That this is not the first time an icon has produced myrrh is actually evidence in favor of a hoax or natural event. In either case, it’s happened before so it must not be all that difficult for the conditions to be right or to set it up.
As for the plane, at least several explanations are possible.
The event could actually be natural. Microscopic quantities of myrrh are quite detectible, and could be seeping from the paints for quite some time.
I can easily imagine the effect being encouraged by spraying a fine mist of oil, water, alcohol, or some other mild solvent over the icon. This could even be passed off as maintenance of some sort. “Just keeping it fresh. Travel is so hard on these paintings, you know.”
The paint could be formulated with an unusually high myrrh content for some reason. This would go a long way to explain why not all myrrh-containing paints do this.
The guy who travels with it might not even know how it really works, but actually believe that it’s a miracle.
Perhaps the myrrh could be applied directly to the icon in some way that doesn’t really show up on an x-ray scanner. “Be careful please! Of course it smells like that. Don’t you know what this is?”
The vessels containing the myrrh may be small enough that airport security doesn’t care. A little goes a long way, and people travel with essential oils all the time. I can think of several ways to produce a myrrh distribution system by carving small channels in the frame. These would likely not even show up at airport security, and could contain enough myrrh to last for quite some time.
The supply of myrrh could be shipped by another means, or in checked luggage.
Charter planes don’t have nearly the security considerations that public planes seem to require.
The myrrh supply doesn’t necessarily have to travel at all. Myrrh is, in fact, reasonably easy to get in many places. I understand that christian book shops, for example, routinely sell the stuff. Here it is on Amazon. You could even repackage it into tiny vials for sale “to recoup travel costs”. That would provide cover for your large orders.
The quantity of myrrh that the icons give off may have been vastly exaggerated over time to enhance the story, either by the originator of the story or by those retelling it. This is a widely known effect of word-of-mouth information transmission, and something that people are often perfectly happy to ignore when they encounter the truth.
Even combinations of several these explanations produce prior probabilities that are many orders larger than the probability for “God did it”. The amount of complexity hiding in the word “God” is pretty extreme.
That this is not the first time an icon has produced myrrh is actually evidence in favor of a hoax or natural event. In either case, it’s happened before so it must not be all that difficult for the conditions to be right or to set it up.
As for the plane, at least several explanations are possible.
The event could actually be natural. Microscopic quantities of myrrh are quite detectible, and could be seeping from the paints for quite some time.
I can easily imagine the effect being encouraged by spraying a fine mist of oil, water, alcohol, or some other mild solvent over the icon. This could even be passed off as maintenance of some sort. “Just keeping it fresh. Travel is so hard on these paintings, you know.”
The paint could be formulated with an unusually high myrrh content for some reason. This would go a long way to explain why not all myrrh-containing paints do this.
The guy who travels with it might not even know how it really works, but actually believe that it’s a miracle.
Perhaps the myrrh could be applied directly to the icon in some way that doesn’t really show up on an x-ray scanner. “Be careful please! Of course it smells like that. Don’t you know what this is?”
The vessels containing the myrrh may be small enough that airport security doesn’t care. A little goes a long way, and people travel with essential oils all the time. I can think of several ways to produce a myrrh distribution system by carving small channels in the frame. These would likely not even show up at airport security, and could contain enough myrrh to last for quite some time.
The supply of myrrh could be shipped by another means, or in checked luggage.
Charter planes don’t have nearly the security considerations that public planes seem to require.
The myrrh supply doesn’t necessarily have to travel at all. Myrrh is, in fact, reasonably easy to get in many places. I understand that christian book shops, for example, routinely sell the stuff. Here it is on Amazon. You could even repackage it into tiny vials for sale “to recoup travel costs”. That would provide cover for your large orders.
The quantity of myrrh that the icons give off may have been vastly exaggerated over time to enhance the story, either by the originator of the story or by those retelling it. This is a widely known effect of word-of-mouth information transmission, and something that people are often perfectly happy to ignore when they encounter the truth.
Even combinations of several these explanations produce prior probabilities that are many orders larger than the probability for “God did it”. The amount of complexity hiding in the word “God” is pretty extreme.