Remember the stories of medieval relics? Any time a town or principality needed some positive PR, someone would dig up some old bones and proclaim them the long lost wrist or shin of some very dead saint; the visionaries went further and proclaimed they'd found the hip of some venerable Jew from the days of Jesus. The Venetians, never shy or reticent, went so far as to claim they had all of St.Mark, stolen in his entirety from Alexandria, if I'm not mistaken.
Then modernity came along and we grew out of such antics. Nobody would engage in such capers today. Would they.
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I read with great regularity once or twice a year stories about the grave linen of Jesus - I think it is in Turin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin
and the writing is always very serious and a lot of serious seeming scholars pipe in, so why shouldn't somebody find something new, especially if it is nicely labelled and thus easily identifiable.
I hope I'll be through with life before the Orthodox get their act together again...
Their history up to the fall of Constantinople doesn't bode well and they probably plan even more longterm than the Catholics.
As ridiculous as it may be I hope that relic doesn't catch on, because once we see Putin showing up there kissing it all kinds of things may happen.
Silke
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