Periodically (such as right now) I enjoy reiterating my opinion that the Shroud of Turin is, in fact, the burial cloth of Jesus, pointing to stuff like this video
…and reiterating my basic challenge, “If it’s a fake, make another one.”
It amuses me to do this. I think the Shroud genuine for the same reason I think Booth shot Lincoln, mammoth skulls contributed to the myth of the cyclops, and Hitler killed himself in the bunker on April 30, 1945: because the cumulative evidence seems to me to be good and plausible.
My belief in the authenticity of the Shroud is, in short, not a “religious” belief (for nothing in the Faith rests upon it and, for most of the history of the Church, it was known only to relatively few people, first in Constantinople and then in France. It was not until the advent of photography and the extraordinarily weird revelation of photonegative images that the Shroud exploded into public consciousness as the extremely strange thing it is.) It is a belief like my belief in the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.
Though the Faith has lots of room for the weird and extraordinary (while materialism is dogmatically committed by its very nature from accepting so much as that possibility of the inbreaking of nature by the supernatural), the Faith is not committed to buying every claim of the supernatural and, indeed, tends to view claims of the supernatural with a lot of side-eye and not to declare them miracles without a lot of substantiation. This includes the Shroud, which the Church has never, to my knowledge, declared to be genuine, much less a miracle, but which has come down to the Church as an object of popular veneration in the great attic of bric-a-brac that includes a ton of other objects of popular folk piety. Some of that bric-a-brac looks an awful lot like the Real Thing, (like the Shroud and such things as Hosts that bleed real human blood or even have turned to cardiac tissue). Other stuff does not even make a claim to being specially miraculous, just connected to (or part of) a saint. In a Faith which emphasizes that the Word became flesh and the spiritual is bound up with the material and not severed from it, this is perfectly natural.
Me: I think the Shroud the burial cloth of Christ. I am agnostic about how the image was formed. I have seen arguments from Catholics proposing a naturalistic account of how this might have happened and if that happens to be the case, I would only add that if t’were so, then it sure is a remarkable coincidence that, out of the countless victims of crucifixion (or any other form of death) in antiquity, the sole person with a credible claim of being both God incarnate and raised from the dead is the only person to which this purely natural process happened. One might almost be tempted to call it miraculous luck.
I mention all this as prelude, because my real point is this:
Some time back a reader left my Facebook page in disgust. Having previously called me an idiot for believing that the gospel narratives about the bodily resurrection of the glorified and divinized humanity of Jesus Christ are, in fact, narratives about the bodily resurrection of the glorified and divinized humanity of Jesus Christ, he then went on to add that anybody who thinks the Shroud of Turin is genuine was exactly the same as somebody who believes in a flat earth, denies climate change, and preaches deadly anti-vax nonsense. The rage energy was… weird.
Years ago, a friend of mine remarked that he was always surprised about the sort of things that stir passion on the Internet. He remarked that he happened on a little discussion about the dating of the book of Daniel. Fairly dry stuff, you would suppose. But one reader reacted with volcanic rage to the proposition that it dates from the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, screaming full caps, “THAT IS A LIE FROM THE PIT OF *HELL!!!!!!”
You never know where somebody’s landmines are hidden. I think the Shroud genuine for the same reason I think the earth round and climate change real and vaccines good. I’m not alone in that view and there are, in fact, reasonable people on both sides of the matter. If it turns out I’m wrong, oh well. I’ve been wrong before. But I think it bizarre to equate that opinion with belief in things that a) have overwhelming scientific evidence against them *and* b) gravely endanger the lives of millions of people. Clearly the person who stormed off in a rage was reacting to… something besides me. Likely something in their past about which I know nothing and could not possibly have predicted or planned for.
No one dies if the Shroud turns out to be genuine. Lots of people die from climate change and vaccine denial. The attempt to smear an opinion about the former with the moral culpabilty of the latter is the opposite of reasoned argument, but is probably less culpable due to trauma of some kind.
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9 Responses
TBH the main reason the Shroud never impressed me is I can’t figure out how it squares with the Gospel account of a separate cloth for the face. But I don’t know enough about first-century Jewish burial customs to know if that’s an actual contradiction or just an apparent one.
But ultimately it doesn’t matter; most of our sacred images are known with a high degree of certainty not to be the burial shroud of Jesus, but fulfill their purpose just fine, and as you say nothing in the Faith rests on this one being different.
There is, in fact, a face cloth called the Shroud of Oviedo. Fascinatingly, the bloodstains on it line up with the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin.
Other than the Sudarium of Oviedo, there is one other relic of Jesus’s passion.
There is a piece of byssus known as the Cloth of Manoppello. Byssus, also known as sea silk, is a fascinating fabric that, while it can be dyed, it cannot be painted. And yet it has an image that lines up with the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo. The difference is that the eyes on the cloth are open. It wasn’t subjected to as much scrutiny as the more famous shroud and sudarium, but if it’s a medieval falsification, it’d be even more difficult to reproduce than the Shroud of Turin.
All three cloths would need to be made at the same time and from the same model and to the same life size. The fabricators would need to have a very wide skill set and would need access to modern technology in order to even try to make the image on byssus.
The cloths have been attested to and revered since before the Renaissance when they attracted some interest, so it presents the latest possible time when they could have been made if they are indeed falsifications.
Skeptics point out that it is possible to dye byssus. While it’s true, it needs to be soaked in dye and allowed to soak up the color early in the process, and once it dries, it’s not possible to dye it further or to paint it because of its surface structure (lack of pores make it impossible for paint to gain on the material). Potentially, sufficiently small nanoparticles could stick to byssus, but it has not been demonstrated as yet, let alone in medieval times.
However, dye would be opaque and would be visible when the cloth is backlit. However, when backlit with normal light, the image is clearly visible, but when backlit with a floodlight, the image disappears into a transparent sheet, while silk insets (sewed into to make the cloth a rectangle for mounting) remain clearly opaque.
Byssus discolors when exposed to certain radiation, chemicals and temperature, so this would be the potential falsification method. However, this would mean that the falsifiers would have access to very precise tools that would apply the required radiation or temperature at very precise dose and duration with needlepoint precision in detailed strokes.
Needless to say, the kind of technology needed to recreate the three cloths was unavailable in the middle ages. And indeed, it would be extremely strange if somebody had access to it and used it only to make these three falsifications and never use them again or before and leave no trace of them. And then tried to pass the cloths off as the genuine things to three separate communities, when people had zero indication that they were genuine and no means of seeing the image on the Shroud of Turin before the advent of photography.
I really don’t know enough about the shroud to definitely pass judgement either way, but allow for the strong possibility that it is indeed authentic. The Pope has not spoken ex cathedra on this, so I would avoid violent arguments.
Ah yes, the old “Lie from the pit of Hell” business. Yes, I have seen it in arguments on the internet. It’s curious that people actually think that the Devil himself gets involved in petty disputes. Evangelicals seem fond of employing that phrase to show that their opponent in debate is not only wrong, but an agent of the Prince of Darkness. The drama is exhausting.
*** the old “Lie from the pit of Hell” business***
Actually the old “Lie ….” can be located currently in Washington, D.C. Sorry, but I just couldn’t resist the cheap shot. **LOL**
Re: the Shroud of Turin
I recall back in the 1960s when my mother was the secretary to the Dean of Studies and later worked as the Registrar of Mount St. Alphonsus Seminary in Esopus, NY, the Mount had a prominent Shroud of Turin studies center with some neat exhibits and an extensive collection in its library of Shroud related publications. It was from the Mount’s library that I read Pierre Barbet’s book, “A Doctor at Calvary,” and IIRC some few monographs on the Shroud.
In later years, I worked for the Dept. of Energy and was involved with activities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory among other DOE sites. As I recall, several Los Alamos scientists were among original researchers who studied in detail the Shroud using their “godless laser machines.” The scientific studies included Carbon-14 dating, whose analysis suggested that the Shroud’s origin was most likely medieval rather than the anticipated biblical origin.
Of course the C-14 dating subsequently had been called into question regarding its accuracy. Among the speculations adduced, there was a theory of a bioplastic coating from a later period of the Shroud’s alleged origin that potentially contaminated the C-14’s results. I don’t think that the Church has agreed yet to a repeat of the Shroud’s C-14 dating using revised sampling methods. This would require the destruction of another small piece of cloth from the Shroud.
This leads to the question of the authenticity or genuineness of the Shroud of Turin. Just what does authenticity mean? From the point of view of the science and technology of the earlier studies, I perceive that at most a conclusion of authenticity means that the Shroud can be dated to the early First Century period, but it can never be demonstrated empirically as the burial shroud of Jesus Christ.
I nevertheless believe that the Shroud of Turin is a cherished relic. I hope someday that the scientific and technological basis for the Shroud’s authenticity is empirically established, i.e., it is from the time of Jesus Christ the Lord.
There’s also the fact that there was a fire in 1997 which would deposit fresh carbon on the Shroud, skewing the dating towards the future. I recall a documentary mentioning this, but I can’t find it anymore, it’s not mentioned anywhere, and if it’s significant, I find it rather odd that supporters of the Shroud’s authenticity don’t mention it (or the skeptics, if it would have worked the opposite way).
The Carbon-14 dating of the Shroud of Turin occured in 1988.
Very interesting. Here is a link to a more recent video from December 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y3zKsxtAEo
Great piece Mark! Some years ago, I immersed myself in studying everything I could find on the Shroud – books, videos, articles. I believe the Shroud is the real deal. I’ve even written a couple of poems about the Shroud. I really like this excellent point that you made:
…out of the countless victims of crucifixion…the sole person with a credible claim of being both God incarnate and raised from the dead is the only person to which this purely natural process happened.
Wow!! This had never occurred to me before. Thanks!
~Nancy M.
Houston, TX