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Sunday, 03 January 2010 |
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From an article about the first burial shroud from 1st century Judea being found:
"We really hit the jackpot."
Found in a first-century
cemetery filled with priestly and aristocratic burials, the tomb was
initially opened by looters, who left the shroud behind, apparently
thinking it has no market value. Experts were able to retrieve the
artifact before it began to disintegrate.
The so-called Tomb of the Shroud is a rarity among Jerusalem tombs from the time of Jesus.
For
starters, the Tomb of the Shroud appears to have been sealed shut with
plaster for 2,000 years, perhaps as a precaution against the spread of
leprosy or tuberculosis, which was also detected in DNA extracted from
the man's bones.
The tight seal apparently allowed the
shroud—radiocarbon-dated to between A.D. 1 and 50—to survive the high
humidity levels characteristic of Jerusalem-area caves.
Archaeologists
were surprised to even find remains inside the tomb. Traditionally
corpses were removed from such tombs after a year or so and placed in
ossuaries, or bone boxes.
The article also briefly mentions the following significant discovery:
. . . the remains of the man wrapped in the shroud are said to hold DNA evidence of leprosy—the earliest known case of the disease.
So after all these years of connecting the leprosy of the Bible with skin disorders others than Hansen's Disease, maybe it was leprosy after all?
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