THE TURIN
Jesus was allegedly wrapped
in the Shroud of
The Shroud of Turin is supposed to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. It
would have us believe that Jesus was just impracticably laid in a long strip
of cloth in the tomb and was not tied up in it for tying up would have
changed the image and distorted it. Supporters say that Jesus’ burial was
hurried but how long would it take to get him tied in the cloth? None. The Shroud
was intended for display which indicates forgery and if there are some
strange things about the Shroud they are just strange things though some will
try and make evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud from them. Sheer
amazing good luck and new facts seem to back up the case for each Jack the
Ripper suspect but they cannot all be verification. So what we observe about
the Shroud comes before the difficulties about how the image was made. We
cannot say that the inexplicability of the image – and there is much debate
about whether the image is inexplicable or not but there have been successful
duplications – is enough to show that it is Jesus. Inexplicable is just
inexplicable and not supernatural or paranormal. So we cannot ignore the
flaws in the case for the authenticity and accept it as authentic just
because the image is strange. Jesus did no convincing miracles so the image
is not of him. We must remember too that Simon Magus was said to be the Power
of God and was regarded as such by the Samaritans, a sect similar to the
Jews, and who was famed for his miraculous powers (Acts 8). Justin Martyr
said that Simon could do real miracles. Simon is more convincing than Jesus
because the New Testament itself says he had strange powers. He was blamed universally
in the early Church for being the father of all heresy.
The debate about the Shroud of Turin reminds one of the bickering and controversy that goes on between supporters of the Jack the Ripper Diary and those who say it is a fraud. Both sides use science and arguments and contradict each other. Read www.casebook.org . Like the shroud believers, the diary believers refuse to give way and admit the truth or the obvious. Far fetched explanations for the problems with the shroud and the diary abound. If something is too hard to defend there is something wrong.
The Shroud would have been expensive cloth. The New Testament says Joseph of Arimathea a rich man bought the burial cloths of Jesus. Joseph had no guarantee that Jesus would be buried or stay long in the tomb if he was. It was normal for hated capital criminals to be thrown on the rubbish heap. Would Joseph buy an expensive Shroud in that case?
The John gospel says a lot of spices were brought to anoint Jesus with prior to his burial. A hundred pounds of spices in fact. If Jesus was plastered in spices to that extent he could not have left an image like that on the Shroud. And where is the residue of all these spices, and that should be a lot of residue, on the cloth? And why are the rivulets of blood on the forehead of Jesus not smeared due to the rubbing on the spices? Ian Wilson thinks Jesus was wrapped up in the spices at burial and the women were looking to come and wash him on Sunday morning when the gospels say the tomb was found empty. If so, then Jesus' body never actually touched the cloth! The spices were in the way!
The real Shroud would have been seized by the Romans, who were investigating
the empty tomb, and then destroyed. The modern Shroud does not tally with
descriptions of the Shroud from before the sixteenth century the most
important of which describes a painting which the Shroud takes pains to avoid
looking like, and the image could well have been created by Leonardo da Vinci
in around 1490 though the cloth might be a lot older.
The Shroud man should have had blood matting in the hair
instead of coming down in tidy rivulets. The rivulets look artificial.
The Shroud man was not dead for he bled after he was laid down. Gravity would
not account for all that blood. He had too strong a build and was too
muscular to have been Jesus who was a travelling preacher who gave himself a
hard time. The blood is not smudged at the back though the man was supposed
to be lying in it with the cloth being pressed firmly into the blood with the
pressure of the body indicating that the cloth is a fake. It is said that a
lance penetrated the Shroudman’s entire body for there is a wound on his back
where you would expect the tip to emerge. This would have to be fatal
suggesting that the blood was put on in attempt to make the image match what
allegedly happened to Jesus Christ unless the cut had nothing to do with a
lance.
The man has hands crossed over his privates but no dead man’s hands and arms
would have stayed in such a position. The hair is depicted as it would be if
the Shroud man were standing up. It hangs down. The hand has unnaturally long
fingers. The errors and the anomalies show that even if this cloth is a
miracle the man on it is not Jesus Christ.
The Shroud was never mentioned in the early Church or in its first
millennium. The Church liked to show Jesus alive and glorious but that was
not the reason for the silence. The Church would not have dared disparage or
hide away such a precious relic whose existence would show that Jesus did not
want all the images to be nice and went to a lot of trouble to track down the
alleged true cross. It would have been a good tool against the Moslems who
denied that Jesus was really crucified.
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 over the
years by dirt 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, Spring 1998). The pieces tested were thoroughly cleaned (page 28,
Looking for a Miracle). The cloth was nearly burned some centuries ago which
was given as another reason why the carbon dating could have been thrown off
by chemical changes.
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 Shroud is very strange in that there could not have been a body inside it
to make the image for the image should be distorted if there was and yet the
image is composed in such a way that would indicate that a man lying on a
very soft mattress as in The Second Messiah was inside it. With all the false
trails it gives it cannot be the burial cloth of Christ the Son of the God
who does not confuse.
IN SHORT
The Turin Shroud is hailed by Christian fanatics as the burial cloth of Jesus
Christ. Whether you believe or not that it is inexplicable comes down to what
scientists you choose to listen to.
But when you consider the rule that you must accept a supernatural
explanation only when all the natural ones are impossible it is clear you
have to side with the sceptics until absolute proof comes. Many deny that the
image is miraculous and say they can explain it. But it is certainly not a
miracle as such errors as the man’s hair hanging down as if he was standing
up show. Carbon dating has pointed to a medieval origin for the cloth but
believers, including “scientists” sneered at the dating from the very start
though there is no evidence that the Shroud existed in the first thousand
years after Christ. The Bible says that Jesus would have been washed for he
was buried according to the Jewish custom – others say the custom was for
criminals to be buried with their blood. Obviously the Bible is referring to
the general custom of washing. Jesus did make a point of debunking Jewish
traditions that were not scriptural but he would have had no problem with the
washing – that was only decency. Also the Shroud man does not have distorted
bloodstains and Jesus would have had them for spices were used and rubbed
into his body. We should have a body that was all red with the blood rubbed
all over in the spices and ointments but the Shroud shows the opposite. The
perfect physique of the Shroud man does not fit Jesus who lived rough and who
should have been malnourished. The man bled into the Shroud – dead men don’t
do that – a bit maybe which is not really bleeding but just blood seeping out
by gravity but not to the extent that the Shroud man did! - which shows the
Shroud was created to indicate that Jesus was not dead at all. Probably that
is why the image was made so subtle to keep the Church wondering what it was
to give it a chance of becoming popular enough so that the Church would have
to come to terms with the existence of the cloth. Otherwise the Church would
have come down too hard too soon and the Shroud would have ended up on a
pyre.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, Raymond E Brown,
Paulist Press,
Free Inquiry, Spring 1998, Vol
18, No 2, Article by Joe Nickell, Council for Secular Humanism,
From Fasting Saints to Anorexic
Girls, Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, Athlone Press,
Holy Faces, Secret Places, Ian
Wilson, Corgi,
Inquest on the Shroud of
Jesus Lived in
Looking for a Miracle, Joe
Nickell, Prometheus Books,
Miracles, Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society,
Sceptical Inquirer 9/10 2001
Vol 25, No 5, Article by Joe Nickell, CSIOCP,
Relics, The Society for Irish
Church Missions, Bachelor’s Walk,
The Blood and The Shroud, Ian
Wilson, Orion,
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline,
The Divine Deception, Keith
Laidler, Headline,
The DNA of God?, Leoncio A Garza-Valdes, Doubleday, 1999
The Historical Evidence for Jesus, G A Wells, Prometheus Books, New York, 1988
The Holy Shroud and Four Visions, Rev Patrick O Connell
and Rev Charles Carty, TAN,
The Image on the Shroud, Nello
Ballosino, St Paul’s,
The Jesus Conspiracy, Holger
Kersten amd Elmar R Gruber, Element,
The Jesus Relics, From the Holy Grail to the Turin Shroud, Joe Nickell, The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2008
The Second Messiah, Christopher
Knight and Robert Lomas, Arrow,
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Paranormal, Lynne Kelly,
The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Rodney Hoare, Souvenir Press,
The
Verdict on the Shroud, Kenneth
E Stevenson and Gary R Habermas, Servant Publications, Ann Arbour,