A Groundbreaking Future Exhibit About the Shroud of Turin

These are difficult times for all denominations founded on the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Recent polling indicates that American church attendance is rapidly declining, with "none" the fastest growing faith group cited by 20 percent of respondents up from 8 percent in 2000.

Then during Holy Week, the most sacred seven days for Christians, two tragic events struck that shook the faithful and the world to its core. First, on Monday, April 15, the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, followed by Easter Sunday’s deadly terror attacks in Sri Lanka that targeted worshippers as they were celebrating the resurrection of Jesus.

What accounts for this exponential growth in non-Western Christian areas? The same as it has always been, the answer in Jesus’ words: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6).

It started in Jerusalem that Sunday morning when Christ’s disciples discovered an empty tomb with His linen burial cloth "lying there" -- then they “saw and believed.” But their faith required proof. The same proof needed by Doubting Thomas when he insisted that, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:24-29). Fortunately for Doubting Thomas, he got his wish when the resurrected Christ appeared to show Thomas proof of His wounds.

Today, I believe that the world is in need of another “Doubting Thomas” moment and I am proud to announce that such an event is forthcoming.

Tuesday at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C., the following announcement was made from the podium on behalf of a major sponsor:

“Museum of the Bible is excited to propose a groundbreaking, high-tech, innovative exhibition about the Shroud of Turin with a mission to explore its history, mysteries, facets, and themes by utilizing state-of-the-art imaginative displays.”

The operative phrase is “excited to propose.” Henceforth, in order for the Museum to produce what would be the most creative, high-tech Shroud exhibit in the world, targeted to open in January 2021, at least $2 million must be raised.

My regular readers know that I am a long-time writer and proponent of the Shroud of Turin. But for those unfamiliar, it is a 14.5 feet by 3.5 feet linen cloth that bears a faint, yellowed image of a naked, crucified man, believed by millions of Christians to be the burial cloth of Jesus. Known for its mysterious properties, it is the world’s most studied, analyzed and revered cloth. Since the 1500s the Shroud of Turin has been housed in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, which explains its name.

Over the past year, a Shroud ministry I founded in 2018 along with leading Shroud experts, has been in discussions with the Museum of the Bible about the merits of a Shroud exhibit that will explore the cloth’s mysteries utilizing the most innovative display technology. Such technology is already a hallmark of the state-of-the-art Museum of the Bible.

Since its opening in November 2017, the 430,000-square-foot museum, Washington D.C.’s third largest just blocks from the Capitol, has joined the city’s pantheon of great museums receiving a 4.5 of out 5 star rating from TripAdvisor.

Of course the Shroud itself will not be present since it is forbidden to travel but, pending funding, this exhibit will demonstrate with interactive and virtual reality displays why the Shroud continues to baffle science.

Does the Shroud provide a “Doubting Thomas” moment leaving us with a “snapshot” of a front and back anatomically correct image of a crucified man that cannot be explained but thought to be Jesus a millisecond before his resurrection?

I ask those who continue to believe that the Shroud is a medieval hoax based on the debunked 1988 carbon-dating to help the Museum fund this unique, never-before-attempted exhibit as a way to prove that “hoax.”

If those who insist that the Shroud is fake, then we must counter with the question, “What if it is real?”

The world could use a “Doubting Thomas” moment about now, and this is why this proposed Shroud exhibit at the Museum of the Bible must be funded, and I have great confidence that it will.

This is my take on the provenance of the Shroud, as written to a correspondent nearly twenty years ago:

There is absolutely ZERO evidence for your contrived hypothesis about a statue or tile 14 feet long being transferred to a cloth over centuries. . . In fact the legend and history of the Mandlyon has details that exclude anything such as what you describe including the fact that the Mandylion was universally described in the story as just a face, not a doubled front and back image of a crucified man. Secondly, all images of the Mandylion or the Image of Edessa show it to have been inside a lattice framework. Thirdly, the Image of Edessa was also described as a Tetradiploid, i.e. Fourdouble folds. If the cloth of the Shroud is folded in just such a manner, the face is what can remain showing. It would be highly unlikely that a cloth would be mounted over a statue/frieze carved in stone fourteen feet long. Fourth, there would be no way that the secret followers of small newly born religion such as the Cult of Christianity in its early years could have made such an image much less transported a LARGE, HEAVY STONE CARVED IMAGE of its founder a long distance to King Abgar V of Osreone, (capital: Edessa) to save him from his debilitating disease. Such an undertaking would have caught the attention of the Romans and been stopped. The stone would have cracked at the very least on such an arduous journey. Finally, King Abgar V died in 40 AD. . . Just seven years after the crucifixion of Jesus, when Christianity was very small.

There is just no way such a statue/frieze was involved in the story of the Mandilyon/Shroud creation. Your theory does not comport with the actual blood stains on the Shroud and the fact that the image does not exist beneath the stains, precluding the blood stains being added after the fact of the image creation which would solve the registration problem. Neither would your hypothesis account for the approximately 120-140 bloodstained images of flagrum wounds on the Shroud, none of which could or would be transferred from a imagined statue/frieze “tile” to a piece of cloth. None of this is possible. No natural process is going to create blood on the cloth over centuries of radiation from a stone.

Nothing in “your take” has any basis in evidence. It is easily “debunked” and that is the proper word in this context.

The only way to “disprove” that it’s real is to recreate it, using techniques pertaining to the age a couple thousand years ago. The image has already been verified as not painted or dye is used, but burned into the fiber through a radioactive type of event that is unknown. The only way that could even be done today is with a laser printer. It also appears to be a 3D image.

Some minor corrections to comport with the science as it is understood as of today.

Image as a burn or char: The image is not “burned” into the fibers, as they do not react to scientific chemical testing like a char. The Shroud has burned areas from the fire of 1532AD, which has “char” and it fluoresces under an ultraviolet light, yet the image areas do not fluoresce.
A laser printer could do it: A laser printer not do it because a laser printer works by melting a medium (toner) onto a matrix such as paper or plastic, leaving behind a residue which carries the color. The Shroud has no such image creating residue.
In addition, the light of a laser is essentially infinitely efficacious in reach, retaining its potency and ability to melt the toner at great distances. The agency that changed the surface linen thread’s fibers did not act at great distances and in fact rapidly attenuated in a linear fashion as it lost potency and was essentially no longer capable of enacting the change after it had travelled about 15 or so centimeters. Whatever type of energy it was, it did not act at all like light, and was absorbed by mere first contact with any atom or molecule, including the atmosphere, traveling no farther.
Finally, any such laser would have to operate from the body’s surface only in the vertical axes, both up and down, with out any spill over on the horizontal axes in any direction. In other words, the energy would have to be vertically collimated, otherwise the image creation modality would and could not be so focused, yet as near as can be ascertained no such focusing mechanism existed between the body and the cloth.
What the image IS composed of: The change that IS seen in the top-most fibers of the threads of the Shroud are most similar, and is in fact indistinguishable, to aged linen, linen fibers that are far more aged than those surrounding them. One theorized possibility that is compatible with the observed facts is the fibers were hit by tachyons, hypothetical sub-atomic particles that travel faster than light which would have temporal effects on objects/atoms they collide with.
Is the Shroud image a 3D image?: Technically, the image is not a “3D image” but rather a “2D image which contains 3D data in the form of an inverse terrain map” due to the image formation process being greatest the closer the cloth was to the body it covered. The 3D data can be extracted by various digital or analog means, but this 3D appearance is not obvious to the naked eye. No normal photograph carries such data.

So mostly you are correct but imprecise with today’s latest findings. . . That precision is important. The skeptics love to walk through the imprecision with their so-called debunking articles for the general public. . . and especially when they create one of their modern attempts to make a Shroud with alternate means they claim were available to medieval artists.

628-year-old fake news: Scientists prove Turin Shroud not genuine (again)

First of all, Sacajaweau, Bishop Pierre d’Arcis letter has actually never been found, only his rough draft. Your article claims:

“D’Arcis told the pope that his predecessor as Bishop of Troyes, Henry of Poitiers, had fairly quickly discovered “the fraud” and obtained a confession from the artist who produced it that it was “a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.”

Pierre d’Arcis claimed that his predecessor found that Geoffrey de Charny “being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore.” and that as proof, his predecessor, Bishop Henry of Troyes had found the “painter.”

This letter was never sent to either the Vatican or to the anti-Pope at Avignon, as searches of the archives have not revealed a final version of the memoranda letter in either location. There are several reasons why this claim cannot be true.

As stated above, Geoffrey de Charny had been the most exalted of all the knights of French Chivalry, being selected by King Phillip the Just of France to be his Standard Bearer, to fight by his side in battle, carrying the king’s banner. Sir Geoffrey as the author of the French Code of Chivalry for all Knights to comport themselves with honor and honesty, was considered the epitome of that code, which all knights looked up to. As such, he would not knowingly be part of a con.
When Sir Geoffrey built the little wooden chapel at Lirey, he funded it and the clergy there, entirely with a rente from his own family coffers, accepting no donations from pilgrims.
Bishop Henry of Troyes did not file a complaint, his replacement, Pierre d’Arcis, some 25 to 30 years later started to, but did not complete it, when pilgrims started diverting from the Cathedral of Troyes, which had their own collection of relics, to go to Lirey to see the Shroud instead prompted him to do something. Only a single, rough draft with cross outs, and marginalia comments for corrections, exists in the files today.
Pierre d’Arcis’ claim that Bishop Henry of Troyes had found and spoken to the artist who had “painted” the shroud we know for a fact today is a bogus claim because we know for a fact that there are no pigments of any kind on the Shroud to make either the image or the blood. There is no way any such artist could have painted the image on the Shroud as it is not any kind of a painting. It bears no relationship to any contemporary, previous, or ensuing technique, style or modality of artistry from that period or any other.
Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, instead of having the Charny family enjoined from displaying the Shroud, was censured by the Pope for his efforts to suppress the Shroud’s display, and was placed under a lifetime order to cease and desist his efforts.
The Charny family was allowed to continue to display the Shroud as “a representation of the Shroud of Our Lord’s Jesus Christ’s Suffering and Crucifixion Under Pontius Pilate”.

As for the article’s next section recapitulating the 1988 C14 testing showing a medieval dating, that has been falsified by no less than six peer-reviewed scientific and statistical proofs showing that the sample that was taken from the Shroud was contaminated with foreign, later dated material. The first red flag that should have been noted by the three C14 labs that did the testing themselves was that the four tested sub-samples—cut from the supposedly homogeneous master sample cut from the one area of the Shroud the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project scientist ALL agreed should be avoided in their agreed protocols due to it being different both chemically and physically from the main body of the Shroud—had tested dates none of which had degrees of confidence that overlapped the next adjacent sub-sample’s degrees of confidence. Not one. This red flag lead to controversy as the averaged date of the sub-sampled dating did not comport to some of the known history of the Shroud. Then peer reviewed science started falsifying the results of the C14 test:

No less than THREE peer-reviewed articles were published by three qualified statisticians showing that the raw data published in the Nature article on the C14 test on the Shroud FAILED the standard CHI-Squared test to show the subsamples were homogeneous. I.e. that the sub-samples were taken from the same identical item, much less cut from the same master sample. These three statistical reports had a greater than 95% degree of confidence that the subsamples were NOT homogeneous. In other words, the sub-samples, obviously cut from what SHOULD have been all of the same age, were not, and were therefore, contaminated by something of vastly different ages.
In 2005, Pyrology Chemist Raymond N. Rogers, in an attempt to falsify a hypothesis that the explanation for the Chi-Squared discrepancy was that what was tested in the 1988 C14 test was that the sample taken from the Shroud had been cut from a corner that had been repaired in the 17th Century using a technique called French Invisible Reweaving in which very skilled craftsmen/women using dyed cotton threads twisted the newer matching dyed threads into the older damaged material, in this case, original flaxen linen, and then matched the weave of the original cloth to repair moth eaten or frayed areas. Thinking it would be a simple thing to show the hypothesis false, Rogers, working with the retained fifth sub-sample, to his surprise, both physically and chemically proved instead it was true. Rogers found one side, the right side, toward the center, was original flax linen, but toward the bottom and left selvedges, was dyed-to-match, opposite twist, alum mordant treated cotton threads, intertwined into the original threads, and then re-woven to match the pattern of the three-over-one twill of the un-dyed linen of the Shroud.
Two other scientists, independently, using other techniques, also proved conclusively that the area in which the 1988 C14 sample was taken against their own protocols, was a mixture of older and newer plant material sufficient to skew the C14 results, thereby falsifying the results of the 1988 test.
The article you cite, typical of skeptic sites and articles, ignores this later peer-reviewed, published science.

Finally, the article relies on two skeptics work which is, to say the least, non-scientific in that it uses fake blood, which has no blood-clotting factors to attempt to discover the real blood factors of the blood seen on the Shroud of Turin.

What I find dispositive about there entire attitude is the following statement from their original paper:

This might also help to understand how this ancient death penalty practice—of which almost nothing is known—was performed. Thus, the current authors are only dealing with the patterning rather than the controversy about the nature of the stains (blood or tempera painting?) 6-11.

These two so-called experts give more space in their footnotes to the totally discredited reports from visual light microscopist Walter C. McCrone than they do to several world-class BLOOD EXPERTS (four self-published in-peer-reviewed articles in his own Journal, compared to two peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals for Heller and Adler) and none at all to electron-microscopy, electronmicro-spectrometry, and other tests, including human immunoassays which proved without a doubt there was no “tempera paint, pigments, or vermilion paint” which McCrone claimed to have seen on the image or blood areas of the Shroud of Turin to which these to BOZOS are implying there is still possible “controversy.” Only intransigent skeptics still lift up McCrone, and his unethical shenanigans, as dispositive of anything when it comes to the Shroud of Turin. This obvious, but unreported bias in their studies spills over into their methodology and scholarship by what they choose to omit from their reports and what they include.

Odd how the shroud suddenly popped up in Europe after more than a thousand years. Where had it been all that time?

There is actually a history that tracks it under different names. . . And an inventory of it in the relics at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople from 944AD onward, after the Sermon of Grerory Referendarius of August 15, 944, in which the Image of Edessa was first brought there, after it had been in kept in Edessa since it was found walled up in the Eastern Gate for four hundred years. It was purported to have been carried there by Thaddeus to cure Abgar V before he died in 40AD of a severe skin disorder in response to a letter he had sent to Jesus before the crucifixion. It was walled up to protest the image and lost for a couple of hundred years when Edessa was over run by a horde of iconoclastic Arabs had conquered the city.

We know the Shroud existed a couple of centuries before the 1988 C14 dating puts its creation due to the existence of an image of it in an illuminated Hungarian Prayer Codex with a known providence showing the Shroud with its distinctive twill weave and the distinctive “poker holes” that predated the 1532 fire and the first known copies. There is also an eleventh century coin with an image of the Shroud on it. . . Putting it three centuries before the C14 date. . . And its appearance in Lirey France in the possession of a Geoffrey de Charny, grandson of another Geoffry de Charney, (note the difference in spelling, which were a matter of opinion in that era) who was the co-leader of the 4th Crusade which sacked Constantinople and would have had ample opportunity to claim the Shroud as spoils of war, something not looked down on in that era.

That Geoffry de Charney would be later burned at the stake in Paris along side Jacques De Molay, then head of the Knights Templar, when the King and the Pope seized their treasuries (the Knights Templar were the banking system in medieval times— one could safely deposit gold at one temple and with a letter of credit safely withdraw it at another temple). . . Who were said to worship a disembodied head, but were also said to kiss the foot of an image of the Crucified Jesus, neither of which has ever been found. However, an image of the head was found in Knights Templar building which bears a striking similarity to the Shroud being used as a door.

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WOW!