and on the Shroud that should be there? Why did none of Jesus' hairs come out and stick to the Shroud in the blood? There are none for both relics are fake. Sadly, this prevents DNA testing to tell us about who the cloths covered if anybody.

The believers in the shroud and the Sudarium talk so much shite that it is enough to turn one off religion forever. A nice proof that the fantasies and lies that they put forward as evidences for the Shroud and the Sudarium being real is that the Sudarium has been carbon dated to about 695 AD fairly close to the time it first appeared in Oviedo (page 209, The Jesus Relics, From the Holy Grail to the Turin Shroud). And as usual, the believers are trying to discredit the carbon dating just as they tried with the dating of the Turin Shroud. They tell lie after lie and none of them agree on why the dating should be discredited. They usually say that we don't know how the cloth was kept in centuries gone by so we don't know how much contamination it got! Speculation. It is as clean as you would expect!

If the Sudarium and the Shroud are related and touched the same dead man as these "experts" say, then clearly both did not come from the time of Jesus Christ.

The Sudarium, if really a relic of Jesus, refutes the Shroud for these reasons:
 

#If they could not move the man's head it was because rigor mortis had set in rapidly. Then how did they get the man so relaxed looking as in the Turin Shroud? His neck is straight.

#The blood on the Sudarium came out and dried and then fresh blood came out creating a large layered pattern of blood. This means the man was not dead at all. Blood came out from the nose area. The Shroud man does not show any signs of a great nose bleed. Like the Shroud, the Sudarium perhaps seeks to undermine the view that Jesus died on the cross.

#There is no evidence and it is doubtful that the Romans would have let the friends of Jesus climb up on the cross to attach a cloth to his head. Why would they want to? The blood was still going to be on his head when they would bring him down from the cross. If the Sudarium and the Shroud come from the same man then the Shroud is a fake.

#   The Shroud man shows no evidence that his head was held in the Sudarium. The blood round the nose area of the Sudarium would mean that the Shroud man should have had a big smear in the middle of his face that transferred to the Shroud. But there is nothing.

#    If the Sudarium covered the head of Shroud man it would mean there would be little blood left to go on the shroud. It would have absorbed a lot and left a thin mess of blood all over his face.  We would see a lot of smearing on Shroud man's face. But in fact the blood is very tidy and the head image is the best part of the Shroud. 

#  Where are the holes that the thorns would have poked in the cloth? Where are the scratches? The Shroud man bled fresh from the thorn wounds indicating the crown had just been pulled off before he was laid in the cloth. So the Sudarium says Jesus had no thorns on while he was on the cross and the Shroud says he had. Note that it is also strange how the shroud depicts marks left by a crown of thorns and you would expect some thorns to stay in the man's head and scratch and pierce the cloth. There is nothing.

#  The man's head was resting tight against his arm. Then why is there no evidence of deep wounds from the thorns on the Shroud man's arm that you would expect if he rested his head against his arm when he died? The man would be most inclined to bow down his head.

#  The Sudarium does not have marks like a crown of thorns for the front so it is not the facecloth of the Shroud man who does have a lot of these marks at the front (page 254-5, The Divine Deception).

#  The research of Dr Villalain who managed to simulate the staining of the Sudarium tries to make out that the victim whose head was wrapped in the Sudarium was bleeding from the nose after he was an hour dead! Some dead man that. And yet there is no sign of respiration on the cloth meaning it is a dud (page 250, The Divine Deception). The Shroud man supposedly has his nose broken corresponding to Jesus who had been beaten around the face hours before the crucifixion. There would have been a lot of bleeding from the nose had this been true. It would have already clotted so nothing would be able to come out after death.

#  The Sudarium did not come from a bearded man. The matted moustache and beard should have left their marks but didn't. The Shroud man was bearded and so he was not Jesus if the Sudarium is genuine. Some say there were signs of a beard but this is unconvincing because there should have been a great deal of blood collecting in the moustache and beard.

#The Sudarium certainly proves there was an interest in cloths allegedly containing the blood of Jesus and his sweat. This interest could have led to the manufacture of the Turin Shroud.

Forensic and geometric experts have stated that the Shroud and the Sudarium "almost certainly covered the cadaver of the same person."  They assume a cadaver was involved but there is no way of knowing if it was a real cadaver. The two could match say if a statue or something was involved. The researcher of most interest is Dr. Juan Manuel Mi'arro a professor of sculpture. The investigation has concluded that the matches between the two relics "far exceeds the minimum number of proofs or significant points required by most judicial systems around the world to identify a person, which is between eight and 12, while our study has demonstrated more than 20."  The investigation does not insist that the man from the prints is Jesus. But if the Turin Shroud matches a cloth that was a hoax then it is a hoax itself.
 
Shroud believer Ray Rogers says anything that claims the blood on the Shroud and the Sudarium match is untrue, "The things you hear about typing are nonsense". See Christianity in the Light of Science by John Loftus.
 
We conclude that the Sudarium is proof only that Shroud believers are too biased and bigoted to care about the truth. The cloth has nothing to do with Jesus. And in fact if the cloth had, that would mean the Shroud hadn't!

APPENDIX

The Sudarium of Oviedo

Another relic of Christianity that has been associated with the Shroud of Turin is the Sudarium of Oviedo. The Sudarium is a piece of cloth roughly 84 cm x 53 cm. It has stains on it, but no recognizable features. According to legend, the Sudarium was the facial covering that lay on Jesus' face under the shroud after crucifixion. It is mentioned in John 20:7, where it was found apparently cast off after Jesus' resurrection. Webster's mistakenly notes it as "Veronica's Veil", which is an entirely different object and considered by some to be the source for the Shroud's artist.  1

Forensic studies on the cloth implied that it had been used to cover the face of a person who had died, probably upright, with a large amount of fluid in the lungs. Like the shroud, blood was found along with fluid from the lungs. How this survived unchanged for two millennia isn't addressed, but at least there is no fire to eliminate all proteins, as there was with the Shroud.   2

Connecting the Sudarium with the Shroud has been of considerable importance from an historical standpoint. There is a longer, more accepted history of the Sudarium; it dates from the 7th century. Successfully connecting the two would be the most effective method of removing support for the radiocarbon test results. However, that connection, while having been made, is supported by only one tenuous scientific thread which has already been brought into doubt in the section Coins, Spears, etc. in the Image. Dr. Alan Whanger, using his PIOT imaging method, discovering 70 places where the stains on the cloth matched with those of the Shroud.

In addition to the very doubts about the effectiveness of the PIOT process, there is the added problem of a lack of image on the Sudarium. One would believe that, if the image appeared on the Shroud, it would appear on the cloth covering the face under the Shroud. The cloth would have been left on, in accordance with the burial customs of the Jews in regards to a damaged face. Guscin uses scripture to explain this away, stating that according to John 20:7: "The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen".  3 However, this section of the scripture plainly comes after the body of Jesus disappeared. It merely says that the headcloth was tossed aside after Jesus got up, with no reference to it before the burial.

[The gospel mentions men in white at the tomb.  Why were they there?  Did they help him out of the cloths?  Jesus would have been buried with a face covering, hence the headcloth.]

1 Ian Wilson "The Mysterious Shroud" (1986)
2 Mark Guscin The Sudarium of Oviedo: Its History and Relationship to the Shroud of Turin
3 Ibid.