The Shroud of Turin

March 24, 2024

Jesus Christ: Yesterday, Today, and Forever ~

The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus looked like, how do we know? Answer: The Shroud of Turin.

Today is Passion or Palm Sunday, where at Mass we solemnly read through Our Lord’s Passion and death. Yet the Scriptures aren’t the only place that testify to what happened to Our Lord Jesus Christ at His death. There is one relic par excellent that irrefutably testifies to the truth of the Scriptures. That relic is the Shroud of Turin – the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

As part of 1st Century Jewish burial custom, people were wrapped in a burial cloth. “They took the body of Jesus and bound it with burial cloths along with the spices, according to Jewish burial custom.” (Jn 19:40) and “They both ran, but the other disciple [John] ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in” (Jn 20:4). Because of what they discovered on it, the burial cloth that was wrapped around Our Lord’s body, was preserved by his disciples after the Resurrection and became a closely guarded relic.

I don’t have the space in two pages to lay out the historical journey (although it’s fascinating) the Shroud took to end up in Turin, Italy in 1578, where it has stayed ever since. Instead, I want to share what the Shroud reveals about the man on it, Jesus Christ, and what facts it establishes about Him and what that means for our faith and the faith of others. Let’s review what the Shroud reveals.

A. The date of the Shroud

1. A 2013 carbon-14 testing suggests a date for the Shroud between 200 BC and AD 200 – 200 years on either side of Christ’s death. You can find the 2013 test results here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/9958678/Turin-Shroud-is-not-a-medieval-forgery.html

2. There was another carbon-14 test of the Shroud in 1987, but that has been discredited by the 2013 testing. It is believed that the sample of the Shroud used in the 1987 test came from a piece of cloth that was sown onto the Shroud in the Middle Ages due to fire damage.

B. The Image of the Man on the Cloth

1. The Shroud has on it a faint, front and back full-body image of a 5’10” crucified man.

2. The image is not a stain. It is not painted. It is not burned on in a conventional manner. Instead it is an image seared onto the cloth with some technology that has yet to be explained.

3. The image of the man on the shroud can be read by 3-D imaging technology.

4. The image is a photographic negative. That means when a traditional photograph is taken, what should be the negative appears as a positive image.

5. Not only is it an accurate image of a dead man, but the image is distorted as it would be if it was lying over a real body – and the body vanished from within it.

6. The image affects only the cloth’s top two microfibers. It is so thin it can be scraped off with a razor blade. Furthermore, the image is uniform in intensity throughout the entire cloth with no variation in density or color.

7. The blood stains never turned black, as blood stains do when they age. Rather, the stains retain their original red color.

8. Unlike the image, the blood stains on the Shroud do fully penetrate the cloth front to back. The blood stains appeared on the cloth first followed by the image of the man. There is no image under the blood. This makes sense if the Shroud was made by God and not a human artist, because the blood from Good Friday precedes the Easter Sunday Resurrection.

C. Wounds & Gospel

1. The “man in the Shroud” is characterized by long hair, full beard, and a pattern of bloodstains that are compatible with the torturous wounds inflicted upon Jesus as recorded in all four New Testament Bible Gospel accounts.

2. Over 100 whip marks on every portion of his body, left by scourging from Roman flagra (multi-headed whips) and consistent with ancient Roman whips used at the time.

3. Blood stains that formed a circle around the top of his head are consistent with the crown of thorns.

4. Severely bruised knees that could have resulted from several falls.

5. Blood stains around holes in the wrists and feet that would be consistent with the aftermath of large spikes; the marks of crucifixion.

6. Blood stains around a large wound that would be consistent with an injury sustained by a spear in his side.

7. Scientific testing shows that the blood stains were formed due to contact with actual bleeding wounds.

D. Jewish Burial Customs

1. The shroud shows details perfectly consistent with first century Jewish burial customs.

E. Geographical Accuracy

1. The cloth is consistent with fabrics from first century Israel.

2. Pollen from the shroud is not only from the Jerusalem area, but from Turkey and the other places the Shroud is supposed to have resided in on its way to Turin. Dust on the Shroud from the area around the knees and feet are from the area of Jerusalem.

3. There are even microscopic traces of a flower that grows only within 15 miles of Jerusalem, blossoms in the spring when Jesus was crucified, and were known to be used for burial.

In the Middle Ages of the first millennium, there was a tradition in the Roman liturgy that the cloth on the altar had to be linen, and the altar had to be made of rock, understood as a tomb. From this we can understand why the altar cloth (the cloth that lies on the altar to this day) is analogous to the Shroud, and until 1969, had to be of “pure linen.” The altar was understood as a sepulcher (tomb), where the lifeless elements became something alive – flesh and bone. What lays on Holy Redeemer’s altar right now, indeed on every altar in the world today, is a direct consequence of the burial cloth of Christ given by God to the Church 2000 years ago.

In the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ,