by
Damien F. Mackey
Commenting on an article that I put up at academia.edu Mysterious Shroud of Turin
James Tabor informed me (13th July, 2025):
Hi Damien, I recently did a two hour video examining all claims about the Turin Shroud. I hope you will find it beneficial. Here is the link: https://youtu.be/uXhkVCdr2KU
Is This The Face of Jesus? Getting the Facts Straight on the Turin Shroud
James Tabor
The description here reads:
This video is TWO HOURS, as I cover the topic so thoroughly! Millions of sincere Christians believe the Turin Shroud offers something very close to a photographic image of the historical Jesus--including selected scientists, Bible scholars, and theologians--and further that it offers tangible scientific proof that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead! But what are the facts. In this video I present what I consider to be convincing evidence that this cloth is a Medieval relic, created in the early 14th century by methods that can be duplicated today. ….
What is the 14th century?
Sounds like a really silly question, doesn’t it?
Funnily enough, just a few weeks ago, I uploaded to academia.edu my appraisal of the very next century, the C15th AD (or CE as James Tabor would designate it):
Bible-themed people and events permeate what we call C15th AD
(3) Bible-themed people and events permeate what we call C15th AD
Jehanne (Joan of Arc), a “second Judith”, channelling Jehudith (Judith); Girolamo (Jeremiah) Savonarola, and Abravanel, channelling the biblical prophet Jeremiah – “Savonarola … like a second Jeremiah” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2376715); Colombus (Dove) channelling Jonah (Dove), the epic voyage of Columbus manifesting itself as the Book of Jonah writ large, including the requisite great fish (whale); the mischievous Machiavelli channelling the Achitophel with whom he is often compared, and so on.
Regarding Machiavelli and Cesare, has the “ancient land of Israel” (see next quote) been thrust out of its proper BC situation and been artificially projected into the so-called C14th AD?
In Bringing the Hidden to Light: The Process of Interpretation (edited by Kathryn F. Kravitz, Diane M. Sharon), we find the requisite (if Achitophel is Machiavelli) comparison now between Absalom and the Prince, Cesare Borgia (p. 181):
…. As Melamed pointed out, although Luzzatto's interpretation followed the literal the literal meaning of the text and traditional Jewish commentators such as Kimḥi and Abrabanel, nevertheless he expressed it in the spirit and vocabulary of Machiavelli and the tradition of raison d’état; in Melamed's most felicitous formulation, “the House of Borgia in the ancient ... land of Israel”, Ahitophel plays Machiavelli to Absalom – his Cesare Borgia”. …. However, it should be observed that Luzzatto was not endorsing the behaviour of Absalom but only indicating, in the context of his refutation of the allegation of Tacitus that the Jews were sexually immoral, how in the spirit of Machiavelli and raison d’état, a prince might acquire power. ….
“The House of Borgia in the ancient land of Israel …”. Hmmmm.
[End of quote]
Just compare the two names:
But what I really find staggering is just how closely the names of the like pair, Achitophel and Machiavelli, phonetically resemble each other:
ACHI T OPHEL
M ACHI AVELL I
Is the presumably earlier, “the early 14th century” (James Tabor video), likely to be any less shaky than this?
I have since started work on another supposedly AD century, the ripe-for-picking C7th: Mohammed; Nehemiah; Chosroes; Shahrbaraz; Heraclius.
The latter, Heraclius, would have to qualify as the most weird, made-up ‘historical’ character of all time!
Just a few tasty morsels on the subject to be presented here, beginning with a piece also on Queen Elizabeth I, amongst those many women of ‘history’ considered to have been a second, or another, Judith:
…. Whilst I am aware of Mark Twain’s famous quote, that: “History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”, I can be somewhat sceptical when I read of a supposedly historical figure as a ‘second’, or a ‘new’, version of someone else: for example, a second King David, a new King Solomon, the new Deborah, a second Judith.
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), whose life occurred, according to the textbooks, outside our C15th focus, outdoes just about every other female character in adopting biblical personae, including a heavy emphasis on Judith whom she is said to have emulated. I say “female”, because it is hard to beat the Byzantine emperor Heraclius in this regard, as told in my article:
Something almost miraculous about our emperor Heraclius
(6) Something almost miraculous about our emperor Heraclius
According to Aidan Norrie (2016), in the Abstract for his article on Elizabeth I:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/rest.12258
Elizabeth I as Judith: reassessing the apocryphal widow's appearance in Elizabethan royal iconography
Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England was paralleled with many figures from the Bible.
While the analogies between Elizabeth and biblical figures such as Deborah the Judge, King Solomon, Queen Esther, King David, and Daniel the Prophet have received detailed attention in the existing scholarship, the analogy between Elizabeth and the Apocryphal widow Judith still remains on the fringes. Not only did Elizabeth compare herself to Judith, the analogy also appeared throughout the course of the queen's reign as a biblical precedent for dealing with the Roman Catholic threat. This article re-assesses the place of the Judith analogy within Elizabethan royal iconography by chronologically analysing of many of the surviving, primary source, comparisons between Judith and Elizabeth, and demonstrates that Judith was invoked consistently, and in varying media, as a model of a providentially blessed leader. ….
Now, here is our ‘miraculous’ Heraclius. What a treat! But what a joke!:
A composite character to end all composites
Heraclius seems to have one foot in Davidic Israel, one in the old Roman Republic, and, whatever feet may be left (because this definitely cannot be right),
in the Christian era.
What a mix of a man is this emperor Heraclius! What a conundrum! What a puzzle!
I feel sorry for Walter Emil Kaegi, who has valiantly attempted to write a biography of him: Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium. The accomplishment of this scholarly exercise I believe to be a complete impossibility. And I could simply base this view on what I read from Kaegi’s book itself (pp. 12 and 13):
The story of Heraclius, as depicted in several literary historical traditions, is almost Herodotean in his experience of fickle fortune's wheel of triumph and tragedy, of ignorance or excessive pride, error, and disaster.
My comment: To classify the story of Heraclius as “Herodotean” may be appropriate. Herodotus, ostensibly “the Father of History” (according to Cicero), has also been called “the Father of Lies” by critics who claim that his ‘histories’ are little more than tall tales.
Heraclius, as we now read, is spread ‘all over the place’ (my description):
At one level his name is associated with two categories of classical nomenclature: (1) ancient classical offices such as the consulship, as well as (2) many of the most exciting heroes, places, precedents, and objects of classical, ancient Near Eastern, and Biblical antiquity: Carthage, Nineveh, Jerusalem, the vicinity of Alexander the Great's triumph over the Persians at Gaugamela, Noah's Ark, the Golden Gate in Jerusalem, Arbela, the fragments of the True Cross, Damascus, Antioch, perhaps even ancient Armenia's Tigra-nocerta, and of course, Constantinople.
My comment: According to a late source (conventionally 600 years after Heraclius): “The historian Elmacin recorded in the 13th Century that in the 7th Century the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius had climbed Jabal Judi in order to see the place where the Ark had landed”. http://bibleprobe.com/noahark-timeline.htm
Biblically, Heraclius has been compared with such luminaries as Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, Daniel, and even with Jesus Christ.
And no wonder in the case of David! For we read in Steven H. Wander’s article for JSTOR, “The Cyprus Plates and the “Chronicle” of Fredegar” (pp. 345-346):
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1291381.pdf
…. there is one episode from the military career of Heraclius that bears a striking similarity to the story of David and Goliath.
Byzantine chroniclers record that during his campaign against the Emperor Chosroes in 627, Heraclius fought the Persian general Razatis in single combat, beheading his opponent like the Israelite hero. …. George of Pisidia, the court poet, may have even connected this contemporary event with the life of David. In his epic panegyrics on Heraclius' Persian wars, he compared the Emperor to such Old Testament figures as Noah, Moses, and Daniel; unfortunately the verses of his Heraclias that, in all likelihood, dealt in detail with the combat are lost. ….
[End of quote]
That fateful year 627 AD again, the year also of the supposed Battle of Nineveh said to have been fought and won by Heraclius! [Nineveh disappeared in c. 612 BC]
According to Shaun Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886-912): Politics and People: “Heraclius … appears to have been intent on establishing himself as a new David …”.
Likewise, in the case of Charlemagne’s father, as I noted in my article:
Solomon and Charlemagne. Part One: Life of Charlemagne
(4) Solomon and Charlemagne. Part One: Life of Charlemagne | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
…. Charlemagne has indeed been likened to King Solomon of old, e.g. by H. Daniel-Rops (The Church in the Dark Ages, p. 395), who calls him a “witness of God, after the style of Solomon …”, and he has been spoken of in terms of the ancient kings of Israel; whilst Charlemagne’s father, Pepin the Short, was hailed as “the new king David'. ….
[End of quotes]
What I have written here is only a tiny tip of a gigantic iceberg.
And then there is the massive overhaul required of BC history (or BCE as James Tabor would designate it).
For a condensed read of my envisioned program for a comprehensive BC revision, I recommend that one commences with my article:
Damien F. Mackey’s A Tale of Two Theses
(3) Damien F. Mackey's A Tale of Two Theses
What on earth has any of this got to do with the Shroud of Turin?
It is all about dating. What would James Tabor, an archaeologist in Israel, who claims to be a “truthseeker” (very commendable), and who is also close to the Jewish people, make of this horrific archaeological anomaly as discovered by an Israeli archaeologist?
I wrote about it in my article:
Dumb and Dumbfounded archaeology
(3) Dumb and Dumbfounded archaeology
“I was lookin' for love in all the wrong places
Lookin' for love in too many faces”.
Johnny Lee
Sounds a bit like the modern archaeologist!
Aligned to, and burdened by, a chronological timetable (Sothic) that can be anything from hundreds to thousands of years out of kilter with reality, they can invariably find themselves digging “in all the wrong places” at all the right times, or vice versa.
Dumbfounded archaeologists ‘ratchet’ downwards to dumb level when, faced with a shock such as the one Moshe Hartal encountered in Tiberias, leave the matter there.
The stratigraphical data at Tiberias had revealed that the Romans at roughly the time of Jesus Christ were contemporaneous with the Umayyads, supposedly succeeding Mohammed in the mid-600’s AD. A discrepancy of more than half a millennium!
That means that the prophet Mohammed could not have existed in the C7th AD.
Nor could the Umayyads have been what the history books tell us they were.
Dumb archaeology fails to take the matter any further. Why?
As Dr. Frank Turek has explained:
… the opinions of … colleagues before … ever entertain[ing] making a shift on such a monumental question … so entrenched in tradition, politics … that any shift in opinion would be met with great resistance. It’s not a shift one should make overnight.
Not “overnight”, or, probably, ever – unless one is Truth driven. “we’ll see.” ….
[End of quote]
A legitimate truthseeker, who has been schooled in a particular system of thought, and who has never felt the need to question it, may perhaps, therefore, be excused for being “dumbfounded” by some most unexpected outcome.
Here “dumbfounded” is alright, as long as it does not stop there.
Dumbfounded becomes dumb, though, when one just shrugs one’s shoulders, throws it into the ‘too hard basket’, and moves on.
Or, perhaps the circumstances of one’s life may not permit anything more than that.
The beauty of being a revisionist is that one is not – or rarely is – dumbfounded, ever expecting the conventional unexpected.
The consequences of Moshe Hartal’s Tiberias find cannot be over-stated.
The ramifications are far-reaching - the so-called C7th AD swallowed up in the C1st AD. A 600-year slice taken out of text book history!
Not only that, but the whole succession of Islamic Caliphates is now undermined:
Oh my, the Umayyads! Deconstructing the Caliphate
(3) Oh my, the Umayyads! Deconstructing the Caliphate
Back to the Shroud
In 1988, the Vatican gave permission to a group of scientists to use radiocarbon dating in an effort to date the Shroud. Four samples were sent to three different labs (one to Oxford University, one to the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, and two to the University of Arizona). The results: the Shroud dated to 1260–1390 AD. While many people continued to believe the Shroud was still authentic, the scientific evidence seemed to have shown that it could not have been.
A highly tentative thought: Presuming that the samples for radiocarbon dating were legitimate ones (many have queried this), then what if the now-deemed necessary (by some revisionists, at least) chronological overhaul of AD time means that, just as the C7th AD Umayyads (probably Nabataeans) coincided approximately with the Nativity, so might the c. 1300 AD carbon dating (James Tabor’s “14th century”) coincide with the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ?
13th July, 2025
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