Jackson said the shroud shows all the blood wounds that are recorded in the gospels. Among Jackson’s findings he cited:
Bloodstains on the shroud are real, and the blood has not been degraded by heat.
Historians say the stains are consistent with crucifixion, including puncture wounds from thorns and scourge marks from a Roman whip.
A puncture wound in the man’s side is consistent with a Roman spear. And the wound marks showing nail holes through the wrists and heels are consistent with Roman crucifixion.
A textile restorer, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, in 2002 announced the stitching found in the material had been seen in material from only one other source: the ruins of Masada, a Jewish settlement destroyed in A.D. 74. And the herringbone weave was common in the First Century but rare in Middle Ages.
“It would seem that it’s pretty unique,” Jackson explained. “Crucifixion was done quite a bit in the Roman Empire. It was their way of controlling the population that they wanted to subjugate. But the crown of thorns, according to the gospel accounts, was something that was invented for Jesus because of his claim of being King of the Jews. He was also scourged as well. There was no record that the other two men who were crucified along with Jesus had it happen to them.”
Jackson said generations upon generations of people have passed on the shroud, and much of the information about the origins of the burial cloth was not passed along with it.
“So you just have a degradation of what you know about this cloth,” he said. “So you have to rely upon scientific archeology of the cloth to bridge over some of that ignorance and tie things together.”
The cloth is in the custody of the Vatican, which stores it in a protective chamber of inert gases in Turin’s Cathedral of St. John. History reveals it was exhibited in France about 1360 by Geoffrey de Charney, a French knight who owned it then.
I remember when I was just a kid STRP announced it was a Medieval fake...somehow I never believed them. You just know that you are looking at the face of Jesus. I get chills when I see it, always have. It feels good that the finally figure out where they went wrong with the carbon dating. It never changed the way I felt about it...I guess that is what faith is all about. Thanks for posting, I look forward to the special.
Well, let's run a DNA analysis on the blood, see what we can find out about that.
He was on the first team, in 1978, that was allowed to examine it - went as a skeptic - it has turned into a life long study.