Problems of Early Christianity

The Shroud of Turin and the Biblical Evidence

As the result of several years of strict scientific examination of the famous Shroud which is now kept at Turin (Italy) by the Roman Catholic Church and which shows the figure, front and back, of a crucified man as if on a photographic negative, we are at last certain that the Shroud was not worked upon by any painter. It carries a genuine image produced by means unknown to science today: some sort of radiation effect beyond our current technology may be presumed.

The crucified man, about five feet ten inches tall, with a beard and long hair is of the Caucasic type - more precisely, like a Sephardic Jew. The fibres of the Shroud's linen have yielded 48 samples of pollen of a kind found only in Palestine, Southern Turkey and a few parts of Europe. So at some point of time they must have been exposed to the air of any of these locations. Dr. Robert Buckley, the deputy medical examiner and forensic pathologist of Los Angeles County, has listed the lesions suffered by the crucified man. There are blood flows from numerous puncture wounds on the top and back of the scalp and on the forehead. There is a wound on the left wrist, the right one being covered by the left when both the hands were placed together just below the abdomen. Scourge marks can be observed as if caused by a Roman whip called a flagrum. A swelling is apparent on both shoulders, with abrasions that indicate the carrying of something heavy and rough across them before death on the cross. A narrow incision is to be seen in the right side and the sign of a spike driven through both the feet.

Enthusiastic students of the Bible at once drew parallels between this report and the Gospel accounts and the Shroud was taken to be the linen in which the body of Jesus was said to have been wrapped after the crucifixion. The past history of the Shroud as well as the fact that it was not an artist's forgery seemed to lend credibility to their claim. Although the Shroud

Page 74

was first recorded as late as 1389 when the widow of the French nobleman, Geoffrey de Charney, held a public showing in Lirey, France, it was reported to have been confiscated in a raid on Palestine during the crusade of 1204.

However, it is curious that at the time of its first exhibition, the local Bishop of Troyes denounced it as false. He cited the charge which a predecessor of his had made that "after diligent inquiry and examination he had determined the cloth was cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it". Obviously, in the light of modern findings the predecessor was misled in speaking of any artist having painted it and having confessed his trick. But the accusation of falsity holds in the sense that recently a special Carbon-14 test made independently by three laboratories, each in a different country, has proved the Shroud to date with 95 per cent certainty between 1260 and 1390. The earliest date possible is 1200. And it is interesting that the announcement of the dates was made by the Turin Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero in October last year, thus upholding the declaration of the Shroud's falsity by the Roman Catholic Church's first spokesman. The Cardinal termed it a medieval fake.

Still, devout Christians are loth to give up their faith. They urge that somehow the present scientific chronology may turn out mistaken. Their plea is to the effect: "How can we not believe the Shroud to be Christ's when there are so many points of agreement between the scientific assessment of the crucified man's lesions and the details of the Crucifixion-story in the Gospels? Do we not know that Christ was made to carry the cross on his shoulders and had been whipped and forced to wear a crown of thorns before the crucifixion and, after his death, received a Roman soldier's lance-thrust in his side?"

Even Dr. John Heller, a key-member of the team of investigating scientists and the chronicler of their various decisive investigations in the fascinating Report on the Shroud of Turin which was published before the triple Carbon-14 test made in 1988, said in that book: "Nothing in all our findings over three years contained a single datum that contravened the

Page 75

Gospel accounts." He was simultaneously careful to add, face to face with the question as to exactly whose body had been represented: "Science has no way of determining the answer. We just do not know." As he remarked a little earlier, quoting his co-worker Ray Rogers, "In science, you're entitled to any hypothesis you choose... But if you don't have a test to examine that hypothesis, it's not worth anything. We do not have a test for Jesus Christ." Yes, there is a distinct reservation here, but the full assent to the alleged correspondences in the Gospels is striking.

It is worth looking into the popular pro-Christ claim. First, we must observe that there are four Gospels - Matthew's, Mark's, Luke's and John's. The first three are designated "synoptic" because of the substantial agreement among them in content and in form despite several divergences in details. The fourth stands rather apart. Most of its matter is peculiar to itself and its differences from the Synoptics are great enough to permit the question whether it can be classified in the same literary form of "Gospel". And it is by its differences that it provides much of the parallelism popular Christianity puts forth. Thus it is the only Gospel which mentions nails as having been used in the crucifixion. As the Roman Catholic authority John L. McKenzie says in his Dictionary of the Bible,¹ the fastening of a condemned man's limbs to the cross was done either by ropes or by nails. Nowhere in Matthew, Mark or Luke do we have a reference to either ropes or nails. Only in John do we learn of nails when Jesus is said to appear before his disciples after his death and to show his wounds (20:25). John alone recounts of Jesus when he had died: "... one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side and forthwith came there out blood and water" (19:34). This second detail is crucial in any comparison of Jesus with the man in the Shroud. So we may legitimately affirm that John's is the Gospel which is most relevant.

But once this inevitable conclusion is drawn we are in for a couple of surprises which too can be considered crucial. In John, after the apostles in the absence of Thomas have seen

Page 76

Jesus appear before them and show them wounds, Thomas said: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe" (20:25). And Jesus, when he appears to Thomas along with the other apostles, says: "Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing" (20:27). With this clear reference to hands, let us attend to some words of Dr. Buckley, on whose information we have already drawn: "There is a wound in the left wrist, the right one being covered by the left hand. This is the typical lesion for a crucifixion. The classical and legendary portrayal of a crucifixion by nails through the palms of the hands is spurious: the structures in the hand are too fragile to hold the weight of a man." John does not bring in wrists anywhere. Palms are made prominent.

Even more serious than this discrepancy is the same Gospel's story of the disciples going to the sepulchre of Jesus: "Then cometh Simon Peter... and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie. And the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself" (206-7). The Shroud of Turin is one single piece covering both body and head. Jesus, according to John, had his body and head wrapped separately. The other Gospels do speak of only one linen piece - Matthew 27:59; Mark 15:46; Luke 23:53 - but as they are "synoptic" and derive centrally from a common source, their evidence here is not really threefold: it is one testimony quoted three times. Except for this solitary agreement with the Turin Shroud, they have nothing to match John's pronouncements. But John fails at the heart of the possible parallelism.

Nor does he give his evidence of separate wrappings in one context alone. There is the story of the resuscitation of Lazarus after he has lain in his tomb for four days. Jesus calls him out. "And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was bound about with a napkin" (11:44).

Page 77

What is further worth noting is that even the body was not wrapped in a shroud. The word employed is not sindon as in the Synoptic Gospels, connoting an all-enveloping single piece of linen: it is othonia both when Joseph of Arimathea wraps the dead body of Jesus (19:40) and when Peter looks into the tomb. McKenzie² comments: "The nature of the wrapping is not clear; the word used by John suggests that the body was wound in linen bands. A similar word keiria is used of Lazarus (11:44), and such binding is further suggested by Jesus' command to untie him."

Finally, to those who would make much of the single shroud mentioned in Matthew, Mark and Luke, what J.A.T. Robinson has written may be repeated. This Biblical scholar, who has attempted to reconcile othonia with sindon, has yet honestly raised a serious obstacle in the way of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Jesuit scholar Raymond E. Brown³ presents the situation very well: "... the othonia ('cloth wrappings') of John are sometimes assumed to be a collective which could possibly be the same as the sindon; or the soudarion ('piece of cloth') of John is either identified with the sindon or interpreted as a chin band which some find depicted in the Shroud. Be all of that as it may or may not, J.A.T. Robinson has a point when he says that only with great difficulty from a reading of the Gospels would one imagine the burial cloth of Jesus to be in the form in which the Shroud is preserved. The lengthwise image of front and back, so that the Shroud is folded over the head rather than folded sidewise, is rather startling granted the Gospel descriptions." So even the burial cloth of Matthew, Mark and Luke hardly tallies in the mode of its use with the Shroud.

Surveying the general field, Brown⁴ adds: "In his excellently balanced book, Ghiberti makes a point that a true biblical critic cannot assume that any of the Gospels necessarily gives us exact details about the burial of Jesus. Each evangelist may be describing that burial (which took place decades before the Gospels were written) in terms of the Jewish customs he knows in his time and in his area. Therefore, lack of agreement between the Shroud and the biblical accounts

Page 78

is really not a major feature if one argues that the Shroud is the historical burial garment, even though most Shroud enthusiasts seem to think that agreement with the Gospels is a matter of life and death. More important is the issue raised by Robinson which may be used in an inverse way. If the Shroud were known to any of the evangelists, would he describe the burial in the way he did? Certainly the Synoptics should have described a wound in the side of Christ, and John should have been more clear about the nature of the burial cloth. But above all, any evangelist who knew the Shroud should have mentioned the marvellous preservation of the image of Jesus. Silence on this point is particularly startling in the Fourth Gospel which makes a point of describing the burial clothes left by Jesus in the tomb. (I for one do not find convincing that a conspiracy of silence existed among the early Christians lest they give offense to the Jews about having a human image of the Saviour in their midst.) In the early argumentation about the resurrection, the Shroud would have been a marvellous apologetic proof over against the Jews; but no mention of it is found in the Gospels, nor even a description that betrays a knowledge of it. This argumentation does not disprove the Shroud but should make us aware that the history of its preservation is more mysterious than one could guess from discussions of where it was before exhibition in France in the 14th century."

All in all, it seems futile to hope that the Carbon-14 result will be faulted in the future and a concordance brought about between the scientific observations and the Biblical evidence from any source. The mystery remains, but all members of the various Christian Churches would be well advised to concur with the authoritative proclamation of Cardinal Belestrero in tune with the laboratories of Switzerland, England and the U.S.A.

Page 79

References

1. John L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Bangalore: Indian Edition by Asian Trading Corporation, 1984), p. 162, col. 1.

2. Ibid., p. 110, col. 2.

3. Raymond E. Brown, Biblical Exegesis and Christian Doctrine (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), p. 154.

4. Ibid., pp. 154-55.

Page 80