What Is Now Allowed about the Shroud
We Can Place the Shroud of Turin at the Time and Place of the Crucifixion
The Shroud of Turin has long been venerated as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ following His crucifixion. The shroud bears an image—which no one can quite explain—but if you photograph this pale image and then view the photographic negative, it is clearly the image of a man. The questions arise: Who is this man? How did the image get there? What would produce such an image? There are no other examples anyone knows of that resemble this type of image.
It was just recently announced that the shroud can be dated back to the approximate time and place of the Crucifixion. This is news, since earlier carbon dating tests made the shroud much younger than this recent analysis, effectively ruling it out as the burial shroud of Jesus.
This recent finding puts it back in the running as the actual burial shroud of Jesus.
The first historical record we have of the Shroud of Turin comes from a little church in the village of Lirey, France, in the year 1354. The cloth is a 14-foot long piece of old linen, about 3 feet wide, on which you can see the faint full-body image of a man.
By 1389, the cloth had already been denounced as a forgery. (I guess they had disinformation fanatics back then, too.)
It was purchased in 1453 by the Savoy dynasty of Italy who stored it in a chapel that caught fire—the shroud survived but got slightly damaged. In 1578, the Savoys took the shroud to Turin, Italy, where it has remained every since. In fact, in 1683, the city of Turin built a chapel specifically designed to house the shroud. In 1983, King Umberto II, the last of the Savoy dynasty, died off, and the shroud passed from the Savoy clan to the Roman Catholic Church.
What created the image? It’s an odd image because if you just look at the actual cloth with the naked eye, the image is so faint it is hard to even see. But if you photograph the image and then look at the negative of the photograph (seen above), the image becomes quite clear. No other burial cloths or other textiles have such images. Early on, some argued the image was painted onto the cloth, but that has since been effectively refuted.
Radiocarbon dating (which is about as good a form of science as phrenology) said the linen was medieval and thus could not have been Christ’s burial shroud. Willard Libby won the Nobel Prize in the 1940s for his work on carbon dating, but the unreliability of radiocarbon dating is so vast that the physics website, Phys.org, claims radiocarbon dating is accurate only about half of the time. The trouble is, we don’t know which half.
To this day, the exact technique by which the image was made has yet to be explained or reproduced.
Now what makes people think this is Jesus’s burial cloth? The custom of Roman crucifixion in Jerusalem threw the dead bodies of the executed men in the dump and did not accord them any sort of burial. According to the Bible, Joseph of Arimathea and his friend Nicodemus were present at the crucifixion and approached the Roman soldiers to get permission to claim the body of Jesus. Perhaps bribery was involved, who knows—that is not recorded—but the Romans let Joseph and Nicodemus take the body of Jesus in order to bury it in a cave-like tomb that was probably owned by Joseph of Arimathea. The Bible prophesied that the Messiah would die with criminals but be buried in a “rich man’s grave.” All four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John mention that the body of the crucified Christ was wrapped in linen burial cloth. When Christ was resurrected, the Gospel of Luke states that Peter went to the empty tomb and saw the burial cloth still there. Thus, there is a historical record that Christ was buried in a linen burial cloth.
But forensically, the existence of “a linen burial cloth” does not mean that the Shroud of Turin is the literal burial cloth described in the Bible. Science has now started to analyze the Shroud of Turin but they only can tell us what it’s not.
In 1978, it was found that the image on the cloth was made without any use of dyes or pigments
In 2002 somebody at Las Alamos National Laboratory suggested that a chemical reaction created the image, but they do not know what kind of chemical reaction and have no other examples
In 2014, the theory was that radiation following an earthquake could have created the image if the cloth was placed over a dead body but it does not explain why we do not have other examples of such images in areas where people perished in earthquakes
There is blood on the shroud and in 2014, Spanish researchers found it was type AB. AB is a relatively rare blood type, but it is more common in Israel than other parts of the world. No one knows Jesus Christ’s blood type, but the blood on the Shroud of Turin is quite plausible to be from a man from Israel.
In 2019, a very interesting scientist named Liberato De Caro, PhD, started to research the shroud using wide-angle X-ray scattering. This is a technique which looks at the cellulose fibers of the cloth and compares how they have aged versus new fibers. This creative but labor- and math-intensive method of dating linen provides a way of telling how old something is by observing minute changes in the fibers. It involves a lot of mathematical equations and scientific explanations, but its if ar more accurate than radiocarbon dating (of course, the Magic Eight Ball is more accurate than radiocarbon dating).
Liberato De Caro’s work with wide-angle X-ray scattering found that the shroud is about 2000 years old. Earlier studies on pollen grains found embedded in the shroud prove that it came from the Middle East, the area where Jesus lived. By the way, Liberato De Caro is no scientific slouch; he’s published over 150 scientific articles which have been cited by other scholars over 5,550 times. This is more than most scientists accomplish over a lifetime, and he is a young man.
The wide-angle X-ray scattering does not prove that the image is Jesus. But if the cloth dates back to the time and place where Christ died, it is evidence that supports the theory that this could be the actual burial cloth. (Remember, evidence is not proof, it is evidence.)
Using artificial intelligence (AI), a more three-dimensional recreation of the body was made based on the reversed image on the cloth. Bear in mind, that anything done by AI needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Regardless of how things turn out, the Shroud of Turin is a timely reminder that two millennia ago, Jesus Christ lived, taught, performed miracles, was crucified, and resurrected in Israel. Artifacts can be interesting, but they are not to be worshiped. Ultimately, it does not matter to believers whether this is real or fake—but it is still historically interesting.
All four of the Gospels specifically mention that dead body of Jesus Christ was wrapped in linen before it was placed in a tomb. The Shroud of Turin has been alternately venerated and discredited since the 14th century. The investigations into the shroud even coined a new word—sindonology—which is the study of the burial cloth. (The linen cloth was called a “sindon” in the original Greek of the New Testament, so the science of the sindon became sindonology.) Sindonology is not a simple science. It involves material analysis (what is the cloth made of and how old is it?), historical research, biology, medical forensics, and image analysis.
The image itself remains most baffling. Today, scientists and sindonologists have agreed that exposure to very bright light might leave an image such as is seen on the shroud. In other words, we have a bright light hypothesis. So was the resurrection of Jesus accompanied by a huge burst of energy? And is this image unique because Jesus is the only one who was resurrected in this way?
These recent announcements about the Shroud of Turin are not proof that this is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Christians do not need such relics for their faith, and the faithless are not usually won over even if a relic could be definitively proved. What is interesting about the shroud is that it’s interesting.
We live in uncertain times. Have you noticed how many people are expressing interest in Christianity right now?
Richard Dawkins, the celebrated biologist-atheist (author of The God Delusion), now identifies as a “cultural Christian.” He stops short of a profession of faith but this once ardent atheist says he likes the teachings of Jesus
Russell Brand, once a promiscuous sex and drug addict and celebrity (but I repeat myself), has turned first to politics and now to Christianity
Joe Rogan is speaking well of Christianity and it would not surprise me if he soon joined the ranks of the saints
In China, Christians are growing at a rate of about 10% a year and if things keep on, China will have the largest Christian population of any nation
Afghanistan and Iran have some of the fastest growing churches in the world—despite horrific persecution
Bible studies online are flourishing and some even have waiting lists since they’re at capacity
Something is going on.
The other day, Tucker Carlson was doing a long-form interview with John Rich on the Tucker Carlson Network. They started to talk about the end of the world and Rich—at Tucker’s request—got out a Bible and started to read to him.
What’s happening? I can’t remember the last time a secular news anchor asked a guest to read to him from the book of Matthew. Tucker wanted to know exactly what it said. He didn’t want Rich’s synopsis. He wanted to hear the very words.
And here’s another oddity. This discovery—that the Shroud of Turin can be dated back to the time as well as the place of Jesus’s crucifixion—did not happen yesterday. De Caro’s finding was made in 2022. It only hit the news recently.
Why the delay? In the natural realm of events, no one knows why such a long news lag would occur.
Maybe two years ago, this didn’t have enough sizzle to be news. It was Christian stuff.
But perhaps there is a clue in the Biblical book of Esther. That book tells us that there are certain things that happen “for such a time as this.” So maybe we’re in “such a time.”