Some of the material in this essay is obsolete. Please refer to the
Shroud of Turin Story Home Page

The
Resurrection
Problem
and the
Shroud of Turin

By Daniel R. Porter

1. Introduction
2. "Ann, You're Nuts"
3. What we need to know 
4. The newer evidence
5. The resurrection problem
6. Vetting
7. Acceptance
8. Textile studies
9. Plant images and pollen
10. Travertine aragonite
11. Sudarium of Oviedo
12. The Image of Edessa
13. Jesus in art
14. A negative that is not a negative
15. Other visual characteristics
16. The most intriguing characteristic
17. A picture of a million words
18. How were the images formed ? 
19. Appendix: Carbon 14, etc.

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Part 3:  What We Need to Know to Look At the Shroud of Turin

The Shroud is an old bloodstained, dirty piece of linen cloth containing life-sized front and back images of a naked man who appears to have been crucified. Its first appearance in Western European history was during a time of unbridled superstition in demons, witches, magic, and miracle-working relics. It was a time of war, plague, and political turbulence. One year before the Shroud's first exposition, England's Black Prince had defeated the French at the battle of Poitiers and captured John II of France. Adding to the political turmoil this caused, the pope was in Avignon, not Rome - some even believed that the plague was God's retribution on the whole world because the pope was not in the eternal city. In this climate of superstition, naiveté and disorder a lucrative market in false relics flourished. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 acknowledged the problem with false relics but church authorities did little to curb the market in them - and it did indeed flourish. Our knowledge of this history rightly conditions us to be suspicious of any medieval relic from Europe.

Yet despite our modern-day suspicions, there was some excitement just a few years ago when it seemed that the Shroud might be real. Scientific examination of the Shroud in 1978 suggested many things about it that gave credence to that possibility. A group of scientists - all well qualified and acceptable to the Vatican though many were not Christians - examined the Shroud and found that it was not a painting. They analyzed the bloodstains and found that they were of real human blood. The images exhibited strange negative and three-dimensional qualities. At about the same time that this physical examination of the shroud was taking place, historical theories were being floated that suggested that the cloth had made its way to Europe by way of Edessa, an early and possibly Johannine Christian community, in what is now modern day Turkey. The Shroud, or a cloth very much like it, was certainly in Edessa in 544 CE. That same cloth - variously known as the Holy Mandylion and the Image of Edessa - was moved from Edessa to Constantinople in 944. Then it disappeared from history when in 1204, knights of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople. There is some evidence that it was in Athens three years later in the hands of French knights and it may be the same piece of cloth that surfaced in 1357 in the hands of a French knight, Geoffrey de Charny.

The Rev. Albert R. (Kim) Dreisbach, an Episcopal priest and a significant Shroud scholar, illustrates the confident mood stemming from the 1978 studies and the newly articulated history as he describes an event that took place in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1983:

The Greek Archbishop, the Roman Catholic Archbishop, the Episcopal Bishop and the Presiding Bishop of the AME Church gathered before the world's first full size, backlit transparency of the Shroud and joined clergy representing the Assemblies of God, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians in an amazing witness to ecumenical unity. At the conclusion of the service, His Grace, Bishop John of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Atlanta, turned to me and said: "Thank you very much for picking our day." I didn't fully understand the significance of his remark until he explained to me that August 16th is the Feast of the Holy Mandylion commemorating the occasion in 944 A.D. when the Shroud was first shown to the public in Byzantium following its arrival the previous day from Edessa in southeastern Turkey.

That was in 1983. In 1988, five years later, carbon-14 tests "revealed" that the Shroud was medieval. That news, to all who hoped that the Shroud was real, was devastating. A headline in the New York Times stated: "Test Shows Shroud of Turin to be Fraud." Other newspapers around the world reported much the same thing. One of the radiocarbon scientists jubilantly declared that anyone who now believed that the Shroud was real must be a member of the Flat Earth Society. The public, by and large, accepted the verdict. Even the Vatican briefly accepted the verdict. The Shroud seemed to be a fake. The public tuned out.

But now, just a decade later, a very different picture is quietly emerging among the scientists and historians who have continued to study the Shroud. There were many, who because of the other evidence, doubted the accuracy of the carbon 14 test. They didn't doubt the general validity of carbon 14 testing as an acceptable method for dating archeological items. But, as scientists, they were aware that radiocarbon dating had limitations, particularly as it might apply to the Shroud. Now, the procedures used by the radiocarbon dating laboratories are being seriously questioned. We know that the tested samples probably contained significant amounts of newer fiber from mending this very old piece of cloth. The samples also seem to have included some biological organisms that had formed on the linen and were not removed during laboratory cleaning.

Most profound in challenging the carbon 14 tests, as Ann suspected, was a preponderance of compelling scientific and historical evidence, much of it new and just emerging. This included medical forensic analysis that reveals, in the image, a body in a medically correct state of rigor mortis with no signs of decomposition. Also, very telling, is the fact that the bloodstains show no smearing or pulling apart, as would be the case if a body were unwrapped while removing it.

The newer data and numerous peer-reviewed research papers are dramatic in the story they tell. The Shroud does not appear to be a forged relic. Nor is it a product of any known natural process. It is not a work of art. Thomas Cahill, perhaps best known for his book, The Gifts of the Jews, is a thoroughly modern Catholic historian who finds "the data immensely intriguing and largely convincing." In his latest book, Desire of the Everlasting Hill, he gives credence to the Shroud and devotes several pages to it. He keenly reflects a newly emerging sense among many scholars that the Shroud may be real.

Gary R. Habermas, a prominent Evangelical historian, also believes it is the real thing. In his book, The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ, (fourth printing, revised 2000) he argues persuasively that the Shroud is possibly authentic because of the scientific and historical evidence. Gary Habermas is widely read and respected. He, too, reflects changing opinions among Christians of all traditions. He writes:

There is certainly no proof at this point, and the shroud could still turn out to be a fake, although the data appear to dictate otherwise. It would seem that, even if it did not belong to Jesus, the shroud is at least an actual archeological artifact, thereby still providing some important information concerning death by crucifixion. The absence of bodily decomposition shows that the body was not in the cloth very long. Further, if the body was not unwrapped and if the image was created by scorch from a dead body, we have some potential data that could be highly evidential consideration in favor of Jesus' resurrection from the dead.

The on-again, off-again excitement about the Shroud was on again. By 1999, just eleven years after the carbon-14 testing, Father Dreisbach was able to write enthusiastically:

In presentations ranging from the Salvation Army to the Syrian Orthodox, from the Bible Belt to the Biretta Belt, Christians of all persuasions are beginning to acknowledge ... that the Shroud is Christianity's most precious artifact.

Dan Porter is an Episcopalian and a member of Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. He may be contacted by email at porter@shroudstory.com or by mail at 20 McIntyre Street, Bronxville, NY 10708. 

(c) Copyright 2001, Daniel R. Porter. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced in full for any non-commercial purpose without further permission.