Shroud of Turin and the Resurrection of Jesus & More

Shroud of Turin Blog Recommended

Over at Wigderson Library & Pub: Evidence and faith:

Those interested in the debate surrounding the Shroud of Turin will be interested in the Shroud of Turin Blog.

Scientifically, we don't know the age of the Shroud of Turin. However, we do know it is at least twice as old as the now discredited carbon 14 date. As for the images, we have no idea how they are formed. But they were not made by any known artistic method.

The Atheist, the skeptic, the rationalist must accept the scientific facts just as any Christian should. To deny that the shroud is authentic requires a leap of faith. So does affirmation. But the evidence suggests that it is a late-Second Temple era burial shroud of a crucifixion victim. From that, much can be inferred.

We are in awe of that which cannot be explained except by accepting the miracle before us, regardless of its origin. The Shroud will be on display to the public in Turin in 2010.

Scavone on the da Vinci Speculation

Historian Dan Scavone comments on the Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince argument that the image was made using a magic lantern, a simple projector, and light-sensitive chromium salts in an egg white medium.

The argument that history's proto-photo was a life- sized photo(!) on a fourteen-foot cloth(!) that was a composite(!): double corpse with daubed-on blood and, in separate processes, Leonardo's own head front and back, is a priori far-fetched. The premise is more demanding of faith than is the authenticity of the Shroud. I am led to ask why Leonardo has left us his self-portrait in red chalk and not his photo, and why he would use another body when Vasari notes that his own physique was near-perfect, and everybody knows his exorbitant vanity.

Scavone also said:

This question leads the authors to another assertion: Leonardo was a member of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, which esteemed John the Baptist over Jesus. Therefore, the apparent disembodied head visible on the Shroud man was Leonardo's cipher for the decapitated Baptist. Leonardo's use of his own photo, they argue, was owing to his inordinate vanity, the same that prompted him to encode his own face in his famous portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco de Giocondo. This theory was confirmed by Lillian Schwartz of Bell Laboratories and Dr. Digby Quested of London, who discovered that it matched up perfectly with the major lines of Leonardo's face in the above-mentioned self-portrait at age sixty. Picknett writes "Leonardo was capable of subtly building his own image into that of his masterpieces; if he had done so with the Mona Lisa, why not with the Shroud?"

Zondervan Newsletter

Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins and a leading publisher of Bibles, published the followng piece in its recent regular newsletter: To the Point.

Torino is well known for something other than the Winter Olympic Games: The Shroud of Turin is an ancient yellowed linen cloth which bears the faded image of a bearded man covered with blood stains which correspond to the wounds of crucifixion. The Shroud has been kept in Turin, Italy for over 400 years but has a history that can be traced to the 6th century with legends and folklore going all the way back to 1st century. Millions believe it's the actual burial shroud of Jesus. National Geographic called it, "One of the most perplexing enigmas of modern times." TIME Magazine called it, "The Riddle of the Ages." The subject is a fascinating blend of ancient history, sacred art, modern science, and religious tradition....

Links in their newsletter included: Shroud of Turin Story, The Shroud of Turin Education Project and Shroud.com

Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins and a leading publisher of Bibles, published the followng piece in its recent regular newsletter: To the Point.

Torino is well known for something other than the Winter Olympic Games: The Shroud of Turin is an ancient yellowed linen cloth which bears the faded image of a bearded man covered with blood stains which correspond to the wounds of crucifixion. The Shroud has been kept in Turin, Italy for over 400 years but has a history that can be traced to the 6th century with legends and folklore going all the way back to 1st century. Millions believe it's the actual burial shroud of Jesus. National Geographic called it, "One of the most perplexing enigmas of modern times." TIME Magazine called it, "The Riddle of the Ages." The subject is a fascinating blend of ancient history, sacred art, modern science, and religious tradition....

Links in their newsletter included: Shroud of Turin Story, The Shroud of Turin Education Project and Shroud.com

Nature on the Carbon 14 Dating

This was 1989. Much has changed and the reported results are now known to be null and void.

The results of radiocarbon measurements at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich yield a calibrated calendar age range with at least 95% confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of AD 1260 - 1390 (rounded down/up to nearest 10 yr). These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.

Gary Habermas, Evangelical Scholar

Gary Habermas, Ph.D. -- Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Liberty University in Lynchburg,
Virginia -- one of the fourteen scholar interviewed by Lee Strobel for The Case for Christ -- author of 25 books including the The Resurrection of Jesus: An Apologetic and The Risen Jesus & Future Hope,

While the literary sources provide excellent historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, there is a less apparent, but still significant pathway from the non-literary artifact known as the Shroud of Turin to Jesus. Yet, the shadow of the 1988 carbon-14 testing remains a sufficient roadblock that we must answer decisively before we can do much more than talk to ourselves in the “shroud community.”

Now that the carbon-14 issue has been resolved and with all the new startling discoveries since 2004, the Shroud of Turin seem very real.

Frank C. Tribbe on Mandylion

While in Constantinople, after 944 AD, the Image of Edessa was known as the 'Mandylion', a Byzantine word used only to describe this image and other images of Jesus on cloth.

In Jesus's day it [Urfa, Turkey] was the semi independent city-state of Edessa, totally outside the Roman Empire and with allegiance to the kingdom of Parthia, whose capital was Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, far to the east. Prosperous Edessa, astride a major east-west caravan route, was ruled by King Abgar V from 13 to 50. Our best account of Abgar's story comes form Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote his famous History of the Church about 325. Eusebius says he got the story by his own translation of Edessa archives from the Syriac into Greek.

- from Portrait of Jesus? (1983)

Frank Tribbe on Preservation of the Shroud

While in Constantinople, after 944 AD, the Image of Edessa was known as the 'Mandylion', a Byzantine word used only to describe this image and other images of Jesus on cloth.

In Jesus's day it [Urfa, Turkey] was the semi independent city-state of Edessa, totally outside the Roman Empire and with allegiance to the kingdom of Parthia, whose capital was Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, far to the east. Prosperous Edessa, astride a major east-west caravan route, was ruled by King Abgar V from 13 to 50. Our best account of Abgar's story comes form Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote his famous History of the Church about 325. Eusebius says he got the story by his own translation of Edessa archives from the Syriac into Greek.

- from Portrait of Jesus? (1983)

Dan Porter on the Strange Images

Most scholars accept the gory implications of the forensic story of the bloodstains on the Shroud. It's Real Blood. However, the faint shadowy images of a man on the Shroud are more controversial. No one knows how these images, one of a man's back on the lower half of the Shroud, and a man's front on the upper half, were formed. They could not have been painted, as some suppose. The chemistry and physics of the image chromophores that which gives visible images are now well understood by researchers, but the method by which the images were created remains a mystery.

The images are the result of a selective, color producing chemical change at the surface of discreet lengths of some cellulous fibers of the linen. These chemical changes could not have been produced with paint, dye, stain or liquid chemical; there is no evidence of any matting, capillarity, wicking, or penetration expected from liquids. Also, numerous tests including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and direct microscopic viewing of the Shroud confirm that the images were not painted.

The images, closely examined with the aid of microscopes and microphotography, are similar to halftone images, in which shades of color are derived from pixels of a single color, like a picture in a newspaper. The images on the Shroud are not black and white, but they are monochromatic. That is, they are of a single color often described as sepia or straw yellow. The color produced by the chemical change to the fibers is constant and the various darker and lighter tones of color we perceive are the result of the density of the altered fibers. It is interesting to note that on a high quality inkjet printer (1200 dots per inch), the ink droplets are about 60 microns across, whereas on the Shroud, the image-bearing fibrils are only about 15 microns thick or about one fifth the thickness of typical human hair.

Another interesting attribute of the images is that they are negatives; that is, the darker and lighter tones of color are reversed. In that sense, the images on the Shroud are like photographic negatives. This was discovered more than a century ago, when in 1898, a photographer named Secondo Pia took the first-ever photographs of the Shroud with a large box camera. When developing his photographs, he discovered that images that appeared on the glass plate negatives were positive images, startling in clarity and realistic appearance. For the first time people could see the amazing detail in the Shroud's images, detail people had not previously been able to observe. The detail is there in the negative images, but the human mind is not well adapted to interpreting negative images. With Pia's discovery, what for centuries had appeared only as ghostlike images were shown to be graphically clear front and back pictures of a man.

But they may not be pictures at all. At least they are not pictures of a human face or body in a traditional sense. Like any picture that tries to convey a sense of dimensionality, by showing how light is reflected from objects, faces and bodies, the images on the Shroud look like pictures with reflected light. However, image analysts tell us they are not.

Dan Porter Quote on Second Face

The Shroud of Turin images may not the direct result of a miracle, at least not in a traditional sense of the word. But they are not manmade either. These seem to be the contradictory conclusions from an article in the peer-reviewed, scientific Journal of Optics (April 14, 2004) of the Institute of Physics in London. Using mathematical image enhancement technology, Giulio Fanti and Roberto Maggiolo, researchers at the University of Padua in Italy, discovered a faint image of a second face on the back of the Shroud of Turin. This has since been confirmed with other software. The implications are explosive and exciting.

Dan Porter on the Image

Imagine slicing a human hair lengthwise, from end to end, into 100 long thin slices, each slice one-tenth the width of a single red blood cell. The images on the Shroud, at their thickest, are this thin. The faint images, golden-brownish, formed by a caramel-like substance, are wholly part of a super-thin film of starch fractions and sugars. Where this film is not brown, it is clear. Knowing the way certain ancient linen was made, the film covering just some of the cloth's fibers can be expected. And knowing that dead bodies produce gaseous cadaverine and putrescine that react with sugars to form caramel-like substances called melanoidins, the color is not only possible, it is expected. Spectral data, chemical tests and photomicrographs: all this is documented in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The honest skeptical inquirer must wonder, How can this be?

The notion that such super-thin images were painted is preposterous. Yes, it is true that one scientist did peer through a microscope and find components of what might have been paint. And because of this he concluded that the Shroud was painted. Walter McCrone was a world renowned microscopist, deservedly so. He was a true scientist and he knew his craft well. We should not doubt that he found iron-oxide and mercury-sulfide, both constituents of paint. But there are many reasons why such chemical particles might be found on the Shroud: water used for retting flax and centuries of dust; particularly dust in churches with frescoed ceiling and walls. All other scientists who examined the image fibers -- many of them as renowned and every bit as qualified -- have disagreed with McCrone. There is, simply, an insufficient amount of paint constituents to form a visible image. Spectral analysis proves that. So does the now certain knowledge of the image bearing super-thin film. Ironically, McCrone identified the super-thin starch substance that ultimately became part of the proof that his conclusions were wrong.