Stuff You Should Know - The Shroud Of Turin: No Ordinary Bed Sheet

Episode Date: March 30, 2017

The Shroud of Turin is no ordinary bed sheet. Some think it's the burial cloth of Jesus. Others think it's an amazing piece of artwork. The truth is, we'll probably never know what it really is. The mystery of the Shroud of Turin awaits you... Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know what that means. Yes, that means it's time to let people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the sheer joy of podcast listening.

That's right, it's T-R-Y Pod, still a nascent industry. A lot of people don't know what podcasts are, and it helps everybody out, if you would go out and just say, hey, family member, who I see at Thanksgiving once a year, you should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what they are. Here's a cool show you should try,

and here's how to get it. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be our show, just any podcast you like in general that you think someone else would like, just share it. Yeah, yeah. So get on board the tripod train. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

We'll be right back. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Sitting across from me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, looking so sharp today, dudes. Wrapped in my hearing bone, linen. I thought that was an infinity scarf. You're wearing it like an infinity scarf.

That's the second infinity scarf joke you've made, although one was live on stage, where you, well, it felt a little bad. You sort of accidentally made fun of the lady there on the first try. Yeah, some lady was like, what's wrong with infinity scarves? And I looked over and lo and behold,

she was wearing an infinity scarf. I backped out from that pretty fast. I don't get why is it called an infinity scarf, because it looks as if it never ends. I think it's a scarf that is sewn together. It's like a ring. Okay. That's all.

Okay. Not a good name for it, for not a great invention. Like an infinity pool. If that never ends, like you can swim and swim forever. Yeah, it looks as if, I just call them rich person pools. Oh yeah.

Not like my above ground, my sweet above ground pool in the back. The rustinator. Yeah. The hick. Right next to the trampoline. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. I think we've insulted enough people. Well, that was a Simpsons reference. Technically, they insulted people first and the hick. Yeah. Yes, we did anyway. So let's talk Shroud of Turin, Chuck. Are you familiar?

What made you pick this, the Easter? No. It's just timing. Although, heck, that's great timing, huh? Seriously? Yeah. It was, to be honest, I was listening to an episode of WTF with Mark Marin.

And it's an older episode. We get all of our ideas from Mark Marin. We do. I'm growing him a stash. Well, I've grown it. I'm just gonna shave the beard. Right, yeah. He was interviewing William Friedkin, the director.

Right. And who, as it turns out, is quite chatty. Did he not stop talking the whole time? He talked a lot. Wow. It was a really good interview. Well, yeah, it's what you want out of an interviewee. Yeah, sure.

But he saw the Shroud of Turin in person and he described the experience and now thought, why haven't we done one on that? That's pretty important. What was his reaction to it? He wept. So that's actually something that's called Jerusalem syndrome. Yeah, he was incredibly moved.

And he's not especially... Well, he talked a lot about Jesus specifically, but said that he's not religious, but he really has a thing for Jesus. Huh. Well, he doesn't identify as a Christian, but he really... He just is a big fan of Jesus in his work.

He's a Jesus file, sure, which is, you know. Sure. A lot of people like that, I think. Well, yeah. There's even Messianic Jews, Jews for Jesus. Yeah. And apparently, William Friedkin. I mean, bioaccounts.

Those are the two categories. Bioaccounts, Jesus, the historical figure. He's a pretty stand-up guy. Sure, you know. Sure, and I think... Well, let's just stop dancing around this, okay? We're not a religious podcast. Oh, we're not?

No. Every time we've ever done a religious episode, we've gotten so much blowback from every single thing we've gotten wrong. Sure. Our structure is not really set up to podcast on religion very much. Yeah.

The Shroud of Turin is such an interesting and contentious flashpoint where science and religion meet and butt heads. Yeah, big time. That we just couldn't possibly pretend like it doesn't exist. It's too interesting. Yeah, agreed.

And I can imagine that William Friedkin wept when he saw the Shroud of Turin. I would love to see the Shroud of Turin myself. I have no idea what my reaction would be, but I wouldn't be all that surprised if I did weep when I saw it. Sure. Whatever the Shroud of Turin is,

it is probably the most venerated object in the world. Yeah, perhaps. It's at least among the top two or three, okay? Give me that. Yeah, yeah. And the idea that so many people look at this thing with love and awe and amazement, that it somehow imbues it with the very stuff

that it's venerated for in some weird way. And I can imagine that even as an atheist, you would get hit by that. Well, to me, like looking at a great painting or something, not to say that it is a painting, even though some people say it is a painting, which we'll get to, but you know what I'm saying, like just moved by-

Seeing the Mona Lisa. Yeah. Or being like, I thought it was bigger than that. Yeah, I was a little underwhelmed. Well, that's the same thing. The Jerusalem syndrome typically happens when you go to a very holy site and you're overcome, but it can also happen when you're looking at art as well.

All right. It is a 50, if you don't know what it is, and your hearing is going on and on about crying. Shroud of Turin. It is a 53 square foot piece of linen rectangle. I think it's about three feet by 14 feet. Yeah. Like I said, herringbone, twill,

faint brownish image that, and we'll get into some of the more interesting finer points, but when photographed, the negative image is a very clear image of a man, naked man, with his arms folded over his groin area, tastefully. Right, Ed? Beard, mustache, shoulder length hair,

parted in the middle, and you know, looks like that, if you grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, looks like that picture of Jesus hanging on the wall. Right. That I grew up with. Or your friend that you went to that 311 show back in 1997.

And there are stains in areas on the linen, consistent with crucifixion wounds. Yes, which we'll get to, because it's very important. All of this is, I feel like we're gonna be teasing this out throughout. Well, let's stop. Let's start at the very beginning of all this, okay? If you're a believer that the shot of turn

is a legitimate religious artifact. That is to say that Jesus Christ was wrapped in it after his crucifixion. And buried in it. Right, in Jerusalem. And that is indeed his image. So, when he died, he, and this is Jesus we're talking about.

Still, not William Friedkin. Right. He's still alive. Right, is he? Yeah. And Jesus died and was interred, or entombed, I'm sorry. After three days, his apostles went and checked on him. And they found, he wasn't there.

Right. He had ascended into heaven. This just happened to be what we now celebrate as Easter. Yeah, and boy, this is gonna come out right around then, isn't it? Yeah. And Easter celebrates, among Christians, the resurrection of Christ after his death.

Yes. He dives, crucified on Good Friday. He is found to have been resurrected up into heaven on Easter Sunday. Jesus wasn't there, his body was gone. But, according to legend, they found shrouds. Right. Still there, his burial shroud.

So, the idea is, is that his burial shroud was taken out of his tomb and venerated from the get-go. Basically held on to, and moved from, I guess, from Jerusalem out to, where did it make its second trip to? I believe from there, it went straight to Turkey, Constantinople, and it was there for several hundred years. Right, it was in the possession

of some of the sultans there. Yeah, and then the crusaders came along and said, we'll be taking that, and whatever else we want. Yeah. And we're gonna move it to Athens, Greece, and it was there. Or actually, I don't know if the crusaders took it.

Maybe it was smuggled out. But crusaders sacked the town. I saw both. Okay. Well, the history is a bit murky until the mid-14th century. Right, it is. And you would think that if the crusaders had taken it,

they would have taken it back to Europe, because that's where they hailed from. They wouldn't have taken it down to Athens, Greece. But supposedly, it spent several centuries between the crusades and about the 13th century in Greece. And somehow, someway, it made its way to France, right? Yeah, a French knight. And I think this is where it gets a little more solid

in its travels. Gifroy de Charny took it to France, about 130 miles outside of Paris. And eventually, it made its way to its final home in Turin, Italy. And it's been there ever since. Yeah, at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Yeah, 1578 is when it landed there, and it's still there.

And you can go look at it. I think it went on tour for a little while within the last few years, right? With Van Halen. Yeah, it was on display as a part of a traveling exhibit. Was it traveling, or was it just on display in Turin? No, I think it traveled. But I'm very surprised.

But here's what I'm going on, is William Friedkin's account. Oh, gotcha. So I'm not sure. I do know that more people saw it in the last few years than ever before. Yeah, ever before very, very recent times, because apparently, for many centuries, it was on public display.

Yeah, you just have to go to Turin, go into that church, and they would probably ask you a series of questions before you entered, and as you exited. They're like, what kind of fish is this? It's a Jesus fish, come on back. The Catholic Church does not have an official stand on the authenticity of the shroud,

but Chope, Pope John Paul, the Chopester, in 1998, said, we trust science, basically, to keep studying this thing. Yeah, the church, I think, used to have an official position on it until, I think, around 1988. And they said, you know what? Whatever it is, we still believe that you, Catholics, or Christians, should venerate this thing,

because at the very least, it's symbolic of Christ's suffering on the cross. But we're not going to say either way, we're the Catholic Church. Thank you, good night. I think it's how it ended, end transmission. That's how Pope John Paul ended all of his speeches. All right, let's take a little break here you want to.

And we'll talk a bit about the early science of the Shroud of Turn. The Shroud of Turn. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know.

So Chuck, we were saying the shroud, as far as the Catholics are concerned, the shroud didn't really exist until 1353, when Geoffrey de Charnay came up with it, right? Yes. So that's the beginning of its documented existence, that the shroud of turn at least goes back on the record to 1353, which makes a pretty awesome in and of itself,

right? Sure. And for centuries and centuries, people saw it, people looked at it, and I'm sure they kissed it, and wept over it, and everything. And then it wasn't until, I think, the 19th century, or at least the 20th century, that it was really started to move out of public display,

and started to be cared for and preserved a little more, I think. And that's when science started to come around, specifically starting in 1898, right? Yeah, that was the first, like if you look at just the regular image of the shroud of turn, not the negative photographic image, you sort of see an image of a person.

But in 1898, like you said, there was an amateur photographer in Italy named Secondo Pia. That means the second Pia. He had an older sibling. He took a picture. He was first, though? No, primo. Primo, that's right.

Have you ever seen Big Night? That Stanley Tucci movie? Great movie. Yeah, Secondo and Primo. Yeah, yeah. Man, I don't want to see that again. I haven't seen it since it was out. Have you ever heard that Famke Jansen, the actress?

Does her name mean female or girl in Danish? I have no idea. I think it might. Because that means her name is Girl Jansen. That's what her parents named her, if that's what that means. Sorry. That's OK. So Secondo took this photo when he was developing it.

He saw the reverse negative and went, wow, Mamma Mia. And what he saw was that much more clear image of a man, of the likeness of a human being in much more detail. He was accused of a forgery, of course, out of the gate. And I think it wasn't fully clear to the 1930s when more photographers did the same thing. And they were like, it's just a negative image. Let the guy up.

Yeah. Like, all right, fine, you win this round. Secondo. Yeah. So this negative image really kicked off like an even greater interest in the shroud of turn. I think up to that point, people of science had just been kind of like, yeah, sure.

That's exactly what it is. It looks definitely like a burial shroud. When they saw that, though, that negative, it's really difficult to avoid the fact that it is clearly the image of a man like you described at the beginning. Yeah, it's not Jesus on toast. No, it's not a Rorschach test.

Or on the wall of the house I'm demoing from, you know. Or this grilled cheese I made, yeah. Yeah. It's very clear. No, it is. And it's universally recognized as that. It's not like it kind of looks like this. That's what that is, so much so that even skeptics say,

well, then it was just a painting or something like that by some artist. But just like that 1898 photograph by Secondo Pia, we've our new techniques and tricks and software that we use as far as photography goes and images goes is starting to unlock even more weirdness of it too, right? So if you take the lightness and darkness patterns and turn them into like three dimensions,

it actually reveals very clearly the three-dimensional shape of a face, which is kind of surprising because that would mean that if it were a painting, somebody had to have painted on a face with just the right amount of darkness in places where that would have been closest to the cloth and a lighter amounts in places that would have been further away from the cloth so that when you did look at it

on this light gradient map, it would appear in perfect three dimension. It's a bizarre little thing, don't you think? For sure. As far as real study, it took all the way until almost 1970, 1969, when scientists could finally, I mean, for decades, people had done what they call indirect analysis.

So basically, I'm looking at it, and I'm thinking about it, and I'm talking about it. But as far as actually getting your hands on it, it was 1969 when, like you said, they needed to preserve this thing. So they brought in a team of scientists to say, hey, how do we preserve this thing? We'll let you touch it.

And they all went, ooh, that sounds good to me. Touch it with your eyes. So they formed the shroud. We're always laughing about how the acronyms work out perfect. This is not that. This is not that. The Shroud of Tern Research Project, or STIRP, they had five days of continuous access in 1978.

Like 24 hours a day for five days. Yeah, so this is nine years after the first scientists were allowed to touch it. I guess they formed this thing. And of course, what they did was it and say, all right, we'll work eight or nine hours a day, kick back, have some dinner, and then sleep, and get up and start over.

Have one of those eight course Italian meals. They split up into teams so they could work nonstop around the clock. They had 33 members from all over the spectrum of science, 20 major research institutions, along with a team of European scientists who observed. I guess they sat there with their arms folded and just went every 10 minutes.

They were the ones that brought the good espresso. The US-led team were like, we don't know where you get that around here. Not the kind of espresso you spit out into a napkin. Like in the. What was that? It was in the Moholland Drive, what a great scene. So good.

So here's what their report said. We need a bombshell effect here. OK. The shout image is that of a real human form of a scourged, scourged, crucified man. Yeah, a whip with several flays on the end. Head of nine tails. And I think it has rocks or something tied

onto the end of the flays. It's just terrible. Very bad. Crucifixion, we could do a podcast on that. Yeah, you know, something that came out of this research for me was, do you have to be a real SOB to crucify a human being? Yeah.

Whether it's the son of God or some criminal, whatever. You should. The idea that the Romans used to do that is just, it makes my ear bleed. Slow torture until you die in a variety of ways. But just the worst kind, yeah. So they continue to say it is not the product of an artist. The blood stains are composed of hemoglobin

and also give a positive test for serum, albumin. And despite this, they said it is a mystery because no combination of physical, chemical, biological, or medical circumstances can adequately account for the image. Right, so. That's their official report from that first scientific inquiry. Yeah, published in 1981.

And these definitely were men of science. But the Sturpe team was also, and it's still today, is criticized for, I guess the way it's put is, they were a team of scientist believers. Like, they were all legitimate scientists, but they also legitimately believed the Shroud of Turin was the burial shroud of Christ that had been, some way or another, miraculously

imbued with Christ's image upon his ascension to heaven. Yeah, I get the feeling a lot of this research is like, well, let's get a team in here to debunk it. Let's get a team in here to verify it. Right. Right, and there were skeptics on the Sturpe team, but they apparently didn't have as full access as the believers did.

Oh, really? And there was a lot of infighting and backbiting among the team. But one thing that's universally agreed on by the members of the team skeptics and believers alike is that the Vatican itself did not try to influence the outcome of these tests. Right.

So at the very least, back in 1978, they were willing to just say, hey, whatever you find is what you find. Yeah. We're still going to love the shroud no matter what, right? I thought the thing you were going to say was the one thing they all agreed on was that those Sturpe t-shirts didn't really

work out very well. They argued about the name a lot. Yeah. But the Sturpe team is still, their findings are still criticized. And one of the things that's very much criticized is the idea that there's no artificial pigments on the shroud and that the blood stains are actually blood.

Right. For an alternative hypothesis or an alternative examination, there's a guy named Walter McLoone. Did you run into him? Yeah, in the hallway. He's very ironic. Well, he's also very dead. So that's odd that that happened.

I should have mentioned it was the ghost of Dr. McLoone. McLoone, I'm sorry, that's it. So Walter McLoone was, I was like, is this guy, you know, is he legit? He's probably the most legitimate scientist of the 20th century. Oh, wow. Like, he published and edited a peer-reviewed journal

on microscopy and microscopic investigation. It's called Scop This, with an exclamation point. Yeah. He, it was just, he's a legitimate scientist. Let me just say that. And he did some examination of the Tern Shroud. And he found, no, there's actually no blood on this at all. And what looks to be blood is actually

red ochre pigment for million, and then a tempura binder. Yeah, and this was in the late 70s, early 80s. And he said, basically, he could account for everything in there as something that would have been in a paint from the 1350s. Right. Whereas other folks have said, no, actually, that iron in there that's old hemoglobin,

that's from the hemoglobin. And he said, no, it's not. Yeah, he didn't bend. So the idea, though, that he did find red ochre and vermilion pigment, you think, OK, well, case close. Right. Here, this is a great example of the Shroud of Tern.

It is not case close. It's never going to be case close. No, it's not. Chemists, molecular biologists, geneticists, you could throw every single scientist that you can possibly think of at this thing. And they can find whatever they want to find. And you're going to have another team who finds

the other contrary findings. And neither group is going to read one another's publications except the most hardcore people carrying out these experiments. But people like you and I have no idea whether, wait, was their blood found on it? Yeah. What were the findings about the red ochre?

Did he just surmise that it was red ochre pigment? Because he found all the stuff that makes up red ochre pigment? Or did he actually find red ochre pigment? Like, this is the kind of thing that keeps the Shroud of Tern a mystery. Well, yeah, I mean, he's not the only one to have studied whether or not it was blood.

There have been other people who's at Heller and Adler said, oh, it's blood. And it's AB blood type. Yes. We can even tell you that. And then someone else would come along and say, it's not blood. Or if it was, you certainly can't tell the blood type.

Or whether or not it's blood from the person who might have been wrapped in the Shroud or blood from someone handling it. That's a big one. Or animal blood. Yeah, there's a big criticism of that, that it was contamination from somebody who was actually analyzing the samples.

Yeah, because, well, as we'll see later on, a lot of people touch this thing over the years. Right. And then other skeptics point to it and say, dude, you can see it's not blood. That's not blood. Blood turns black, or at least such a dark, deep brown over the years, that it looks black to the human eye.

This looks like blood. That's not what blood looks like once it dries and ages on cloth. So there's a lot of different arguments, either side. But neither one is compelling enough to convince the other side that they're correct. Correct. And so it just goes on and on.

And I read, I think, a skeptics dictionary post on the Shroud of Turin. And the guy who wrote it, just perfect skeptics fashion, was basically said, even if you do prove that this is Jesus' burial shroud, that Jesus Christ was buried in this burial shroud, it doesn't prove that he's the Son of God. So it will never be settled.

Yeah, that's not the point of this Shroud of Turin. I mean, I don't think anyone's saying that this proves that, yeah, I think they're just trying to get to it. Well, there are two big mysteries. One is, is it authentic as a Shroud? Who is it? Or if it's not, how is this thing made? The second thing is called the question of questions.

Yeah, so should we take another break? Yeah. All right, we'll talk about that in some other Carbon 14 testing and DNA testing right for this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted

Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. All right, should we start with the, let's start with carbon testing.

Yeah, let's go chronologically. 1988, late 1980s. I'm a junior in high school. Sunny Crockett was coked to the gills. I have long bangs hanging in my face. What was I? I think I'm a skater, but I'm really not. Same here.

I tried pretty hard, but I was never that great. No, I was OK. I was wearing jams. Sure. You were like a little virgin to me. Did you wear jams? Yeah, we all did. Did you ever wear skids or wear those like past your time?

I don't know, skids. They were like pajama pants, clear and simple. Definitely not. They had footies? No, no. But I mean, they were what you would think of as flannel pajama pants, but they were to be worn like pants. They were a weird hat.

Not as weird as that Izzy Cavarichis, but they were weird. I saw a guy, I try not to judge people on their appearance, but I saw a guy getting on a Delta flight a few weeks ago wearing a pair of oversized baggy fleece Batman pajama pants with these huge fuzzy animal slippers and like a Porsche or a Lamborghini T-shirt and mirrored sunglasses. Oh, how cool.

It's like a 40-something-year-old man. So cool. I couldn't figure it out. And that man was Val Kilmer. It might have been. All right, carbon-14 dating. 1988, the Vatican said, go forth and date this thing. That's what I kind of love about how the Vatican's treated this

over the years. They've always been like, you got some new scientific methods. Let's bring them in here and talk about it. We're the Vatican. We love science. So they sent it to three different labs. University of Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, University of Arizona, Go Wildcats,

and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Go Mountaineers. Probably so. Go Utsies. Yodelers. And this is an interesting case because all three of them found that the shroud material that they were given dated between 1260 and 1390.

Long, long, long after the Jesus of history lived. And perhaps not coincidentally, right around the time when the shroud first shows up in the documented record. Yeah, so that combined with the fact that it was much after Jesus' time led a lot of people in the late 80s to say, case closed, this thing is certainly not the burial cloth of Jesus. No.

Now, when somebody comes out with findings like this, the other side sets about trying to take it out as much as possible, every way they can. There's a lot of really interesting backwards twisting, turning, arabesques that involve logic in a lot of instances. But with this, one of the first ones that came out was, well, you guys, the sample was tainted somehow.

That was a big one. And then the scientists have said, well, how was the sample tainted? And this is where some of the stretching comes in sometimes, right? One of the accusations is that the samples were tainted by contemporary carbon deposits, which threw off the readings of the carbon 14, right?

OK. There's a very famous thing that I think maybe Walter Macron came up with. But it shows, it's a graph, and it shows how much 20th century carbon it would take to taint the results from the 40s CE to the 14th century CE. It would take an amount of carbon contamination

that weighs more than the shroud itself weighs. So that was probably not the case. Yeah, another thing that some people kind of poo-pooed about this study was they gave them three control fabrics to test alongside all old stuff. Egyptian mummy, a medieval Nubian tomb, and a medieval French vestment, ecclesiastical vestment.

And all the data from those three, from the three different institutions, came out the same. Whereas there was a span of about 150 years on the shroud of Turin between the three. And what they released was the mean of these three. And so a lot of people said, well, hey, your fancy science tests nailed these controls, all three of them. But there's a big variance in the shroud of Turin's results.

So they go back to the, your stuff was tainted. Another criticism that was proposed was that they had taken a patch from the medieval era that had been used to patch up the shroud. Because the shroud actually was in a fire once. When it was in France, I believe, still. It was folded up in a box. And the chapel that it was in caught fire.

And the box caught fire. And the shroud miraculously, sorry, didn't burn. It just kind of got some scorch marks and melted a little bit. Yeah, but you're still there. But survived, yeah, they are. But they survived this fire.

So what the critics of the Carbon-14 test said was that, well, you guys chose a part that had been patched up around this time during the medieval age. Episofacto, you got it wrong. And then they probably said, well, why'd you give us that part? Well, they didn't. The Carbon-14 report supposedly says that they specifically avoided any part

that showed any stitching or patches or anything like that. But they did not take a sample from that. And these were very small samples, too. It's not like they cut off the bottom third of it and sent it out for testing. All right, so back to what you described, well, you quoted from the description of physicist

Paolo de Lazaro as the question of questions. All right, forget the fact that this could be the shroud that Jesus was buried in. Forget all this stuff. Like, how was this thing made? Because no one's been able to recreate this, like come up with a process that could recreate this thing because it's got a weird color

and no one can replicate it. Right, and the reason why they're having trouble replicating it is it's not just the color that's tough to replicate. They're finding that if you look at the places where it is colored, the thread itself is only just a little bit saturated with this color. Yeah, like it soaked in a very thin amount, right?

Right, this is what's throwing everybody off, apparently. To me, this is the whole key that the mystery swings on. If you were an artist and you were creating this using pigment, your paint should just soak right through at least one thread. This stuff is literally not deep enough to penetrate in an individual fiber, let alone all the way through like a paint would.

Yeah, 0.7 micrometers, 1.30th the diameter of an individual fiber. That's a very shallow pigmentation, right? So this is where the big stumbling block is. They're like, how would you do this? One of the proposals is that there's this technique called bas-relief, I always thought it was bas-relief until yesterday, but it's like if you take an image

and you carve it, and this is actually pretty well known in the medieval era, you can make it out of metal or stone and you heat it up and you can scorch an image on the fabric. The thing is to make a scorch that's as shallow as the Shroud of Turin's image is, it would have to occur. The Shroud would have to lay on the bas-relief bus for something like just a minute fraction of a second.

And no one can figure out how you would get a good image like you have on the Shroud of Turin if the linen just dropped and was pulled off in less than a second. No one knows how that could possibly be done. Yeah, and that's just one, there have been many, many attempts to replicate this over the years, either through science or through people using arts and materials available in the medieval times.

Something called acid pigmentation. There's actually a kind of photography, very, very primitive photography. I saw that. In medieval times. Something called dust transfer, the bas-relief, and then some have contended it's a mallard reaction taking place.

Okay, explain. Well, I don't really know fully how they explain that. I don't think it held up, but I mean, that's the reaction in cooking, like when you're browning like a meat. Gotcha. So, I don't know. Well, that actually deepens the mystery rather than,

rather than solve it. Other people say it could have been burial ointments, ultraviolet radiation. In the Bible in Matthew, it says the earth shook, the rock split, and the tombs broke open after the crucifixion. So, geologists said it might have been an earthquake that happened, and maybe that threw off

the radio carbon dating, and maybe there was a blast of neutrons that burned this image into the fabric. Yeah, and those are geologists, legitimate geologists, but they're also extraordinarily controversial, and most people in their field shunned them. Wouldn't even talk to them at a cocktail party. They're geologists for Jesus.

Basically, what they're talking about is something called piezonuclear fission. Yeah. And the idea is that if you crush a rock, the force of it can actually break the atoms apart, releasing a bunch of neutrons. Right. And this Italian geologists' idea is that

this earthquake that happened when Jesus died released these neutrons and created this irradiated image of him on his burial shroud. And that's if you take that one line from the Bible completely, literally. Right. And suppose that they didn't mean in a symbolic way the earth shook.

Yeah. But even if it did, there's no evidence whatsoever that there is such a thing as piezonuclear fission. Right. And then secondly, it even says that it shook when he was crucified. Right. So he wouldn't have even had the burial shroud

around him at the time. Oh yeah. There's a lot of holes in that one in particular. Yeah. But it's a theory, and that's another thing about the shroud of turn two. It's just learning about all the different hypotheses and all the different suggestions

that people have come up with and all the holes that they poke in those suggestions. Yeah. That in and of itself is fascinating to me. Yeah. The physicist DeLazzo tried the ultraviolet light experiment, and he basically said, you know, the amount of ultraviolet light you need

exceeds, quote, exceeds a maximum power release by all ultraviolet light sources available today. So how in the world could someone have done this on purpose in medieval times? So Chuck, the Carbon-14 and the fabric analysis, those were huge, big landmark cases. 1981 and 1988, right? Yes.

And then I think things just kind of everybody bickered for the next 12, 25 years. Yeah, it's a lot of bickering. And finally, somebody's like, well, hey man, we've got this great DNA testing stuff we can do. Let's do something. Let's do it to it to the shroud of turn with the DNA tests. Yeah, and so what they found out,

they found out a lot of interesting things that didn't in the end lead to any sort of verification of fake or authentic at all, but interesting stuff nonetheless. Right. One is that this thing got around, or at the very least was touched by a lot of people from all over the world.

And in return, it touched a lot of people around the world. I would say so. Europe, Middle East, India, Africa, it had DNA from a lot of folks and it had a lot of plant DNA too. They tested both. Yeah, and a lot of weird DNA, plant DNA showed up on it, right?

So you've got like black locust trees from Appalachia in North America. That was a little surprising. It's weird. Apparently a very rare Asian pear tree. Okay. Stuff that's found in India. Yeah.

Mediterranean clover. That makes sense. Well, yeah, and so does with the human DNA. They found the heaviest concentration of DNA was from people in the Middle East around where Jesus was buried. So that kind of makes sense. But here's the one I don't get.

They said that the oldest DNA was from India, which they say suggested it could have been manufactured in India because Indians and Europeans didn't like have a lot of contact back then. Right. But then I saw someone trying to refute that in the same article, and this is from Live Science, by the way,

saying that it could have been, when it was on public display, is where the Indian DNA came from. That's where all the DNA could have come from. Well, yeah, but they said that the oldest DNA was from India. So again, it's just like, every time someone uncovers something,

there's just another little mystery to it, it seems like. Sure. Unless you go back to the carbon dating, and those scientists are like, now this has stood up to scrutiny over the years. Yeah, and I actually saw a BBC little documentary on the Shroud of Turin, and they went and visited somebody

who was there at Oxford when they did the carbon dating, and they were like, no, his mind seemed wide open at the very least, but he was definitely like, no, it was all legitimate, and I've never heard an objection to it that panned out. Right. You got anything else? I don't do you?

Well, I think you can probably sit here for hours, and hours. Yeah. And hours. But we're not going to. If it has floated your boat, there's plenty of stuff for you to go read. You can start with a couple of great articles

that we used, one from Nat Geo, Why Shroud of Turin's Secrets Continue to Elude Science, that was great, and Live Science, like you said, article, called, is it a fake DNA testing deepens mystery Shroud of Turin, and plenty of other stuff. Go check out Walter Macron's site as well, he's got his own site on the Shroud of Turin. Yeah, oh, it's by the way,

I mentioned to mention this, I meant to mention this. Syndenology, it's what it's called, the official study of the Shroud. Really, it has its own ology? S-I-N-D-O-N, ology. Nice. We all know how to spell that, O-L-O-G-I-E.

Right. Well, if you want to know more about the Shroud, like we said, go start searching and welcome to the rabbit hole. Go see the thing. Yeah, in person. Why not? I totally would if I was near Turin.

There's steamers that go to Italy still. And since we said Italy, it's time for Listener Man. I'm gonna call this Divorce Upcoming. Hey guys, my wife Jade and I are huge fans of the show and listen almost every night before bed. But we don't like each other. We have our favorite S-Y-S-K moments,

but one that made us both laugh like crazy was Chuck's nerdgasm toward the end of the action figures episode. We rewound the podcast and listened to that part so often. I decided to take a clip, make a clip of it and set it as my alarm clock tone. Sound files attached is very short, but played on a loop 15 to 20 times at 7.30 a.m.

and you will get the full effect. Now we wake up to your voices as well as falling asleep to them. Long may your great show continue, David. He didn't leave his wife's name, but David and, oh yeah, Jade, in Newcastle, England. And let's just play this really quick. Let's play it like five times to get the full effect.

Let's hear it. Go, real, go, real, go, real, go, real, go, real. Wow. That would wake me up. I'd sit pulled up right and be like, not again. Yeah, that's, yeah, good luck with the divorce. Sorry, Jade and David. Thanks, Jade and David.

You could also bring them together, you know? What, in opposition against us? Sure, okay. Thanks, David and Jade. Or, Jade, that's your couple name now. And, Jade. Yeah, either one's good. I like it.

If you wanna get in touch with us like Jade and David did, yeah, you can tweet to us at SYSKpodcaster. I'm also at Josh on Clark. Chuck's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant and at stuffyoushouldknowonfacebook.com. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

["House Stuff Works"] For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, hey dude, the 90's called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

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