The Shroud of Turin
St. Paul argues in 1 Corinthians that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most important doctrine of Christianity, and without this fundamental belief, our faith is without merit. He states:
But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. Then we are also false witnesses to God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. 15:12-17
Those who were fortunate enough to see the resurrected body of Jesus Christ, like Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, the apostles in the upper room, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and a group of more than 500 brothers at once, have all provided us with eyewitness accounts. Their testimony is incredibly compelling and has been corroborated by many historical facts. Many of these eyewitnesses went to their deaths without ever recanting the incredible story of Jesus Christ crucified and raised from the dead. Some 2,000 years later, how are we who have not seen for ourselves to believe in this cornerstone of the faith?
We may have had the physical proof of the miracle of the resurrection in the form of a burial cloth called the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud has been steeped in controversy since it was declared a “hoax” in 1389 and more recently in 1988 when carbon-14 testing placed it as a medieval artifact. Secondo Pia took pictures of the Shroud in 1898. A full body image was then revealed through the negatives when Pia developed the glass plates. It is impossible that a medieval hoaxer would have known about the future invention of photography and how the image he created might be revealed through its negatives five hundred years later.
Recently, new technologies have emerged and are calling into question the veracity of the 1988 research team. Scientist Raymond Rogers claimed in a peer-reviewed article that the sample used for the carbon testing on the edge of the Shroud was cotton, not linen like the rest of the cloth. This indicates that the sample taken and tested came from a repaired area of the Shroud. In addition, about 50% of the material tested during the carbon-14 process is whatever falls between the empty spaces between the fibers of the linen, presenting the problem of cross-contamination and thereby producing potentially unreliable results.
Regardless of what the 1988 carbon-14 testing inferred, the Shroud of Turin can be authenticated in many other ways. First, there is written documentation in all four gospels that Joseph of Arimathea provided a burial cloth for Jesus. The Shroud of Turin’s weave is herringbone, which would have been something a wealthy man like Joseph could afford. Note how Matthew refers to him as a “rich man.”
From the gospel of Matthew 27:57-60: When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph, who was himself a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be handed over. Taking the body, Joseph wrapped it [in] clean linen and laid it in his new tomb that he had hewn in the rock. Then he rolled a huge stone across the entrance to the tomb and departed.
In addition, Peter and John saw a burial cloth lying in the empty tomb as recounted in the gospel of John 20:4-7:
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
The head cloth mentioned above is known as the Oviedo of Sudarium, and the blood stains and wounds on this cloth perfectly match the Shroud’s marks. The face is the same shape and size, and the postmortem blood on both is of an AB+ type, with the exact chemical composition consisting of six parts pulmonary edema to one part blood.
Type AB+ blood is the rarest of all blood types, belonging to only 3% of the population, and is common in the Jewish race. AB+ blood type is also the same type found in many Eucharistic miracles that have been analyzed and verified. The blood on the Shroud remains a ruddy color to this day because of the amount of bilirubin present. The high levels of bilirubin suggest the extreme trauma that the victim must have experienced before death.
The Shroud shows evidence of wounds to the head, hands, feet, and side as well as 50 abrasions and 372 lacerations clearly depicting a man who was severely scourged and later crucified. Interestingly enough, the blood on the Shroud sits only on the very top of the linen fibers. This would not have happened if someone had tried to paint the image on the Shroud. No pigments, paint, dyes, vapors, or scorching have ever been detected on the Shroud.
Wide-angle X-ray (WAXS) scattering now suggests that the Shroud is about 2,000 years old. This process compared the degradation of the cellulose molecules in linen fibers of the Shroud to another one known to have been made during the life of Jesus. The Shroud’s fibers exhibit consistent degradation, as seen in the 2,000-year-old sample. There is also a lack of vanillin (a breakdown product of lignin) in the linen fibers of the Shroud, indicating the main portion of the cloth is much older than its repaired areas.
Yet there is still more physical evidence. Pollen found on the face cloth and the Shroud comes from plants that only bloom in Jerusalem during the spring. Jesus’ crucifixion is thought to have occurred on April 3, 33 AD. A close review of the photograph also shows ancient Roman coins minted in the time of Pontius Pilate that were placed over the victim’s eyes before burial. 3D imaging reveals bones inside the hands and flesh surrounding the bones.
Although it was studied extensively by 63 different academic disciplines, no one has ever been able to ascertain precisely how the Shroud of Turin was created. The Shroud has a full body image on both sides, yet the cloth did not touch all body parts. This has led to theories that the cloth collapsed right through the body at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection. Many scholars also now believe that the image was made by an immense amount of energy (4 to 8 billion watts) through ultraviolet radiation in less than one-forty billionth of a second. No modern technology can produce this amount of energy in such a short period of time.
When we gaze upon the Shroud of Turin, are we seeing the world’s very first selfie? All the scientific evidence seems to point to the authenticity of the Shroud as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas once said, “For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice.”
This sentiment applies to the Shroud of Turin. Although the Catholic Church has never stated publicly that the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus, perhaps it is way past time that the Church “trusts the science” in this matter and leaves things like climate change and vaccines to political activists.