Transcript: The Mystery of the Shroud — Dr. Cheryl White #011

0:01

The Shroud of Turin.

You've probably heard about it.

It's the alleged burial shroud of Jesus Christ.

I know of no other historical or archaeological artifact that has had more science brought to bear on.

It, I mean, if you presented this in a murder case or something you have to, I think you'd be easily convicted with the load of evidence that we're talking about.

0:20

The image is less than a Micron D It's about 150th of a human hair.

Something came into contact with that cloth.

Some energy, some light, some radiant source.

We're talking about a pulse of light that can only be produced by a laser in the 21st century.

0:37

To discredit it, you've got to have a medieval forger who has a technique no one's ever seen before then or since then.

He uses human blood, Semitic typed blood, and then he gets soil samples from Jerusalem and applies them in all the right places.

0:54

And that, yeah, I mean, all of this starts to get to be too preposterous.

My guest today is Doctor Cheryl White, but before I bring her on, I want to take a moment to address today's episode because it's a little bit outside the realm of what I'm normally talking about here on the show.

1:13

And that topic is the Shroud of Turin.

You've probably heard about it.

It's the alleged burial shroud of Jesus Christ.

Now, like a lot of people, I grew up just assuming this was a forgery, a fake, some kind of religious artifact that people wanted to believe in but did so on no real basis.

1:32

Now, I grew up in Protestant circles where it's very common to think of Catholic relics, again, as just sort of forgeries or fakes or unimportant in some way.

And for Catholics out there, I mean, no offense by that, but, you know, you probably understand that tension that exists between Catholics and Protestants in regard to certain things like this.

1:50

And it's just how I was raised.

And it wasn't until I accidentally heard an interview about it.

I was painting in my living room, and I had a YouTube video on in the background.

And when it ended, the next video after just sort of played automatically.

And because I was covered in paint, I didn't go over there to stop it.

2:08

And it happened to be an interview about the shout of Turin.

And, you know, initially, again, I just thought, like, this is silly.

And then within a few minutes of hearing a litany of facts, I'd never heard actual facts, scientific facts.

I was stunned.

2:24

And at the end of that, I went on to listen to several more interviews, and then eventually I watched some films on the topic.

And that led me to want to read the probably most official book on it, which is the report on the Shout of Turin.

2:40

That is the the scientific report done by the Sturt team who had the opportunity to spend a week with the Shroud in 1978.

And these were folks from MIT, NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab, who all thought they were going to go there and quickly prove that it was a forgery.

2:57

But at the end of that week, they came out saying, hey, we can't really explain what this is, but it's not art, it's something else.

That led me to want to read several more books on it.

So I just thought I'd show you a sampling of some of the books I've read on this topic.

3:12

And I do that just to sort of say this is something that I've come to take very seriously over the years.

I've now consumed just countless, not only books, but many, many hours of audio and video on the topic as well.

I'm pretty deep in, and I'd say that my belief is in that, you know, high 90 percentile because the facts speak for themselves.

3:36

Whatever you think it is, it is definitely one of the most interesting artifacts on the Earth, and it's one of the most scientifically and rigorously studied artifacts on the Earth.

You know, I often hear it said that more scientific hours from more disciplines have been put into the study of the Shroud than any other relic or artifact on Earth.

4:00

So whether or not you believe that it's real, I invite you to at least hear the argument for it.

And if you think it's a forgery, I invite you to explain how many many have tried.

No ones been able to accurately replicate it and the fact remains that it's essentially a photograph from the ancient world.

4:24

It is not art.

So whether you think it's the greatest hopes of all time or you think it's a literal Easter egg that's been tucked into reality to leave a witness to the alleged events of 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, it's up for you to decide.

4:41

But I hope this is just the first of many interviews I do on this topic because as you can probably tell from the way I'm talking about, it's something I'm really, really passionate about.

Now, like I mentioned at the beginning, my guest today is Doctor Cheryl White.

She's a professor of history at Louisiana State University, where she holds the endowed Hubert Humphreys Professorship.

5:03

She currently serves on the board of directors of the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association, and she's published original research from the Vatican Secret Archives on the history of the Shroud.

Doctor White served as the historical consultant on the original Shroud of Turin exhibit developed for the Museum of the Bible, and she's a lecturer for the Smithsonian Institute.

5:27

She's a regular consultant and contributor to The History Channel, and she's featured in a forthcoming documentary on the Shroud.

She works closely with the Center for the International Study of the Shroud in Turin on collaborative projects.

Her new book, The Shroud in the Third Millennium, Confronting the Limits of Human Knowledge, is available now.

5:49

Doctor Cheryl White, welcome to the show.

You, Daniel, I'm happy to be here.

Man, I couldn't be more excited to tell.

My wife's been making fun of me all morning because of how excited I am.

But this is a topic I'm really passionate about.

I wanted to kind of start off maybe just defining this term, syndenology.

6:08

I think it's so fascinating that there's a whole field of research dedicated around this topic.

But what is syndenology and how did you become a syndenologist?

So syndinology comes from the both of the the Latin syndome and it, it means of course, burial shroud, burial linen.

6:29

So syndinology is simply the study of a specific burial linen.

The shroud that's held in Turin, Italy today, it's also come to be extended to another cloth that's that's held in Oviedo, Spain that we may be able to talk about as well, that the pseudarum of Oviedo, which is the other cloth that John mentions in his Gospel in the tomb.

6:50

The the one that's folded up right, you know I grew up in.

Protestant churches and so.

For me, the idea of relics aren't really, you know, something that Protestants talk about or think about.

7:06

And I always heard of the Shroud of Turin because all of this evidence emerged essentially during my lifetime, a lot of the scientific evidence, but it was something I just always kind of brushed off.

I never really thought about it.

And by chance, it was a couple years ago, maybe a few years ago now, 2022 probably.

7:26

I was, I was painting and just put on a podcast in the background.

It was about the Shroud of Turin.

And I almost had a meltdown.

I couldn't believe that I had not been exposed to this information and that no one had ever told me about this.

Since then, and it's only been a few years, I've seen this exploding across, I guess the podcast sphere.

7:46

You know, in all of these YouTube videos, it seems like we're in this like renaissance moment.

Tell me a little bit about how you you got involved in this and what you've seen play out over these last few years because it seems like it's an exciting time for the Shroud.

I think it's probably the most exciting time in Shroud studies in decades, literally decades.

8:05

And and I've been at this a very long time.

So I was an undergraduate history major in the early mid 1980s when the very first peer reviewed science began to be published about this claw that was all coming out of that 1978 research project.

8:22

And, and, and at that time I was, I was pulled into the to the incredible mystery and, and maybe not even as much as I was pulled into the mystery in 1988 when the radiocarbon dating results were published and told the whole world that could be no older than the year 1260.

8:43

Well, I'm, I was by that time in Graduate School and I'm a medievalist.

This is this is kind of the age I live in.

And so when someone told me this cloth was from the 13th or 14th century, I said there's no way.

There's no way.

There's no artistic process.

There's no, there's nothing that could produce an image that complex in the 21st century.

9:03

So don't try to convince me that this is a medieval artifact and it's just never turned me loose.

The mystery of this has has actually, I think really ramped up in the last, just in the last decade because that radiocarbon dating I think is seriously in doubt because of some, some work done in 2017.

9:24

So, so I don't, I don't think that there's, there's been a more exciting time to be looking at this clock since we first learned the complexity of it in the 1980s.

And when you're talking about the early 80s, you're talking about the strip team and their research.

9:43

I have that book actually, you know, on the bookshelf back there.

It's just again of such a fascinating story.

I think maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's back up a little bit, OK, What the shroud itself is for people who have heard of it, and I want to preface it with this question.

9:59

When you hear people say this is the most studied artifact on Earth, I hear that repeated quite a bit, or people saying there's more and hours on this or more interdisciplinary research.

Is that true to you?

When you hear that, does that ring true?

Pyramids and things like that, you know, Is that true?

10:17

Yeah, I do think that there's there's truth in it, in that of course we can't quantify that.

I can't tell you how many hundreds of thousands and thousands of hours per discipline.

But but I do think it qualitatively rings true when you look at all of the peer reviewed science that came out of this, even even in the beginning in the 1980s, you've got dozens of peer reviewed articles that appear.

10:41

And if you look at the field of Shroud studies today and see all of the different disciplines represented, I think that it it rings true.

I know of no other historical or archaeological artifact that has had more science brought to bear on it.

You mentioned the pyramids.

I think that's an interesting an interesting parallel.

10:58

The structure architecturally probably has been studied more than other structures.

But then when you speak of true like historical artifacts, I don't know of anything else.

So yeah, I think that does ring true.

Yeah.

11:14

And what is the, what is the shroud that we're talking about for people?

So we're talking about a cloth that was held in Turin, Italy today.

So that's therefore its name, Shroud of Turin.

It has a 14 foot by three proximately 3 foot strip of linen cloth that that bears the forensically accurate and anatomically perfect image of a man who has some pretty unique wounds.

11:40

And really the image on the cloth is, it's interesting to us, not because not, not just because we can't reproduce the formation process, but because the the man who's depicted there, this forensic image is someone who has been scourged with a specific type of weapon that we can reproduce forensically from the wounds.

12:05

This man has been crucified.

He was capped with something thorny on his head that left, well, something that leftover 50 puncture wounds in the scalp and the nape of the neck, and he's been pierced in the right side, right between the 5th and 6th ribs.

12:22

Again, a forensic wound that we know a lot about.

So no one looks at the image on this cloth and says, Gee, I wonder who that man is supposed to be?

You know, it only fits one, one person of history.

12:39

And so that's the reason we're so interested in.

It's so compelling is, is the the combination of the complexity of the image.

But most specifically, there's there's a person there.

There's a person.

12:56

When you tell this story, you know, I think you and I probably agree that this cloth goes back 2000 years.

But right when you're telling this story to folks, where do you like to start?

Because I, I watched a YouTube lecture you gave recently.

13:12

I love the sequence that you took us through.

I've heard this story told so many times and I want to kind of open it up to your sequence.

Where do you like to begin when you start telling people this story?

So I usually begin with the documented history.

And the documented history, of course, is in the 14th century when the shroud turns up in the possession of a knight, a named Geoffrey Decharney, who who built a, a collegiate church to put it on display as the burial linen of Christ.

13:42

So the reason I say documented history is because that's where we can trace, we have a, a clear chain of custody from today back to that time period.

There is, of course, profound historical questions about where the cloth was before 1355.

14:00

And, and although historians might not agree on that, I think that when you look to the environmental evidence we have, we know from the Pollens, we can trace an environmental journey for the for the cloth.

So if you take that and then you begin lining up a possible historical record with, with the scientific evidence, what emerges is, is I think something we can put together from Jerusalem to Antioch to Edessa in Turkey into Constantinople and then in Constantinople.

14:37

That's the key date because in 12 O four, that city was sacked during the 4th Crusade and lots of relics disappeared from Constantinople.

I've spent a lot of time in the letters of Pope Innocent the 3rd and I can tell you he was horrified when he learned all of the relics that had been taken, the churches that had been looted.

14:57

So in that environment, Daniel, I think it's a very plausible that such an artifact would have disappeared off the historical record because the Pope is excommunicating everyone he can get the name of who's participated in that looting of those churches.

15:13

So, so this is, you know, it's true history.

You'll, you'll read this in the book.

There's this true history that's obviously was well documented and well agreed upon.

And then there's this era that we really have to put pieces together.

And it doesn't make it any less plausible.

15:30

It just makes it less direct direct in the record, if that makes any sense.

So that date you said that we we know it's chain of custody from is what date?

1355. 1355 but of course you know there's some really interesting evidence that brings us back further I'm curious do you think it's best to talk about that now or go or continue on on our.

15:54

Journey whatever order you think so.

Well, I guess I'm curious.

You know, there's this idea of the image of Odessa, and you know, in Wilson's book, the Shroud really goes deep into that, the idea that there's this image that's being shown publicly, historically, that's described quite like the Shroud of Turin folded.

16:18

Up.

Genely it's the face being shown, right?

I think there's also the fact that we, it's, it's pretty clear in the artistic evidence that all of these depictions we current list, this idea of what Jesus looked like that we've landed on is based on the shroud.

16:34

And that takes us back much further than that 1355 date as well.

And then of course, you mentioned the sodarium as well.

So could you kind of pick that apart a little bit because somebody could hear this and go, OK, well, I heard that the carbon dating said this is around 300 and then it shows up in 1355.

16:53

Case closed.

This is a forgery.

Let's move on.

Like, oh, it's not that simple of a story.

Yeah.

And it's really not that simple of a story.

And when people suggest to me that that this is, you know, they'll hear that and then just go, OK, well, I'm done.

That's it.

You haven't done the intellectual rigor of really looking at at at the history and the and the context of this, because anyone who really studies the medieval period at all would know that nothing here lines up.

17:20

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So you mentioned the image of Odessa and I think that's, that's a really fascinating connection we can make is that clearly there's something that's being venerated and, and, and Edessa that is documented in the historical record.

18:43

It may have been, it sounds like it was, it was a face image only, but that's how the shroud we know was stored even into the 16th century.

It was in a reliquary that was folded in such a way that only the face was showing.

18:59

So there seems to have been this tradition of a, perhaps a devotion to the face.

The, I think the the the major historical question that begs about the image of Odessa is where did it go?

What happened to it I mean?

19:15

This highly venerated image.

Yeah, this, this, this thing that this shows up in the historical record and in association with the great legend, by the way, that Eusebius of Caesarea reports about the king of Odessa being cured by an image of, of Christ.

19:31

But we have this, this documented record of something that is being venerated as a as a sacred relic and lots of discussion around it.

It seems to have spawned what became the artistic standard for the way that we understand the image of Christ.

We don't even tolerate A deviation from that today, by the way.

19:50

So what happened to it?

Well, I believe what happened to it is that we have a record in Constantinople, August 15th of 944.

The image of Odessa is received into Constantinople, into the Emperor's.

20:06

Relic inventory, we have a record of that.

So so that what's received into Constantinople in 944 isn't that Or couldn't it be the same image that in 12 O 4 disappears from Constantinople?

20:26

You know, Robert De Clary, who was a knight on the 4th Crusade, left a beautiful first person account, what he calls the conquest of Constantinople, where he describes some of the crusading events and he says something really interesting.

He says every Friday at the Church of Saint Mary de Black Arnie, an image of our Lord was stood straight up for the faithful to venerate.

20:47

What became of that image after the crusade?

He says no one knows, neither Latin nor Greek.

Well, what is he referring to?

Again, There's this issue of continuity.

There's clearly something that Christians have venerated for centuries before 1355 that bore the image of Christ.

21:12

And what was the term?

There was a term like the Tetra something.

It referred to a four part fold I believe.

The the the tetrafold meaning that that that's how the image had been stored in the reliquary.

Right and they and you know like on my shirt right now, you can see the strong fold line right there or I've got.

21:34

That's that's visible in the 1931 photograph of Giuseppe Henriet, right?

You can see that fold line.

And so those those folds, you can imagine this being folded in such a way.

I mean, it's easy to understand because a 14 foot cloth is a lot too try to display all the time.

21:51

So you could imagine folding it up to what and I think with the imaging techniques we have now, we're able to see this image so much better.

But you could imagine kind of like what was the most relevant to people at the time being it.

Would have been the face.

It would have been the face.

22:08

You wouldn't have shown the wrist or the knees or the feet.

I mean, it's it's the face and and that's you know, it even Harkins back to what I think Christians and and people of faith going back to the Judaic tradition have longed for.

The psalmist talks about we longed to see your face and and that's the thing that that made Christ humanity evident to us.

22:29

Right, Wow.

And there's this idea too, that if we look at old coins, old art, Byzantine type art, all that kind of the the old icon art, there's quite a few points that match the shroud.

22:47

You know, the split in the beard as an example, lines between the eyes were it's pretty clear once you're walked through this evidence, like, oh, all of the shroud is most likely the standard from which all of that other art.

You think that's fair to say of Christ?

23:04

I I do, I think that it that a survey, just think that a brief, simple survey of art history would show you that there is in the earliest depictions of Christ during the the time of the Roman Empire, he was depicted as a young Roman man, you know, with short hair, wearing a, wearing a toga usually, Yeah, clean shaven, only really identifiable because he's carrying a lamb over his shoulder, like he looks like the Good Shepherd.

23:33

And those images are in the catacombs of Rome.

Well, what's fascinating about that is that after Christianity is no longer persecuted in, in, in the Roman Empire, after Constantine's era of the 4th century, you begin to see more Jesus takes on more Semitic features, more identifiably, radically different features than what you see in those early ones.

24:00

Well, where did that memory come from?

You know, I think I think that's an important and fair question.

How did the first artistic representations of Christ after that era, what are they drawing upon?

The the the Christ Pentacratur image that's in Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai.

24:22

It's the oldest depiction of Christ existing that we know of that has these uniquely Semitic features and all of the points of congruity with the Shroud of Turin, the swollen right cheek, the hairline.

24:38

This, Cheryl, is the famous image that folks might It might come to mind if I say this like the face is sort of split down the middle of 1, making two distinctly different faces essentially expressions.

Right.

And, and you can interpret that theologically as some people have that there's Christ humanity depicted and there's Christ divinity depicted.

25:00

But but there's the other way you can read that is, is more of a forensic map because the man's right cheek is clearly swollen.

So the, yeah, what does that mean?

And where did that depiction, the idea for that come from?

And how did it become the standard?

25:17

Then if you Fast forward, even if she's Speaking of artwork, can you Fast forward even into, into the 12th century?

Are you familiar with the, with the Hungarian Prey Codex?

This is a, this is a manuscript that came out of Hungary, we believe in the, in the year 1189, so the end of the 12th century.

25:43

And there is a depiction in this, it's manuscript, it's, it's drawn by probably a scribe or a monk, a depiction of the enshrouding of Christ.

And that depiction shows a body of Christ that only has four fingers on each hand, which is fascinating because even a medieval monk would have known that Christ had five fingers on each hand.

26:10

But the but the shroud, the shroud shows only four fingers because of the wound in the in the wrist causing the the retraction.

You know, the thumb, the medial nerve was was damaged in, in having a spike driven through the hand.

So the thumbs retract.

26:25

Well, how would a monk know that in the in the 12th century?

And then there's also the the pattern of the weave that's shown in the the cloth that they're wrapping him in.

It's a 3 / 1 weave which they.

Show kind of blown up out of proportion, right?

26:41

Almost to like make sure you understand.

To make sure you know exactly we see this week, and having seen the shroud myself, I can tell you that 3 / 1 herring bone weave is highly visible to the eye, to the naked eye.

You don't have to magnify it, you can see it right?

26:58

And, and, and then of course there's the the whole thing that the burn holes are there, those l-shaped burn holes.

Why would a monk draw those if he hadn't?

Seen distinctly on the shroud and very distinctly in this image.

What's this image dated to?

27:14

This is I believe it's at 1189.

OK, so that already inches us back.

Already predates the.

Predates the carbon dating that was done, which we will get to that carbon date.

I I didn't hear, by the way, I just want to say briefly for listeners, I don't hear the carbon date brought up as much anymore.

27:31

I feel like it's sunk in for a lot of people.

Maybe you're having a different experience.

I just don't hear that broad.

I hear other points of contention, but I feel like that one's losing its potency.

Well, and I think the reason for that might be, and I agree with you, but I think the reason for that might be that anyone who who really who's a serious skeptic and and I and I respect those.

27:52

I appreciate that someone who's a serious skeptic is going to do the intellectual work studying the science.

They're going to soon run into the fact that that no one really seriously considers that date as valid anymore, which we can talk about.

28:08

But but yeah, there's when you, when you begin to, as I said, if you're intellectually honest and you begin to look at all the data points together, it it's, it's hard to to not be pulled deeper into the mystery.

I mean, if you presented this in a murder case or something, if I think you'd be easily convicted with the load of evidence that we're talking about, maybe we should take a minute and just talk about the image itself for people who haven't heard about this.

28:36

You know, I just assumed, like everybody, I just assumed it was painted on there.

I just, you know, and then I think a lot of people when they see it and they go, oh, maybe that isn't pain.

They think they're looking at a blood stain or something like that, maybe or body was that made the stain and when?

And it's really, there's so many things that are just mind blowing about the shroud, but I think the image and how it's actually on the linen itself is just absolutely stunning to find out.

29:00

Yeah.

So the the image is actually, if you want to talk about its, its chemical composition, it's it sits on the very top fibrils of the linen.

So it's less than a Micron deep.

Now if you say, well, I don't know what that means a Micron.

29:16

Well, it's it's about 150th of a human hair.

OK, so so the image is incredibly superficial, which is the great paradox because then it contains all of this complex forensic information.

But but the image itself is is we know is is a result of a dehydration of the cellulose fibers in the linen.

29:39

Something came into contact with that cloth, some energy, some light, some radiant source that did not burn, but yet caused a chemical reaction in those very top fibrils that captured all of that, all of that information.

29:55

And so it is not a painting.

It's not, there's no paint, there's no dye, there's no pigment of any kind to account for the image.

It's not a photograph.

It's not a boss relief.

It's not some artwork.

It is, it is actually even more complex than this is that of course, we learned in 1898 with the first photograph, we learned that the image is itself a photographic negative because when you take a negative of this negative image, you come up with a positive image of the man.

30:30

We learned in 1976 that there's direct spatial information embedded in the fibers of the linen.

So in other words, there is a direct correlation, proportional relationship between the the the distance the body was from the cloth and the density of the image itself.

30:46

So you get a map, you have a three-dimensional map of the man's body.

I have to tell you, we're already at a point that should people should be saying what?

Yeah.

Can I can I pick those apart a little bit just because?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

The image is, you said less than a Micron.

31:06

Yes.

So every thread of the linen is made of bundles of these fibrils and it's just the top fibrils.

So less someone hears that and think, oh, the top threads only.

No, it's the top fibrils in the threads of which there are many in every individual thread.

31:23

So that's very difficult to achieve because some people have thought, oh, maybe you take a a metal sculpture of the body, heat it up and then quickly, you know, touch this linen to it and it's like, well, that burns the linen that's been tried quite a bit.

The piece about no pigment, no paint.

31:42

That's because that my understanding is the Sturb team thought they were going to get there and be like, right, this is going to take us like half noon.

We're going to figure this out right away.

We'll.

Figure it out in an hour.

The another piece for me is just how different this is than any medieval art or any ancient art.

31:58

It doesn't look like anything.

It's the idea that this was someone off that this painter never did anything again or this artist or that this style was never seen again.

It's extremely unusual.

And then I think sometimes this piece about the photograph is just, it's just so stunning because I think like what would it take for a non believer?

32:19

It's like because the the historicity of the biography of Jesus is barely something that can be questioned at this point.

I think he's the most well attested to person from the ancient world.

So you've got to throw out like Alexander the Great, you got to throw out the Caesars if you're not willing to accept the effort for the life of historicity of Jesus.

32:40

But I can understand somebody saying, well, OK, I'm fine that he lived, but this idea that he rose again.

So it's like, well, what if we had a photograph of the moment that he rose from the dead?

Would that do it for you?

Because we have that.

It's not just a picture of them, but it's like a stunning photograph of his resurrection moment, which is just like what?

33:02

Like an opportunity to put your finger in the wounds and prove for yourself.

I mean, it's so stunning, but could you tell us that story about that first photograph?

I just can't even when I imagine being in that dark room.

I know.

So stunning.

33:18

Well, and I think that it's really interesting to me, and now I'm going to venture into the theological just a little bit and say that it's I've always found it fascinating that that the image, the photograph comes in 1898.

Like we're coming out of a period which historically we call the Enlightenment, you know, the modern era where we're introducing reason to everything and we're throwing out all the meta narratives, the big stories of history.

33:48

And, and it's, it's all about the evidence.

Where is your evidence and where is your proof?

The question is no longer, you know, by what authority do you say that the question now is where is your evidence?

If you're going to make a claim, where is your evidence?

It's interesting to me that that's when we get the photograph.

34:05

So.

So photography had only been around, you know, about, what, 5 decades at this point in time?

And when Sokundo Pia, who was an amateur photographer, went to the Savoy family and asked to photograph the shroud, they said sure.

I mean, bear in mind that no one knew.

34:23

I mean, what you're looking, looking at your shirt, that negative photographic image, no one knew that was there.

Yeah, for centuries.

For centuries.

So, So through the medieval mind, the person who went to to venerate this claw did it because someone in authority told them it was the burial land of Christ and they believed it.

34:43

Well, by 1898, we don't accept that authority anymore.

We want to be we, we need to see it.

We need to, you know, we're the Thomasis.

Show it to me.

And that's when we have the image.

So, so, so Kundopia is the very first one in the world to ever see.

I mean, going into the dark room to process that negative image, Can you imagine?

35:03

I mean, being the first one to ever see, not only is there an image of a man there, but it's forensically perfect.

And now you've got all the detail that the naked eye doesn't see on the cloth.

It's best seen in its photo negative because the photo negative is actually the positive image that's like it's.

35:27

Hidden until our time, you know that's what's.

So fascinating it's hidden and that's what I love about the word mystery.

You know I said this in all my presentations that if you look at the Greek word mystery, mysterion, it has a beautiful connotation.

A mystery is something that just hasn't been revealed yet and and it's but it carries the connotation of something eternal.

35:48

There's always something new that's going to be revealed, and so I love calling the Shroud a mystery for that reason.

It's always revealing new things.

All right, so again for the listener, you see these.

I know Daniel, this is a lot to unpack.

No.

36:03

Well there's just so much there.

I just like I'm you're the first person I've got to talk to who knows more about this than me.

It's very exciting, OK, because I'm obviously it just an amateur.

I just have an amateurs interest.

But.

I'm always wanting to talk to people about this and I've just been really eager for this conversation.

36:23

It's very nourishing.

So the image itself, when you see it, it's not that it is an impressive, but it's very faint and kind of takes a little discerning to really understand what you're seeing.

Sure, because it's like looking at a negative and if for young people right now, this is like got to be like, what are you guys talking about?

36:46

But.

You should have seen me at World Youth Day trying to explain.

Right.

But there is a setting in your iPhone that will do this.

You can take any photograph and put it in classic invert setting and you and you can explain to a young person what a photo negative is so.

Cheryl, I carry around this bookmark that is is a little replica of the 14 feet of the shrouds and back.

37:08

So again for listeners, because the shroud wrapped around the body, we have the whole front head to toe and we have the whole back head to toe almost.

So I've got this bookmark that I carry of the actual image and I always break that thing out, put my phone in classic invert.

37:24

Because when you see it for yourself, it's rapturous experience the first time where because you know, there's not, you don't need any special image.

I mean, if you can pull it up, right up on your computer and do this with classic invert, you get any image of the shroud.

37:40

Put your phone in that classic invert, which is the negative function.

You look at this image and you see what he said.

Isn't that fascinating that you can do it even on your computer?

You can do it on any image of the shroud.

Any image, I go around, I pull out all my Shroud books, I check them all.

It's like, yeah.

It brings it out in complete detail.

37:57

It's mind numbing, yeah.

Yeah.

So I mean the, the image itself, like if you, if you didn't know that and then you see it in the negative, it's so clear you're looking at a real person at that at that point.

Because there's a couple other things out there.

I, I don't want to offend anybody and I don't know how you feel about these things, but you know, you have images like the veil of Veronica, or I think they call it Van of veil of Manapello.

38:21

Mana.

When I look at that, that looks like an artist's rendering, right?

But of course, you know, you have a lot of these objects that are venerated and they have claims of, you know, divine origin or something like that.

But a lot of these things, you look at them, you're like, that looks like a painting.

38:38

This does not look like a painting.

And there's just nothing in its class or category that I've ever seen from from those.

That there is, there's literally nothing else that I'm aware of that has this incredible scientific complexity to it.

38:55

Although I mean, I would, I would say that, you know, maybe subject for another discussion would be something like the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is also forensically really compelling and interesting.

But it's still even that's not like this.

39:11

This is like a.

Photograph.

This captured a moment and actually if if if you don't mind, I'd I'd like to tell the listeners exactly how long this cloth was in contact with whatever the light source was it caused the image.

39:28

Before you say that, I want to talk about this idea of a light source, just because my understanding is that now my, my, I have a background in nutrition and, and herbalism.

And one of the things we're always trying to be careful with with food is oxidation.

So it's like if you get exposure to sunlight and oxygen, things oxidized and that oxidative process is sort of like what happens with ozone or peroxide.

39:52

It just breaks things down and you lose really quickly and it can discolor things as well.

And my understanding is that these fibrils, because they're not painted, there's no pigment, that the image is essentially like an oxidative process.

Or something, right?

40:09

Dehydration.

OK, so the idea that is most prominent right now is that it was exposed to like a burst of light from within the body itself, something like that, right?

So I'll, I'll pass that to you.

Yeah, because if you look at the shroud, and again for your listeners, if if they we're just going to look at an image of it, you'll see the frontal image running on one side in the dorsal, the backside running on the other opposite to each other.

40:34

And that's because the cloth covered the body.

What you also need to realize is that the image, when you're looking at it, the front and the back are on the same side of the cloth, OK?

Which means that that when this image was created, it's only on those top fibrils.

40:51

We're talking about a light source that had to have come from within the claw because, because that's the way the image is oriented.

So it didn't come from external to the cloth.

It came from inside the cloth.

And, and we're talking about a burst of most, most physicists agree.

41:10

I've heard, I've heard words and I'm not a physicist, but I've heard words used like light, energy, radiant, some sort of an event.

But, but Doctor Paulo de Lazaro in 2011, so physicist working for the Italian Nuclear Energy Association was very interested in this image and and what is working with excimer lasers.

41:36

And he was curious to know if he could recreate the exact depth of penetration on on a linen piece of, of claw.

Not trying to create an image, just trying to discolor it in the same manner using a light that dehydrates the cellulose fibers, takes the moisture out of it and leaves this this image, this discoloration.

42:01

So he worked with this excimer laser and came up with, and I don't know how many experiments it took before he realized he got a number that that he could recreate it on a postage stamp sized piece of linen.

He could discolor it at that exact depth, at a pulse of light.

42:18

That is 140th billionth of a second.

OK, now you're talking about carrying around a bookmark with the image on it.

I want to put 140th billionth of a second on a T-shirt to just have people ask me what it means.

Because.

42:35

Because when you know, the human mind can't, we can't even wrap our minds around that.

I mean, I can't.

I can barely think about 1/2 a second. 140th billionth of a second is as close to something like otherworldly that I could think of. 140th of a.

42:53

Billionth of a second.

So we divide a second into a billion parts, and then we take one of those parts and divide it into 40 parts.

That's exactly right.

Those parts, how much energy?

Yeah, and more.

Any more than that, and this is all published.

43:08

I mean, you can go and read Doctor de Lazaro's work on this.

Any more than that and you you destroy the the linen.

Any less than that, and you can't get the discoloration.

So.

So that's the number we're talking about.

43:24

And science can tell us that.

Mathematics can tell us that, but you haven't even created an image yet.

As Paulo says, it would take about 50,000 lasers firing simultaneously to discolor a 40 to discolor a 14 foot strip of cloth.

43:42

And you don't have an image yet.

Do you know how many watts of energy were?

I do not.

And, and I hear that thrown around all the time, that 34 trillion watts or whatever that number is.

I don't know that that's scientifically verifiable.

So I always kind of stay away from that.

43:59

I know that that's Doctor de Lazaro's work with the lasers is probably the best science we have that demonstrates how that image could have gotten there.

And we're talking about a pulse of light that can only be produced by a laser in the 21st century.

44:15

Yeah, I love it.

So could you talk a little bit about because when you when you mention him, it makes me want to hear about the credentials of some of the other scientists who've been involved, because this is another area.

I remember talking to a scientist friend of mine and I was explaining how much biblical scholarship has been done.

44:38

And I think he didn't understand what I was saying because to him, how could there be like he, he couldn't imagine to somebody who's not been introduced to even biblical scholarship, like the idea of how many people have put their minds to Scripture over the years, like you just, it's kind of stunning when you find out.

44:56

It's like, oh, yeah, you know, because people have ideas.

Well, I think it's been a game of telephone.

It's like, hey, dude, people have been thinking about this for a long time.

Yeah.

You know, and this is sort of similar, like when I learned about the STERP team, if I understand that correctly, you had like NASA people, MIT people, US Air Force science people.

45:14

Like, these are not all believers.

They're not some of them more Jewish, you know, which gives them a pretty strong bias against.

So, right.

Could you kind of lay out like what kind of people have been involved in this?

Sure.

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45:32

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46:11

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46:45

And, and in beginning with the STERP team, and I can just point to a few examples.

I mean Doctor Eric Jumper and Doctor John Jackson, both were at, were professors at the Air Force Academy physicist who were working with, at the time with, with the Jet Propulsion laboratories to, to develop some imaging technology.

47:04

And that's how the VP8 analysis came about in 1976.

So these so these were men who were at the top of their up top of their academic fields.

And Doctor Jackson of course, is the one who who really spearheaded the 1978 research project.

47:21

And he as a as a nuclear physicist, he is still very much involved in shrub research today.

He works on it every single day.

It just.

Gets so it gets a hold of people, Doesn't.

It, it gets a hold of people.

There was Doctor Ray Rogers who was a chemist on the team, was with Los Alamos National Laboratories.

47:41

I mean, he was not even a believer.

The documenting photographer Barry Schwartz was Jewish.

And and Barry Schwartz, he's the one who famously tells the story that he took the trip because it was a free trip to Italy and he thought that he was going to be able to walk up and take a photograph and see the paint.

48:00

And he died blessed, you know, God rest his soul.

He died about a year, a little over a year ago.

And he was probably the most active person in the entire Shroud world because he maintained theshroud.com website.

48:15

Which is, by the way, I want to say that's where I got, you know, this image here, which is a reproduction of one of his photos, but also all of the photos are there for you to see in positive and negative close-ups for full images.

I mean, all of that still at shroud.com, right?

48:32

Right.

It's probably the, the largest clearing house on the web, I think to this day.

So, so we're talking about a team of people who, who were true scientist and true empiricist who wanted to get to the truth.

And, and so of course, what they published, ultimately published is their summary statement is that that for now we can only conclude that the image is not a painting or a photograph, that there's nothing natural, there's no natural process that we can account for the image.

49:03

So it remains a mystery.

That's been the definitive statement that came out of that scientific investigation.

It's stunning.

I really recommend people get the original book, you know, the, the report on that.

I, I again, I think it's called See Shroud of Turin.

Yeah, like the like the report on the Shout of Turin I.

49:20

Think it's called yes.

I've got like an original copy.

It's it's stunning because you get to the end and you're like, OK, they they can't say it's real because that's not really how they can't say it's Jesus.

That's that's that wouldn't be science, but they can say this is definitely not a painting and this is we don't know how it's made and this is a real person.

49:39

This is a crucified man.

I can't even imagine what that was like for their peers who are outside of this research because I'm sure you know you see the the desire to discredit it after that seems like it was really strong.

49:56

Could you, I want, I'm curious what makes the most sense to go into for you next to talk about.

I'd love to talk about the blood, but I also like to talk about the the carbon dating.

So I'll kind of let you.

Decide well, yeah, we can and we can talk about let's let's talk about the dating.

50:13

Because I think that that's again, it's probably, although it's not as common as what I used to hear, I think that people still are very much informed because it made every headline of every newspaper.

But there were almost immediately some concerns about the heterogeneity of the of the cloth, I should say.

50:36

Is it all the same?

Is it all the same kind of material?

Because one thing that the start project did, of course, was they photographed the shroud under ultraviolet light.

And and when you do that, you, you realize that there's an area of the cloth that doesn't look quite like the rest of it.

50:54

And that's the top left corner.

If you're standing it vertically, it's the bottom left corner.

But there is an area that that does not look like it's the same chemically.

So, so Doctor Ray Rogers noted this when the chemist I mentioned who said that he thought that there was something chemically different about that area of the linen.

51:18

He didn't really know what it was, but but he knew that that there was something about that that corner.

So it it became that we call it the controversial corner.

We know that because of the 1532 fire that happened in Chambray, France when the Savoy family owned it, there was a repair of the cloth that took place.

51:42

The poor Claire's did that.

They they stitched on a backing cloth.

They sewed on triangular shaped patches and we believe now that they may have well indeed rewoven new fibers into the old linen to strengthen it.

51:58

They didn't.

They didn't know.

They didn't know any better.

So that controversial corner, as it's been called, it's always kind of nagged.

I think it's Shroud scholars.

And in 1988, when 3 universities got permission to carbon 14 date the Shroud, it was the University of Oxford, the University of Zurich, and the University of Arizona in the United States.

52:23

They were going to get 6 samples of the linen.

Each lab would get 2 samples they would test and then they published that result.

This was meant the double-blind, they were supposed to have a a similar linen that they were going to use as a blind control right There was there, there was a whole series of pretty rigorous protocols that were developed and I think nearly all of them were violated in this process, right.

52:56

So like the actual process did not play out the way it was meant to play out.

No, that's true.

And there's, there's any number of works out there about this process.

Now, you could read a Joe Marino's book on the, the carbon 14 dating controversy.

53:11

It's pretty comprehensive.

And, and I'll, I'll talk about the 2017 study that came about that's more recent.

But so, so when the, these laboratories got the samples and, and published their results as 1260 to 1390, I think the world stepped back.

53:31

You know, as I said it, it made every major newspaper headline.

I think we lost 40 years of, of, of opportunity to teach people about this.

And, and, and the whole sort of mystery surrounding the, the lack of transparency about the data was very troubling.

53:56

In 2017, Chris Tristan Casabianca, who is a French lawyer in a recent convert to Christianity, by the way, called up the British Museum to get access to the raw data.

The British Museum is the custodian of all the raw data from the 1988 test.

54:16

And when he asked for the raw data, he was told no.

Why?

I mean, why?

Why would you deprive the world of knowing the result of a scientific investigation?

You've published the results.

54:32

So he sued them under the International Freedom of Information Act and forced them to release the data.

And what resulted is a pretty damning indictment, because the sample was taken from guess where controversial corner, the one area of the linen that everyone knew was chemically different from the rest of the cloth.

54:54

So what's initially meant to come from multiple locations, right?

I mean, I understand why you wouldn't want to be cutting, you know, punching pieces out of this, but but it wasn't supposed to all come from one place, right?

Because they ended up just taking a strip from that corner and distributing it out to the different labs.

55:11

They took, yes, they took.

Instead of taking six samples, what they did is they took one piece and cut it 1 sample and cut it into six pieces, which is not the same thing.

So, so Tristan published in 2000.

Actually it was Oxford, their credit, it was Oxford University's journal Archaeometry that published his work to their credit.

55:31

And, and he pointed out that this is not representative of the linen.

This is, you know, you, you can't trust this date.

We know there's something different about this area.

We know that chemically it it, it may under light it fluoresces differently.

55:48

So.

So I think any serious skeptic would have to look at that and say, OK, maybe, maybe good science was not done in 1988.

And I've seen so many of these medieval depictions where the cloth is being shown because it has quite a history of public showings.

56:08

I think that's really cool thing, I mean.

Very well documented.

All over Europe to see it, right?

And you see these images where you've got a line of people there and they're all holding it up and they're gripping those corners real tight, stretching that thing out for these public showings.

So you also have just a tremendous amount of organic contamination that would have had had happened in those corners as well.

56:29

But so the the concept is though that in addition to that, there's probably a cotton re weaving that took place into that corner.

Yeah, like that.

This is this is Joe Marino's work that he's done.

Again, I reference his work just because I think it's excellent.

He, he and his wife did, did a lot of research into an invisible re weave technique that was in use in France in the 16th century.

56:56

And, and his hypothesis is that there was a reweed that took place in that corner.

And, and, and it it makes sense that there would be something chemically different, because what they would have had to have done if they'd rewoven any new fibers in there is they would have had to have dyed them to make it look like the rest of the claw.

57:13

Right, like sepia tone them somehow.

Again, not knowing, not knowing that they were, they were altering the cloth, Yeah.

I can't imagine being a custodian of this thing and you know, some of the decisions that are have to be made over the years, the fires that it went through all those kind of right.

You pointed out in the lecture I watched of yours and I really appreciated this because I hadn't heard anyone say it.

57:35

But you you kind of point out because they came out with this carbon date with, I would say a, a smug attitude and.

There's you react to see the photograph.

Yeah, we'll put that up here so people can see it.

But there's the famous image of those three scientists there with the chalkboard behind them, and it says, I think 1260 to 1390.

57:53

Exclamation point.

Exclamation point.

Yeah, not, not exactly how we typically do scientific findings.

No, I I've always been troubled.

Long before Tristan challenged this, I had always been troubled by that photograph, which is the reason I always mention it.

58:12

You know, even in, in the historical method, you know, if I'm writing an objective history methodology requires me to be objective and, and not pronounce on opinion or, or emphasize things.

And I think the rigor is even more expected of a scientist.

58:29

So I've always been very struck by the need to punctuate that.

Why did you need to put an exclamation point behind a medieval date if you did not see some implication of the cloth being older than that?

58:46

You see, the implication is that the cloth is older than that.

Well, we might be talking about the burial linen of Christ.

You know, if I'm this is going to come off as a bit Mystic, forgive me.

But if I just zoom out and look at the big picture history of this, what starts happening around that era and where our culture is today, It's that exclamation point to me is the like hedonism of the time.

59:12

It's like, oh, good, it's not real.

We can party.

And then here we are 2020, about maybe 2024 is when I started to hear this new date that came out of it and maybe we can talk a little bit about.

This 2022?

Yeah.

Out of the Italian National Research Council, Yeah.

59:27

Right around the time where culturally you start seeing this tremendous return to the churches, Like it's, you know, I feel like in the last few years things have gotten so out of hand culturally people are going, OK, wait a set.

So it's really interesting how these two dates frame this period of hedonism that is almost intolerable to the average person.

59:49

That's just fascinating.

But but yeah, so I started seeing it was kind of fun.

All of a sudden I'm seeing videos, articles, all this stuff's coming out.

New date, new date.

It's 2000 years old.

And obviously this we're in this era where people really jump ahead pretty quick to conclusions.

1:00:06

And and I know this is.

You know, there's still some work to be done, but could you describe a little bit about this more recent dating technique?

And also, is it, am I correct in understanding that they the Pope has said there's never going to be another carbon dating test done on this?

Yeah, I don't, I don't think.

1:00:21

Well, the last two popes, Benedict the 16th and Pope Francis, both refused further testing.

I think that the door is, is still open as far as probably the 14th is concerned, but but radiocarbon dating is destructive.

1:00:37

And so I, I think that the church does not fear that.

I think the church rightfully is concerned about the conservation of the clock.

So, so you know how long it's.

Going to be till he comes back.

We got to keep this thing.

1:00:54

Keep it for him.

But but the, the, the new methodology of dating again, and I'm not a scientist, but I mean, I know just enough to, to help myself understand that, that there is a predicted value, predicted value, an absolute value of, of a rate of deterioration of cellulose in five and in Lenin.

1:01:14

So in other words, if, if you have this fixed value, you can take linen comparatively and know the age, you can say, well, if it deteriorates at this fixed rate, then this linen is 100 years old.

Then we know that this one must be 500 years old.

This one must be 800 years old.

1:01:32

So using that kind of methodology, the, the Italian National Research Council has come up with a date of, of the 1st century ±100 years.

There's a, there's a, a window in there.

And so I think that that methodology holds a lot of promise.

1:01:54

I, I don't know that that anyone's ready to pronounce that is an absolute yet this with the same with the same veracity that they did in 1988, but I do think it's very compelling that newer technologies are pointing to older dates.

Yeah, it's exciting.

1:02:11

Let's talk a little bit about the blood because I think that this is another really compelling component that there is blood on this.

One of the cases people will often make is why would this if it was a forgery?

1:02:26

You know, you have obviously we talked about the difficulty of even producing this image.

I think there still stands a $1 million reward for a somebody produce it, right?

And I know there's been a lot of attempts and people have done some pretty far out stuff to try to accomplish this, but still remains to be done.

1:02:43

But on top of it, we have the blood.

And then you could imagine a medieval artist implying blood.

You would question whether they would use human blood.

If they did, you'd question, yeah, just the whole story starts adding up into it to another compelling piece.

So what is the blood on there?

1:03:00

Where is the blood and what does it tell us post mortem?

So, so the the interesting thing about the blood study is that this is goes back to the early, again, the early 1980s.

Heller and Adler published extensively on this.

1:03:18

That, you know, in the beginning there was no, there was no sense that it was even human blood, that that it was, it was primate blood.

OK.

And it, it's forensically accurate, aligning with the wounds.

In other words, the exudate that's coming from the wounds is forensically accurate.

1:03:36

So we're talking about if it is blood, it's primate blood.

We're not talking about an orangutan.

It's human blood because because that's not an ape that's depicted in the Shroud.

So.

So this is actually a subject of contemporary discussion among many Shroud scholars.

Is it we we go too far when we say that it's human blood.

1:03:54

And I'm like, how are we going too far when it's a forensic component of the cloth?

And, and I'm not going to say it's primate blood.

It's it's human blood.

Because there's, there's, there's chemical markers that.

1:04:11

So Helen Adler identified, you know, albumin, hemoglobin, bilirubin, which is a present in very high levels because bilirubin is something that's produced by the liver in response to extreme physical stress.

So, So all of these things point to this being human blood on the Shroud.

1:04:33

It has been typed as AB.

Now, this is another thing that is, is again, I have probably have some Shroud scholar friends who might hear this and say, you know, I shouldn't be saying that because this is something that is again coming under scrutiny.

But but I think that science builds on what it already knows.

1:04:52

So we've already established that it is blood because of these components.

We've already got a forensic image.

We've already got blood type that's been identified that I think that anything future we can say about that will only be to enhance that, not to take that away.

1:05:10

And, and I also think that that, you know, we, we talked about blood splatter forensics.

Looking at this claw, there's a definite forensic pattern to the flow of the blood, the pooling of the blood in the lower, like the the small of the back that indicates this man was vertical.

1:05:29

The blood flow on the arms, I mean, tells us forensically how this man was hanging on a cross.

The the blood comes from the wounds which are in the carpal bones and actually runs down like toward and it drips off the elbow, right?

1:05:45

Right on the right arm it does on the right arm, it flows directly down, straight down, but on the left it comes off the arm because of the left arm was clearly extended in a direct like 45° angle, whereas the right arm was at more like a 45° angle directly up.

1:06:04

So, so I mean, we have all of these forensic data points and and I think the other thing that's that's fascinating and and this might be a point to talk about this is this is a forensic in forensic congruity with that other cloth we talked about the one that's in Oviedo spay.

1:06:25

Yeah.

Right.

So, yeah, so you know, I revisited this morning just I love that all the gospels, all four gospels mention this cloth and Joseph of Arimathea and this this cloth, you know, it's so cool.

And and you hear about this face cloth from John that's.

1:06:42

Only from John.

Right.

And you know, the, the story too, because I can imagine and I, and I've read this somewhere, I don't remember which book I had read this in, but you know, one might ask like, well, why wouldn't they have said something about this?

But of course they're under persecution.

You know, they've, they've got Roman persecution, but also from the the Jews of the time too.

1:07:03

And the idea of having an image of blood, blood being loaded with blood, like this thing wouldn't have been something you could necessarily talk about publicly.

But John describes going into the tomb, seeing the clothes and believing, believing in one sentence, like he saw the clothes and believed.

1:07:20

And you're like, what did he see?

What do you see?

But what did he see?

What's this?

What's the Sudarian?

So this is something that I'll talk about also in the book.

I'm always fascinated by the fact of what John doesn't say.

You know, we we read the Gospel, you know, every, every Easter and John is John's resurrection narrative is the only one that gives us this detail.

1:07:42

But but I'm always struck by what he doesn't say.

He he never says what's not there.

He only talks about what is, and that's what is there is what made him believe.

So what is it about the arrangement of the placement or the laying of the burial linen that made him believe?

In other words, you're saying he doesn't say Jesus wasn't there.

1:07:59

Doesn't say Jesus isn't.

There I see the clothes and believe.

He never says Jesus isn't there and although he's responding, of course, to Mary Magdalene's pronouncement that they've taken our Lord, but but it's it's fascinating the way he says that.

1:08:15

I often wished he'd been a little more descriptive.

Yeah, yeah.

I could use.

Three or four year gospels if we could go.

But John is the only one who gives us an interesting detail.

He says that he tells us clearly there's the burial linen lying there and, and the word that he uses for that in Greek is ethonia.

1:08:32

So it's a different word than the 1 he uses when he says including the cloth that had covered Jesus's head that was rolled up in a separate place by itself.

So that other cloth, the word that that he uses there is sudarium in Greek, which means sweat cloth.

1:08:49

So a sweat cloth is would have been a simple piece of cloth that, you know, anyone who worked outside would have had.

I mean, you know what it's like to be outside on a hot day and exactly something that that the probably a young, a man working outside would wrap around his head or have tucked in his belt.

1:09:09

So, so that cloth, what's purported to be that cloth is in Oviedo, Spain today.

So imagine this, imagine that you, you were deposing Jesus from the cross.

The the first thing anybody would have done in Jewish sensibility, even our sensibility today, would be to cover his face.

1:09:32

So someone pressed A claw into the face to soak up the blood.

And remember, it's Passover.

It's the what's the Sabbath?

They've got to get the body in the tomb before sundown.

They're in a hurry.

1:09:47

This is the reason the women were going back on Sunday morning.

And so you, you soak up the blood, but now you, you're enshrouding the body, you're placing the body in the tomb and you've got this other cloth.

Well, it's got blood on it.

Under Jewish law, blood is part of the body.

1:10:04

It has to go in the tomb.

I mean, this is a Jewish, this is Jewish sensibility.

So John's describing really a, a very technically accurate Jewish burial scene.

So this other cloth, this is fascinating because in the year 614, there is a cloth that turns up in Oviedo, Spain, in a religious community there that's in an ancient reliquary that was purported to have belonged to the apostle James, James of Jerusalem.

1:10:37

OK.

And it's a bloody cloth and no one really thinks very much about it.

You know, I mean, this is the year 614.

And it's out of the ahead of the Persian invasions that are coming through the Holy Land because many Christian relics left Jerusalem during the 7th century for this reason.

1:10:57

So today, what we know is the sudarium that's held in Oviedo, Spain.

There's a, you know, like 20 points of forensic congruity between the blood spatter on the Sudarium and blood spatter on the Shroud and.

1:11:14

If you want they they the way that those blood splatters line up show.

That they line up.

Probably in contact at 1:00.

Point they line up that would that would lead have led some forensic experts to say they had to have covered the face of the same man Wow so so I think that you know we're again this speaks to the dating issue because if the clothes came into contact with the face of the same man if in fact that's forensically demonstrable, then that had to have happened before the year 614 because we know where that cloth has been since the 7th century.

1:11:55

So that pushes our date back.

Again, is that it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the contributing scientific and historical disciplines working together that could help build a more accurate picture you see of of of the complexity of this.

It's not reducible to a simple carbon date.

1:12:13

John's also gives us the picture of the spear wound and being blood and water, right?

So some kind of either only one fluid or or could be edema that built up in the cardiac sack.

But whatever happened there, he describes very distinctly blood and water, and he kind of really drives that point home.

1:12:35

Right.

We see that stain on, we see water and blood from that wound on the right shroud, correct?

Right between the 5th and 6th ribs, it's it's very visible.

There's a separation of blood and clear fluid that some scientists have identified as like a pleural fluid, but it's a clear fluid.

1:12:56

And I think we may be going a bit too far as we suggested, we know it's a post mortem wound, but definitely there is a separation of blood and fluid there that is quite visible on the shroud, just as John describes in his gospel.

1:13:14

And, and I think that that that's the other thing that that people need to consider when they, when they look at this cloth is that it doesn't just mirror the Gospel accounts.

Like it doesn't just like all these wounds that are described in the passion narratives are not they're, they're all there, but it's more than that.

1:13:30

It amplifies the Gospels for us because, you know, we're told that Jesus was scourged, but the Gospels don't tell us with what kind of weapon.

The Gospels don't tell us how many men were involved.

There were two men beating Jesus.

1:13:45

There was one on either side with the same weapon, but one of the men was taller than the other.

And we know that from the Ark of the Wounds.

So, so it kind of amplifies that passion narrative for us in, in ways that, you know, if you take these two things separately, you might miss some of that.

1:14:04

Yeah.

So we see those that double ball bearing kind of wound repeated again and again.

Again and again.

Urging, but we see that it's coming from 2 angles, from two sides, from men of different heights, most likely.

And again, kind of confirming the narrative that we read where Pilate has him scourge man, because Pilate in the in the gospel, he's, he wants to let him go and he's like, he's trying to are we good?

1:14:32

And it's like, I just to me, the idea of being scourged, but but I'm not guilty.

And now you can go free.

It's like, oh man, I mean, that's a pretty serious scourging.

So you know, it's pretty when you see those wounds brought forward in that negative image, it's pretty stunning.

1:14:48

I mean, it's like film, right?

You're like, that's no joke.

I think actually Mel Gibson's film may go a little bit too far in depicting the, the, the sort of the, the tearing away of the flesh and all that.

The shroud doesn't show us that the shrouds shows us these wounds but, and, and many of them bled, but more of a ball bearing, as you mentioned, the ball bearing a metal, like maybe a metal or bone kind of shaped ball, but but nothing that would have torn the flesh.

1:15:13

We don't have evidence of that.

What we do have evidence of, though, interestingly, is that the wounds on the right shoulder are macerated and you can make out the outline of of a rectangular shape on that shoulder, something that broke those wounds down more because this man carried something on that shoulder.

1:15:34

My gosh.

So he's carrying the cross, or at least that cross beam.

The petibulum, probably just the cross beam, yeah.

Wow.

And is there, is it true that we on the knees, on the feet, on the nose, that there is soil samples that essentially are from Jerusalem?

1:15:55

Yeah, soil was taken from the shroud and, and actually we learned, and then this may be 20 years old now, we learned that that soil is a specific type of limestone.

It's a travertine aragonite that's that's very common throughout the Middle East.

1:16:14

But but like all soils, when they're learning, you know, that that soils have specific geographic fingerprints.

And so there was a study that was done in 1986 that showed that this was the closest geographic match for that soil was the Old City of Jerusalem.

1:16:32

You just use Occam's Razor and it's like the idea.

OK, so you got this to, to discredit it, discount it.

You'd you've got to have a medieval forger who has a technique no one's ever seen before then or since that creates this image.

1:16:48

But then he uses human blood, but it's not just human blood.

It's like somatic typed blood.

And then he gets soil samples from Jerusalem and applies them in all the right places.

And that, Yeah, I mean, all this starts to get to be too preposterous.

To say nothing of the pollen evidence.

1:17:06

As you mentioned that briefly too, because that's.

All so we haven't we have an environmental journey for the Shroud that again, this is the subject of more study right now.

We're sort of looking at this again right now but Max Fry published in 1973 that he had identified 56 pollens on the Shroud, that seven of them were unique to the Middle East and he believed he could place three of them specifically only in Jerusalem.

1:17:28

That was confirmed by Doctor Doneen Avanandaneen and I think the late 1980s and he was a Jewish botanist who who said that, you know, that the the best assemblage of plants placed this 10 to 20 kilometers east and West of Jerusalem at some point in its history.

1:17:48

And so, you know, now we're looking at pollen again, obviously we don't have any, any new samples to test, but looking at what what the previous botanist have done, we're coming up with perhaps a broader distribution of some of those, but still giving us an environmental journey that aligns with what we think we can save about the historical record.

1:18:11

So.

Including Edessa.

Including, well, including that area of the Anatolian peninsula, yes, maybe not specific to Odessa, but that area.

So, you know, I again, these are things that in the Shroud world, you'll find different scientists who disagree.

1:18:29

So I always encourage people to try to find like the middle ground.

Where is the consensus?

Something I talk about in my book, not to make another commercial plug, but but I do talk about.

There's a lot of Shroud books out there, so I think it's important to plug your book because there's so many good ones and so many that are like, does that need to be?

1:18:45

Real Well, mine is mine is primarily more philosophical and it deals with the with the question of how do we, how do we trust knowledge?

What knowledge can we take and say this is true?

And and I think that there is something profoundly important about consensus.

1:19:03

When you find a consensus point, like a place where all the science meets, that's significant.

So I always tell people, look for the consensus.

Don't look for the outliers, don't look for the fringes, but look for what the consensus is telling you.

1:19:20

So if there was like a Venn diagram and you have like the pollen people and the image people and that, you know, where everything overlaps, everyone agrees that the image is not made with pigments, is not made with dyes, right?

Everybody agrees that the that the images and then the other component you talked about before, I want to make sure I, I love the 1970s, right?

1:19:40

The VP8 image analyzer.

Yeah, that's a fun.

But basically this was a device that the, I think the military was using for 2D images to try to create relief so that they could get a sense of aerial photography, what the topography was right and when, why.

1:19:56

My understanding is typical photographs come out distorted and flat, but this rendered a 3D image which I've seen actually rendered into sculptures and such.

Right, it's a map.

And and to you'd mentioned this before, but essentially the darkest areas of the image are what would have been closest like the nose or the knees or something that are the closest to the fabric.

1:20:18

And so you get this 3D rendering away that's also not really disputed, right.

So these, the nature of the image itself is you know what we're talking about there being disagreement, we're talking about whether or not these pollen samples are valid or like that.

But the image itself is pretty agreed upon.

1:20:35

Yeah, and and I it is it's a it's a broad point of consensus that that the image characteristics, you know, there's scientists do agree.

I mean, there's all you have to do is, is basically look at that 1976 imaging of the VP8 and you realize that when you look at this, the other study samples, I mean did nothing images like that, nothing images like that.

1:20:56

You take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you run it through AVP 8 analysis, you're going to get a very distorted image because there's no dense, there's no dimension to it.

It's a painting, it's a flat artwork.

What the VP8 analysis told us in 1976 is that the claw covered a real human form at the time the image was made.

1:21:17

That's what it tells us.

Do you, is there anything that can be said about I, I remember for a time seeing things like, well, this kind of a weave, this kind of linen wasn't available in the Middle East.

I'm and it seems like that's since there's been some that have been found.

1:21:32

Is that correct That, you know, what's that story there?

Because, because one thing we know is that Joe, it's pretty clear across all the Gospels.

It's Joseph of Arimathea.

I believe it's Luke, Mark or Luke that tells us that he purchased it then, like so he, he's a wealthy, probably a member of the Sanhedrin.

1:21:49

He's wealthy.

He's like kind of a secret follower of Jesus.

He asks for the body, he's given it, and that's where this cloth.

Comes from we're we're told, I mean contextually, that Joseph Vermouth Thea had a a new rock tune.

1:22:05

Yep.

If he had.

Nobody ever been laid in it.

If he had a new tomb, he owned a shroud.

This is a linen that is of such rarity that no one would have gone out and purchased it at 3:00 on a Friday afternoon at the corner market.

1:22:22

This was this was a cloth that was so special and expensive because it was a fine weave.

So, so I think that's another just another little element to consider is in all of this is Jesus clearly got the worst execution possible.

1:22:45

Under Roman law, criminals like this didn't receive burials.

They were left to rot on a cross or their bodies were dumped into a mass Gray.

But this man got a very fine burial.

Yeah.

1:23:01

Kind of like the the spikenard oil that he gets anointed.

Yeah, 100 lbs.

Yeah, it's.

Like that's mind blowing.

So when when I first learned about all this, I thought to myself, I have to go see it for myself.

1:23:18

And then I was, I was found out, OK, in 2025, they're going to show it.

And I'm thinking, all right, baby, we're going to.

We're going.

To Turin, yeah.

This is around the time that like, you know, young people are throwing soup on to Van Gogh's and the museums and stuff and, and all of a sudden I see like, oh, it's just going to be a virtual showing.

1:23:43

And I was like, no, but right now it's not like you can just go see it.

So I want to talk about that.

And also it sounds like you had a pretty awesome opportunity to see it, which I would like to talk about.

But right now it's in Turin and it's in kind of like what an is it in an Argon?

1:24:03

Yeah, no oxygen be in exposures to it.

And then there's no light I would assume as well.

It's thinking a bomb proof case.

I mean, this thing is because it's been through, it's had some trauma.

There's been fires that miraculously the it's just like, I mean, it's pretty stunning.

You know, people will see this image of all those triangular patches and it's like somehow he just doesn't get burned.

1:24:25

You know, it's stunning.

Right, right.

What what's at state now and, and do you think we'll ever get a chance to go see it in person?

Oh gosh, I certainly would hope so.

But but you know, I, I have to balance my desire to see it again and, and I think everybody should get to see it against the conservation concerns and preservation concerns.

1:24:44

So when it was in the second fire in 1997, I think it, it really ramped up the, the awareness on the part of the custodians that there needed to be a plan for the future in an age of, you know, global terrorism and in an age of, of, you know, we the 97 fire was deliberately set in the cathedral.

1:25:07

I think you.

Destroy it or.

Yes, probably so and.

Man, you're right up there with Judas.

You make that move.

That's.

Yeah.

And, and you know, there's, there's a, there's a great story about all of that, that there was an off duty fireman by the name of Mario Trematore who lived down the street from the cathedral.

1:25:28

I literally was looked out his window and saw the flames and, and ran down the street to, to run into the cathedral.

This is all on a YouTube video by the way.

They captured, they captured someone, a news person captured him, I believe, running out of the cathedral with the shroud over his shoulder.

1:25:45

He at the time it was in an, in a reliquary that was above the altar in the, in the Chapel.

And he jumped up on the altar, used an axe to breakthrough what was then bulletproof glass to reach into the Durell Aquarium, just ripped it out and just pulled it out and, and ran out of the cathedral with it over his shoulder.

1:26:09

And so I think it's that last little footage that's captured by newsmen.

But, but which is why we call him Super Mario, by the way.

But yeah, but I think it was that event that made the custodians realize that this was a really a critical concern.

1:26:24

And so another thing that's happening is that that over the centuries, the, the, it's not that the image is getting lighter, it's that the claw, the linen itself was getting darker.

So so.

It's.

1:26:40

Awesome.

So we're losing.

We're losing the contrast.

Wow.

And so custodians have been very concerned about his exposure to light, his exposure to, to humidity and temperature.

And so it is in a reliquary right now that, well, I, I think it, it, it was designed by NASA so, so you could shoot the the shroud into outer space and it can reenter the Earth's atmosphere and not burn up, but just in.

1:27:06

Case.

Just in case it's never going to be in another fire and it's it's in a very stable neutral environment.

They change out the nitrogen gas in it, I think every periodically to keep the environment stable.

1:27:22

But the challenge of a public ostention or public viewing would be, would be its exposure to light and how long it would have to be exposed to light.

So, so you think about, you know, you used to see it hanging vertically and it can never be hung that way anymore because there's been slippage in the fibers of the linen.

1:27:42

So now when I saw it, it, it's, it's exposed horizontally.

So you have to pass in front of it horizontally and you lose, I think some of the perspective that way.

Because that's the other thing about the image is that it it, you know, it kind, it disappears in transmitted light.

1:28:01

It seems to disappear at certain angles and you have to be like a certain distance from it to truly see it up.

Close.

It's not so clear that's what they.

Say when you get right up to it, you can't see it anymore.

And so I think, I think there's all sorts of concerns about the conservation and, and I know people want to see it and I, I do think that the answer might be in the future that we can only have digital, you know, but but we'll see.

1:28:26

We'll see what this you got to see it.

Yes, I did.

With Jonathan Rooney, is that true?

No, I did not see it with Jonathan Rooney.

OK, I thought maybe I misunderstood.

The story no, no, no I did not.

I was with a small group of people at an event in 2022 that was part of a yeah, just a small private showing.

1:28:48

And it was very privileged to be there for that event and actually got to to see it twice during that visit and so.

How much time did you?

Have pardon me?

How much time?

How much time?

Oh my gosh, enough people have asked me that.

1:29:05

I don't know.

I like I can't tell you so the so the first time that that I saw it, I do I do like to tell this story because the first time I saw it, I had a pretty emotional reaction to it.

And as you would expect, somebody that studied it as long as I have and you know, finally seeing.

1:29:25

It.

And to be able to finally see it.

And then and, and then the, the, the second time I was with, it was very different.

The second time, it was like the academic part of me kicked in and I was like, OK, there's that blood stain, there's that water stain.

Look at that weave.

1:29:41

And I could see that the top corners, all those things that went through my mind.

And, and it occurred to me afterwards that, you know, this is how we're created to know.

It's kind of that added something to the to the genesis of my book, by the way, is that those are the two ways we know we encounter things with our heart, with the sense of knowing that's innate to the human condition that you can't measure empirically.

1:30:07

And then there's that more reasoned empirical Thomas moment, right?

And the beauty of that is that both of us, both of those ways lead us to truth.

So.

Especially when they.

When they converge, yes, yes.

1:30:25

And I, that's another, the other thing I think about this, this cloth is that I don't know of anything else that challenges us in that philosophical sense the way this does.

It brings both of those ways of knowing together, unlike in a in a beautiful, perfect Nexus, unlike anything else I've ever seen.

1:30:45

Well, I mean, I don't want to say I'm jealous, but I'm excited that you got to.

Do that, but don't give up hope.

I think that, you know, once they figure out some of those conservation issues, hopefully this Pope will allow another public exhibition of it.

Has Pope Leo 14 said anything about the shroud publicly as he talked about it?

1:31:02

Only that he wants to, that he wants to visit it.

Only that he wants to venerate it.

And.

So.

He hasn't seen it and so, but he is the owner.

I mean, he's the, the, the Holy See, the Holy See owns it.

And so I expect you'll make a visit to it.

1:31:18

Just kind of last thing I want to talk about and then we'll talk about your, you know, where to get your book and all those things.

But so, yeah, I started off with, you know, my first book and then before I know it, I'm growing this library of shroud books.

And then yes.

And then I'm like, oh, I need, I need to get this, this picture that's behind me over here.

1:31:34

Then I was like, well, I need the life-size and, and now I'm like, all my friends are joking.

When are you buying a life-size replica?

And I I see they're about 2000 bucks.

It's not too.

I have one.

Do you have one?

Yeah.

I do have one.

Yeah, I do have one.

So I'm seeing that people are going on the road with these and doing, you know, exhibition type things.

1:31:53

I saw in your bio talking about the Museum of the Bible, right?

Are there places that you, you somebody like me who's so excited about this could go and see something?

I mean, in Turin, is there something to see like what, what, what for people who want to go to another level in person?

1:32:11

So there is a life-size replica that are an exact 1 to 1 replica that tours in the United States as part of the Ethonia exhibits that, that, that they, they have that in several places in the United States.

I, whenever I travel and I have the space to display it, I take mine and I did, I chose not to frame mine.

1:32:37

I, I asked people to and that was produced in Turin.

It's a digital exact 1 to 1.

It's a photograph of the, of the shroud that Turin produced.

And so it is exact and, and I asked for people to give me a 14 foot table and I and I display mine horizontally because that's how people are going to see it if they ever get to see it.

1:32:58

And, and so I, I know that there's an effort on the part of many people in the United States to try to bring this experience to more people.

The Museum of the Bible has one that was produced on ancient linen using an ancient leading technique.

Oh, really?

Oh, OK.

1:33:13

Yeah.

Are they in DC?

Is that where that is?

Then they're Washington, DC, but it is not always on display.

I think they they, they plan things around the Linton Easters season.

But yeah, I do think that you'll see more and more of that sort of thing.

1:33:30

OK, I actually have one, one more question, which is I hear people say a lot, you know, they don't want people to they don't want this to be the linchpin of a person's faith, right?

Like you got to leave that.

Like for me, there's not much point 1%, you know, I'm, I'm pretty convinced at this point.

1:33:50

But yeah, like, you know, heaven forbid something comes out, Oh my gosh, it's not real.

Like you don't want your faith to be hinging on that.

But at the same time, I don't know.

I'm just curious if you want to speak to that because to me, pretty compelling.

And I think, I think for I think that more skeptics would be converted to faith if they understood this personally.

1:34:14

Then people would lose faith by finding out it wasn't real like that.

Yeah, I mean, I, I, my colleague, Father Peter Mangum, who I've worked with on this for many, many years, I love what he says, that this is the, the the shroud is as a tool for evangelization in the world we live in because it speaks so uniquely to faith and science.

1:34:36

I always tell people that if I find out tomorrow that the shroud is not authentic, the only thing that changes for me is my travel schedule.

You know, it's like I, I, I don't think we can hang our belief in the resurrection on, on an object, a physical object.

1:34:55

And, and I think, I think there is a really deep Christian theological reason for that.

And it goes back to the earliest Christians.

If you look at the, at the the Apostolic community, you know, that's, it's described in the Acts of the Apostle.

1:35:12

It's the curricula, it's the teaching of that early community that emphasizes the resurrection.

That's what did this metaphysical, supernatural event defined the Christian faith.

It's not defined by anything physically left behind.

1:35:30

You don't even find a mention of this in the Apostolic community.

I mean, I believe it was there.

I believe they probably used it maybe as an altar linen, but but they didn't hang their faith on it.

And that tells me that we shouldn't either, because once we begin to elevate something physical over the metaphysical event itself, you're missing the meaning you're missing.

1:35:55

The knowledge in a sense too, you know?

It is I, I think, I think we venerate relics.

You know, that'd be a subject for a whole other conversation I'd love to have with Protestants about, about the teaching, about relics, because there's nothing about it that should be superstitious.

1:36:13

There's there's nothing about it that should elevate the physical.

It's a conduit to the greatest mystery ever.

And that's how we have to approach it.

Yeah, well said.

Tell people about where to get your book.

Where do you where do you want to send them in anything?

Else that's available on all the major booksellers online.

1:36:30

Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, you can buy probably in some local booksellers, but it's certainly available online.

And it's the shroud of Turin in the third Millennium confronting the limits of human knowledge.

And so that's what I do is I is I bring us to the point that all the science and all the history and all the biblical scholarship can bring us to.

1:36:50

And we had a wall.

You had a wall.

Because none of that can answers the biggest.

They can answer for us the biggest question of all.

You're not talking about an object, You're talking about a person.

Yeah.

Who is it?

Who is it?

And what does he mean?

Yeah, yes.

Oh, it's been a real pleasure for me.

1:37:08

I really appreciate.

You this has been fun.

Time today thank you so much.

I'm good to meet you sometime in person.

Do you?

Are you?

So you have a tour schedule, I assume that?

I do and I am.

I am recently retired from this is my last semester to teach at LSU, so I am.

I'm actually hoping to be able to do a lot more public venues and more education about this in the future than I have in the past.

1:37:31

So.

So yeah, I am in got a, an organization or, you know, a church group, large group, whatever.

And you'd like a presentation with a full size replica of the shroud.

I'm your girl.

How many people do we need to get you over here?

You know, I, I can't really say an answer that because God sends who he sends and so.

1:37:54

Yeah, I'm not in.

Charge of the invitation list.

Great.

Well, I really hope that I get to connect with you in person and and see.

I love that.

Well, like I had mentioned to you, I have your book arriving today.

I thought I would have it before, but the IT got kind of delayed in transit.

1:38:11

So I will be up the next couple of nights pouring through your book.

I couldn't be more excited and I feel very invigorated from this.

So I'm going to be chasing down all these Shroud leads.

I have not seen that YouTube video you told me about about the rescue effort, so I'll be checking that out as well.

1:38:30

And I just hope that people listening and watching go and dig into this a little more deeply because it is truly one of the most profound mysteries on Earth today.

And I just, I think it's so cool that you've made this, you know, such an area of academic focus.

1:38:47

I really appreciate it.

Thanks for your time today.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.