I don't know what I think about this. On the one hand I don't believe that Jesus was resurrected nor that the Shroud is real. I also don't believe that people 2000 years ago were more (or less) susceptible to optical illusions than we are today - I don't think cognition has changed that much (though there are, today, people who go and worship at sites where oil spills look like the Virgin Mary, so there's that). BUT I am in LOVE with this IDEA because it plays into my fear of flat things - how terrifying flat things are, especially in the dark. This idea of a paper-thin cloth Jesus as the thing that came back. Something that couldn't quite push through the membrane between worlds, but pressed its body up against the membrane like a monster against the picture plane - that is a wondrously terrifying thing.
"Art historian Thomas de Wesselow is convinced the Shroud is real and did touch Christ's body. But the Cambridge academic insists that the image on the cloth fooled the Apostles into believing Christ had come back to life, and the Resurrection was in fact an optical illusion.
His theory is that in the mind of a person 2,000 years ago, the image on the Shroud would have been astonishing - far beyond their normal experiences and truly unsettling. 'They saw the image on the cloth as the living double of Jesus,' he said. 'Back then images had a psychological presence, they were seen as part of a separate plain of existence, as having a life of their own.'
'If you think yourself into the whole experience of the apostles. Going into the tomb three days after the crucifixion, in the half-light, and seeing that image emerging from the burial cloth,' the 40-year-old academic told The Daily Telegraph."
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