G. Gispert-Sauch: A shroud, an atheist & Christ
G. Gispert-Sauch, Professor Emeritus at the Vidyajyoti College of Theology, in another review of “The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection” by Thomas de Wesselow writes in the Deccan Chronical, India’s largest English language newspaper
For the Christian, the Resurrection is a fact, a gracious act of God. According to Wesselow, the early Christian community mistakenly interpreted a natural process (i.e., the “photogenic” imprint of the corpse on the shroud) as an act of God’s revelation. He excludes a priori any theological explanation. I am not sure if such exclusion is more “scientific”. But as a believer, I find it easier to conceive that God showed us a new way of life in raising Jesus from the dead and assuring humanity of a similar end. This belief does not depend on the historical validity of the shroud, but on the testimony of the first generation of believers who “saw” Jesus himself, and its resonance in our personal life. This explains more convincingly the power of the faith in Resurrection than a mere darshan of a shroud with a faint image, even if it was seen by a few hundred persons, as Wesselow thinks it was.
I believe that Wesselow has been referring to himself as agnostic, not atheist.
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
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