In my opinion, if nothing else, the Shroud of Turin is compelling evidence that shows God has a terrific sense of humor. There are precious few religious relics and artifacts that can cause such a furious and ferocious debate. If you really want to argue about whether it could be real, I’ll be your Huckleberry.
For years, I’ve studied every piece of alleged evidence involving the shroud. As luck would have it, my cohort-in-crime Wilfred recently published an image of the shroud with commentary, and the post went viral: as of this writing, his post has received more than 3.2 million views, over 76 thousand reactions from visitors, 5,000 comments, and shared 5,150 times.
Not too shabby for an hour or so of easy work.
For the record, we will probably never know exactly what the shroud is and how it was created, but we do know with some degree of certainty what it is not: it is not a medieval forgery.
The image on the shroud was created by some unknown means, and was not created by paints or dyes. A team comprised of some of the best scientists in the world spent two weeks in the early 1980s closely scrutinizing the cloth and performing a series of scientific experiments to see if they could figure out what the material was and how it was created, which became known as the Shroud of Turin Research (STURP) Project. In 1988, a rather famous carbon dating test result dated the shroud between 1260 and 1390 A.D. which of course would make it a medieval forgery with a much too recent date of origin to be considered a candidate for the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
Most people (myself included) dismissed the shroud as evidence of anything after the carbon dating test because that is considered sort of a “gold standard” for scientific results, a trump card against further argument. The test is performed with a margin of error, but that was only about 130 years, not more than a thousand. The debate was over until 2000, when a couple of researchers named Benford and Marino published a paper titled “Evidence for the Skewing of the C-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin Due to Repairs” that challenged those 1988 experiment results. Original STURP team member Ray Rogers sought to discredit their paper with additional C-14 experiments but instead, he confirmed their hypothesis and wrote a 2004 paper titled “Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the shroud of turin.”
There should be little doubt as to why the shroud remains such a hot topic of conversation: if the shroud could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that it was indeed the burial cloth used to wrap the body of the crucified Christ, it would be the sort of “smoking gun” evidence proving the Bible is true but ironically, at the same time that would also create a huge problem for Christianity because the religion is founded on faith. It’s the ultimate paradox, a perfect Catch-22.
This reminds me of one of my favorite bits from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about a fictional creature called a babel fish, whose existence was used by philosophers to “prove” the non-existence of God because the babel fish was such a useful organism (you simply placed one inside your ear and it began to translate foreign languages into your native tongue) that the existence of which absolutely could not be explained by a series of fortuitous accidents, therefore proving God exists. However, because a relationship with God completely depends on faith, if we have absolute evidence that God exists, it must somehow mean that God doesn’t exist (and suddenly vanishes in a puff of logic.)
Therefore, if the shroud could be proved to be the burial cloth of Jesus beyond all shadow of a doubt, that would be problematic for faith. However, to establish that claim as an indisputable fact, we would need to have the DNA of Jesus for comparative analysis to the DNA found on the shroud, which we do not have, so we’ll always be forced to rely on faith to determine our beliefs. Otherwise, we merely have the DNA of an unknown subject who just happened to have suffered a virtually identical execution to the one the four Gospels describe. We can never prove without any doubt that the dead body covered by the shroud was Jesus. At best, the science can prove the subject died exactly as the Bible describes
We can never have proof, but proof is limited to courtrooms and mathematical theorems. We do have very compelling evidence that happens to be quite excellent.
For example, NASA scientists looked at photographs of the shroud using their VP-8 digital analyzer that helps NASA scientists map planets and other extraterrestrial bodies, and were astonished to discover the shroud has 3D characteristics that strongly suggest it was indeed once used to wrap the body of a dead person. No other photograph on Earth has the same effect when viewed under this device.
Naturally, there will always be people who love to argue and want to prove the popular consensus wrong, so we will always see articles like this one from the Daily Mail. Naturally, being the Daily Mail, they present the other side of the argument with equal enthusiasm. You can’t possibly be wrong if you argue for both sides, can you?
The objections from visitors came in two basic forms. There were both science skeptics and religious skeptics. Here are a few of the more popular observations and criticisms in comments coming from our “science” skeptics:
Carbon dating tests performed in 1988 proved that the shroud is a forgery that was created between 1260 and 1390 A.D.
I’ve already explained why there is very good reason to question the 1988 C-14 experiment results, as noted in the work of Ray Rogers.
One commenter even wrote, “Science debunked this many years ago as FAKE and misleading. But, whatever. If that fairy tale makes you feel better, go ahead and “make believe”.”
Naturally, the most frequent dissenting comment included the word “fake” (or FAKE).
My reply to anyone who insists THEY KNOW the shroud isn’t real would be to ask, “How exactly was it faked? Please be specific. Also, how do you reconcile your belief about the shroud with the collected evidence from the experts who actually studied the material and performed the experiments?”
I don’t like to boast or brag, but the odds are pretty good that I’ve forgotten more about the shroud than you currently know. I am a Georgia Bulldog, and that means once I sink my teeth into something, you practically have to knock me out cold to get me to let go. I am very interested in the Shroud of Turin.
If you know anything at all about me and have read my book The God Conclusion, you’ll know that I place a high value on scientific evidence. My attitude has always been to believe scientific evidence on face value until it disagrees with your common sense, and then you should scrutinize the evidence more carefully rather than automatically reject it. Please don’t pretend you speak for science when you don’t even appear to know what science is currently saying.
In a court of law, the very best evidence is direct evidence, or eyewitness testimony, and for that we have the four Gospels. Because the four Gospels contain minor discrepancies, they can be considered reliable because that is precisely how reliable eyewitness testimony works. Conversely, if all four Gospels agreed in every minor detail, we should believe the “witnesses” were coached to give the exact same story, and could safely assume the accounts were false and the witnesses were lying.
The shroud should be considered indirect or circumstantial evidence, and that is inferior to direct evidence. A conviction could never be made based solely on evidence obtained by studying the shroud because there is no comparative DNA to test.
There are a number of rumors circulating on the Internet suggesting the blood on the shroud was tested and determined to still be “alive” somehow, or that the blood only had 24 chromosomes, meaning 23 from Mary and one Y chromosome from Yahweh. I judge such rumors as bogus. Until I read it in a scientific paper, I’m inclined to believe any and all claims, even those I might like to believe, and that would be the most important scientific paper ever written. Don’t believe anything until you’ve evaluated the evidence and can judge its veracity.
The shroud was painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
Not only is this claim categorically false, it is absurd. There is no paint or dye on the shroud, as shown in the conclusions made by STURP. And even if the carbon dating results had not already been invalidated, there is absolutely no reason to believe da Vinci could have been involved in its production because the latest date provided for the “forgery” was 1390 and Leonardo wasn’t born until 1452. Unless da Vinci invented time travel, there is no reason to assert he could have been the shroud’s creator.
“Read how Jesus was tortured. There’s no way His body would l leave an image of so few injuries. Obviously fake.”
“…and the face cloth which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself. John 20:7… doesn’t seem to jibe with the shroud.”
Jesus didn’t look anything like the image depicted on the shroud.
Specific claim: “THE PROBLEM I have with it is the fact that it is the face of a white man from the Middle Ages, and according to some historians Jews of that era didn’t look like that.”
My response: Why does the image on the shroud look like a “white man from the Middle Ages” to you? How do you know what Jesus looked like? I don’t. I can say I don’t believe Jesus had blond hair and blue eyes because it wouldn’t make sense for the region where he lived, but I cannot claim any knowledge of how Jesus looked. The best I can do is tell you how others who claimed to see Jesus described him.
Ray Downing is an expert on creating death masks for famous individuals, and his team produced this image, which looks like a young Middle Eastern man to me. I suppose to each his own.
The religious skeptics seem mostly focused on what they perceive to be discrepancies in the biblical description of the burial cloths and the shroud itself, probably because the Bible describes two cloths, not one shroud. However, the cloth that allegedly covered the face of Jesus is called the Sudarium of Oviedo and its location has been known since 570 A.D. which gives it a known history much older than the shroud, and yet experts claim they perfectly match as the burial cloth and the shroud of Jesus.
The result of every known scientific experiment, whether it be carbon dating, pollen tests, chemical analysis and testing for blood, paint, dye, etc. suggests it is a genuine burial cloth for a man who lived in Palestine and died by brutal crucifixion…it does not prove the victim was Jesus himself, but the extraordinary efforts that people have exerted for centuries to preserve it speaks of its perceived importance. The only reason to doubt their sincerity is to assume sinister motives.
The body looks too good to have been Jesus.
Admittedly, this seems to be the strangest criticism of the religious doubters, that the corpse looked too good, based on the descriptions of Jesus’ condition post-crucifixion. He was allegedly beaten and tortured to the point of being barely recognizable.
Ironically, I also found the best potential response to this criticism in the comments. Someone suggested that the image projected on the shroud was created at hte literal moment of resurrection, by the intense radiation created as the dead body became reanimated with the soul of Jesus Christ himself. That would explain all of the known characteristics of the shroud: the lack of paint, reverse-negative imaging, etc.
As to why the body looked so good, that is also answered by the suggested timing. Would you expect your risen Savior to appear bloodied and beaten from the grave, or would He look relatively good, considering what He’d just been through?
On the other hand, I’ve watched hours of documentaries about teams of experts that studied the shroud as closely as anyone has been allowed, and I’ve written numerous articles about the shroud and the unique evidence supporting it, from the STURP experiments to the Sudarium of Oviedo and the Hungarian Pray Manuscript that both contradicted the carbon dating test results before Ray Rogers repeated the experiment and invalidated the 1988 C-14 test results, the reverse-negative photographic imaging phenomena and the work of Ray Downing.
I’ve just explained why I believe the shroud is real. The scientific evidence all says that it is real. But what I cannot say is that I know the shroud is real.
But I can give you a very good explanation for why I believe what I believe.
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