Saturday, April 25, 2015

"Fa-Fm": Turin Shroud Dictionary

Turin Shroud Dictionary
© Stephen E. Jones[1]

"Fa-Fm"

This is page "Fa-Fm" of my Turin Shroud Dictionary. I decided to split the "F" entry in two at the outset because the entry "Filas" (see below) is large and there is another large entry "Frei" in the pipeline. For more information about this dictionary see the "Main index A-Z" and page "A."

[Index] [Previous: "E"] [Next: "Fn-Fz"]



Felix V, Pope (see Amadeus VIII)

Filas, Francis L. Fr. Francis L. Filas (1915-85) was a Jesuit priest and Professor of Theology at Loyola University in Chicago. A founding member of the Holy Shroud Guild, Filas delivered a paper at the 1977 Shroud conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at which Jackson, et al, reported that three-dimensional imaging of a Shroud photograph

[Above (enlarge): Right eye in Enrie 1931 negative sepia photograph of the Shroud, magnified (left), showing letter "K" (red) and to its left angled letters "A" (orange) and "I" (yellow), the curl of the lituus (green arrow) and its staff (blue arrow). Each are in their correct relative position on a Pontius Pilate lepton (right), after I had horizontally flipped it because the Shroud image is laterally inverted in Enrie's negative photograph.]

with a VP-8 Image Analyzer had unexpectedly revealed images of small round `buttons' over the Shroud man's eyes. They concluded these were probably coins to keep the eyelids closed. Ian Wilson advised they were the size of a Pontius Pilate lepton (the "widow's mite" - Mk 12:41-44, Lk 21:1-4 KJV), which was acceptable to Jews as a Temple offering. A prominent lituus is only on coins minted by Pontius Pilate. Since Pilate was the Roman governor of Judaea from AD 26–36, who sentenced Jesus to death (Mt 27:24-26; Mk 15:15; Lk 23:23-25; Jn 19:14-16) in AD 30, Jackson et al. realised that if these `buttons' were Pontius Pilate leptons this would date the Shroud to the time of Jesus. In 1979 Filas noticed on an enlargement of an Enrie 1931 photograph of the Shroud face, a design over the man's right eye. Frei consulted Michael Marx, a numismatist, who using his magnifier identified four tiny curved letters which looked like "ECAI." Filas checked a copy of Madden's "History Of Jewish Coinage" (1864) and found that a Pontius Pilate lepton (Madden's #14), struck in AD 30, was the nearest to the design (a lituus or astrologer's staff) and the letters (part of the inscription "TIBERIOUKAICAROC" - "of Tiberius Caesar"), in the correct angular rotation and relative position, over the right eye of the Shroud. Moreover, Tiberius Caesar, who reigned from 14 to 37 AD, was the Roman Emperor at the time of Jesus' death (see Luke 3:1). Filas theorised that "UCAI" was a variant inscription and numismatist Bill Yarborough later found for Filas a Pontius Pilate lepton with the variant "C" in place of the "K." In 1981 Filas had negatives of his Shroud face photographs digitised by Log/E Interpretation Systems, with the result that the letters and the lituus over the right eye were more clearly seen, but but there was no clear evidence for design or letters over the right eye. In 1983 Filas sent his coin and photos to Robert Haralick, Director of the Spatial Data Analysis Laboratory of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, who in a 60-page report agreed that:

"The evidence is definitely supporting evidence, because there is some degree of match between what one would expect to find if the Shroud did indeed contain a faint image of the Pilate coin and what we can in fact observe in the original and in the digitally processed images."
But the numismatist Mario Moroni, using computer enhancement, found that Filas had mistaken part of the curl of the lituus for a "C" and the four letters over the right eye of the man on the Shroud are in fact the usual "UKAI." Filas, in response to his critics who claimed the letters and lituus were an artifact of Enrie's photographs, pointed out they can also be seen on other photographs of the Shroud. To critics who claimed they were just random quirks of the weave, Filas pointed out those features are not found anywhere else on the Shroud, and a mathematician calculated the probability of the four letters in the correct order, and in relative position to a lituus, of the correct size, position, angle and parity. The result was 1 in 6.2273 x 1042 or about one chance in 6 followed by 42 zeroes. To those who object that Jews would not place coins over the eyes of their dead, because pagans did it, coins have been found in first century Jewish skulls that can only have been placed over the eyes. The image of a coin over the man's left eye is less clear, but it may be a Julia lepton, minted only in AD 29 by Pilate in honour of Tiberius' mother Julia Augusta (58 BC - AD 29) who died that year. This image of a Pontius Pilate lepton, struck in AD 30, over the man on the Shroud's right eye, is further proof beyond reasonable doubt that the Shroud of Turin is first century. While an invincibly ignorant Shroud sceptic could argue that still doesn't prove that the Shroud was Christ's, even the agnostic biologist Yves Delage (1854–1920) "estimated the probability that the image on the shroud was not caused by the body of Jesus Christ as 1 in 10 billion"! [1].

first century. Evidence that the Shroud is first century includes: 1) the image of a coin over the Shroud man's right eye which matches a Pontius Pilate lepton, struck in AD 30 (see above); 2) textile expert Mechthild Flury-Lemberg's discovery that the stitching of the hem joining the sidestrip to the main body of the Shroud, and the selvedge (woven edge), are identical to that found at the Jewish first century fortress of Masada and nowhere else (see below); 3) Prof. Giulio Fanti's "three separate tests, when averaged, showed the linen fibers of the shroud to have been woven into cloth around 33 B.C., give or take 250 years, thus nicely bracketing the year 30, when most historians say Jesus died on the cross"; and 4) Ray Rogers' (1927–2005) discovery that the vanillin content of the Shroud linen "suggests the shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old."

flagellation
flagellum
flagrum (scourge)
flax
flogged (see scourged)

flower images see "Danin" and [1].

fluorescence

Flury-Lemberg, Mechthild. Mechthild Flury-Lemberg (1929-) is a Swiss textile conservation expert. In 1998 she prepared the Shroud for its Exposition that year, and in doing so determined the Shroud's dimensions to be 437 cms by 111 cms. In 2002 Flury-Lemberg carried out a restoration of the Shroud, in which she removed charring from a fire in 1532 that was a threat to the cloth and the image, and also removed unsightly patches sewn over the burn marks. In removing the patches, Flury-Lemberg discovered the stitching of the hem joining the sidestrip to the main body of the Shroud, and the selvedge, are identical to that found at the Jewish first century fortress of Masada and nowhere else. Since destroyed by the Romans in AD 73-74 and never re-occupied, this is further evidence that the Shroud is first century. Flury-Lemberg proposed the best explanation of the sidestrip, that the linen bolt of cloth the Shroud was originally cut from was up to three times the Shroud's width (~3.3 metres or ~11 feet) and the cloth was then cut twice lengthwise, and then the two sections with a side selvedge were joined by a seam to form the cloth which became the Shroud. In removing the Shroud's Holland cloth backing sheet, and examining underside of the Shroud which had remained hidden since 1534, Flury-Lemberg found no evidence to support the Benford-Marino invisible repair theory. [1, 2].


Notes:
1. This page, and each page in my Turin Shroud Dictionary, is copyright. However, permission is granted to quote from one entry at a time within a page (e.g. "Filas, Francis L.," not the whole page "Fa-Fm"), provided that a link and/or reference is included back to the page in this dictionary it came from. [return]

Created: 25 April, 2015. Updated: 16 May, 2015.

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