THE SHROUD OF TURIN is the most investigated archaeological relic in history. If it’s real, it’s no trivial matter: the resurrection of Jesus Christ is supercharged with physical evidence. It’s no longer just a propositional truth claim found in scripture but measurable proof that can no longer be ignored. The linen shroud’s existence captures the light, literally speaking, of the greatest miracle ever recorded—the empty tomb.
Here are my notes from and edits of the documentary called “The Shroud: Face to Face” (2023) by Robert Orlando.
The Shroud is the image of Jesus Christ imprinted on his burial cloth. It shows that he was lanced, scourged, pierced and crowned.
The Shroud offers a high Christology: only an intense radiation of light—the kind of light that one would expect from the glorious resurrection of the Son of God—can explain the markings and blood stains on the Shroud. It’s a photographic negative in an age when they knew nothing of photographic negatives.[1]
That’s not to say that there aren’t legends about the Shroud. Obviously, one would expect a remarkable story, fiction or nonfiction, as to how the Shroud arrived in Turin, Italy, in 1578. One legend says that the Shroud went from Jerusalem (30ish AD) up to Syria to King Abgar, who was healed of leprosy because of it, and as a result converted to Christianity. Then during the Crusades, the Shroud was locked away for a few hundred years. It wasn’t until the flood of 525 that the Shroud reemerged due to the reconstruction of the city walls in 544. The theory is that the Knights Templar brought the Shroud back to Turin in 1578, where it remains till today.
With that said, these are the historical facts of the case:
- In 1898 an Italian named Secondo Pia, interested in both art and science, used electric light bulbs to take photos. That was the same time when Turin was selected to host an Italian arts and culture festival. A sacred art exhibition was planned where the Shroud would be displayed publicly. Pia was the official photographer. He discovered that the reason why the Shroud appears so ghostly is because it’s a photographic negative.
- It wasn’t until 1931 that an Italian photographer by the name Giuseppe Enrie would take the same photo on orthochromatic film.
- That photo reached the hands of a French skeptic named Yves Delage, who writes for the Académie des Sciences. He ends up writing a paper studying the pathologies of the man of the shroud, comparing them to what we know about Jesus of Nazareth. His conclusion was that the man of the shroud is Jesus of Nazareth. (Notice he is not making any faith claims. He is simply comparing the evidence.) The Académie des Sciences rejected his paper. Sadly, the scientific worldview determines what it believes more than the facts do.[2]
What is truly remarkable is that the pollen from Palestine and the mineral made of calcium carbonite, aragonite, matches the pollen and aragonite found in the Jerusalem caves. How would a forger know to put these microparticles into the fabric of the Shroud when they were not visible to the naked eye and when the microscope did not yet exist? Medieval forgery cannot explain it. It’s not like any medieval painting of the death of Jesus, not Grünewald, not El Greco, nothing.[3]
What about the carbon dating? The results from the 1980s depicted it as being from the 14th or late 13th century.[4] However, that does not take into consideration the smoke that was entrenched into the fabric from the fire of Chembéry in 1532, giving it an abundance of carbon (C14). Combine that with the fact that the image itself was not tested. So that just leaves the burn marks and the edges of the cloth. (As you move away from the fringe toward the center the dating changes, giving younger dates.) Add to that the contamination of medieval cotton fibers that were added and dyed into the cloth by Catholic nuns who had woven the dyed cotton into the spot where the sample was taken. These issues would’ve given extremely inaccurate dates.
A study from geology shows that the Shroud might be authentic after all. According to Roman Catholicism, the Stations of the Cross is a traditional account of Jesus falling while carrying his cross to Calvary based on scripture.[5] And what do we find on the Shroud at the knees, nose, and feet? Traces of soil that match the soil of the grottos of Jerusalem.
The Shroud also depicts on the right shoulder two excoriations on the back which match the tradition of the Stations of the Cross as well as the biblical account whereby Jesus carried his cross.[6]
But it’s the blood stains of a raised Messiah that speak to us from the dead. For example, the proportion of water to blood on the Shroud shows evidence of lung edema. Someone who has been brutally beaten or scourged would’ve suffered just this way.
And what about the light source that created the negative image on the Shroud? There’s what’s called Vacuum Ultraviolet Radiation (VUR). Six to eight billion watts of VUR would be needed. This radiation is equal to half a million searchlights worth of light energy for 1/40,000,000,000th of a second, which would require a device like an ARF Excimer Laser. The problem is that that would exceed all the ultraviolet technology that we have in the world today to produce that one image for 1/40,000,000,000th of a second. It’s extremely doubtful that a VUR was used.
So what’s the conclusion? It seems unwarranted to make the definitive statement that the Shroud of Turin is a fraud. There are too many variables that cannot be easily wiped away by skeptics, which lend to its credibility and mystery. Take into consideration the matching pollen and aragonite found in the Jerusalem caves, and the corresponding soil of the grottos of Jerusalem and excoriation marks on the back with the tradition of the Stations of the Cross, as well as the blood stains and the Vacuum Ultraviolet Radiation that would’ve been needed to create such an image. My conviction is that the Shroud tells the gospel story, eliciting a holy, heartfelt response of “We engage the archaeological relic that ushers us into a sacred space whereby we contemplate Christ’s passion.”
[1] Ben Witherington, III.
[2] Gary Habermas.
[3] Craig Evans.
[4] Around that time a bishop wrote to one of the French Popes and told him he knew a bishop who knew someone who painted it.
[5] See Luke 23:26.
[6] See John 19:17.