What caught my attention about this thread was the term "purpose". If anything at all has any purpose, the wisest of all questions would be to ask, "What is my purpose? Why am I? Why must I be?"
"According to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus and the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, the Essenes were indeed celibate."
First Person: Was the Dead Sea Scroll Community Celibate?
If "all the knowledge of previous generations has been lost in the mists of time", we would be back to hunting and gathering. My fellow cave dwellers would write me off as a nut case for contemplating whether the Earth is round or not. We would have more pressing issues to wrestle with.
There are no eye witness accounts of the existence of Jesus outside of the Bible. Therefore, we are only left with the Bible as the only source of evidence. To use the Bible to prove the Bible is circular reasoning.
The Shroud itself isn’t fake. It’s the certainty that the image on it is Jesus that is fake. But to this day no one knows how the heck that image got on that thing. No one has been able to mimic it.