Piers Morgan Uncensored - “Beyond ALL Doubt Jesus” Experts Debate Shroud of Turin With Piers Morgan

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

ExpressVPN: Right now you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN for free. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or go to https://ExpressVPN.com/PIERS and get four extra months for free. The Shroud of Turin is one of the most studied and debated religious artefacts in human history. The 14-foot linen cloth bears the image of a bearded man, leading many Christians to believe it lay on top of the body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion; it has the likeness, the contours and the wound marks to match. However researchers have discredited that explanation; arguing it may be a scorch or a painting - and a high profile study released last week used 3D modelling tools to determine the shroud may have rested atop a statue, not a person. So, are we any closer to understanding whether the shroud is proof of Christ - or a medieval hoax? Piers Morgan speaks to professor and pastor at the Christian Thinkers Society, Jeremiah Johnston, Shroud of Turin Research Project’s Dr. Joseph S. Accetta and ‘The Thinking Atheist’ host Seth Andrews. Piers Morgan Uncensored will be back with a bang in September! Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Riverbend Ranch: Visit https://riverbendranch.com/ | Use promo code PIERS for $20 off your first order. Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And I used to be a complete skeptic of the Shrout. That I began reading these very recent scientific studies. I had a big change of mind. A radiation event occurs. So we're really not talking about a death cloth anymore, Pierce. We're talking about a resurrection cloth. Clearly, there's a lot of compelling evidence it was of a crucifix man. But in terms of these abnormalities, what do you say to that?

Pierce, hold my ice cold code zero will I answer these, will you? If God wanted an image on there, he would have just put it there. Okay? It was black printed. There's no mention of this. There's a glaring absence in the gospels of this image. What I see mostly is a tremendous desire to believe. Apologists are quick to brush it aside.

The Bible is the same book that makes all kinds of claims we might reject in another context with the donkeys that spoke Hebrew. The God who is not the author of confusion, though, I would think would have parted the curtain of the sky. And he would have said to all of his children, Yes, it's me or no, it's not. I don't think that's unreasonable. The shroud of Turin is one of the most studied and debated religious artifacts in human history.

The 14-foot linen cloth bears the image of a bearded man. Many Christians believe it lay on the top of the body of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion as the likeness, the contours, and the wound marks to match. Researchers have discredited that explanation, arguing it may be a scorch or a painting. And a high-profile study released last week used 3D modelling tools to determine the shroud may have rested atop a statue, not a person. So are we any closer to understanding whether the shroud is proof of Christ or a medieval hoax? To debate all this, I'm joined by two scholars with very different interpretations of the significance of all this. Pastor and founder of the Christian Thinker Society, Dr. Jeremiah Johnston, and Dr. Joseph Assetter, who's a member of the Shroud of Turin,

research project. Well, welcome to both of you. Dr. Jeremiah Johnston, let me start with you, first of all. For people who are tuning into this, I'm a Christian, I'm a Catholic, I'm very aware of the history of the shroud of Turin. But for those who aren't, just give me a very brief summary of what we're talking about. What is the shroud of Turin? Absolutely, first peers, it's such a joy to be on your program. You're a fellow seeker of truth. I'm a huge fan of yours and uncensored, so delighted to be joining you. The Shroud of Turin is the most researched, as you said, artifact in the world. It's also the most light about artifact in the world, interestingly enough. And I think that's because it does something that no other artifact does. It gives testimony to the death, burial,

and resurrection of Jesus. And nothing outside of Scripture does that. And I'll just say right here at the beginning, Pierce, I did my PhD on the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. I studied in Oxford in the Griffith Paprology Lab. I've published 250,000 words on the rest of resurrection, and I used to be a complete skeptic of the shroud. But I live by a motto, I learned from everyone, but I don't let anyone think for me. And it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I began reading these very recent scientific studies that are truly breaking news that I had a big change of mind. Talk about the shroud itself. How big is it? What do we think it's made of? What kind of material? And where physically is it now? Absolutely. I've been with

the shroud. It's in Turin, Italy, and the beautiful Piedmont District of Northern Italy. It's in the St. Giovanni Cathedral in Turin, Italy. Pilgrims can go see there today. It's held in a reliquary. This is really cool, Pierce, the company, in turn, Italy, that builds all of the facilities for the International Space Station

actually built what's called the reliquary, the box that the shroud is preserved in. There's two huge enemies of the shroud today because we do believe it's a 2,000-year-old artifact. That's light and oxygen. I just was with my friend Enrico, the chemist, who twice a year, changes out the 99% argon gas mixed with 1% oxygen to preserve the shroud.

The shroud is fascinating, and that we have hundreds of burial shrouds from the land of Israel that wrapped Jewish corpses. We have only one shroud that has the image of a crucified man that corresponds with all of the realities that we read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Josephus, by the way, of how Jesus was brutally crucified under the hands of Pontius Pilate. And so that is my area of specialty. So if it's not a hoax, what is it? And without a doubt, because I'm not irrational,

I believe that the shroud belongs to the historical Jesus. How big is it? 14 feet, four inches long. Pierce, I had to get this too. It covers a body like a pita, okay? It would wrap under the body, over the head, and then drape back towards the front of the body all the way down. And that's the Greek word that we get sendin from.

And that shows up in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then that singular rap wrapped Jesus's body. According to Jewish burial traditions, if the Sanhedron condemned a criminal to death, it was on the Sanhedron to take care of their burial. They were not given honorable burial. They had just been crucified. They were given proper burial. What do we see?

We see that Joseph Verimuthia, Nicodemus, two members of the Sanhedron. They ask Pontius Pilate for the body of Jesus. They have to go quickly. He has to be buried before sundown. It's a high Sabbath the next day. They wrap Jesus' body and they place it in the tomb, approximately pierced 200 feet from where he would have been crucified just outside the city. And then it is at that point 39 hours later that a radiation event occurs.

And we believe that the best explanation, remember David Hume says, wise men choose probabilities, the best explanation after 102 scientific disciplines have spent 600,000 hours studying this, is that at the moment of Jesus' physical bodily resurrection, a radiation event occurs that leaves this incredible image on the cloth at the moment of Jesus' resurrection. So we're really not talking about a death cloth anymore, Pierce. We're talking about a resurrection cloth. Fascinating. Okay, let's bring in Dr. Joseph Ascetta.

Now, you interestingly participated in an on-site examination of the shroud of Turing, and you believe it's a 14th century origin, which is around the time the shroud came into public existence. So tell me, first of all, about your examination of the shroud and why you've determined that you believe it's only from the 14th century? Well, I think my belief has to be qualified a little bit. First of all, I am a Christian. I'm a practicing Christian, so I have no axe to grind here.

And I did examine the shroud firsthand. in 1978, I was a member of the team that was doing infrared spectroscopy and infrared imaging. Okay, and my impression, of course, at that time was it's truly an extraordinary object. I would not disagree with anything that Jeremiah said here, a minute ago. It is truly extraordinary. But my position, I have to clarify it, is that if the shroud is 14th century, then I think there's an explanation. on how it was done. I wrote a very detailed paper on the circumstances of the 14th century,

the historical and geographical circumstances, and also the optical properties that shroud all match up to a certain paradigm using wood printing. And the recent paper by Cicero kind of underscores that. It's complementary in a sense. Now, remember what I said, if it's 14th century, I will leave the controversy about the date to the current discussion that's going on between a number of members of this community regarding its authenticity. I think that there are some issues associated with the date.

I think they're legitimate issues, but in my view, at the current time, the evidence of the Shrazo authenticity doesn't really meet the rigorous standards of circumstances. scientific inquiry. That's where it basically where I stand right now. Okay. Jeremiah, I suppose the obvious question for me is, why did it only emerge in the 14th century? Why, if it's so obviously historically important, why did it not emerge earlier? And given the enormous time scale between the event and the discovery of this shroud, do you understand why people are so skeptical? Oh, 100%. I understand why I used to be a skeptic. myself. And by the way, I have incredible respect for Dr. Joe Seta on this wonderful panel with us. He also served in the armed forces and has a defense department clearance. I mean, he is a very

well-respected scholar. And Joe, I appreciate you so much. I think Joe and Pierce, you and I, all three of us agree on a lot more than we may think that we do. But for the benefit of the audience, because when you get shroud red-pilled like I've been, because I've gone from, this is a complete, you know, a very Oxford high-brow response. I deal with evidence. This, you know, keep me away from that weird relic to now becoming this defender based on the evidence. One of the key indicators of why some people are skeptical of the shroud is based on a 1988 radiocarbon dating that was very famous. Pears, you probably remember this from your journalistic career. It was on the front of every newspaper 37 years ago that they wrote on a chalkboard

that based on the radiocarbon dating they had done. And remember, it was supposed to be seven labs, only three labs, more about that in a second, that the shroud, that the shroud dated from 1260 to 1390. They wrote that down on the chalkboard, and they sat down, they crossed their arms, and that was that. Are you ready to experience the best steak you've ever had? I know I am.

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Once again, that's riverbendranch.com, code Piers. Now, I just spoke at the International Shrout of Turin Conference at the St. Augustine Institute in St. Louis, and I met a French scholar by the name of Tristan, and get this, Piers, this is what's fascinating, to me. And what I love about your program uncensored, because we have to get to the truth. We have to be truth addicts. And what I learned from Tristan is he did the equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. It took him eight years. We told me all about this. And after eight

years of trying in 2017, the British Library finally released the raw data of that carbon dating from 1988. And this is what Dr. Assetta has rightly pointed out. This is thrown into question, this entire radiocarbon dating, so much so actually brought the Oxford article from 2019. This is the Journal of Archaeometry from Oxford University, where these scholars point out that the sample that they used peers, which is the top left of the shroud, they didn't use the middle of the shroud, they didn't use the middle of the heart or the body. They took the fringe.

They took the one spot that the Sturp team members encouraged them not to test. And that this article shows that the sample is not representative of the, the entire shroud. It's not a homogenous sample. And so therefore, they're saying those results need to be thrown out. In other words, if you're skeptical about the shroud, we understand that's okay to be skeptical. Because if this is what we think it is, it should stand up to the greatest scrutiny. But don't base your skepticism on the radiocarbon dating from 1988. We have a lot better ways of dating the shroud now, such as the waxes, the wide angle x-ray scattering, peers, which showed that the shroud has been getting old for 2,000.

and years from the Institute of Christolography. There are other fascinating things that I'd love to get to if we have time. So the shroud does appear before Leary, France, to answer your direct question, Pierce. Sorry, I wanted to give context to that. The shroud was not always known as the shroud of Turin, though. So my area of specialty, remember, peers,

a PhD knows a lot about a little. The little I know a lot about is a Christian historian is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, okay? And I understand how historical documentation works, all right? And one thing about the shroud, and I always use this analogy because we're in football season now, American football, that is. I'm a huge Kansas City Chiefs fan, but they were not always known as the Kansas City Chiefs. They were first known where I live as the Dallas Texans. The Shrout of Turin has been known historically as other things.

After all, it didn't even end up in Turin until 1578, which was a political maneuver, make no mistake by the Savoy family, to centralize their power in Italy and coming from France. It was known as the Mandelian, the image of Edessa. Eusebius discusses it in 325 with a letter to the King of Agbar. I mean, think about that. Eusebius, who's at the Council of Nicaea in 325, that great Christian historian, who had amazing sources at his disposal. Also, predating, or for the scholars watching, antedating, the carbon dating, we have the Hungarian Prey Codex.

And Pierce, this is an area that I love studying as ancient manuscripts. 250 years before the carbon dating in the Hungarian prey codex, there is an image that is obviously handwritten that matches point for point one for one, the shroud of Turin down to the anatomical condition of the body and even the herring bone weave. Can you believe that? It's fascinating. Okay. Joseph, your response to that? Well, admittedly, some of the circumstances around the carbon-14 gating cast a little bit of a cloud over it, specifically because, as already been pointed out, where it was taken from, which was a very bad choice. And secondly, some so-called logistical mishandling.

It wasn't quite handled off to light. All of this has casted a cloud, okay, on the data. But I will go on to say that there are very few people around that are competent enough to question the competency of these laboratories. So we have to get back to the question of what was handed to the labs to test. Okay, and that's a legitimate concern. One of the astonishing things about all of this is that if you look for explanations and why the date came out what it did, okay, you could look to, A, what was handed to the labs was, in fact, a 14th century piece of cloth from the patch area or some re-weaving that might have taken place.

Or secondly, it was randomly contaminated. Now, all the dates that came up in these three labs are roughly the same in 14th century. What is astonishing to me is that given this random contamination, the radiocarbon date turned out to be co-incident, with the historical date. Now that, to me, is almost a miraculous event, okay? How this random contamination gave rise to a date that's almost totally coincident with its historical date. And for that reason, you know,

I have some skepticism about the legitimacy of this clot. And I could go on and discuss this in great detail. I don't think we have time for it, frankly. Oh, we got as much time as you like. Don't worry about that. Let me come back to Jeremiah. So the forensic evidence of it includes wounds consistent with Roman crucifixion practices,

including puncture marks in the wrists and heels, hundreds of scourge marks from lead tip whips and more than 50 punctures from a brutal crown of thorns. Now, the figure on the shroud has numerous anatomical abnormalities, people have pointed out. The arms, for example, seem freakishly long. the fingers are longer on one hand than the other. The supposition being the figure would have been considered as a giant at the time.

Men were typically averaging around 5 foot 3 inches. The figure measures 5 foot 10 on one side, six feet on the other. Another weird discrepancy. What do you say to that? So clearly there's a lot of compelling evidence it was of a crucifix man. And we can debate about the timing of the shroud and the history, and we've discussed that. But in terms of these abnormalities, what do you say to that? Absolutely.

Pierce, hold my ice cold Coke Zero will I answer these, will you? I love this because this is my area of specialty. First, I want to show you something, Pierce. I've never shown this on any interview I've done. I just got this from the land of Israel. You just pointed out the fascinating correspondence of the wound marks in the man of the shroud. I'm holding in my hand, Pierce. This is not a replica, Pierce, and Dr. Aceta.

This is an actual Roman crucifixion spike that was from the Syrian province. I do a lot of work in archaeology. Pierce, I've been in more first century tombs than any guest you've ever interviewed. And this is six inches long. It's an iron spike. And for the benefit of our audience, this is what's so cool about Christianity. Christianity's closest cousin is actually archaeology and history. Other religions can't say that.

What's fascinating about this crucifixion spike is it's actually bent and curved. if you can see that clearly, it's bent, it's curved. Crucifixion spikes were used again and again on different victims, and to minimize movement and maximize torment, if you can imagine, peers, the crucifixion spike would actually be adjusted while the victim was dying of Roman crucifixion. And that's what we see right here reflected in this crucifixion spike.

It reminds me of what David wrote in the Psalms a thousand years earlier. Psalm 22, 16, they pierced my hands and my feet. It's interesting. He says that 700 years before crucifixion. is invented. When you look at the anatomical questions, and again, this is where my students and my four boys think it's really cool that I'm an expert in execution of the first century, by the way. When we crucified people under the Roman empires, first off, the shoulders would always be separated. And we see that there are abrasions on the shoulder of the crucified man. I don't think

you pointed that out yet, Pierce. But when you look at the rear image, there's actual abrasions. Jesus is asked to carry what's called the petibulum. Just to correct, he's not carrying the whole cross. It's just the cross beam called the pitibulin. It would have weighed 125 pounds. Think about this, though. As you rightly pointed out, all the scourge marks. We count 372 scourge marks.

That's front and back on the image of the crucified man. We can approximate because there's no lateral images that there's over 700 wounds on the crucified man of the cross, or man of the shroud. And what's interesting, he's then asked, this is when Pilate brings him before the mob, before the Jewish mob especially, and he says, etchohomo, in Latin, behold the man, and then the Jewish leadership, who hated Jesus say, crucify him, crucify him. It's documented, and there's actually some phenomenal hematological studies pierce on the blood.

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under the weight of the cross? He can't even get to Calvary. Simon of Cyrene is tasked to carry the cross beam. And do you know why? We believe that Jesus had lost one third of his blood volume during the scourging. Let that sit in for a minute. He was dying of dehydration, high levels of ferritin, creatin based on the blood samples that we have on the shroud. He would eventually die of massive, a massive heart attack on the cross. The reason his arms, though, are so strangely long on the cross is because his shoulders were separated during the crucifixion. And that's what makes the arms look so long. That's the fascinating part about it. Again, the deeper you go into this, it might sound good in a sound bite to say that. Well, no, this actually smacks of authenticity of

what we know of Roman crucifixion in the first century world. The thing that's fascinating me that I may pierce is the amount of energy. This is what I want to get to because this is the latest science and truly breaking news on this program. When you, I just interviewed Paula DeLazero. And what's cool about Dr. Aseta and the original Sturp team peers that I respect about these men and women, Dr. Ossetta was one of 26 scholar scientists who went to turn Italy to study this. They're not pastors with a theological acts to grant. They were not privileging this, even though Dr. Ossetta is a believer. They were applying the scientific method.

Ray Rogers, who died a great defender of the shroud, famously said, give me 15 minutes in the scientific record, and I'm going to prove this is a complete forgery. He wasn't saying that a few minutes later after studying it, which is really fascinating to think about. look at the power though, Paula DeLazzo is doing some amazing work out of Aenea laboratories. He's a physicist who works with lasers. And this is something that's gone viral when we've shared it. He has postulated the amount of energy it would take to leave to make a chemical change in the flax, in the linen fibrals.

Because remember, the image, Pierce, it doesn't absorb like the blood does. The blood fully absorbs into the shroud. The image is just two microns. peers, if you took a razor, you could literally shave off the image on the shroud. It's that thin. It's almost unbelievably thin. And this is what science cannot replicate. And so Paulo Delazero at a neal laboratories outside of Rome, the physicist laser expert, spent five years and his academic reputation to say he estimates the amount of radiation energy it took.

And to bring the audience along by the hand, at the moment of Jesus' resurrection, we believe this happened. 34,000 billion watts of cold radiation, traveling at 1, 12th of a billionth of a second. Literally, so fast. And because of it would have been hotter, as the Sturp team pointed out, the Sturp team pointed out conclusively, this was no scorch, there is no paint, there is no dye, there is no pigment. They publish those findings. And in many ways, the Sturp team did not achieve their objective. You know, the scientific objective objective with the shroud is the who, what, when, and how of the shroud.

None of those answers have been found. We don't know who did it, how it was done. We can't explain it. We certainly don't have that amount of power radiation to change the chemicals in the shroud. What I try to answer as a historian is why it was done. Okay, before I go, before I go. Go ahead. Yeah, please do.

Yeah, please do. Well, I'll tell you what, Joseph, just before you do, but before you do, Joseph, just one question and a very quick response, Jeremiah, if we assume that everything you say is correct, that it is dated back to the period when Jesus Christ was known to be on earth and alive and operating, and he was crucified and so on, if we assume it's a crucified body that was shrouded, how many people in the people in the world? that period would have been crucified by the Romans? Many thousands. They were experts. So remember the Persians invented crucifixion, Alexander the Great made it great with Hellenization. The Romans perfected it, especially in the Syrian province. We have 21 different records of Roman victims being nailed to the cross, not hung to the cross.

What takes it beyond all doubt for me in 10 seconds or less, the helmet of thorns. There are 50 puncture marks on the scalp in the back of the head, and that makes it beyond all doubt that it's Jesus of Nazareth. No one was crucified the way Jesus was. Okay, Joseph Setti, you want to respond to the various things you found? Well, I have several responses, one of which, of course, is that nobody would deny the immense amount of detail in the cloth that matches the gospel accounts. There's no question about that. Getting back to the, I would say, overarching a comment is that if God wanted an image on there, he would have just put. it there and he doesn't have to explain it to us about how it was done.

I appreciate the radiation comment that just made, but it turns out that there's no natural radiation mechanism that would give rise to that image. So if it in fact was, as the scientist said it was, well, that was a miracle. There's no question about that. And you're asserting that, of course, the image is a miracle in the first place. It turns out that the image content itself by Ray Rogers, it turns out to be a oxidized cellulose, either oxidation by heat or oxidation by some other mechanism. For example, acid, okay, and that acid plays into one of my theories regarding the 14th century

origins of the cloth. So there's a lot more background here in the scientific domain than can be described in this very brief interview. But there's a lot of factors that are associated with with the cloth itself. As he pointed out, the image at the time that we did this, what we found out was basically what it was not, strangely enough. It wasn't a painting, there were no breast rakes, and we had no immediate explanation for the image. Subsequent investigation showed, as I said, that the image itself is a form of oxidized cellulose, which could have been, as it's pointed out, by a blast of radiation, but it could also have been printed there with heat or with acid. And my thesis, again, going back to the 14th century origins of this, is that the ink that was used at that time to print textiles was an iron gall ink, which is corrosive.

than the document preservationist at this time, in fact, I work tirelessly to save documents from themselves because the ink eventually eats it all the way through the cloth or the material that the whatever was printed on. So that plays quite readily into my theory about the possible 14th century origins of this image. Okay, it was black printed, It's black printed of iron gall ink.

A form of black printing explains all its optical properties, the negative image, of course, the high resolution, and it also explains the so-called 3D property. That's what you get when you, with a carefully sculptured low relief that's printed on cloth. And again, if it's printed with iron gall ink over the time, the iron gall ink would flake off because linen is difficult to die and to color. until ink would flake off over time and it eventually corrode. And that's what we see right now. In this time period, we see a corrosion of the surface of that cloth. And that is, in fact, what causes the image proper.

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It goes on and on forever. I am, my position is simply tried to explain how this thing was done. in the 14th century. And again, if it's a 14th century image, I think that this is a reasonable, has a lot of circumstantial evidence to show how it was accomplished. There's geographical factors.

This textile printing was in great development going on just north of Lurray in France at that time period. There were printing textiles. Somebody who had the skills could have migrated down to Lerre and created this. created us. No, there's a confession on record, which of course hasn't been corroborated. Look, the four pillars of authenticity from the rigorous scientific perspective are, one, its age, it has to be 2,000 years ago. Two, we have to show that the cloth ensconced the body of Jesus Christ.

Three, there has to be some sort of chain of custody that shows that, you know, where was it for the last 2,000 years ago? And four, there's no mention of this. There's a glaring absence in the gospels of this image. And, you know, you could rationalize all those, but those are hardcore scientific factors that have to be established before you claim rigorously that this is the authentic burial cloth of Christ. And just to be clear...

That's my story. Yeah, no, I understand it. And you've articulated very well. But just to be clear, if your thesis is correct, and it was from the 14th century. Is your supposition in that circumstance that it was a deliberate forgery intended to dupe people into thinking it was the genuine shroud of Jesus Christ?

Well, there's several lines of thought along that question, one of which it was an artistic representation to show the crucifixion to a number of people who were quite illiterate couldn't read the gospels at that time. That's one explanation for why. And the other one, it was a deliberate forgery that was designed to entice pilgrims to that part to that church in France. And in fact, as it said, the confession, there was a confession on record.

Somebody said, the priest wrote to the Pope saying that, yes, it's a forgery. The person who did it confess to me that it was. And I think the Pope writes back and says, no, okay, you can show it, but don't tell anybody, it's real. of course that was lost. And, you know, it in fact enriched the local parish a considerable amount because all the pilgrims were traveling to that part of France at that time. So, you know, the forgery explanation could be a possibility given its 14th century origin.

Okay. Well, look, I want to bring in another guest now because both of my experts are Christians, as am I. So in the interest of balance, we're going to be joined now for the final part of this, by author Seth Andrews, better known as the thinking atheist. Well, Seth Andrews, welcome to uncensored. You've been listening to this. What is your response?

Actually, let me clarify, the thinking atheist is an icon. It's certainly not me. I came out of a faith culture. And so it's an icon that represents using reason to try to figure out what's true in the world. And I'm certainly not a great thinker. But I'm an ex-phangelical. I was a Christian broadcaster for 30 years,

and now I am on the other side of the faith, looking at it through the other side of the lens. Right, so tell me about your view of the shroud of Turing. Do you think it's real? Do you think it's fake? Do you think the whole thing is just a PR stunt? What do you feel? What I see mostly around the shroud

is a tremendous desire to believe, to connect dots. And it's totally understandable, you know, people who lean into the Jesus story, but, you know, whether or not it dates, to the time of Christ or to the medieval era, and I tend not to discount the carbon-14 date. I think apologists are quick to brush it aside, and then they throw out a lot of fancy letters at the end, but I don't think that we have seen a debunking of the carbon-14 dating of the fabric, but even if it did date back to that era, I mean, we're talking about a time

where the Romans crucified hundreds of thousands of people, and so now we're connecting a dot and saying this looks like a crown of thorns, and so therefore it is the Christ. And we root that in the Bible itself and the Christ account in the Bible, which is hugely problematic. I heard references to Josephus. I mean, the antiquities was, what, 60, 70 years after the alleged death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Josephus was not an eyewitness, and the only reference to Christ was not about the crucifixion, the resurrection. certainly not the shroud of Turin. The Gospels, I mean, they're not reliable because I think the earliest gospel being Mark was 69-70-something CE, long decades after these events were supposed

to have happened. The authorship of all four Gospels is not known. Nobody has pinned them down. Nobody can authenticate them. And beyond that, the Bible is the same book that makes all kinds of claims, we might reject in another context, whether it's giant, 900-year-old people, donkeys that spoke Hebrew, and a savior baby that was born via ghost sex, if you will, to a virgin, so that the offspring could grow up and sacrifice himself, blood sacrifice, to rescue us from the very torture chamber that that God created. So all of this about the shroud, it's interesting. I find, you know, the God who is not the author of confusion, though, I would think would have parted the curtain of the sky, and he would have said to all of his children, yes, it's me, or no, it's not. I don't think that's unreasonable. Okay, Dr. Jeremiah Johnson, I'm going to give you the final word here, because that was a pretty compelling argument against everything you believe about this crowd. You can respond.

Absolutely. Jesus Christ, the historical record is so clear that in the 89 chapters of the gospel, they all point to that Jesus really lived. He died. And even the greatest skeptics alive of that time, had experiences of seeing Jesus alive after he was dead. You can look at my book, Body of Proof, the Seven Best Reasons, to Believe in the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. And you can see that I never mention the shroud of turn. Isn't that fascinating, Pierce? I don't believe the shroud is authentic because I want it to be. And as followers of Jesus, we don't even need the shroud to be authentic is our best evidence of the resurrection. We have so many other lines of this. But what's fascinating, yeah, exactly. It's not an article of faith. And what's fascinating

to me is when you look at the historical records, they stand on their own. Even atheist scholars, like Garrett Ludemond said, and others say, I cannot argue with the fact that the earliest followers of Jesus were first hostile to the Christian message. They had experiences of seeing Jesus alive after he had been dead. And they say, now, what kind of experience? those were, we can't explain, but we know those experiences not only change the lives of the followers, but also change the world forever. And again, there's such great evidence for the authenticity of the Gospels. We know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the Gospels. We know that Paul writes 20 years before the Gospels, that incredible passage, that no serious historian or scholar calls into question in 1 Corinthians 15 saying,

this is the gospel that Christ died for our sins, according to the scripture, he was buried, and he rose again. again on the third day according to the scriptures. A quick note about Josephus, there's some phenomenal work being done, published by Oxford University Press, T.S. Schmidt, Josephus absolutely knew and had first-hand acquaintance with those who attended the trial of Jesus. So friends, again, you have your choice. You've got to think for yourself. This is what I do at Christian Thinker Society.

You've got to get beyond the sound bites. You've got to get to the substance, read these things for yourself, and you'll be amazed. Christianity doesn't need to be defended. It stands up for itself. If I may. Well, fascinating debate. Very quickly, yeah. Well, I'm not sure we can quote the Bible to prove the Bible.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written in the third person, and we're not written by a Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Mark itself was actually written by two, possibly three authors. And even if Josephus had referenced the Christ in the year 100 CE, it wasn't a direct reference. We're still in the arena of hearsay. This is not evidence. You guys are in deep theological territory here.

We are, and we probably haven't got enough time to get into the entire Bible. That could be another show of uncensored, but it's been a fascinating debate about the cheering shroud. I just want to win, because Jeremiah, you've created an AI image of what you believe Jesus Christ look like based on the shroud, which is quite fascinating. So we're showing it now to our viewers. And if that is indeed the person who is in that shroud, then many people would argue that is pretty much exactly how they imagined Jesus Christ looked like. So perhaps a little bit more, you know, meat on the bone for your argument there, Jeremiah. But I think, look, we'll probably never be able to conclusively prove this kind of thing.

You either believe it or you don't in the end, but it's fascinating. Thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Peers Morgan Unscensored is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Pierce Morgan Unsensored on Spotify and Apple Podcast. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free.

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