Shroud of Turin

Many of you saw my presentation about the burial cloth of Jesus. The Shroud of Turin is a historical artifact preserved through the centuries that seems to show an impossible image, a negative photo of a crucified man. Secondo Pia, an Italian lawyer, took a photograph in 1898 inside the Turin church where the Shroud was on display. He had to use long-time exposure film before flashes were invented. When he developed the photographic plate, he was shocked to see the clear details of a crucified man!  

Is this the actual burial cloth of Jesus? I think it could be. Several non-believing scientists who examined the Shroud became Christians based on the evidence they saw. How the image came to exist is still a mystery. (Click HERE to watch my 20-minute video presentation.)

What are the implications for us if the image on the Shroud is real? Can we see a glimpse by using our faith or our imagination of “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ?"  

The man on the shroud looks like an adult Hebrew male, about 6' tall. He was scourged and crucified. The image of the crucified man rests only on the surface of the fabric's fibers. NASA’s X-ray topography revealed that the picture is three-dimensional, that the fabric was resting on the body of a dead man when the image came to be.  

The linen's texture and weave are from the Middle East. The pollen on it is from the same area, and it blooms only in Jerusalem in the spring. The wounds and bleeding of the man exactly match all four gospel accounts of Jesus' suffering. His brow is bloody from a crown of thorns. He was scourged on his back and arms with a Roman flagellum. It was cruel torture. He had wounds on his wrists. His arms were out of joint. There is a lot of blood in the fabric, especially from his back and side, but no broken bones. The blood is human type AB, common in the Middle East.  

What produced the image? It’s a photographic negative. The image is only a few molecules deep in the topmost fibers, but blood soaked all the way through, saturating the linen. A burst of energy? The glory of God? Perhaps it’s the same power that will one day raise us up!  

Let me repeat this for emphasis: the image on the Shroud is NOT a painting. It was not painted by Leonardo da Vinci to be a Roman Catholic artifact or forgery. There are no pigments, dyes, or brushstrokes. The image is very superficial, penetrating only the top 200-600 nanometers of the fabric’s upper surface linen fibers, but the blood on the fabric, pints of it, soaked all the way through. Physicists conjecture that a burst of intense light lasting less than a billionth of a second might reproduce it. But who knows? 

Glenn Beck hosted a TV show claiming the shroud as authentic. He interviewed Jeremiah Johnson, president of Christian Thinkers. Johnson said that 63 academic and scientific fields have put 500,000 hours of research into the Shroud and still cannot explain its origin. It could be the first selfie in human history, captured at the precise moment that Jesus came alive, never to die again. Psalms 22 and Isaiah 53 describe in exquisite detail what we can now see pictured clearly on the Shroud: an image of our crucified Savior, the Lord Jesus, by whose stripes we are healed.