There were periods in history when people peddled relics like good luck charms capable of warding off the plague or other diseases. Some were no doubt legitimate, but how could one know or tell the difference? Protestants avoid things viewed as speculative and not based on their primary authority, the bible. Unlike Catholics, the role of church tradition takes a back seat as a reliable source.

Questions regarding the legitimacy of bones or clothing items associated with a particular saint are common. It is a natural outgrowth of our skeptical age. Other than tradition, how can we ever know for certain? However, if the Shroud could be proven without a doubt to be authentic, it would be far more than just a relic, it would be equivalent to the archaeological find of the century and front-page news around the world.

Testability is the distinctive characteristic of the Shroud that sets it apart from any other relic. It is not a vacant cloth, but one with the image of a crucified man bearing a pattern of bloodstains that matches his wounds as described in all four gospel accounts. We can test the blood and analyze the image. Thousands of hours have been spent on both.

Protestants generally have little regard for relics for reasons already stated but have great respect for archaeological artifacts as they support the historical accuracy of the bible.

The Shroud may be authentic, but it is difficult to apply an archaeological approach because the early church removed the linen from its historical context long ago.

If we discovered it today hidden away in a cave near Jerusalem with other first century artifacts, the controversy would be over. We would have assurance of authenticity based on the location of its discovery. But since the Shroud’s historical trail has some missing intervals, it has caused some to balk at considering it an authentic artifact of the crucifixion.

Hopefully, the historical and scientific research of the past decades, new challenges to the carbon date, and the preponderance of evidence clearly leaning towards authenticity, will one day allow the Shroud to be seen as a true archaeological artifact.

The second commandment of the Old Testament forbids the worshipping of graven images like the golden calf.

In the Old Testament no one ever saw the face of God, not even Moses. The Second Commandment says we are not to make any graven image representing anything in Heaven or on earth for the purpose of creating a pagan idol. However, in accordance with New Testament theology, when Jesus entered the world as the Word of God made flesh, everything changed. People could see the Son of God face to face. Something shifted dramatically between the Old and New Testaments. In Colossians 1:15 (WEB) Paul refers to Jesus as the image of the invisible God. An image is something we see with our eyes, a reflection of the actual object. Paul elevates the importance of seeing Jesus in the flesh as seeing the glory of God himself: The glory of God is revealed in the face of Christ. (2 Cor 4:6) Paul elaborates further in Hebrews: His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance. (Heb 1:3)

The question then arises if the Shroud of Turin is authentic, did it capture “the radiance of God’s glory” at the point of resurrection? Does it contain the “the very image of his substance?”

As a corollary, we can ask why there would be such a dramatic difference between the Old and New Testaments. There is a familiar theological statement first coined by St. Augustine that is perfectly reflected in the Shroud, “The new is in the old concealed; the old is in the new revealed.” One definition of “revealed” is, “To cause or allow (something) to be seen” and another is, “to make (something) known to humans by divine or supernatural means.” It appears the Shroud fits perfectly with both definitions.

In response to the evangelical objections, scripture shows that God uses many means to accomplish his will. How can we know what God may or may not use to reach someone? Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 9:22 (NIV) I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. It seems like the Shroud fits perfectly with the plan and purpose of God.

This is always a consideration, but it may be the wrong question. What if it IS authentic, and we did nothing with it? Which would be the greater mistake? Is there a middle path that allows the church and individual Christians to use the Shroud for its amazing witness even though we don’t have absolute proof of authenticity?  Absolutely yes, it is what I call the middle path.  As we explore the mystery—we encounter the message.  This remains true whether the Shroud is authentic or not.

All four gospels mention how they wrapped Jesus in linen (sindon) but only John mentions strips. The Greek word used is “othonia” which is a plural term and simply means more than one cloth. John’s Gospel mentions a ‘napkin’ that was about his head rolled up and placed next to the body. Additional strips may have been used to tie the hands and feet and perhaps a strip around the head as a chin band to keep the mouth from opening.

This would also be consistent with the description of Lazarus, who was “bound hand and foot” when Jesus raised him back to life after four days in the tomb. They also needed strips to overcome rigor mortis, the stiffening of the muscles after death. With Jesus, rigor mortis would set in quickly as he lost much blood from the trauma. They would have to break the stiffness to force the arms down from his last position on the cross, with arms outstretched above his head.

The Jews were not winding their dead with strips of linen during the time of Christ. In fact, even the Egyptians had discontinued the practice by the first century. There is some evidence for winding the body in strips during the time of the first temple period, circa 600 BC. However, by the first century, six hundred years later, the winding procedure was no longer performed. In addition, there were different rules for people who died by violent death with significant loss of blood. In such a case, they would not wash the body because for the Jew, life is in the blood and should not be removed from the body, nor would they remove the clothes as they would likely have absorbed blood. Those tending to his burial would wrap the body in a single linen cloth called a “sovev” which means to surround or go around and perfectly corresponds with the Shroud. With Jesus, he was naked because the Romans had cast lots for his clothes. This is also what is observed on the Shroud.

Evidence on the Shroud shows that the beard on Jesus’s chin was plucked leaving what appears to be a cleft beard. This prophecy does not suggest the beard of the future Messiah would be plucked clean.

There is no reference from the New Testament narratives that Jesus was unrecognizable as a human being. However, the Romans rarely scourged those crucified, and certainly not as severely as Jesus. It was unique to the punishment of Christ, as Pontius Pilate did not believe him to be guilty of a crime worthy of capital punishment, which only the Romans could administer. 

Pilate had him severely scourged, hoping that would be the end of it, but the Jews still demanded his crucifixion. As brutal as the scourging may have been, it did not turn Jesus into a mass of unrecognizable flesh. 

They forced Jesus to wear a crown made of thorns jammed onto his head. He was beaten with sticks driving the thorns even deeper causing blood to pour down from his lacerated scalp.

They punched his face, leaving bruises and contusions. Without question, when Jesus hung lifeless on the cross, it was indeed a tragic scene. Much of this blood was absorbed into a small cloth, or “napkin,” that was wrapped around his face after death.   

John’s Gospel 20:6-7 describes a small cloth called a napkin that was found in the tomb along with the linen shroud. It is believed to be the same cloth known as the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) and has a documented history to 614. It measures 84 x 53 cm (33 x 21 inches), about the size of a small bath towel.

The cloth bears a pattern of bloodstains and pleural fluid and is believed to have been used to cover the face of Jesus after he died but while still on the cross.

It was a Jewish tradition to cover the face of the dead. The cloth was kept on the face until the body was taken to the tomb.

Once the body was placed in the tomb, the Sudarium would have been removed from the face and placed next to the body and therefore has no image. The Shroud was then folded over the body lengthwise. The pattern of blood and pleural fluid correlates with what is seen on the Shroud.

In addition, both cloths are stained with type AB blood and also share pollen from the area surrounding Jerusalem suggesting a common geographic origin.

There are numerous shrouds in existence from Egyptian and other cultures, but extraordinarily few for the Jews. The primary reason is the Jewish burial custom of utilizing ossuaries, also known as a bone box. 

The Jews used ossuaries in burials for about 400 years, which included the first century up to about 70 A.D., when the Romans destroyed the Temple.

During that era, when someone died, the relatives would lay the body in a family tomb and wrap it in a shroud, but not as a permanent burial. The body would decompose and after a year or more had passed, members of the family would enter the tomb, place the bones in a limestone box (the ossuary), and etch the name of the deceased on the outside. Any remaining linens would be discarded, most likely burned, or buried. 

Many boxes could be stacked in the same tomb, allowing an entire family to be together in burial. The use of the ossuary certainly clarifies why Jewish burial shrouds are rarely found. It may also explain why they would use a cloth designed to pull over the body lengthwise. 

Knowing family members would re-enter the tomb the following year to transfer the bones to an ossuary, they would not have performed an elaborate winding of the body with strips of linen as some people believe. 

Using a single shroud would have allowed easy access to the bones by simply pulling the cloth back. The intricate wrapping of the body was unnecessary as it was not a permanent state. 

This is a complicated question because the scriptures are not clear on what really happened. Mark tells us that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both members of the Sanhedrin with financial means, bought a hundred pounds of spices made from myrrh and aloes. This is significant as it speaks to the importance of the person they were burying. The quantity of spices was well beyond that of a typical Jewish burial. Jewish tradition shows the more respected an individual, the more spices were brought to the tomb.

The Roman historian Josephus recorded forty pounds of spices were brought for the burial of the highly respected Rabbi Gamaliel. How they used these spices remains in question. Were they sprinkled on the body? Perhaps, but more likely they were bags of spices meant to perfume the chamber and placed around the body or around the tomb. 

Most scholars believe the burial of Jesus was hasty because of the impending Sabbath when the Jews were prohibited from work of any kind. This may explain why, in Mark’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, a disciple of Jesus, were returning to the tomb early Sunday morning carrying spices with plans to anoint the body. They intended to complete the burial preparations unfinished on Friday. The lack of spices found on the Shroud does not pose an issue. We do not know what happened or how the spices were used. 

However, Dr. Avinoam Danin, one of the leading botanists in Israel with the Hebrew University, analyzed the Shroud and scrutinized all the various image patterns seen on the cloth. He concluded they sprinkled a common spice known as Pistacia on the body as evidenced by stem and berry images seen on the Shroud using high contrast photography.

Paris is the home of the famous Louvre Museum complex and contains the Gayet collection of Egyptian burial linens. It comprises three trunks full of 75 burial cloths that belonged to first century Coptic Christians. They were buried in knee length tunics, then wrapped in full length shrouds with strips of linen wound around the outside of the cloth. The linens have all been examined and show no imprints of the face or body. It was as if the bodies melted through the cloth by gradual decomposition, leaving multiple stains of putrefaction.  There are no stains of decomposition on the Shroud of Turin. If there was a body in the Shroud, it was not there for long. 

The gospel narrative found in John 20:1-9 is quite instructive.  Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb first and sees that the body is gone.  She runs to find the apostles and tells them that “someone has taken the body and I don’t know where they have put him.”  She thinks the body has been stolen.  Peter and John run to the tomb, Peter goes in first and “sees the linen cloth lying there.”  Then John goes in and he also “sees the cloth lying there and the napkin that was about his head…and believes.” 

It wasn’t the empty tomb that grabbed their attention, it was the vacant linen shroud and becomes the first piece of evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead as he had predicted on at least three documented occasions. John becomes the first person to believe in the resurrection based on the evidence of the empty shroud.

The question must be asked, was the burial shroud left behind only for the benefit of Peter and John?  Or was it left for the entire world for all generations? 

It is curious how Acts 1:3 says, “After his suffering he showed himself to be alive through many convincing proofs.” No doubt most of these proofs were post-resurrection appearances in six recorded incidents over the course of forty days. But the first proof was the empty shroud lying in the tomb.  It is not inconceivable that the first proof was kept, passed down through the generations and now preserved in Turin, Italy.

In fact, there is no mention of the linen at all even though it contained the atoning blood of Christ—that alone should warrant a reference, yet the New Testament is silent.  Why?  The gospel accounts were written about thirty years after the resurrection when persecution was in high swing. James was killed in 42 and they had arrested Peter to do the same, but he escaped through an angelic intervention.  Any mention of the Shroud would have set off a search and destroy mission on behalf of either the Jews or the Romans.

An unwritten code was established among believers known as the “Discipline of the Secret” as a means of minimizing persecution and preserving prized relics of the passion and martyrs of the faith. However, after the edict of Toleration in 314 established by Emperor Constantine, it became safer to be a Christian. 

A sixth century liturgy known as the Mozarabic Rite of Holy Week was brought to Spain by Egyptian Catholics known as the Mozarabic sect.  They translated John 20:5 in the following manner: “Peter and John ran to the tomb and saw the recent imprints of the dead and risen man on the linens.”  Why would they choose to translate the verse in this manner unless it was based on something they had seen or knew about? 

The legend begins when a woman named Veronica wiped the face of Jesus as he was carrying his cross along the Via Dolorosa and resulted with an imprint of Jesus’ face on the cloth. Catholics commemorate this story in the Sixth Station of the Cross. Some versions tell how Veronica later traveled to Rome to present the cloth to Emperor Tiberius. This ‘Veil of Veronica’, supposedly imbued with divine power, could cure blindness, and even raise the dead. The story emerged in the Middle Ages and became the central icon of the Western Church during the 14th century. Some say the cloth disappeared after Rome was sacked in 1527, however artists made replicas of the image until 1616 when the Pope prohibited copies, suggesting the cloth survived the invasion. 

Reports indicate the Veil was kept in a chapel deep inside St. Peter’s Basilica but there are no known photographs. In 1907, clerics examined the Veil when it was inspected by a Jesuit art historian. He removed the glass from the frame and could only observe a light-colored cloth with two rust brown stains but was unable to discern any facial details. 

Some believe the Veil is a Western version of the Abgar legend that became the genesis of all Orthodox icons of Jesus featuring a front facing image of Christ with long hair, full beard, large eyes, and a long nose. It became known as the True Likeness. Curiously, Veronica is a derivation of two Latin words, Vera (true) and Icon (likeness): Vera Icon = Veronica. What seems to be the most significant stumbling block is that the story is not found in the bible and there is no reference to Veronica or her cloth prior to the twelfth century.

Maria Valtorta was born in 1897 in Caserta, Italy. In 1916, she experienced a dream so vivid it remained clear in her memory for her entire life. In the dream, the Lord called her to Himself. She awoke “with her soul, enlightened by something which was not of this world.” During her life, she had 703 visions. They all focused on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In 1948, the Pope told her to publish her visions with no edits. From her first vision, she could never find a picture of Jesus that matched what she saw when he appeared to her … until she received a book on the Shroud in 1942. What she saw jolted her. The hands, the face, the height all matched. Jesus gave her a message on May 20, 1949. 

My Shroud, Maria, for those who know how to look, is not only the proof that I really died and rose. It also testifies that I was conceived and born, not according to the laws of humanity. It is therefore a confirmation of the truths which My Religion teaches.

Mel Gibson based much of The Passion of the Christ on the visions of Maria Valtorta. The question as it relates to the Shroud is how much emphasis can we place on dreams and visions? That decision is up to the individual. They are clearly valuable for inspiration and should be approached with that in mind.

One of the most famous Marian apparitions occurred on December 9, 1531, outside Mexico City. A young indigenous man, Juan Diego, was walking in the hills and suddenly heard beautiful singing. He went looking for the source and came upon a young woman wearing a radiant dress. She identified herself as the Virgin Mary, who then requested Juan to appeal to the bishop to build a church in that location so all could come and honor her Son Jesus. Juan Diego obeyed, but the bishop wanted a sign from Mary to confirm the request was true. The next day Juan Diego was on his way hoping to find Mary but received news his uncle was gravely ill and changed course to visit him. Mary was aware and intercepted him along the way telling Juan that God would heal his uncle. She instructed Juan to climb to the top of a hill and pick all the flowers he saw. Roses and various flora covered the hill, which was unusual for winter and that part of Mexico. Juan collected them in his tilma, a typical cloak worn by Aztec farmers. He then traveled back into town to present the flowers to the bishop. As Juan opened his apron to release the flowers, the bishop saw a miraculous image of Mary imprinted on the cloak. 

Our Lady of Guadalupe is now the most visited Catholic Shrine in the world visited by over twenty million per year. People have attested to its mystical properties such as the preservation of the Tilma made from cactus which should have deteriorated long ago. Unlike the Shroud, which is a monochrome image with no variation in color, the Tilma image is quite colorful and after almost 500 years, the colors are still vibrant even though painted copies have long since faded. 

The difference between the Tilma and the Shroud is the amount of research and analysis. Those who have observed it say the image on the cactus fibers seems to rest only on the surface, reminiscent of the Shroud. Others see the reflection of Juan Diego in Mary’s eyes. While the Tilma may have received cursory analysis, nothing has been published in a peer-reviewed journal to know if other scientists can confirm any of these observations.  The Tilma is fascinating, but it does not rise to the level of the Shroud in terms of scientific scrutiny.

Unlike Our Lady of Lourdes in France, with 67 confirmed miracles since 1858, there are no recent claims regarding the Shroud except for a young girl who was partially healed in the 1950’s. Some may point to the Doctrine of Addai from the 5th century when legend says King Abgar during the 1st century was healed of leprosy upon seeing the folded-up Shroud brought to him by the Apostle Jude. Others point to 544 when the sacred cloth was paraded around the walls of Edessa and is credited with delivering the city from the conquering army of Persia. Sometimes people relate the authenticity of a relic based on miraculous events associated with it, but I believe the Shroud serves a different purpose. As a visual gospel written on linen, the message is about the crucifixion and resurrection, the core belief required for salvation as declared by the Apostle Paul. (Rom. 10:9) Millions of people have placed their hope in Christ through the witness of the Shroud, the miracle of faith.

Both eyes appear to be closed, but on close inspection, some researchers can see circular objects over the eyes and believe they may be buttons or coins. First discovered in the late 1970s by Father Francis Filas of Loyola University in Chicago, he believed markings seen over the right eye in photographs taken in 1931 may have been Roman coins. Filas claimed they originated in 29 A.D. with the letters “UCAI” in the proper sequence to reveal a portion of the inscription that read “Tiberius Caesar.” As compelling as this evidence would be, it does not show up in all photography and is therefore not definitive.

Some critics allege the dumbbell shaped scourge marks on the Shroud are not verified to be that of a flagrum. However, excavations of Herculaneum, a Roman city that suffered the same fate as Pompeii and was buried by a volcanic explosion, yielded an intact flagrum with dumbbell shaped tips matching the scourge marks seen on the Shroud. A medieval artist would have no knowledge of what a Roman whipping instrument might look like. This information has been learned through modern excavations in Israel.

While this may be true in most instances, it is not true in the event of violent death with significant loss of blood. The 16th century Code of Jewish Law states, “If his body was bruised and blood flowed from the wound, and there is apprehension that the blood of the soul (blood that flowed at the time of death) was absorbed in his clothes, he should not be cleansed.”

From
Dr. Siegfried H. Horn, Professor Emeritus of Archaeology and History of Antiquity, he states,

Ancient Egyptian mummies do not show uniformity in the position of arms and hands. Frequently bodies were mummified with their arms crossed over their chests and sometimes lying stretched out along their sides. However, a few mummies have been found that show the arms and hands in the same position as those of the Shroud, namely so that the hands cover the pubic area. There are five mummies, all found at Thebes together with the mummies of many royal personages, show their arms and hands in the position just as those of the image on the Shroud. They were published by G. Elliot Smith, the first physician and anthropologist who made a systematic examination of all the Royal Mummies in the Cairo Museum. 

Excavations made in Masada, Israel in 1960 revealed graves containing multiple skeletons of Jewish males from 70 A.D. They often found the dead buried in the same position as seen on the Shroud: on the back, face up, with elbows protruding from the way the hands folded over the pelvic area. No difference from the Shroud. 

The History Channel program did not represent this info very well. There are traces of human DNA on the cloth from anyone who ever touched the Shroud. The highest concentration of an ethnic cluster found on particles vacuumed from the cloth in 1978 and 1988 appear to be from the Druze community which originated in Egypt and lived throughout the Middle East. It does not mean that Jesus descended from the Druze but rather that people of Druze descent held and handled the Shroud at some point in history.

This is interesting corroborating data that correlates with pollen found on the Shroud from plants that are unique to the Middle East as well as limestone particles that match the hills and tombs surrounding Jerusalem. It further indicates the Shroud originated outside of Europe and was most likely manufactured in Egypt or Syria both with loom technology capable of weaving the Shroud.