John A. T. Robinson Surprising Views on the Shroud of Turin
There is no doubt that John A. T. Robinson, formerly the Anglican bishop of Woolwich, England and later Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, was a major force in shaping today's liberal and the Progressive Christianity movement. What is not well known about him is that he considered the Shroud seriously and expressed reasoned doubt that it was a forgery. This is classic Robinson thinking:
One of the things that shook my natural predisposition to scepticism about the Turin shroud was precisely that it could not at all easily be harmonized with the New Testament account of the grave-clothes. I am not saying that it is incompatible with them but simply that no forger starting, as he inevitably would, from the details of the Gospels, and especially that of the fourth, would have created the shroud we have. (Emphasis mine, scepticism is British sp.)
Robinson is certainly most famous for his seminal and controversial book Honest to God. What Robinson did in his million-copy bestseller was extract from the opaque scholarship of academia the best of Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmannm and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and share it with a wider world. Robinson proposed not so much a reshaping of Christianity but the application of concepts and contemporary language that conformed to a modern scientific worldview. There can be little question that Robinson wished to reduce Christianity’s dependence on belief in the "supranatural” (supernatural) and on legendary accounts. Some conservative Christians were (and still are) horrified. They saw in his approach an appeal for a secularized Christianity or worse, an appeal for secular humanism.
Robinson repeatedly reaffirms the Resurrection of Christ. And mysteriously, and without much clarity, he affirms belief in paranormal (meaning not normal rather than connotatively occult or psychic) while rejecting the supernatural. Knowing this, the following statement is intriguing. This, too, is classic Robinson:
The marks might conceivably have been left on the surface of the cloth by some kind of paranormal, though not necessarily miraculous, radiation from the body during the period when the two were in contact. (Emphasis mine)
It was 1977, a decade before the carbon 14 dating. He had just published Redating the New Testament, his argument that the whole of the New Testament was written before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. Robinson stated:
What [the Shroud of Turin] has done, if genuine, is to take us into the tomb itself during those thirty-six hours. And this none of the canonical Gospels do. It is a unique story, complete with exclusive picture. But the picture is the latest and final testimony to the past. It is of the dead Jesus, however vivid and majestic, not of the living Christ. Yet if in the recognition of the face and the hands and the feet and all the other wounds, we, like those who knew him best, are led to say, 'It is the Lord!', then perhaps we may have to learn to count ourselves also among those who have 'seen and believed'
There is a bigger issue that argues for its authenticity as Jesus' burial shroud. It exists. It survived the tomb. Most crucifixion victims were not buried but, as John Dominic Crossan makes clear, were tossed into charnel pits or left on their crosses as carrion for crows and wild dogs. But if this victim was buried-and we know from archeology that at least one other crucifixion victim was buried-the cloth was separated from the body it enveloped. Robinson comments:
This [=the tomb burial] incidentally is one of the best attested of all historical facts about him. That Christ not only died and rose but was `buried' is part of our earliest summary of the Christian faith . . . . The view that we can know nothing about the body of Jesus, because as the corpse of a condemned criminal it would have been thrown into a lime-pit, is sheer dogmatic scepticism, flying in the face of all the evidence that, contrary to what might have been expected, it met no such fate.
After about three days, fluidic decomposition products from the body would have stained and damaged the cloth. Soon the cloth would have rotted away. Robinson, who has no reluctance about calling the Shroud a fifth gospel and is open to the possibility that it is an 'extra-canonical witness' comments:
It certainly supports the tradition of a tomb found empty and of grave-clothes separated from a body. For how else would this shroud, unlike others, not have disintegrated with the body it wrapped? But I cannot see that it adds anything to the picture of how they became separated. . . I do not think that it necessarily presupposes, let alone 'catches', some moment of dematerialization.
Dematerialization? Wondering what it was the fourth evangelist is intending to present, Robinson says:
That he means us to draw the conclusion that the grave had been rifled and the body removed from the clothes (as his expressions would allow) is clearly impossible: this first and most natural explanation is firmly corrected. Does he intend us to suppose that the grave clothes had been left behind undisturbed in their original positions, the body having passed through and out of them, as Latham and many others argued? I had always assumed this was his intention but I am not so sure. He could of course have imagined the body passing through the clothes as later it did through locked doors (20:19,26), though why then was the stone moved away? Dematerialization is I suspect a modern way of envisaging the relationship between flesh and spirit, matter and energy, of being 'changed' or 'clothed upon' with a body of 'glory'. How a first century Jew would naturally have envisaged resurrection (though this does not of course mean that this is how it actually happened) would surely have been as a corpse waking up from sleep, like Tabitha in Acts (9:40), as indeed Jesus predicts of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then like Lazarus walking out of the tomb. The difference in the case of Jesus was that the grave clothes did not need to be taken off him nor the stones removed: he did it himself. For, unlike Lazarus, he was not simply being restored to the weakness of a flesh body. In the power of the Spirit he broke the bonds of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Far from being viewed as helpless and naked, he would probably have been envisaged in robes of light like the angels at the tomb, as in the vision of the risen Christ in the Apocalypse (cf. especially Matt. 28:3 with Rev. 1:14).
Conclusion
The scientific facts about the nature of the images make artistry or fakery all but impossible. There is no evidence to support any known method from the history of art. The most damning argument, however, is that a hoax makes no sense. In an undemanding age when any sliver of wood could be passed off as a piece of the true cross, any shred of cloth could be thought to be part of some saint's attire, or any bramble might be foisted on the public as a piece of the crown of thorns, why would a crafter of fake relics go to such extraordinary contra cultural lengths to produce a fake relic. To this, John A. T. Robinson adds nuance:
That the corpse of Jesus was enfolded in a simple linen cloth passing lengthwise over the head and covering the whole body back and front is not, I submit, what any forger with medieval or modern presuppositions would have thought of; but it makes complete sense of the texts and comforts with the other ancient evidence.
And:
This . . . is not, I suggest, how any forger would have thought. He would have imagined [a face cloth] lying over the face, rather like the bogus St. Veronica's handkerchief, and incorporated its image on a separate piece of material.
Images formed as byproducts of a miracle will always be challenged. Mixing miracles and science is difficult, perhaps impossible and philosophically inappropriate. And how is it that we can presume that God's might leave bit and pieces of elementary particles about or a radiation field that by accident or on purpose should paint some images. Is a God of awesome exception to nature of one sort bound, if we presume a supernatural resurrection event, dependent on the use of these very same laws to accomplish a picture of his exception?
So what did Robinson mean by the conflicted phrase, "paranormal, though not necessarily miraculous?" Robinson does not say. But Marcus Borg in Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally shares Robinson's perspective. He does not believe in miracles in a classic sense yet professes his belief in the paranormal. In a rejoinder to a discussion—John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright, and Deirdre Good—in a 1996 Episcopal Teleconferencing Network follow-up to Trinity Institute’s “Jesus at 2000 Symposium,” Borg offers a definition that may accord well with Robinson’s views. Borg wrote:
miracles [are] supernatural interventions into a universe understood as a closed system of cause and effect operating in accord with natural laws. . . I prefer to speak of "the paranormal" (meaning experiences/events for which we don't have a very good explanation within our world-view).
Robinson was not particularly concerned about how the images were formed. He seemed disinclined to think they were miraculous. What is important is to recognize that he doubted the Shroud was a forgery and he was open-minded to the idea that the images are not easily explained.
By forgery, miracle or natural means; however we might think the images were formed, it may turn out that every explanation is more assailable than acceptable. If that is so, then Bishop Robinson was prophetically correct. The body really did leave "its record for the puzzled sleuths of this and every age."
Home Page & Introduction: The Shroud of Turin Story - A Guide to the Facts 2005
© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
