So our academic calendar here is funny. So far I've only been taking Music in History and Italian 101. The Economics of Wine class has already started and concluded, being just a 3-week course while Professor Don Stabile was here. I didn't take that one, but almost kind of wish I did. The other two classes are Film in Italy and Images in Christianity, both of which just started this past week.
I went into both classes without any real expectations, and I'm glad to say that both are interesting, since I have to deal with 3 consecutive hours of one or the other every Monday - Thursday. The Cinema class though, for whatever reason, is really really hard for me to get through. It's kind of more like a history through cinema class.. it's taught by two professors (whose names I still have yet to remember..) - one goes over the history of the time period (50's - 60's) and shows us clips of Italian movies from that time, while the other introduces a movie at the next class period and we watch the whole thing. It's not that it's uninteresting, I think it's just that the man who goes over the history part has a deep voice, so that in addition to the Italian accent makes it hard for me to catch everything he says and I kind of just zone out. I really really need to try harder to take notes in that class. :/
The Religion class has actually been a pleasant surprise. It's taught by Professor Lingua, the guy who gave us the 3-hour "introduction" to the Cuneo Summer School way back when. That didn't bode wonders for our religion class with him, but both classes that we had this week were absolutely fascinating, in my opinion. The first 2 hours or so of each class was lecture, and then we watched a documentary for the last hour of each class. I took 3 pages of notes on Day 1, and 4 pages on Day 2, even though he was sending us the powerpoint files that he was lecturing from, if that tells you anything about how interesting it was. Our course is going to be broken up into three parts, the first of which focuses on the Shroud of Turin. I think I had heard of it before coming here, but didn't really know what it was.
What it is is a long, old piece of linen that may or may not be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. There is an image of the front and back of a crucified man on it, and the wounds all match up perfectly with the accounts of Christ's crucifixion in the gospels. There's been a whole bunch of research on it, but there's still so, so much mystery surrounding it. The biggest questions about it are 1) When is it from? & 2) How did the image get there?
This is what they do know: the image is not painted or drawn on, it did not get there from bodily contact (the anatomy of the image is perfect - if the image got there from bodily surface contact, the image would be more skewed), the photographic negative of the Shroud has far more detail (the image on the negative is more like a positive image, aka how one would actually view the subject - this means that if this was created by an insanely detail-oriented artist, he/she was highly skilled in that they were working with an absolutely unfamiliar and unnatural system of shading before photography existed), and the bloodstains are definitely human blood, type AB.
In an attempt to answer question #1, they did a carbon-14 dating test back in 1988, where they sent samples to three different labs around the world, all of whom worked independently and got the same result: It's only from the 14th century - about 1300 years too young. BUT they've discovered since then that the sample used for the test was taken from a corner of the shroud that had been repaired in the 16th century - meaning that if the shroud is from the time of Christ, that particular sample had both portions of 1st century linen and 16th century cotton that had been dyed to match the old linen. Basically they took their sample for the carbon test from the worst possible place ever. This would make sense then that the result was a 14th century date b/c the carbon test works by counting the number of carbon-14 atoms in the sample - the older the sample, the less atoms it has (at least, that's how I understood things from one of the documentaries we watched).
So now, there's no way to get a more accurate date for the shroud unless they do another carbon test, which would involve getting permission from the Cardinal and the Church in general, but the chances aren't very high, since any sample used for a carbon test is destroyed. If the Shroud does turn out to be a holy relic, I'm sure people wouldn't very well appreciate that parts of it have been annihilated, gone forever and all that. Then there's also the question of, if they did get another sample, what possible contaminants might that have from years of handling, moving geographic locations, damage from fires, etc.
All in all, I just find everything about it so fascinating and intriguing. What if it really is the burial shroud of Christ? Just think of all the profound implications that would have! It's pretty crazy. Someone in our class asked what the Catholic Church's stance on the Shroud's authenticity is, and our professor answered that they are currently neutral - they consider the Shroud an icon ("single image created as a focal point of religious veneration"), as opposed to a relic ("object once connected with the body of a saint, martyr, or holy person").
One of the documentaries covered the topic of classical Roman crucifixions in more detail, pointing out that the nails had to go through a bony area near the base of the hand and through the heels in order to be able to support the weight, as opposed to the palms or the front of the feet, as Jesus is often depicted. I thought this was really interesting. It made me curious as to why Jesus is depicted that way in paintings and such, but in general the gruesomeness of it all made Jesus Christ in history that much more.. tangible to me. When I read his stories in the Bible, oftentimes they seem like just that - stories, with Jesus Christ as the protagonist. I don't often think of the Bible as a history book, but I guess it is, right? So now, considering those gory details about crucifixion (how driving the nail through this particular point in the base of the hand, which moves the bones around but does not break them, causes such excruciating pain and turns the thumbs in (the image in the Shroud has the thumbs hidden beneath the hands, one point of evidence supporting the claim that this was a real human victim)) just makes it that much more real what Jesus went through; all that he suffered through for our sins, so that we might have eternal salvation. It makes me appreciate that great gift that much more.
I look forward to learning so much more about the Shroud (look how much I've learned already in two class sessions!) and other acheiropoetai - images not made by human hands, like the Veil of Veronica, & the Image of Edessa, which I don't know anything about - over the course of this class. It's all just so interesting and thought-provoking.
Currently we don't have a field trip scheduled to go see the Shroud of Turin, but I think that would be sooo cool if we got to go do that. Might have to see if it would be possible to go see it anyway just on a day trip to Turin or something. We do have two excursions scheduled for the Film class though, one this coming Wednesday and another at the end of November. This Wednesday we're going in to Turin for the whole day; I don't know what all the day is going to entail, but I think the morning has something to do with film production, and in the afternoon we'll be going to the Cinema Museum, so hopefully that will be pretty cool. Our trip in November I think will be back to Turin for a Film Festival, so that sounds kind of exciting too. If only I could pay more attention and take better notes in that class! Haha.
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