What's a "Maillard reaction?"

On July 23, here, I referenced three books about religious matters.

I knew nothing more about them than what I got from a book catalog, and a bit of surmise. But one of them in particular intrigued me and in the meantime I have purchased the book.

Here's what I wrote at the time.

Thomas de Wesselow, THE SIGN: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection
Dutton 2013.

De Wesselow, an art historian by trade, contends that the famous shroud is not a work of art or a fraud but an authentic burial cloth from first century Palestine. Also, he contends that the shroud was central to the origins of Christianity.

He seems not to believe in the orthodox Christian account of events -- he is skeptical that the tomb was found empty or that Jesus later appeared to his disciples and ascended into heaven, etc. But he does believe that the early Christians believed in the resurrection with sufficient ardor to be martyred for it. So ... what convinced them? A mysterious piece of cloth.
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I can now say after acquiring the book that I was right in my surmise about what de Wesselow is saying. He has a naturalistic point of view on life, but he felt that PoV threatened when he came to the realization, [acting within his field of professional credentials in this],that the Shroud of Turin was not a medieval fake, and that it was indeed likely of first-century origin.

"For a skeptical agnostic," he writes of himself, "this was a suffocating thought. The idea that the Shroud might be authentic hinted at something uncanny happening to Jesus' body in the tomb."

Yet the authenticity of the Shroud becomes less suffocating if a naturalistic process might have brought about that image. This would have to be a naturalistic process sufficiently rare in its operation that it would seem uncanny and miraculous, and lead to the willing martyrdom of those who first witnessed it, convincing them that the Resurrection was not a matter of faith but a simply matter of observed fact, yet a naturalistic process nonetheless.

That is where a Maillard reaction comes in. You can read the basics on such a reaction here. It involves amino acids, sugar, usually some mild degree of heat -- and is best known for producing a browning effect upon foodstuffs.

No such reaction would produce any browning effect upon a pure linen shroud. The hypothesis requires impurities in the shroud, carbohydrates to be precise. Wesselow cites chemists (here he is definitely outside of his personal field of expertise) who confirm that yes, it is possible a dead body could have stained the shroud via a Malliard reaction.

So, essence, the heat in the cave toasted a detailed image of Jesus into the impure linen. The whole thing makes the Easter turn-about in the convictions and fate of a small cluster of Jews no less astonishing than if one presumes his bodily resurrection and His Father's intervention to bring about a miraculous coloring of the same Shroud.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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