HOW
OLD IS THE TURIN
SHROUD MENDED IN 1534 IS NOT OUR
TURIN SHROUD
The Turin Shroud, reputed to be the burial cloth of Jesus
Christ, was carbon dated in 1988 to having been made between 1260 and 1390
AD. So its too young to be the burial
cloth of Jesus. This has not stopped
religious cranks from trying to prove the cloth is older than that. One method they use to prove this is from
the existence of the Shroud in historical records before that time. The other is seeing if the way the Shroud
was made matches what we know about how things were made in first century
The gospels say that Jewish burials had the face left bare with a cloth put over the face as the body was wrapped up in stripes and that Jesus was buried according to the Jewish custom (John 19:40). There have been attempts to deny that Jesus was strictly buried in this method or that there were a variety of Jewish methods. But when the John gospel describes the burial of Lazarus buried with a bare face that a cloth was put on and then says Jesus was buried the Jewish way then clearly John means Jesus was buried that way too. We know that from the fact that his gospel was meant for non-Jews. He wanted to inform non-Jews.
WHERE WAS IT BEFORE 1355?
The existence of the Shroud is not even mentioned in early Christian writings and what is mention in the gospel is certainly not what is now the Turin Shroud. For centuries after the Christian faith inflicted itself on the world nobody said that the Shroud still existed. In The Holy Shroud and Four Visions it is “explained” that to mention the Shroud would have led to antichrists tracking it down and burning it. That is no excuse. They didn’t have to say where it was. The silliest excuse has to be the one that since the Church forbade images of the suffering or dead Christ the Shroud could not even be spoken about. If people kept the Shroud and did not burn it then they could and would have mentioned the Shroud because they were rebels anyway. The ban means that there was no Shroud for to forbid its veneration would have been to blatantly insult God who had preserved the miraculous image. The Church would not have dared disparage or hide away such a precious relic whose existence by the power of God would show that Jesus did not want all the images to be nice. And a Church that went to a lot of trouble to track down the alleged true cross would have been delighted to have the Shroud. The Church loathed Islam when it appeared so it would have used the Shroud to the best of its ability to close up the Muslims who were saying that Jesus never died on the cross.
In 436 AD, in the Basilica of Blachernes, the Shroud of Constantinople was displayed and remained so for a long time. It is thought that this was what is now known as the Turin Shroud. This is because it is thought that the eastern tradition that Jesus was lame arose from the man on the Shroud having one leg shorter than the other. This is only a conjecture. The man on the cloth was pulled everywhere so a dislocated limb would not have been taken as an indication that Jesus had a limp. If Jesus had had a limp we would be reading in the scriptures that his enemies were mocking it because he claimed to be a healer but could do nothing about his limp. If they had the Shroud they would have realised that they could not go by this when the back image is two inches taller than the front one. The back image has legs that look bent so the Shroud could not have made people think Jesus was crippled.
That Shroud would have been a picture of a glorious and rising Jesus for the Eastern Church avoided images of a suffering Jesus because it overstressed the resurrection. Only in the tenth century, did the Roman Church decide to have images of the dead Lord during his crucifixion (page 8, The Holy Shroud and Four Visions).
A cloth with Jesus’ face on it
seems to have been put on show above a gate in
A Georgian manuscript dating
from the third century says that Joseph of Arimathea wiped blood off Jesus’
head with a headband and caught the blood from the side in a big sheet (page
311, The Blood and the Shroud).
The Acts of Thaddeus were written before 600 AD. They speak of a cloth that Jesus wiped his face on and which was doubled in four (page 312, The Blood and the Shroud) making Wilson think this is the Turin Shroud which was folded so that only the face was visible in the picture and which was initially known as the Cloth of Edessa. But Jesus did not wipe his face on the Shroud for he was dead or unconscious. And if the cloth were doubled in four it would show more than the face but the side wound and the arms and the stomach. Nobody would hide the rest of the image when they showed so much. The face print must have been made near the top edge of a towel leaving three quarters of it blank. They folded the cloth to hide the blank.
An ivory image from 1100 AD is supposed
to have been inspired by the Shroud.
(See it in photo 34 b of The Blood and the Shroud). But in the ivory image, Jesus has his head
up high and is wearing a loincloth and his side wound is hidden under the arm
and the cloth has embroidery on it and is not long enough to detect the Turin
Shroud. An 1192 AD picture that shows
Jesus lying naked on the Shroud in the position of the
Gervase of Tilbury wrote in
1211 that the
Tradition suggested that the Shroud was printed. In fact, this may have given the forger the idea to print the image on.
In Romanus Pontifex in 1506, Pope Julius II authorised the Mass of the Holy Shroud apparently meaning the one later known as the Turin Shroud.
It came to
There is no evidence at all for
the
Robin Lane Fox observed that
there is evidence that the Eddesa cloth was not older than 560 AD. It was probably discovered thanks to a
battle around that time (page 250, The Unauthorized Version). He says the tests that showed pollen from
plants in
1355, is as far back as we may
be able to go in tracing the history of the
THE
CARBON DATING
In 1988, scientists used carbon dating on the Shroud with the result indicating that it was made between 1260 and 1390 AD and was not the winding sheet of Jesus Christ. Many who say that it was his Shroud hold that it proves that Jesus did not die on the cross and that his resurrection was a hoax. The dispute over the reliability of the tests still continues.
In 1983 it is claimed by Dr Garza-Valdes that an invisible coating could have been layered on the cloth that could have distorted the results of the tests. The bacteria that does this was indeed found on the cloth. He was backed up by Dr Stephen Mattingly who was a microbiologist but the pair earned mistrust by publishing no detailed reports on their findings. Experienced carbon-daters say that if the cloth had a lacquer great enough to throw the test out by several centuries it would be visible on the cloth.
It is a fact that the argument that the carbon dating which came up with a medieval age for the cloth is wrong for the cloth was contaminated is junk. There would need to be a hugely much more substantial pile of debris on the cloth for it to throw it off so far that it comes up as thirteen hundred years younger than what it is (page 49, Free Inquiry, Joe Nickell, Vol 18, No 2). The pieces tested were thoroughly cleaned (page 28, Looking for a Miracle). The cloth was nearly burned centuries before which some say could lead to misleading carbon dating. Some go as far as to say it gives another reason as to why why the carbon dating cannot be accurate. But experiments with cloth exposed to similar heat and smoke as the Shroud endured show that this claim is futile. Two independent labs using different pieces and using controls which were dated accurately came up with nearly the same dates. Some things cannot be dated accurately by carbon dating but cloth is different.
The fire that nearly destroyed the cloth in 1532 has been ruled out as the culprit that some think was making the test mislead. The portions of the cloth used in the carbon test were cleaned of soot and other contaminants (page 193, The Second Messiah). The test worked out in three labs that the flax used to make the Shroud had died between 1260 and 1390 AD. The other samples used were dated by the process according to the date they were known to have been made in.
The view that the Carbon 14 test was thrown off by the exposure of the cloth to steam when water was thrown on it to put out the flames that had caught and were threatening to engulf the cloth is pure fantasy. No tests of this kind would be any use if they were that easily upset.
The Holger Kersten and Elmar
Gruber theory that the pieces of the Shroud that were tested were not really
from the Shroud has been thoroughly discredited (page 195, The Second
Messiah). They alleged that the
THE COINS
IT IS IMAGINED THAT THE COIN SHOWN ABOVE LEFT A MARK ON THE EYELID ON THE CLOTH! THE THIRD PICTURE IS A THREE-D SHOT OF THE REGION ON THE CLOTH THAT ALLEGEDLY BACKS THIS UP!
A professor from
The coins are called leptons and were minted by Pilate in 31 and 32 AD another reason why leptons would not have been used for Pilate killed Jesus. The right eye is supposed to show a staff like a bishops crook with letters around it and the roughly roundish shape of the coin on the eye. No coin is going to sit perfectly flat on the eye so you have to laugh at the suggestion that the shape is on the eye if the coins were taken off when the man was laid out. If the mark fits the coin then it is not a coin but just plain prints that some people think they can see a coin shape in.
Also, how could the image of the coins transfer to the cloth when the image was caused by the body and by the blood? We would expect to see clean roundish patches on the eyes. Yet the book, Verdict on the Shroud, says that the man may have been buried with coins on the eyelids.
The head of Pilate, can according
to some, can be allegedly be seen from a coin on the right eyelid of the
Shroud man. But this image would not
be is perfectly clear so it could be anything. Actually, it is far from even half
distinct. It is easy to see faces and
patterns in blots and blobs that are not really there or there by design - we all do that and the cloth has a
roughish surface too which causes too much distortion to justify the claim
about the coins. But it is probable
that burying people with coins on their eyes was not done in the first
century (Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, page 151). It is hard to believe that coins with Roman
emblems on them would have been placed on Jesus when
Filas studied 3-D images of the eyelids and though he could read UCAI from Tiberius Caisaros which was inscribed on coins in those days (page 19). But when you look at the pictures you see you can imagine other letters that were not on these coins just as clearly. They are all in the head. Good researchers and even the pro-Shroud STURP insist that the coins are imagined (page 19, Turin Shroud).
Jesus would have died with his eyes closed because the blood would have been running into them from the crown of thorns so there was no need for anything on the lids to keep them shut. He would have closed his eyes on passing gradually into a coma before death.
It has been claimed that the
Shroud bears images of
Shroudies make a lot of noise
about the coins. But as usual with
every supernatural claim there is a whole supermarket of rival claims. For example, on the website Apollonius of
Tyana and the Shroud of Turin there is a series of photos of a bust of
Apollonius with each photo of the bust carrying a heavier superimposition of
the face of the Shroud man. The result
is that the face of the bust looks exactly like the man on the Shroud. This would mean that the pagan god
Apollonius was the same person as Jesus or perhaps that Apollonius had a twin
brother who masqueraded as Jesus. This
bust is preserved in
THE
HUNGARIAN CODEX
Despite recent attempts to prove that the herringbone
pattern of the Shroud was used in first century
We are told by people like Ian Wilson that the Hungarian
Codex dating from 1192-5 has a picture of Jesus being prepared for burial in
the Holy Shroud and another one where the angel holds the Shroud which has
mysterious poker holes like the
The shroudies want to believe the Carbon 14 test was inaccurate but if they are right what if it was only wrong by 68 years? Remember, even if the test is wrong it is not likely to be extremely wrong. It can’t err by as much as 1260 years.
To say the Codex has a copy of the Shroud of Turin on it is as ridiculous as saying that all the paintings of Jesus looking up to Heaven as he dies on the cross and has a nail in each foot are copied from the first painting that does this. There are many depictions of the Shroud and the Cross so coincidences have to be expected and in the Shroud even more so than the crucifixion. Yet people argue that there are ancient icons of Jesus which have too much in common with the face on the Shroud to mean anything other than that the Shroud inspired and influenced the pictures! But there are thousands of icons so it is only natural that some would look a fair bit like the Shroud man. And the Shroud man’s features are not as plain as an ordinary photograph so anybody that couldn’t have the negative image which was plainer would have found it difficult to render a very accurate likeness.
There is a reproduction of the Hungarian Codex picture in Ian Wilson’s book, Holy Faces, Secret Places (page 209). The Jesus in the picture has a smaller beard than the Shoudman. The wounds are entirely omitted. His wrists are crossed like in the Shroud only the right hand is very obviously stretched over to cover the genitals while the left lies on the thigh which does not match the Shroud at all. Even more telling the loincloth lies opened up between the linen and the man’s buttocks while we can see the Shroud man’s buttocks. In the picture Jesus is laid out on a plain white shroud.
In the lower picture, the shroud cloth is bunched up and has xs in it not holes at all. What has the holes is the lid of the sarcophagus which has an edge jutting out to indicate that it is a solid object. These holes match the Turin Shroud holes exactly. And the slab composing it also has holes too.
So the picture is inconsistent with the idea that the Shroud holes signify poker holes. My theory is that the triple holes in the Shroud and on the lid are markers of the Trinity and not poker holes and then there is a hole then on its own near them to indicate the oneness of the Trinity. Why would anybody put a hot poker in a new Shroud? Whoever forged the Shroud got the idea of the poker holes from the picture. But he misunderstood what the artist understood by them indicating that the Shroud came AFTER the codex not before.
The holes in the lid then could easily be just for spying on the corpse in case it would arise. Ian Wilson says the picture authenticates the Shroud and he has no right to. It is the wishful thinking to which we are accustomed in him. He even thinks that a picture of Jesus lying in a Shroud from the eighth century called the Byzantine umbella shows the Shroud image was known then (page 202, Holy Faces, Secret Places) though the Jesus in it has a large towel round his waist though there is no need for his hands would conceal his modesty.
The pictures indicate that the Shroudmaker may have copied the holes from the picture indicating that the Shroud was a forgery. He thought they were poker holes because he did not look carefully enough. He even mistook the lid which has a herringbone pattern and the four holes for the burial cloth which contains both these features! The item containing the pattern and the holes is stiff and looks like a something rigid like a huge plank of wood or a big flat rectangular slab of stone, the lid of the sarcophagus. Jesus in the shroud on the picture is smeared with ointment contradicting the shroud image which doesn’t show such smears and doesn’t have blood smeared as you would expect from rubbing the body of a man covered in blood. And we cannot doubt that the cloth he is lying on is the Shroud for the body and the people depicted are shown anointing the body inside the tomb or cave. They wouldn’t have been anointing him outside anyway.
It is interesting that like the shroud man the image shows the hands without thumbs and crossed in the same position. But why would the creator of the Hungarian picture not show the wounds and show the thumbs missing? It is totally foolish to suggest he seen the shroud for the thing that would be foremost in his mind would be the wounds.
The picture cannot be taken too seriously because it shows the inside of the sarcophagus being full of crosses. But nevertheless it seems to have inspired the creator of the cloth. Whatever the picture indicates about the Turin Shroud one thing it can’t be used for is showing the cloth existed before the dates given by the carbon dating.
HENRY
AND D’ARCIS
It is held by shroud believers that there is no concrete evidence that the Shroud existed before the mid-1350s when it was seemingly fully exposed in the Church at Lirey. Again they are guessing.
Catholic bishops looked into the claims made for the Shroud roughly around the time it appeared and condemned it as a scandal and a fake. The silence in response to their accusations is deafening. The custodians of the Shroud though it gave them a bad name and lost them much revenue from pilgrims maintained what can only be thought of as a guilty silence. A bailiff, the Bailiff of Troyes made a report in 1389 that the shroud was a painting.
Bishop Henry of
In 1389, Clement VII, was informed by a letter from Bishop D’Arcis who told him that the Shroud was a fake that Henry who investigated the cloth that found that it was a forgery as in a painting and the artist admitted creating it. The integrity of the two bishops is accepted by all (page 99, The Turin Shroud).
What supports the bishops is the fact that the cloth was in the possession of Geoffrey de Charnay who would not display or publicise it. This is bizarre both from religious and financial point of views. Why hide the cloth of Christ and risk it being lost maybe forever unless it is a fake and you are afraid that people find out that somebody was murdered to create the cloth or the artist who made it might be discovered? Why not make money out of displaying it? The Shroud had to wait until he died before it could be unleashed on the world.
Back to the letter from Bishop
D’Arcis. The letter could be saying
that the Shroud was painted or copied, the Latin can mean either (The Turin
Shroud, page 98).
The letter says that Henry the bishop did not learn it was a painting until he found the painter for it says he discovered it was all a hoax after an investigation when the forger confessed. Nobody can say that it was thought to be a painting before that. If it was it could not be the Turin Shroud which nobody would call a painting for it is so vague and you can’t see brush marks. You get brush marks in paint but not if you mix it with a lot of blood so don’t see a miracle in the absence of brush marks like the Shroudies do. Remember too that the cloth is very coarse so brush marks made in paint with a very fine brush would be unnoticeable plus the paint would have to have disintegrated and come off a good bit too over the years meaning the brush marks, if any, would be impossible to make out. The lack of outlining and brush marks could have been the reason the bishops assumed that it was more than just painted but cunningly painted by trickery. The bishop’s letter says the artist showed Henry how it was done. The Shroud didn’t look like a normal painting. Some strange technique was deployed that had to be demonstrated to the bishop. So far it could sound like our Turin Shroud. If it was then this artist forged it. It is evidence that people were interested in using strange methods to produce such images. If we don’t already know how it was made, we might never know now after all this time. The image surely would have chemically changed since that time.
Pope Clement’s response was to let the exposition of the Shroud continue as long as the owners said the cloth was only an image of the Shroud (page 100, The Turin Shroud). He told D’Arcis to say nothing probably because he would not have liked this decision. There was no need for him to say anything because the pope had been convinced by his letter that the Lirey Shroud was a clever painting.
The people displaying the Shroud in the Church said in public that it was not real but said it was real in private. Yet they let its alleged authenticity be broadcast all over. This tells us that they knew it was a fake and said so but when they found they could say it was real and get away with it they confided in all the indiscreet gossips they could find. This was to make it look like as if they believed all along, to strengthen the pro-authenticity case.
Most people believe that the Shroud image was made about the time Geoffrey de Charney got the cloth and kept hidden in a chest because it seems to them that that is as far back as the cloth can be traced. After his death, his second wife had it put on display to make money (The Jesus Conspiracy, page 218). This took place in Lirey in 1355. We can’t prove that Geoffrey had the cloth for he would never ever have mentioned it. It is hard to believe that he would never have looked into the chest it was in. Either he knew the image was made in some immoral way and was afraid of being caught or his wife got somebody to forge the image. Perhaps she lied that her husband had it to make it seem older.
If he knew he had the image he would have desperately wanted the world to revere it and yet he left no deathbed testimony or letter in its favour. The man could not speak because it was forged and he knew it.
Bishop Henry wrote a warm
letter approving of the
The two bishops were accused by
Wilson says that the
information from Henry was not taken from Henry’s memos by D’Arcis for
D’Arcis tells the pope that the dispute between Henry and the Shroud people
took place thirty-four years previously or thereabouts (The Blood and the
Shroud, page 149). The exact date
wasn’t important in the letter – it was only a letter not a legal
statement.
The main argument for the Shroud being a forgery from the 1350s stands and is stronger than many even realise. Also, the carbon dating says the Shroud linen was made between 1260 and 1390 AD. It might be that the linen comes from that time but the image was made later say if the Shroud had been a painting and the paint washed off an a new image put on it by photography in Leonardo’s time.
If the Lirey Shroud was the Turin Shroud then the people who would have known knew that it was a fake. If it is not the Turin Shroud then that did not exist in those days and must be a forgery substituted for the Lirey Shroud.
The Jesus Conspiracy pages 152-153 accidentally proves that the Turin Shroud is a forgery as the bishops said when it finds 15 similarities between Byzantine iconography and the face of the Shroud man. The similarities include a horizontal stripe on the forehead and a three sided square on the head. These characteristics are so hard to see on the Shroud even in the clearer negative image of it that they didn’t have that it is tempting to hold that they were inspired not by the Shroud but the Shroud was inspired by them. We have no evidence that any of these artists saw the Shroud. It is easier to believe that the Shroud artist copied the icons and that it wasn’t the Byzantine artists copying the Shroud. The Byzantines showed Jesus as glorious. They didn’t depict his suffering. Yet in many icons Jesus has an enlarged left nostril. So does the Shroud man. This clearly indicates that the Shroud came after these paintings and didn’t predate them.
The Church had enough relics of the cross to build ships in the days of the Lirey Shroud. Dishonesty was rife and a lot of money could be made from fake relics. If the Lirey Shroud was the Turin Shroud which looks convincing and mysterious at first glance and to simple people, it is unthinkable that the Church would have rejected it and tried to discredit it. This shows that the Church couldn’t deny that the artist made it and it was too well known that he did. The Church made relics out of less mysterious objects so the Church knew that the Shroud was not a mystery. The bishop even knew how the image was made.
SUBSTITUTED BEFORE 1500?
There is no proof that the
Turin Shroud existed in the time of Jesus Christ. The carbon dating says the cloth was
medieval but the image could have been made later. Whoever was going to forge the cloth knew he
had to have a very old cloth to pull it off.
People would expect discoloration, fraying and dirt on a cloth from
the first century. Since Palestinian
Jews buried different to everybody else he knew he had to get a cloth from
The Shroud might have been replaced a few times with a better production. This could have been done any time though it is a bit more likely to have happened when the Shroud was hidden away following its being moved out of the shrine. It is possible that the Shroud that the bishops opposed was a painting of blood with no image and the blood was painted on as if there had been a body in it. Then later somebody decided to put an image on it.
It was usually exposed in the
past to celebrate the weddings of the
The Shroud went missing, apparently stolen, after very slight damage in a fire of 1349. When it was recovered it was laid upon a dead man who came back to life. This was a test to see if it was the right Shroud (page 8, The Holy Shroud and Four Visions). Now the Shroud had been displayed before thousands so there was no need for doubt if it was the same Shroud for there were plenty of witnesses to verify it. This silly test shows that this was not the real Shroud for the witnesses doubted that it was it. Even a priest, Richard La Pie, who had seen the old Shroud had to see the miracle before he would believe that it was the old one! A miracle was staged to get him to mistrust his memory. It shows the people knew the Shroud had been a fake and knew fakes as good.
Two bishops testified that the Shroud was a painting in the fourteenth century and one of them set out to track down the artist and was successful. He got professors to declare their certitude that it was forged (page 307, The Turin Shroud).
The Turin Shroud does not look like a painting for it is a light print with the naked eye and is only clear or more impressive when you see it in the negative which nobody saw until Pia photographed the image in 1898 so was this Shroud not our present Shroud? We can’t be sure but maybe the image faded since then. Plus a painting you can hardly see is still a painting and the bishops could have known other ways that it was a painting apart from testing it for evidence of paintwork.
Bishop D’Arcis in 1389 AD observed than when his predecessor began to sue the Shroud promoters they hid the cloth away for thirty-four years or thereabouts for they were scared they would lose the case (page 308, The Turin Shroud) and when they displayed the cloth again in 1389 they said it was a copy of the Shroud. The bishop could have been wrong in thinking the Shroud in 1389 was the same as that of his predecessor’s time. Even the promoters admitted the image was a fake in the end.
The Benedictine monk, Cornelius
Zantiflet, said that he saw the Shroud and that he admired it as an excellent
picture of Jesus and agreed with his bishop that what he saw was a
painting. This happened in
Picknett and Prince think that the painted Shroud was replaced by Leonardo da Vinci’s copy in 1492. The Shroud was hidden at that time. It would be wrong to think that a new cloth would have been used for the carbon dating shows that the 95% probability that the Shroud fibres were cut between 1260 and 1390 must be considered. 1492 is not likely to be the year in which the cloth was made – possible but not likely. So it could be that an old cloth was used. Leonardo would certainly have used an older cloth for a new length of linen would not make a very convincing forgery. Maybe he used the original Shroud after removing the paint, to put the image on it by photography then. Some say that there is no evidence that their idea that Leonardo created the image and put an image of his face on the cloth is right. The fact that the Shroud face looks exactly like a picture of Leonardo as a young man to many is evidence enough. We know that the head of the Shroud man does not belong to the body – the fact that it is more clearly printed than the body proves that as does the indication of decapitation – there is even a cut mark there where the throat would be and if the neck was there the head would not be in such an unnatural position that no model can duplicate (page 135, Turin Shroud) shows that somebody wanted to use some important man’s face to fake the cloth. Chances are it is a self-portrait when all that trouble was gone to.
Leonardo could have created the Shroud image. If he didn’t then somebody did.
A
SWITCH AFTER 1500?
The first copies of the Shroud were made in the 1500s (Turin Shroud, page 107). So, there is no evidence that the present image existed before then even if the cloth did.
The Shroud was allegedly boiled
in oil and then in water a lot of times in 1503 to test its authenticity (The Holy Shroud and Four Visions, page
9). It was reasoned that if the
imprints on it were the miraculous image of Jesus Christ they could not be
removed. In 1532, water was poured on
the cloth to stop it burning and these left stains which makes one wonder why
there is no discolouration from the boiling in oil and water. The Shroud that went through all this could
not have been the
How do we know that the pollen
from Palestine wasn’t added when interest grew in the Shroud or when the
microscope was invented which made many believe it would soon be possible to see
pollen and identify the country of its origin? It’s a matter of shaking flowers from
The Shroud had holes in it because of the fires it nearly perished in. That is why only half of the arms are visible. A large part of the image has therefore been lost together with the blood. When the Shroud is not fireproof how can it be resistant to hot water and boiling oil? Scientists today can remove “blood” from the image and cut pieces off it. It cannot protect itself.
It’s tempting to think that whoever forged the Shroud forged more than one. When a Shroud was destroyed it was replaced.
THE 1532
FIRE
In 1532, the Shroud was
housed in a chapel in
The Shroud perished in the fire of 1532. This would mean that the Turin Shroud was not the Lirey Shroud. Though the carbon dating dates the Turin Shroud back to the time when the Lirey Shroud was known to have existed, it does not prove that it did. If the Shroud was made from old linen and was burned, old linen would have had to be used for its replacement. Or perhaps a number of Shrouds were made the same way and the one we have is the last remaining one. There could have been spares made when the Lirey Shroud was made. Perhaps there were some differences between these shrouds though they were basically the same. If so then the Turin Shroud is certainly a forgery.
We believe that the Shroud of Lirey was a painting. If it didn’t get replaced by Leonardo’s Shroud in 1492 then it perished in a fire in 1532. Perhaps it was Leonardo’s Shroud that perished in 1532 and a spare was put in its place. At some point after the fire, another one - perhaps a photographic one forged by Leonardo, appeared and was passed off as the original Shroud.
Two years later, Rabelais wrote that nothing had survived of the Shroud in the 1532 fire (page 347, The Blood and the Shroud).
A story appeared that a blacksmith threw water on the burning Shroud and rescued it from the flames. It is strange that this survival story was not told at the start when everybody believed that the Shroud had perished. It seems to many it did become a pile of ashes and was replaced with a clever forgery using an old linen cloth – the best forgery to date. This forgery even had burn marks in it. It needed repairs to make the scheme look good.
It looks like another Shroud was produced to back up this story as the Chambery Shroud had perished.
The Turin Shroud has water and burn marks to make it fit the story of the blacksmith saviour but these marks under close analysis tell a different story. The marks were contrived. The Shroud perished in the fire and was replaced by a new fake.
The 1532 fire might have been a cynical plot to force somebody to allow a substitute Shroud to become the new relic.
There is no reason to hold that the Turin Shroud image (not necessarily the cloth) existed before the 1500s.
SHROUD MENDED IN 1534 IS NOT OUR TURIN
The Shroud perished in the fire of 1532.
However, later a story began to appear about how the Shroud was delivered from the conflagration. The legend goes that in this fire, a blacksmith was sent into the chapel to rescue the Shroud and it was saved.
A cloth bearing an image and burn and water marks was brought to the nuns to repair it in 1534.
The cloth was folded into forty-eight and one corner of the folded cloth caught fire from the molten silver casket resulting in the burn holes that the nuns had to fix. He threw water on it right away (page 75, The Blood and the Shroud). But if a cloth is folded into forty-eight it has four corners and if it is burned down one corner then you get fourteen holes. But the Turin Shroud has sixteen holes though the four ones on the back along the arms are met but still a pair. And the water stains that came from the dousing do not cover the holes and only touch some of them. That water couldn’t have put anything out. See for yourself in the diagram of the Shroud damage. Diagram 6&7 of The Blood and the Shroud. It seems very odd that only small and unimportant parts of the image were burned.
The Shroud
is believed by many to have got burn marks from the 1532 fire. Five copies of it were made after until
1578 but none of them show the marks (The Blood and the Shroud, page
135-6). Was this because the
A 1516 copy
in
The burns on the Turin Shroud do not prove it is the same one that allegedly survived the 1532 fire with a few holes for the new Shroud would have had have these marks for it was a replacement of the old. It had to be passed off as the old one that was destroyed. The 1516 Shroud shows Jesus with his feet crossed and with an egg-shaped face and the crucifixion wounds on the both hands are visible. This suggests that what the artist copied was like but was not our present Turin Shroud for this copy differs too much from our Turin Shroud. It shows toes and hand wounds not wrist wounds.
It has been
suggested that he saw the Turin Shroud and copied by memory. The copies had to touch the original to
deserve and win veneration. The
practice was to lay them on top of the original (The Blood and the Shroud,
page 115). This means the artist did
not need to struggle with memory for he could see the original. There are too many features in common with
the Turin Shroud for it to be merely memory.
The poker-hole burn marks are exactly where they are on the Turin
Shroud. The side-wound blood flows are
the same length. The artist would have
sketched the Turin Shroud at the very least.
Whatever he sketched had toes and other things that the Shroud in
We have seen that the Shroud perished in 1532 and soon after in 1534 nuns repaired a cloth presented as being the Shroud pulled from the flames. This cloth does not match our Turin Shroud. Another switch must have taken place after 1534.
Witnesses had to be brought in about 1534 to make sure the damaged cloth that was due to be repaired was the Shroud. The nuns, who were to sew it, described it. They said the blood of the side-wound went to about half a foot long. It does not. They said they saw the back of the head pierced by a cap of thorns. They did not say they meant the blood so the cap of thorns must have been on the image. It is not on our Shroud. There are many spots of blood on the back of the head but they need not have come from a cap of thorns. The blood dripping and the stains soaking into the hair would have done that. Roman solders would not have made a cap of thorns when a ring shaped coronet would do. Making a cap would have been harder and they didn’t want their hands all picked.
The nuns said they noticed
traces of a chain bound tight to the back.
IMAGE ALLEGEDLY MISTAKEN FOR CHAIN
In the
middle of the 1500’s, the cloth was snatched from the cathedral in
Those women did not repair the Turin Shroud we have now but another Shroud. This would mean that the Turin Shroud has been replaced and/or perhaps retouched a few times through the centuries.
The 1534 Shroud is not the Turin Shroud.
THE
HINNOM SHROUD
The
CONCLUSION
There is no evidence from history that the carbon dating is incorrect. The evidence provided by those who disagree is deception and imagination. The Turin Shroud is most probably a forgery from 1260 to 1390. Would the Jesus of the gospels who said that if your neighbour takes from you what you need give him more than that and go the extra mile if a Roman soldier who is your enemy urges you to carry his pack leave behind a relic that has cost the world millions of dollars in tests and debates and time to work out if the cloth is real or not? I don’t think so.
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Jesus Lived in
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Gordon, Headline,
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The
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