A major point in Christianity’s favor that sets it apart from other religions and bolsters its truth claims is the historicity of its central events. Unlike other traditions’ myths of demigods and divinized heroes, Christ’s birth, ministry, and death are not said to have occurred in some nebulous age of legend. Scripture takes pains to ground the Gospel in concrete details. Key events are dated to this king’s reign or that governor’s tenure. Public figures are not only mentioned, but directly involved. People who were widely known and still alive when the Apostles spread the Gospel are cited as eyewitnesses.
The Gospel’s historicity is why smug atheists looking to show how smrt they are have stooped to ham-fisted attempts at debunking not just Christ’s divinity, but His existence. These attempts always rely on hair-fine degrees of scrutiny to which no other ancient personage is subjected, because no other personage could withstand them. Their first step is always ruling the Bible inadmissible on arbitrary grounds. That’s akin to disqualifying your great-grandmother’s recollections of her father as proof of your great-great-grandfather’s existence. With a pre-Social Security, pre-driver’s license world where only a sliver of the populace was ever photographed not that far gone, applying the smrt set’s standards consistently would force us to deny that most people born before the early 20th century existed.
But the debunkers have another problem–specifically the wealth of evidence for Jesus’ existence outside the Bible.
Which is why they really have a hate on for this:
For the few who don’t recognize it, the picture above is a full-length photo of the artifact known as the Shroud of Turin. The single sheet of linen bears two images of a 5′ 10″ man with a powerful build marked with wounds that map to current understandings of Roman crucifixion–complete with multiple small puncture wounds on the head, nail holes in the wrists and feet, a single large puncture wound in the side, and signs of scourging on the back.
Skeptics’ first shot at debunking the shroud was to dismiss it as a medieval painting of Christ’s crucified body. This theory fails to hold water on several grounds.
First, the wounds shown on the shroud aren’t consistent with portrayals of Christ’s wounds in Medieval art.
Even the late medieval painting above locates the nail wounds in Jesus’ palms, instead of the wrists where later archaeological research showed the Romans actually placed the nails. Unlike pretty much all medieval crucifixion art, the shroud gets this vital detail right.
Also, note the polar opposite dispositions of the bodies in both pics above. The medieval painting shows Christ recumbent in serene victory, complete with halo and loincloth. In sharp contrast, the shroud shows a naked, beaten, and bloody corpse in all its messy humanity. To the medieval mind, those features would have been strikes against the shroud’s authenticity, not evidence for it.
Perhaps most damning to the medieval painting theory is that the shroud wasn’t painted. In fact, to this day no one is sure exactly how the image was made. We do know there are no pigments on the linen. If a medieval artist produced the shroud image, he did it with invisible brush strokes and some kind of unknown substance that didn’t soak into the threads. What did soak into the threads was human blood of type AB, the same type that’s definitive of Eucharistic miracles.
But the definitive proof against the shroud being a painting is that photographic negatives of paintings don’t turn out like this:
Do not adjust your screen. Negatives of the shroud actually do reveal more detail–3D detail, in fact. That suggests the shroud itself may be some kind of 3D negative.
Again, nobody can reproduce a version of the shroud with all these features. Even if future advances in technology eventually let them pull it off, that’s not much argument against a miracle. It would be like saying, “St. Joseph of Cupertino couldn’t really fly. He simply used a jet pack.”
Here is the point when shroud skeptics play their trump card: “Radiocarbon dating done in 1988 proved the shroud linen dates from the 13th-14th century! The image can’t be older than the underlying fabric!”
This theory, too, is replete with holes–pun intended, as you’ll soon see.
First of all, researchers have unearthed volumes of historical evidence indicating the shroud’s existence prior to the 13th century.
The Pray Codex, a 12th century Hungarian manuscript, depicts Jesus’ burial cloth with a pattern of L-shaped dots remarkably similar to the “poker holes” on the shroud of Turin.
Those burn holes provide a host of other clues, such as the fact that folding the shroud four times perfectly aligns the dots so that they could have been caused by a single hot implement, hence the “poker holes” moniker.
Folding the shroud four times also leaves you with what looks like a single cloth bearing a faint image of Jesus’ face. That fact is significant, since it provides a missing link from the shroud of Turin to another famed Christian relic, the Image of Edessa.
Edessa was a small city in Mesopotamia whose church boasted a true wonder: an image “not painted by hands.”
Shroud skeptics brush off the Edessa image, pointing out that it was said to be an icon only of Christ’s face and that its background lore made no mention of it as Jesus’ burial cloth.
What they miss is that a faint image of a humiliated, bloody, and naked Jesus would have scandalized ancient Eastern Christians even more than their medieval Western brethren. They also overlook accounts from Pope Stephen III in 755, a 10th century Vatican manuscript, and 11th century Byzantine relic inventories describing a full-body image.
The presence of burn marks, though not the poker holes specifically, may drive the final nail in the radiocarbon dating canard.
That the shroud suffered significant damage in a fire in 1532 is beyond doubt. Two years later, a group of Poor Clare sisters mended the worst of the damage. Their repairs included sewing on patches and re-weaving certain sections. All of the samples taken for radiocarbon dating came either from those sections, or parts of the shroud adjacent to those sections. If a mix of 1st century and 16th century threads were radiocarbon tested in 1988, we’d expect the mean age of the fabric to be a little over 700 years, which nicely matches the actual results.
To sum up, author Mike Flynn has come up with a highly plausible chain of custody for the shroud.
- Peter takes Shroud to Antioch, where it is hidden away in the Cherubim quarter against discovery by Jews and Romans.
- During reign of Commodus, it is taken to Edessa to “seal the deal” with Lucius Agbar. The story is eventually projected onto an earlier time period.
- Becomes dangerous once more to show your head. Shroud is hidden, forgotten, until flood or earthquake opens its hiding place in the wall of the Cherubim Gate. The district becomes known for its special icon.
- When Persians destroy Antioch, the Shroud is moved to Edessa, where it plays a folkloric role in foiling a Persian siege. Folded up and kept in a box, it becomes the famous Image of Edessa.
- The Roman Emperor decides the Image belongs in the City and the Image is taken to Constantinople, where it becomes known as the Holy Mandylion. Gradually, people seem to become aware there is a full body, and it begins to be associated with the burial shroud of Christ.
- Othon de la Roche takes the Shroud to Athens as part of his booty from the Sack of Constantinople and then sends it to Besançon.
- Othon’s great-great granddaughter Jeanne inherits and she and her husband Geoffrey de Charny house the Shroud at Lirey. (A painting replaces it at Besançon and is eventually destroyed by the French in a Revolutionary hissy fit.)
- Margaret de Charny pulls the Shroud from Lirey and puts it in Montfort for safekeeping. The Livey monks never get it back.
- Margaret turns the Shroud over to the House of Savoy, who keep it first at Chambéry (where it is damaged in a fire) then at Turin (where it remains to this day).
Applying a standard of evidence consistent with other historical figures, we find that the shroud’s authenticity as the burial cloth of a man who was crucified in 1st century Palestine is a less miraculous explanation than the medieval forgery theory.
Think of it this way: If the shroud of Turin were reputed to be the burial cloth of anyone besides a biblical figure, secular researchers would declare it a highly useful source of knowledge about Roman crucifixion and let the matter rest. Instead, because the mere possibility of Jesus’ existence sends secular Moderns into CogDis fits, they have to go into full-on Fact Check™ mode.
In other words, the Shroud of Turin is a pictorial Witch Test. That alone lends credence to its divine pedigree.
For a metaphysical thrill ride with a healthy dose of Christian horror, read my award-winning Soul Cycle.
“What did soak into the threads was human blood of type AB, the same type that’s definitive of Eucharistic miracles.”
I just reread that linked article, but I don’t see the connection between blood type and Eucharistic miracles. What am I missing?
The header image of that post is of an actual Eucharistic miracle in which the host started bleeding.
In every such miracle I’m aware of that the Church has authenticated, the blood type always turns out to be AB.
Thank you for the clarification.
My pleasure
I once came across an atheist who insisted that the consistency of blood testing finding Jesus’s blood (through the shroud and through Eucharistic miracles) was evidence AGAINST the shroud being authentic.
His argument went like this:
-AB is the rarest human blood type.
-Therefore it is the type of blood type that someone would choose to bolster the claims that a certain blood sample was “special”
-Since the blood was of this type rather than a more “likely” type, it proves that the Eucharistic miracles are frauds
-Since the Shroud of Turin shares a blood of a type with proven frauds, it must be a fraud itself
He was incapable of seeing how ridiculous this looked to anyone not in lockstep with his ideology.
Unprincipled exceptions and special pleading are these peoples’ stock in trade. A truly objective skeptic would say, “On the weight of the evidence, it’s the burial shroud of a 1st century man executed by crucifixion in the Levant. We know such things happened all the time. No miracle necessary.”
But since they’re motivated not by scientific curiosity but by a deep-seated hatred of Christ, they tie themselves in knots insisting, “The ‘shroud’ is a medieval fraud perpetrated by a 13th century forger who somehow had access to 21st+ century technology and 8th-12th century Hungarian, Vatican, and Byzantine records which he redacted to support his scam. And you pious rubes fell for it!”
File under: Miracle Disproof More Miraculous than the Miracle.
Thanks for this, Brian. Very interesting. I admit, I used to be one of those smug atheists from about the ages of 11-16 (thankfully I never found Internet Atheism during this period, we didn’t have internet at home until my preteen years, I think), and some of this attitude remains with me as a foul residue, mostly manifesting as a difficulty in taking heart in relics, for fear that someone will come along with an “actually, so-and-so’s relic probably isn’t real human blood, and the Vatican won’t let us investigate it, so they probably know that too! See, this professor made up a recipe for a red substance that does the same thing!” and disturb my peace.
Random fact; my initial atheism was caused by a book I was introduced to at the age of uh, I’m not sure but sometime in primary school (elementary school for you Yanks), called “The Philosophy Files”. This really bothered kid me, but eventually I forgot about it. Some decade later I returned to the faith, and lo, what did I find when I investigated my childhood bugbear but that it was written by Stephen Law, (in)famous for his bone-headed “Evil God Challenge” that fails to even comprehend God as Classical Theism understands Him. No wonder, then, that it made me react like that, as a defenceless child! I tell you, it was gratifying to find that out, and to be able to put that old thing to bed for good.
CantusTropus
A really interesting reminiscence. Thanks for sharing.
Sometimes I wonder if we should bring back the Index for bad books unsuitable for youngsters.
We really need to protect children’s innocence as long as we can while preparing them for the world.
I’ve always held the arguments the Shroud to be persuasive and cogent. I’ve never understood the antipathy against relics. They remind us our Lord and the saint walked the earth too and left us something to remind us they too were here
xavier
Thank you for recounting your fall and reversion story. Charlatans like Law have much to answer for.
“elementary school for you Yanks”
Midwesterner for you Euros 😉
God bless
Haha. Where I grew up, “Yank” meant “American”, with no distinction made. I guess this isn’t really all that strange; Middle Easterners used to call all Europeans “Franks” during and in the aftermath of The Crusades, and we reciprocated by calling them all “Saracens” or “Moors”.
I read once “To a non-American, a Yankee is someone from America. To an American, a Yankee is someone from the North. To a Northerner, a Yankee is someone from New England. To a New Englander, a Yankee is someone from Vermont. To a Vermonter, a Yankee is someone who still uses an outhouse. I’ll stop there.”
Yeah, it’s fine. I don’t mind. My state did side with the Union during the war.
Point of etiquette: Call someone from the American South a yank only at your own risk.
Jesus is taller than me!
As someone who grew up Evangelical these types of stories would never cross my path. I find it all this deep lore of the faith fascinating.
Same here. I never gave it much thought, but I find the Shroud’s provenance believable and the thought that we can look at it and see the shape of Our Lord’s face truly marvelous.
Ancient and early medieval Christians would agree with you. In Edessa, the Holy Image was viewed only once a year, and only by the archbishop, who cracked the lid of its special reliquary after a solemn procession and liturgy.
In Constantinople, viewings of the shroud were reserved to the Emperor, the Ecumenical Patriarch, and select nobility and clergy.
Accounts do exist of the faithful being allowed to view the face imprint, but only at a distance through a golden screen.
Andrew
The Lord’s face is more clearly visible in what’s the Sudadarium (aka the cloth the St Veronica used to wipe His face).
I found really neat and it’s a great reminder of his statement if you see me you see the Father.
xavier
Some shroud skeptics are Evangelicals who perceive that the details in the image contradict Scripture.
Me, I don’t see a conflict.
Evangelicals are the kinds of Biblical literalists who can read that Jesus gives his apostles the authority to pardon sins, yet they can think to themselves, THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT; ONLY GOD HAS THAT POWER. THIS PASSAGE IS CLEARLY NOT LITERAL.
They also struggle with connecting Christ’s teachings to modern problems because of their rejection of the Church’s councils. I’ll tell them, “I’m pretty sure that the Church already dealt with these issues hundreds of years ago,” and they’ll respond, “But we need to think for ourselves.”
Being an evangelical pastor, it has always infuriated me when someone brings up a gotcha that has been dealt with definitely in church history. My cousin, who no longer speaks to me, likes to bring up kosher laws as the exact same level as fornication laws. It does no good at all to point out to her that this question has been answered in Scripture (Council of Jerusalem, gentiles are not held to food laws but sex laws still stand)! She just wants to not see her friends’ homosexuality as a sin.
One of my favorite seminary professors taught us the first day of hermeneutics, “Pay attention in this class and you need not fear coming up with a heresy. Pay attention in Dr. McGee’s Christian History class and you will find that every heresy you hear about once in ministry has already been addressed.”
I detailed a time in my denomination’s history about this very problem (a “new” heresy that had already been addressed) at my blog.
You’re Pentecostal? And you’re even from the Assemblies of God?
My life is a lie.
>You’re Pentecostal? And you’re even from the Assemblies of God?
>My life is a lie.
I couldn’t reply directly to the post this came from, but yes, to both. I grew up Southern Baptist but have been in the Assemblies more than half my life now, and 2/3 of my life since first professing faith.
I’m curious what you mean by your life is a lie, though.
Not Evangelicals are strict literalists. Some are, to be sure, particularly in the KJV-only camp, but not all. I think part of the problem, other than tendency to ignore the councils, is that we teach the Bible, but not always how to study it. Another problem, I think, is that Evangelicals don’t tend to study or teach church history. I grew in a devout Evangelical home, in a family of studious introverts. My family’s tradition goes to church about three times a week (Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night) and we were there like clock-work. I studied the Bible for myself, and wore out a few Bibles that way. I learned some of the rules of hermeneutics, like “Context rules in intrepretation”, but was totally ignorant of others, like the notion that every passage of Scripture can be read on four different levels at the same time. If I didn’t learn about things like the four levels or much about church history, then the other kids in my youth group who weren’t Bible nerds surely didn’t.
Now I’m a Methodist (and still an evangelical) so I’ve shifted from a sola scriptura view to prima scriptura, and take the councils, tradition, and the perspectives offered by other denominations a good deal more seriously than I once did.
Brian,
“But since they’re motivated not by scientific curiosity but by a deep-seated hatred of Christ…”
why do they (or anybody really) hate Christ ??
The Gospel of John tells us exactly why.
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. Jn 3:19
If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. Jn 15:18