For those unfamiliar with it, the Shroud of Turin it is a 14-foot linen cloth bearing the faint, photographic-like negative image of a crucified man. It has long been venerated by many as the burial cloth of Jesus and the object of more than a century of scientific and historical scrutiny. During the six-day 2015 public exposition—which was the last major, in-person public viewing authorized for pilgrims and the one Pope Francis attended on June 21, 2015—more than 2 million people visited the Turin Cathedral to see the Shroud.

Since the mid-1970s, there has been, in circles of interest throughout Italy and in the U.S. and the U.K., a concerted effort to authenticate the Shroud and thereby add a measure of forensic proof to the Passion and Easter stories in the Gospels.

So far, the forensic record has been discouraging: the 1988 radiocarbon dating, subsequent pollen DNA studies, and blood and bodily-fluid analyses have all produced results that range from inconclusive to actively unfavorable to authenticity, depending on whom you ask. Into that vacuum a different kind of evidence has reemerged: the words of Scripture and historical records themselves. One scholar, Teddi Pappas, an online friend, a criminal defense attorney by trade, and a gifted Shroud scholar in her own right, has done a great deal of heavy lifting on the ancient Greek vocabulary used in the Gospel burial accounts, arguing that a close reading of terms like sindon and othonia can tell us something meaningful about the number, form, and arrangement of Jesus’ burial cloths, and by extension, something favorable to the Shroud’s authenticity. See: Farey Takes On Gregory Referendarius and Teddi Pappas

I’m no expert in ancient Greek, so take what follows for what it’s worth. But from what I’ve read, that project may be resting on ground shakier than it appears.

A paper from twenty years ago comes to mind: “A Clean Cloth: What Greek Word Usage Tells Us about the Burial Wrappings of Jesus.” It was published by Diana Fulbright in 2005 in the British Society for the Turin Shroud’s Newsletter No. 62. At the time, she was Director of Research at the Shroud of Turin Center in Richmond, Virginia. Fulbright’s paper functions as a thorough philological takedown of the popular assertion that the Gospels specify a single, massive shroud like the one in Turin. By tracing how these Greek words were used across centuries of classical literature, secular trade documents, and the Septuagint, she demonstrates that modern translations have retrofitted technical meanings onto very ordinary words.

Two findings stand out:

  • Sindon (σινδών): Fulbright shows this was never an intrinsic technical term for a “burial shroud.” It simply denoted a fine, high-quality, expensive fabric, often but not exclusively linen, used for consumer goods like fine garments, sheets, or cloaks. Its connection to death in the Gospels is entirely contextual, not semantic.
  • Othonia (ὀθόνια): Often translated rigidly as “linen strips” or “bandages” by those trying to contrast the Synoptics with John, Fulbright shows that othone and othonion actually referred to strong, durable sheets of linen, used elsewhere in antiquity for things like ship sails.

Even Hugh Farey, no friend to authenticity arguments, calls the paper masterly. And it makes a fairly convincing case, in my lay reading, that neither word was ever a precise, technical term for “burial shroud.” Both were generic words for cloth or linen, and their meaning came from context, not from the word itself.

That seems like an important caveat. These words show up over centuries and across a lot of geography, from the Septuagint’s use of sindon for ordinary linen garments, all the way to the Gospels, written decades apart in different communities. Koine Greek wasn’t a fixed, standardized language; it evolved and varied by region and era. Even within the New Testament itself, Luke uses sindon for the burial cloth in one verse and then othonia for what Peter finds in the empty tomb just a chapter later, which only makes sense if the words genuinely overlapped rather than referring to two distinct, well-defined objects.

So it seems fair to ask: if the vocabulary really is this loose, can it bear the weight of an argument for a specific number or type of cloth at all? That cuts both ways. It’s a problem for skeptics who want to rule out a single shroud, but it’s just as much a problem for making a precise case for one.

One more thing worth adding, and I say this to everyone here, not just to Teddi: this whole argument rests on treating the Gospel burial narratives as straightforward historical reportage rather than what they likely are, which is oral tradition committed to writing decades after the fact, shaped by the theological concerns of each community. The story is fine to accept on faith, as I do, but faith isn’t the same as historical certainty. And we shouldn’t let a close reading of vocabulary trick us into thinking we’ve established the latter.

It’s worth remembering that not all scholars even accept the burial-and-empty-tomb sequence as historical bedrock. John Dominic Crossan has argued Jesus’ body was more likely left on the cross or given an indifferent burial by Roman soldiers, consistent with common Roman treatment of crucified criminals, and that the Joseph of Arimathea story and the empty tomb were later theological developments rather than eyewitness memory. Marcus Borg, coming from a different angle, was less concerned with reconstructing what physically happened to the body and more willing to treat the empty tomb as a story whose truth is symbolic rather than strictly historical; for Borg, whether the tomb was literally empty mattered less than what the Easter story meant. Bart Ehrman has taken a more tentative version of the skeptical view seriously as well. That’s a minority position among scholars, most still hold to some form of the burial and discovery accounts, but it’s a serious one, held by serious people, not a fringe theory.

The point is: if you’re going to build a case on the precision of a Greek noun, you’ve already conceded more to a literalist reading of the text than the text itself may support. Teddi has written a series of well-thought-out philological comments, and I respect the care and legal precision she’s brought to them- no surprise from an attorney. Still, I think she’s put herself in a spot where she has to defend not just what the words could mean, but that the account is historical in the first place, and that’s a much bigger claim than close reading of Greek alone can carry.

And maybe that’s the real lesson here, whichever side of the linen you land on. I’ve written before about divine hiddenness, the idea that God’s refusal to make Himself undeniable isn’t a flaw in the design but a feature of it, because certainty crowds out the kind of trust that faith actually asks for. A perfectly authenticated Shroud, with airtight philology behind every stitch and thought, wouldn’t just settle a historical question. It would collapse the space where faith has always had to live. Teddi’s project, and Fulbright’s before her, are worth taking seriously on their own terms, as history and as language. But even if every word fell into place exactly as she’d want, I don’t think it would get anyone closer to belief. It would just relocate the mystery. And I suspect it would still be there waiting, however precisely we manage to translate it.

There remains a lawyer’s measure of reasonable doubt, and that is a good thing here.