The Confessionals - 782: Shroud of Turin The Evidence That Changes History

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

What if a centuries-old cloth truly held the face, blood, and story of the most pivotal death in history? After seeing it with your own eyes, could you walk away unchanged? In this riveting account, biblical apologist Doug Powell unpacks the Shroud of Turin, and the lesser known Sudarium of Oviedo, revealing a labyrinth of historical intrigue, forensic detail, and mind-bending scientific puzzles. Medieval power struggles, pollen trails leading back to Jerusalem, and anatomical precision that mirrors the Gospel accounts of crucifixion converge into a body of evidence with startling clarity. With each revelation, the shroud moves out of legend and into the realm of tangible history, carrying the haunting possibility that it may be the very burial cloth of Christ. By the end, the question is no longer whether you believe in the shroud, it’s whether you can ignore what it implies about the Resurrection itself.Please pray for Tony's wife, Lindsay, as she battles breast cancer. Your prayers make a difference!If you’re able, consider helping the Merkel family with medical expenses by donating to Lindsay’s GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b8f76890Tony's Recommended Reads: slingshotlibrary.comBecome a member for ad-free listening, extra shows, and exclusive access to our social media app: theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinThe Confessionals Social Network App:Apple Store: https://apple.co/3UxhPrhGoogle Play: https://bit.ly/43mk8kZMy New YouTube ChannelMerkel IRL: @merkelIRLMy First Sermon: Unseen BattlesOriginal Documentaries: merkelfilms.comMerkel Media Apparel: merkmerch.comDoug Powell: www.dougpowell.comSPONSORSSIMPLISAFE TODAY: simplisafe.com/confessionalsGHOSTBED: GhostBed.com/tonyCONNECT WITH USWebsite: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: [e-mail] ADDRESS:Merkel Media257 N. Calderwood St., #301Alcoa, TN 37701SOCIAL MEDIASubscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaIReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/theconfessionals/Discord: https://discord.gg/KDn4D2uw7hShow Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's Instagram: tonymerkelofficialFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcasTwitter: @TConfessionalsTony's Twitter: @tony_merkelOUTRO MUSICJoel Thomas - ImposterYouTube | Apple Music | Spotify

Hey, everyone, before we get to this week's show, this is just your weekly reminder to please continue to pray for my wife, Lindsay. She is battling breast cancer right now, and we're praying for complete healing in Jesus' name. Thank you. Merkel. Media's here. This was all circulating around the base that a giant had been killed, but no one was supposed to talk about it. I saw three long, bony fingers, reach up underneath the door, curl up to grab it, and then disappear. When he came over to me, dude, he slithered over to me.

And this giant comes out of the cave and they're all frozen. And he starts running and firing up this giant. With a giant move, he's got a spear in one hand, and he's running really fast. And spears, Dan, holds him up like this. Somebody else, shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face. They basically decapitated. And I look over and there are two small, gray and fatigue. And they're literally, I'm getting pulled off the bed.

It's Bush and I touch air. Couldn't breathe and I couldn't move because I know I'm seeing a monster. Welcome to the show, everybody you're listening to The Confessionals Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Merkel. Thanks for being here. If you have something you think would be interesting to talk about on the show, go ahead and shoot me an email. My email address is contact at theconfessionalspodcast.com. That's contact at the confessionalspodcast.com. Or go to the website, theconfessionalspodcast.com. Hit the contact section. and you can reach me that way as well. Either it works for me, just get a hold of me. If you want more episodes every week,

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slash join, become a member today, and get access to all that extra good stuff. All right, friends, listen, murkmerch.com is where you can get your Merkle Media apparel. We're restocking the shelves right now. I'm very excited to say that. And also go ahead and check out Merkelfilms.com for our on-demand streaming service, documentaries, docuseries, a lot of episodic things coming to that platform. Merklefilms.com on-demand streaming. All right, friends, today is a little bit of a different episode because I actually traveled to

do this one. You see, I've been longing to do a Shroud of Turin episode. If you don't know what the shroud of Turin in, essentially it's claimed to have been the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. And it has some supernatural things about it, some supernatural origins and mysteries behind it as to how we got it. How do we even know that this is the burial cloth? In fact, the main mystery of the burial cloth is the fact that it has an image imprinted on it of a man's face and body. that is said to be Jesus Christ himself. And nobody knows how it got there. But this is an episode that I can't just do with anybody.

It had to be the right person. And I felt like I found the right person. But he said to me, listen, I can come to your studio and I can do this interview and record with you about the shroud. Or you can come to me and we can do this entire interview in front of a life-size replica of the shroud of turn. And I was like, say less, my friend. So I packed up the gear, packed up the crew, and we traveled to do this one.

So if you want to see this interview, I highly suggest you check out the YouTube channel today at noon Eastern time is when it's going to be premiering. But if you want to listen to the interview, you're at the right spot. The Shrout of Turin, all its mysteries right here with Doug Powell. Let's get to it right now. Doug Powell, how are you, sir? I'm good. Thanks for having me. I'm super glad to have you.

And actually, I think you're having me because I am having you. Yes, I've traveled. In fact, this is the first time I stepped outside the studio to do a recording specifically for this show. And I reached out to you because I'm heavily interested in biblical archaeology. And I'm fascinated by it. And it's like a renewed fascination for me because my son, who is going to be turning 8 in December, is extremely fascinated by such things. And so it's kind of given us things to talk about on the way to school.

And I started looking at the shroud. And then suddenly the shroud started popping up in news circles recently. And it just became like this obsession of mine. I'm like, I got to find somebody to talk to. And you popped on my radar. And not only did you pop on my radar, you said, I have a life-size replica of the shroud of turn if you come to me. And I said, absolutely, here we are.

So if you could, as we get into the topic of conversation, lay the groundwork as to who, who you are and why should people even consider listening to what you have to say about the shroud? Well, I have a master's degree in Christian apologetics from Biola University. And I went through that program about 20 years ago. And one of the professors that I had was Gary Habermas, who is one of the experts and the historical evidence for the resurrection. And one day, I think he was going off-scrifice.

he started talking about the shroud. And that was something that I have always been interested in, but I never did a super deep dive because I heard so many incredible things about it that I thought, I don't even know really how to tell the good sources from the bad sources. And he turned out to be my guide into the good sources. And so I got far more interested in it as a result of that because I had some trustworthy sources to look into.

And then from there, a few years ago, I wrote a novel that had to do with the shroud and another cloth that's associated with the shroud we'll probably talk about. And again, interviewed Habermass for a podcast that I did. And then that turned into talking to one of the members of the scientific team from 1978, who was part of the most, that team was the most intensive scientific study of the

shroud ever done. And he was one of the photographers on the team. And he's the guy who took the picture of the shroud that we have here. This is a photograph printed on cotton that is a life size photograph, one-to-one replica. So it's almost 15 feet long and three-and-three-quarters feet wide. And I got it from him. And then I discovered there was some postgraduate work that could be done on the shroud. And I went through that program. And he was one of my professors for that. So it just, it became, I became aware of it through the master studies. And then it became more of a side interest and then turned into another academic pursuit as a result of that. And so you've spent a long time studying the shroud and this, you have to be fascinated by it.

I mean, you don't study this kind of thing for so long without being fascinated by it. Yeah. Now, for people who maybe don't know anything about what we're about to get into, what is the shroud of turn and how did it come into, I guess, relevance, maybe the right word? it's not just something that people found hidden away somewhere. This is something that's been passed around throughout the millennia. And what's the significance of this shroud? Well, the belief is that this is the burial shroud of Jesus. And this is what was discovered in the tomb,

in the account of the discovery of the empty tomb in John 20. And it showed up, it first appears in Europe in about 1315. and it just seems to historically almost appear out of the blue. It's not explained where it came from or anything like that. The knight who showed it didn't explain it. He just presented it as the burial shroud of Jesus. And what fascinated people about it, what gave it a sense of believability is when you're looking at the shroud,

if this is the first time you've ever seen it, there is a vague figure of a man on it, both the front and back figure of a man, but the front and the back meet in the middle. So the front side is the left side as we've presented it with the face here in the middle, and then the backside of the head starts in the middle and goes that way. So you can see the backside of a body outline and the front side of a body outline here. It looks like there's blood stains on both sides of it, And that's about as much as, that's about as much as anybody knew.

And that's about as much as you could know. Now, there's way more stuff, obviously, visually on the shroud than just that body. And that's because of all the different damages it's received over the years. And I can kind of walk you through what some of that is. And some of it becomes evidentially very important. But that's really all you could know about it, is that it is this mysterious burial shroud that just suddenly appears. And there's a body on it. And it was very famous.

It was very well known. It was not without controversy. There were some naysayers around it. It wasn't like everybody instantly accepted it. And, of course, then there's controversy throughout the Reformation about relics. their authenticity and things like that. And so this was part of that conversation as well. But in 1898, it was on display in Turin, Italy.

So it's usually rolled up or was folded up or is not always on display. So they would have exhibitions every so often. And so it's not very common for it to be on display. It's actually pretty rare. But when it is, it's a big deal. What's that? Is it still to this day? Or is it on display completely to this day?

It is not on display to this day. You can see the reliquary in a side chapel in the cathedral in turn, the cathedral of John the Baptist. But the reliquary, it's a high-tech reliquary that controls the light and the atmosphere and things like that. But it is covered in a cloth so you cannot see it. You can see it. It looks like a big conference table almost. So it doesn't even appear like a traditional reliquary. So it just looks like a big, long conference table covered in what looks like, you know, a cloth for an altar.

So you can't go up and see it. You can go to it, but you can't actually see it. So when it's on display, it's a very big deal. But in 1898, it was on display. And at that time, the church thought, well, it would be nice to have some kind of commemorative card or something that people can get. And so for the very first time, they did an official photograph of the shroud. And the guy who took the photographs, Secundapia, was a local lawyer who had a camera and knew how to use it. And at that time, cameras were very expensive and photography was highly technical.

So hardly anybody could afford to do it or knew how to do it. But he had one and had the know-how, and he was a supporter of the shroud. And so this became very important because, At the time, okay, so everybody who remembers the era before digital phones, you know, you used to have to have, in your camera, you had film in the back of it. You can't just like instantly take a photo. So when you have film in the back of the camera, when you take a picture of something, you have this light sensitive film in the back of the camera. So whatever you take a picture of, whatever it is that's light turns dark on the film and whatever is dark turns light on the film. so you have a light and dark reversal,

so it's known as a negative. And that's what you take into a dark room, and then you would develop it, and then you would pass light through it, and it would flip light back around onto photographic paper, and that's how you got a picture, which was a big, long process. But the point is what's in the back of the camera

on the film is a light and dark negative. It's an exact reversal of the light and dark of what you see and with the naked eye. So when Seconda Pia took this photograph, his camera was about the size of a refrigerator that you see in a motel or something or hotel. So it was this gigantic wooden box that with the front and back was connected by like an accordion, and that's how you focus this thing. And instead of film, it used glass plates that were about 20 inches square

and covered with light sensitive chemicals that weren't super light sensitive. It required a long exposure to make an image. So they hired him to go take this photograph. and so after everybody who comes to see the shroud for the day leaves, he gets in there at night. And it's in order to fit this into the frame of the camera, it's the camera had to be about 25 feet out in front of it and on top of a 10-foot-tall platform.

And then he had the problem of light because the cathedral didn't have any electricity at the time. So they had to bring in electric genital. generators, and this became one of the first photographs ever taken with electric light. And to get enough light to make the picture, he did two different pictures. One was a 12-minute-long exposure, and one was a 20-minute-long exposure. And then he takes the glass plates back to his dark room, and when he developed them, it was completely counterintuitive because, I'll show you on the screen here,

What he saw, the negative image of this image right here turns out to be the positive image of the body. So as you see on the screen over here, that, hold on a second, it is not there anymore. Okay. So you can see that the negative image on the shroud, it shows. a positive image of the man. So it's absolutely counterintuitive. And not only that, so he's totally startled by this, because this is the last thing you would expect to see, but not only that, but the shroud itself, the man in the shroud is not only in a positive, but you can see all sorts of details that you can't see with the negative eye. So what it means is the image that

you're looking at on the shroud with the naked eye has the same properties as a negative image of a man. So the negative image of what we're looking at with our naked eye is the positive image of the man. None of it makes sense. But not only that, but when you look at it in negative, which is the positive of the body, you can see all sorts of details that you can't see otherwise. So he believed he was the first person to see the face of Jesus in almost 2,000 years. And this became a very famous image. So the shroud, which was already famous, just got it ramped up into a whole new level of fame because this was an extraordinary image here.

But the most interesting thing about having an image like this is now people, scientists and medical professionals could have, could study it, this body, and in a way that you can't over here. So it was almost like you could do a forensic analysis of the body, or at least of the photograph of the body. And so at this moment, at the moment of the first photograph, the shroud moves outside of just being a relic, it becomes an object of scientific investigation. And so it's not merely a relic. It is an artifact. And this is one of the things that makes it unique because there's only two relics that are actually artifacts. Because, you know, if you think about any other relic that you know of, you know, alleged piece of wood from the cross or a bone of, you know, one of the apostles or

whatever, even if they're authentic, there's no way you could demonstrate it. There's no test you could do. And this is what makes the shroud unique and the other cloth that we're going to talk about as well probably. So it starts the age of scientific investigation into the shroud in 1898. And what it shows is this negative image that shows the positive image of the man shows that the body has been brutalized and tortured in all the same ways that you read about that happened to Jesus and the Gospels. And so you do you want me to walk you through the wounds? Because this is where it takes it from just an image of a man to actually pointing to a historical figure. Right.

This is where you can say, oh, this was what Christ was buried in. And it's, okay, you know, there's a face there, fine. But how do we know? And then when you start taking all these information, it becomes, for me, undeniable. Well, you know, this is where it moves out of the realm of mere relic into, an object of real scientific inquiry and not just from believers, not from Christians, but from it, it can be, there are a lot of people who have investigated the shroud that are not believers. And it's a totally legitimate object of inquiry for them. And that's what,

it's one of the things that makes it so fascinating. So when you're, when you're looking at the positive image of the body now, we'll start at the, the back of the head here. So you can see that what appears to be blood with the naked eye on the shroud, it shows up as white on this negative image because it's dense and it's dark. And the thing that is in reverse is the body, not the actual blood. So the body is still in the body is what gets reversed. The blood has, it appears white on this negative now. So if you look at the back of the head area, You can see there are a number of rivulets of blood that look like they come from small, superficial wounds.

And if you look at the front, you see the same sort of wounds over here. And this is what you would expect to find left from a crown of thorns if the crown of thorns is not made like a wreath, but it's more the form of a helmet or a dome. Which is what we have here. What we have right here. It would be something more like that. Because it appears to be about 50 different wounds all over the head, front back, top. So on that note, was there any historical evidence of anybody else receiving a crown of thorns?

No. This is a unique feature of Jesus's crucifixion. There were other, remember, he's being mocked for being the king of the Jews. And there were other people who were insurrectionists, who were crucified, of course, but they weren't given a crown of thorns or mocked for being, you know, a wannabe king or anything like that. This is totally unique to Jesus. And so when we see the crown of thorns traditionally in our culture, it's always depicted as a wreath. Do you have any idea where that depiction came from to what we have here as a replica, which looks more like a helmet?

I do not. If there's an explanation for that, I don't know what it is. I can spitball for you. Sure. Okay. So, and this may not be the case. Okay. So a relic in Notre Dame in Paris of the crown of thorns exists there. And if you see it, it is more like a hoop. And most of the thorns are gone off of it. But that's what gets preserved. So if that really is, let's say it's authentic. It doesn't mean that's the whole of what was the crown of thorns. It may be parts of it. Okay. There's evidence just historically that thorns were broken off and sent off in different places in reliquaries.

But let's say this really was an actual part of the crown of thorns. It doesn't mean it was merely this kind of wreath or halo type of shape. But in order to make the helmet, that is the base that holds the rest of the thorn branches that bend around it. So it may be that that's what is survived if it's authentic. There's no way to know. What test are you going to do? I think that's, it's something that, I mean, I've never even considered questioning, like, until I saw the replica, I was thinking, helmet.

Interesting, you know? But it makes sense. I was talking to, I think I was talking to either my wife or my brother yesterday about this. And, you know, it's even more violent when you think about Reef versus Helmet, because they're abusing this man. and if you make this helmet, I imagine you can put a lot more pressure on it by using a helmet by hitting it onto the head

or something like that, instead of just trying to push it down onto somebody's head. They weren't doing it gently. And so when you're talking about a man who went through a very violent death, like wearing a helmet of thorns, it seems excruciatingly painful. Right, yeah. And, you know, some replicas have really long thorns as well.

several different kind of species of plants that make thorns around that area. So we don't really know what kind. You know, these are pretty modest thorns I have on here. But when you're talking about your head, it doesn't take much. Your head bleeds so easily. And so it doesn't matter if it's a big thorn or a little thorn. As long as you've got thorns, it's not pretty. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I didn't need a sidetrack there. I just, curiosity. No, another thing you see. is, there is, you can see the man in the shroud has long hair. And it's almost in the form of a ponytail.

And we'll talk more about this later. We don't know if it's, if he wore it stylistically as a ponytail or it's just gathered together for a reason I'll explain later. There's evidence of abrasions on the shoulders. And this is consistent with where abrasions would be for somebody who carried the crossbeam of a cross to a place of crucifixion. most of the times a place of crucifixion would have the vertical beam already there, the stipees, and so the victim would be forced to carry the cross beam, the pitibulum. They wouldn't carry the whole cross.

That would weigh almost 300 pounds or so. So you just physically couldn't do it. But they would be forced most of the time to carry the cross beam. So that's the kind of wounds that would be left. You can see that the back is covered in these hash marks that you also see on. the front. And this is consistent with wounds that would be left from a Roman scourge, but it wouldn't be a scourge light. So scourges could have a couple different forms. So a scourge would be a Roman, a wooden handle, and it would have thongs of leather coming

off the end of it, three of them that are about 18 inches long. And then at the end of it, sometimes they had sharp things embedded in the end, like you see in Passion of the Christ. So it's pieces of glass or metal or rock or whatever that would embed in the flesh of the victim and then strip away flesh. And it was very violent and brutal. And people died from scourging. But another way that a scourge could be made is with dull pieces at the end. So things like sheep bones or almost like lead sinkers at the end. And there'd be pairs of them or three of them at the end.

And they would tenderize the skin and creep these very very. deep contusions that would eventually break the surface. That's what you see are these barbell shapes all over. And so we have a Roman scourge replica over here with the lead weights at the bottom, which would be possibly what was used to make these marks. There's over 200 on the back, over 150 of them on the front. And you can't see the sides of the man. And these are the wounds that show up.

So, you know, you got to figure with a weapon like that, There were marks made that didn't show up at first. So he's probably quipped more than 350 times to get those wounds. You can see the rear end of the man in the shroud is not flattened out under the body weight, which indicates that the body's in rigor mortis. So the muscles have stiffened up, which happens between two and 48 hours after death. And it just depends on environmental factors, but it shows that the man in the shroud is dead. If you go over to the front side, there is an apparent blood wound here between the fifth and sixth rib.

See how the blood is the way it's dripping out and you can see it drip into the small of the back here. It's not being pumped out. It's oozing out, which indicates the man in the shroud is dead. The heart's not beating. And if you look very closely right at that front angled tip there, that would be the wound. And you can see it close up over here. That is the size of a Roman spear tip, which we have a replica of right there, about four centimeters.

And this, well, I'll come back to that in a minute. You can see that there's a wound on the wrist, which is right in the local. that would support the body weight of a crucifixion victim. So the nail would go in at the top of the wrist and that's where it has to be in order to support the body weight. If you put the nail in the palm, the body just slips right through it. So the nail would go through there. We have a replica nail right there. And so you see a wound in the correct place for crucifixion. And you also see blood running down toward the elbow on the back side of the arm. So the arms are about in a 15 to 20 degree angle, which is the location of the arms in a crucifixion victim.

Also, you cannot see the thumb at all because the nerve damage from the nail going through the wrist would cause the thumb to turn in, probably. So you can't see the thumb there. And then look how anatomically correct everything is, except the arms are too long. The arms are too long for probably for a couple of reasons. First, the body is not laying flat. The man is in rigor mortis, so the knees are slightly bent and he's slightly rocked forward, still maintaining mostly the position of the cross, even though his arms had been moved in. So his arms would be moved down his body a little bit.

But secondly, there is evidence in one of the shoulders that we can see that the shoulders are dislocated, which is what usually happens to a crucifixion victim. Because they are laid out at the spot of crucifixion. They're laid out on the cross beam. They're nailed to the cross beam. And then the cross beam is lifted up and it slid into place onto the vertical one. And that jolts the shoulders probably to the point where they dislocate. Even if they don't dislocate at that point, they may dislocate while the victim is hanging there.

And so what happens is the chest begins to crush the lungs and the victim can't breathe. They're asphyxating. and plus the mechanism of the physical mechanism of breathing where the diaphragm is constricting in order to exhale, everything gets reversed. So at this point, the victim is asphyxating and they cannot exhale. So the instinct is to pull up on the wrist in order to lift the weight off the chest,

but they can't do it because their shoulders are dislocated. they don't have any leverage. Even if their shoulders aren't dislocated, I mean, think about how hard that is. You can only do that for a few times. And so the victim's going to die less than 15 minutes from asphyxiation. So the only thing they would have to give themselves leverage to lift the weight off of the lungs is when the nail is going through the feet. And so they press up on the nail and then they are able to exhale and then get a bruce. breath and come back down again. And so the cycle begins. And you can see that there is blood on both

the front and back of the feet that is in the spot where a nail would be. Wow. What are the, because I was always told that, I don't want to say I was always, I heard somewhere that most crucifixion victims were tied to the cross and not nailed. Is there, is there statistical odds of this being even more so Christ being nailed to a cross versus being tied to the cross? Or was it always something that people were nailed to the cross? There's no manual for how to do these things. So there's variety. There's variety in how the cross was formed.

Some are capital T's. Some are lowercase T's. Some are X's. Some are just, there's no T at all. They're crucified on a pole. Some were crucified on a tree. There's all sorts of ways it could be done. So there's no set standard way to do it necessarily.

However, you're right. There were a couple different ways ropes were used. Sometimes nails weren't used at all. They were only ropes. Because if you think about it, the nails through your wrists or your feet, that doesn't kill you. being put in that position, you are in a position where you're slowly asphyxating and all sorts of other factors start to come into play as well that we'll talk about in a minute. Sometimes there were nails used and ropes at the same time because there was so much pressure put on the nails by the body that the wrist would pop off the nail heads, the body would flop forward. And so sometimes ropes were used just to fortify the arms to the nails.

So it's a yes, no, and both. Wow. I mean, the way we're talking about this crucifixion, I mean, if anybody has seen the passion of a Christ, they can visually see it. But maybe anybody who maybe hasn't seen it, you know, it was made, what, 20 years ago? This really kind of paints a picture of how violent this crucifixion process was. I mean, I had never heard anybody talk about the shoulders being dislocated during the process. And, you know, as a sports fan, you see players have a dislocated shoulder and you're just like, oh, that looks painful. Try having both of them while they're trying to kill you.

I mean, it's just, it's such a painful process that I think growing up, you have this almost like censored version of it where it's just like, you know, we knew he was tied to or nailed to the cross, but it's, it was just, you know, tap, tap, nail it to the cross, and he hung there and probably starved the death or something. Like, it wasn't like this violent thing until you start really looking into the details of it. And the shroud not only backs it up, but visually gives you that depiction of what is documented as to what happened to him. Yeah, it makes it much more concrete. Yeah, absolutely. It puts the horror back into it, for sure. Yeah. So we have all these markings, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the lashes on the body, the blood marks. What else, what other things about this would you like to go

into as far as, I know you talk about the statistical odds of these wounds being on this body versus maybe other crucifixions and stuff, but I find that very interesting because... You want to know the odds? I do. All right, let's do the odds. So the odds come from several people have run the odds here. And of course, these are estimates that are done. And the way the odds get run are several features, specific features of the shroud are assigned statistical probabilities.

And then you multiply them all together, and that's how you get the odds. So I believe the oldest ones come from that professor I had, Gary Habermas, who co-wrote a book with the communications director. For that group of scientists, I mentioned, the Shrout of Turin Research Project, are also called the Sturp Team. They have two books together, and so they calculated the odds. Because, you know, a lot of people got crucified. So what are the odds that this is Jesus, if so many people were crucified in the ancient world?

So to answer that, they chose these seven different features and gave them probabilities, which they then made even more conservative. So these are incredibly conservative numbers in their view. So they, for example, they show the Crown of Thorns. They give that a 1 in 400, considering that's the only person we know of, crucified with the Crown of Thorns. That's pretty conservative.

They show that the shroud has no evidence of decomposition. So they're looking for liquefaction, putification coming out of the mucus membrane and the nose in the mouth. That hasn't happened. There's no evidence of that. They give that a one in ten. The spear wound in the side, they give one in 27. Remember, that was done by Roman soldier in order to see if Jesus was dead or not.

Well, he didn't have to use a sword, and he didn't have to do it in that spot or he didn't have to use a spear. So, you know, he could have done a test in a bunch of different ways. but this is how he does it. They give it a one in 27. We just talked about ropes or not on the crucifixion. So some people, again, were crucified without nails, and some had ropes and nails. There is neither on the man in the shroud, and you don't read about either.

And the Gospels, they give that a one and two. Scourge marks, they give one and two. Almost everybody who was condemned to crucifixion was scourged beforehand. the reason being it weakened the victim significantly, because, like I said, people died during scourging. So you had blood loss and shock and all sorts of things that you're suffering from as a result of scourging. But that weakened a victim when they were put on to the cross.

So if a crucifixion victim was not scourged beforehand, and they were well hydrated and well-nourished and in good health, they could last upwards of a week. Wow. It took that long to die for some people. And so the scourging, as brutal as it was, and it was brutal, in a way, it lessened the time on the cross. I mean, not in a way.

That's what it was designed to do. In Jesus' case, the scourging that Pilate gives him is to get him out of the crucifixion. Remember, he's not condemned. He's not scourged because he's condemned at the cross. He's scourged to keep him off the cross, and yet the crowd still wants him crucified. So he ends up having both anyway. So more people were scourged before they were crucified than not. So they give that a one and two.

That's why that one is un-conservative. No broken legs on the man in the shroud or in the gospel accounts. The idea here is that if a Roman soldier want to... to hasten the execution of someone, they would break their shins so they couldn't raise themselves off the, you know, they could breathe and they would die within a few minutes. And we read that happening to the two other people crucified with Jesus, but not with Jesus. So one in three. And then the most conservative number is the buried in a linen shroud, which they give one in eight.

The reason why that's the most conservative is because when people were crucified during the time of insurrection, they were just left on the cross to rot as a warning to not challenge Rome. And during peacetime, the crucifixion victims were almost never given back to the family. Instead, they were thrown into a shallow common grave. and they were just erased from history, essentially. However, there were times when the bodies were given back, but it was very rare. So think about it this way. Crucifixion was a punishment for about 1,000 years, about 750 years of that were the Romans did it. And during that 1,000-year period, there's an estimated 2 billion people who lived.

So half of them are men. And just the best guess anybody's got is that about one in a hundred people were one and a hundred men were crucified. So there were a lot of crucifixion victims. And yet, archaeologically, there are only four remains of crucifixion victims that have ever been found. Only two are from the first century. And only one is from the area around Jerusalem. So the bodies were rarely given back, although it did. It did happen because we've got evidence of one. And in fact, the heel bone of that victim with the nail going through it, we have a museum quality replica right there. That's the thing at the end there. So it did happen. But it was far less common than one in eight, which is what they've assigned it. And the thing is you can't bury a body in the linen shroud unless you get the body back. and people very rarely got the body back.

So you take all those numbers and you multiply them together and you get one in almost 83 million. It could be anybody other than Jesus. The other number I'll show you comes from Bruno Barbaris. He's a mathematical physicist who is an expert in the Shrout of Turin.

And he ran some of the same features. He gives Crown of Thorns one in 5,000, no decomposition, one in 500. He includes the feature that the victim carried the cross. gives that one and two. Not everybody was in good enough shape to carry the cross beam at that point. The spear wound, he gives one in ten.

He's more conservative. He has hasty burial on here. So the condition of the body of this, what appears to be a Jewish man, is not totally in conformity with the Jewish burial customs of the first century. So it looks like it's partially dead. done so that maybe somebody is going to come back later and do it for whatever reason. So it looks like a partial burial, that they're not quite done. In his view, he gives that a one in 20.

Crucified with nails, that's the same thing as without ropes. And then he gives the linen shroud one in a hundred. With those numbers, you get one in 200 billion that it could be anybody other than Jesus, which is a statistical certainty. Yeah. So for whatever that's worth. his numbers, it's like impossible to not being Christ. Now you're in OJ's glove, you know, DNA territory there. Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard to plausibly go anywhere else with it.

Wow. That's incredible. So, and he was a mathematician. He's a mathematical physicist. Mathematical physicist. And, and he was a believer in the shroud. He is a believer in the, he's still live, he was one of my professors. Okay. Wow. That's incredible. And so it's actually his, his numbers are a lot less conservative. Yeah. And, uh, well, let's say he's,

let's say he's overestimating it. I'm not saying that, but let's just, for the sake of argument, say he's overestimating it by a factor of 10. Yeah. Well, that just lessens it to one in 20 billion. Let's say it overestimates it by 100. Now it's one in two billion, right? Yeah.

So, If these numbers are anywhere close to representative of the actual odds, then it's pretty compelling. Wow, that's incredible. So I come out here to talk to you about The Shroud, and you introduced me to a whole other piece of the puzzle, this piece of fabric that I had heard whispers of, but I had no idea I was going to get a chance to look at today that actually complements the shroud. And in my mind, doubles down the authenticity of the shroud. And I just, I feel like we got to talk about that because if we're here trying to show people why the shroud is what tradition and history says it is, I think this other cloth holds a huge key to that. Okay, so what do you know about the other cloth?

Where have you heard about the other cloth? You. So essentially it's been you. I'm drawing a blank of what it's called again. What is it called? The Sudarium. The Suderium. Of Oviedo.

Of Oviedo. Yeah, which sounds like it's like out of Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or something. Yeah. And so, I mean, I guess the only thing that I've ever heard of it would be out of Scripture. But historically and stuff, I don't recall hearing people talk about it a whole lot. So in Scripture, we read about a face cloth that was found at the, the same time as the burial cloth in John 20. So when Peter and John go into the tomb, they find the burial clothes, and then they find the face cloth laying to the side. You see that in John

25 through 7. That's the account of it. And where we see face cloth in English, the Greek word is pseudarian, and that's a lone word from Latin, which means pseudarium. And a pseudarium is just a sweat cloth. That's what the word means. And in the first century Roman Empire, most of it was really hot and really dirty and it was just something you carried around to kind of keep yourself clean. You know, it's almost like, you know, football quarterback with the, with their, you know, they're wiping their hands on the, on their towel, right? That's stuck into their uniform. It's kind of like that. You can imagine it's about the size of a pillowcase. It is just kind of a low quality piece of linen. And this face cloth is believed to have been wrapped around the head of

Jesus when he died on the cross. And there is a city in Spain in northern Spain called Oviedo. It's about 200,000 people. And the cathedral there believes they have the pseudarium that was wrapped around Jesus' head when he died on the cross. And so we have a ruptuble. And so we have a replica of that as well. And there is no image on it like there is on the shroud, but there are a bunch of stains on it. And the stains, once you kind of familiarize yourself with them, they match what you see on the shroud. It's pretty fascinating. The stains map to both the face and the wounds on the back of the shroud in a pretty compelling exact way. So the pseudarium is the only other relic that has kind of transcended that realm of relics

and become an object of scientific inquiry as well regardless of what you believe. Regardless of religious convictions, you can study this as a scientist. And one of the things that has been discovered is that, well, okay, in the 1978 investigation of the shroud, the stuff that looks like blood on the shroud, okay, this is one of the things they had to figure out, is it really blood? Turns out it's actually blood, and it's human blood, and it's type A-B. And that's the rarest blood type, but it is three times more common in Mediterranean Jews than it is in Europeans. So it's also post-mortem blood, which they can tell because under UV light, they can see that the serum is separated from the red blood cells. So they know it's post-mortem blood. And they also know that the blood coming out of the side wound here is a mixture of blood with pulmonary edema, six parts pulmonary adema and one part blood.

That's the fluid that builds up in the lungs during asphyxiation. And so that corresponds with what a crucifixion victim is suffering. And when you look at the pseudarium and the stains on the pseudarium, those stains turn out to be made by human blood. That's type A, B, and is post-mortem blood, and is six parts pulmonary edema and one part and one part blood, with the exception of the what appears to be

where it touched the back of the head, and in that case it's life blood. So it was actually blood that was shed while the victim was still alive. That's incredible. And so

this behind me gives us a direct link to the shroud It seems to, yes. Okay, so am I taking a liberty of saying that? Well, there is, there's compelling evidence for the authenticity of both of these things, but there's not dead certain, like, proof. There's always going to be wiggle room.

Yeah. Okay. So when you hear me talk about the shroud, I'm convinced it's Jesus, but I'm not a hundred percent certain, but I'm next door to it. But if it turns out to not be, nothing in my theology is, you know, or destroyed or anything like that. Okay, my faith doesn't depend on whether this is real. But I only refer to this is the man on the shroud. Because we don't know. Right. But I mean, the more that you learn about, the more compelling it is that it's Jesus. But you never want, I don't want to overstate the case because as you can tell, both you and I are fascinated by this thing.

And there's so much evidence. And it's so exciting to learn through credible, to learn this credible evidence that you get tempted to overstate the case. And a lot of people do. And I don't want to be one of them. So I'm because I think the most powerful case for the shroud and the Sudarium is the most modest case. Because the most modest case is still so compelling. that you don't have to overstate it. If you undersell it and you still get that degree of compelling evidence, then that's where I want to go with this. The odds of AB blood type being on both claws alone brings it down to such a narrow margin, right?

Oh, yeah, I don't even know what the odds are. But, you know, I think it's 10% or less, people in the world have a type A-B. So, you know, rarest is not like ultra-rare, but when you start to think, well, these two claws, you know, what are the odds of that? You know, the first thing that the skeptics of the shroud will often try to come up with some other, some method of being able to recreate it. And there are accounts in the Middle Ages and during the Reformation where there are even claims that this was painted.

The image of the body was painted. So in 1978, the Sturp team investigation, they had over two dozen different tests that they did. Like I said, it was the most rigorous scientific investigation ever done on the shroud. And it's where we have most of our information still to this day. But the main question that everybody hoped would be answered is, how was the image made? And the answer they came up with was, we have no idea. They don't know. But they do know conclusively what didn't make it.

And it's not paint, stain, dye, any sort of chemicals, no scorching. You cannot recreate this image. using any sort of known artistic or biological means. Can't be done. The image can't be made that way. But the reason why I bring this up is because we were talking about the blood.

So one of the things that people have said is that, well, there's trace elements of medieval paint on the blood, on the shroud. And so we know that there's paint on the shroud. And so skeptics to this day, say that. And that is absolutely true. There is trace elements. There are trace elements of iron oxide, which was an ingredient in medieval paint on the blood of the shroud. But what they do not, but the skeptics don't tell you is that there are also trace elements of paint where the image of the body is,

but there's no blood, and there's trace elements of paint where there's no blood and no body. It's kind of uniformly found, but there's so little of it, you might be able to recreate one blood drop using the amount of trace elements of paint that they have found. And so there are a couple of ways of thinking through this claim of the paint on there. The main one is that when the shroud became well known in Europe, the owners allowed replicas to be made of the shroud that were painted, that were then laid directly face to face onto the shroud as a way of blessing or sanctifying them,

and it's probably contamination from that. Because the way the image exists on the shroud is nothing was deposited into the cloth in order to make the shroud. Okay, so if you were going to paint or stain it or use any sort of pigment or any sort of dye or chemical or oils or whatever, you're putting, you're adding to the cloth. And that means if you took the shroud and you backlit it, you would be able to still see the outline of the body because it's

deposits on the cloth that are creating the image. But if you do that, the only thing that shows up are the blood stains. You don't ever see the body. Because what the Sturp team discovered is that the not only is none of that stuff present, that what is creating the image on the, the physical properties of the image on the shroud is that it's a degradation of the linen. And that it only is a degradation in the outermost fibrals of the linen thread. So the linen thread is, it's not just one thing. A thread is two or three hundred micro fibroles of material kind of spun together.

And what they discovered is that the image is only present on the outermost fibroles of the thread, and they don't penetrate at all. Paint, stain, pigment, dye, oils, they will all penetrate and be absorbed into the material, into the thread doesn't happen on the shroud. And so if you look at the screen, what I've got is in order to understand just how superficial the image is. A human hair is about 60 microns in diameter.

A linen fibril on the shroud is 10 to 15 fibrils, so a quarter of that size. And the image penetrates 0.2 microns. Okay? So that's actually, I've got that size on the screen, it looks like a pixels out. You probably can't even see it on camera. It's that small.

That's how far it penetrates. And what's fascinating about it is that on the shroud, the image that we're looking at of the body, if you look at the backside of the image and you went around to the backside of the actual shroud, the body isn't there. Okay, it's only on this side of the material. As far as the front side of the body goes, if you look at the back side of the shroud, it does, the face area does come through a little bit and also one of the hands does. So there is a double image on it on the front side, but not on the backside,

but there's no change to the cloth in the middle of the cloth. Wow. It doesn't penetrate. It's on the surrogate. superficial parts of both sides of the face and the hands, but not in the middle. So it doesn't absorb all the way through. You can't recreate it. That's the thing.

And think about this. Let's see you did paint the, if you were going to fake the shroud, what you would do, at least intuitively, you would paint the body and then you would paint the blood in place on the body. so it's in an accurate position. But the body doesn't appear beneath the blood stains. There is no change under the blood stains because the blood stains get deposited onto the cloth first. So whatever makes the image of the body happens

after the blood is on there. And that means if you were going to fake it, you have to start by painting the blood streaks and then painting the body around it, which, again, doesn't make any sense. None. So the other thing about the body they discover is that it has three-dimensional

properties to it. There's information, three-dimensional information in the image of the body. And in the way that there's only one color that makes up the image of the body. And the reason why it looks darker in some places

is because it gets more concentrated in that area, the damage to the linen. And the darker the image is, it's also more defined. It shows the body in a more defined way. And that indicates how close the cloth was to the body.

So the darker the image is, the closer it was to the body. And that is true up to about four centimeters. You know, the body isn't wrapped around it like a wetsuit or anything. It's going to drape away from the different contours of the body. So there's parts of it, parts of the body that show on the shroud where it's not, touching the shroud. It's within like four centimeters and it gets fainter as it gets further away. And this is something that's not true of photographs and it's not true of paintings. They don't work like that. So you can take the density variance that you see in the body of the

shroud and put it into an image modeler and it will create a three-dimensional image based on that data. And it's linear data. So it's, it's. not like, it's not from contact with the body. The, the, whatever imprints the image onto the shroud is, is coming straight, uh, off one direction. It's not, uh, it's, um, not explaining it well. Imagine if you were going to try to recreate this, um, you could take a body and you could put paint or pigment on it and then put cloth on it. And as the cloth fits around the body, it's going to imprint the image of the body onto the cloth. And it's going to look exactly like the body

only as long as the cloth retains the contours of the body. But as soon as it flattens out, it's distorted. And the image on the cloth is not distorted. So the image on the shroud was not made by contact with the body. Wow. That provides a whole new mystery. Yeah. That provides a whole new mystery.

Right. And I don't know if we want to get it. get there right now or if we should hold off because that's something that takes my brain down a rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. Everything you're saying, you're laying out evidences as to why this is what tradition says it is. And you brought up the skeptics and you brought up the idea of the pain. Is that their strongest argument against the shroud, would you say?

Are there more... Well, that would be the... No, it's not. That's one of them. But that's been... You know, you can show that there's evident... There's a better... There's a more plausible explanation than what they're saying because of all the way, all the features of the image.

Probably the strongest one they lean on is the radiocarbon dating. Okay. Really? That's the one they lean on. on? Oh, yeah. Really? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Because that was the big monkey ranch in shroud studies is when that comes out. So we can go any number of directions at this point. So if you want to talk a little bit more about the pseudarium and the correspondence, do that? Do you want to do that? I think I could easily

move past that by accident. Because I know there's parts of the pseudarium that you have an overlay that I want to get to because I think when you showed it to me, I thought it was really fascinating. And if we could maybe go into more of the details of the Sudarium before we move off of that. Sure. Okay. Well, let's see. I will, let's move to the screen. Okay. And I'll have my, I'll kind of show you what we're looking at here. So this is the pseudarium. Like said, it's about the size of a bed sheet. There's no image on it, but you can see there's kind of three general areas. We've got this area right here. We've got this area. And then this area, which strangely looks like the middle area, reflected. And the way to understand these stains is that this

right here is what was in direct contact with a face. And this, you can see that this right here, I'll show you more details in a minute, but this right here is that you can see the nostrils of a nose. If you look closely and you know what you're looking for, you see the nostrils of a nose. And then this would be like the upper lip, the lower lip, and you can see this kind of hook shape and the stain. That's where the blood is dripping into the beard and around the chin. And you got another kind of a hook claw shape going this direction. this vertical area is following the bridge of the nose and then blood pools on the forehead. I'll explain that in a minute.

And then you can see there are other like isolated stains like this one, this one. This is a hole in it that is the shape of a stain, which is intriguing. I'll show you that in a minute. And then you've got a bunch of wounds on this side and then this big butterfly shape right here. So because of these odd shapes and these isolated shapes and these defined features from the face, there is, you've got enough data to see if it can match the face on the shroud. Now, the researchers into the pseudarium have been able to recreate this whole stain by, placing the body in the three different positions. So this is about how the shroud gets

registered or the pseudarium gets registered onto the face. And you can see how it all the, the blood seems to cluster around the nose because this is where the blood starts coming out of the nose and the mouth right here. Let me pause and explain why there's a pseudarium in the first place. Yes. Because, I mean, the idea of a picture of Jesus with this cloth wrapped around his head is really freaky to picture. You know, it's like a kidnap victim or something like that. The idea is that in Leviticus 1711, it says that the life is in the blood. So the Jews have historically believed that the soul is in the blood.

The soul is in the lifeblood. And so in the first century Orthodox Jews, when their burial customs said that when a Jew died violently, meaning that they bled, they have to bury the blood with the body because that's what has the soul. You got to keep the soul with the body. So if there was blood on the clothes, they would bury the clothes with the body. If there was blood on the dirt, they'd collect the dirt as much as they could, and they'd bury it with the body. So with a Jewish man on the cross, if this really was Jesus, the reason why he's got a cloth around his face is because, because he's now spewing blood toward the end of the crucifixion process.

And as he's dying, they know all that blood is collected in the lungs. And as soon as they start moving them off the cross, it's going to come gushing out the nose and the mouth. And so they have to collect it. And that's the idea behind the pseudarium, that this is what its function was. So this is something that was put on Jesus, literally during his crucifixion, fiction. Well, it would be when he appeared to be dead. Okay. So, but it wasn't something that, like,

they bury him, they put him in the tomb, and then they wrap his head in it. It was something that happened while he was on the cross. He was still on the cross. It appeared to be dead. Wow. Okay. Now, you know, the the, the, the, blood on the backside, right here is lifeblood. So

he's, you know, either that's seeping out before the serum separates from the red blood cells. And so it's, you know, It doesn't appear to be, it's not post-mortem blood, but I mean, he's dead at this point. That's when they put it on. Excuse me. So the body is on the cross when it gets put on.

But apparently his head was rocked forward into the side like this. And so they can't wrap it all the way around. So it gets doubled back, which is why you have a mirror image of the stain. That's what makes this. This is not contact. This is in contact. This is folded onto the area that was in contact. Then the, and so the body's in this position for 45 minutes to an hour.

And then the body was laid face down for, with the feet slightly elevated. And that, with resting on the forehead. And they had to be slightly cocked. So the blood runs down the bridge of the nose and pools on the forehead. And it's in that position for 45 minutes to an hour. So those total, that gives a plausible window of time for Joseph of Barramathia to go get permission to get the body to bury Jesus. Then the body's in one more position, which is face up for about five minutes. And the distance between Golgatha and the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre is less than 50 yards.

So five minutes isn't anything to move the body. And there's evidence of a hand reaching over the back of the head to pinch the cloth over the nose that you see on the pseudarium. And so the question is, how close of a match is it to the shroud? So I've done some work on this. If you look at the mainstain of the pseudarium, I've made these outlines of the jude. area. So you've got the main outline here and then the more condensed outline here. The nose is outlined right here with the upper lip, lower lip. You can also see there's an isolated stain right on the eyebrow. There's a hole right here that looks like it's stained shaped and may have been,

I mean, might have been cut out to give as like a relic to someone important. And then you've got, but we don't know that. Sure. But I mean, it's a logical theory. Yeah. And then you've got a a stain right here on the forehead. And if you map that onto the shroud, you can see that once you register the nose, this stain from the Sudarium matches a stain right below this Epsilon blood streak right here pretty closely. And this hole in the Sudarium matches almost exactly this stain right here.

This cluster of stains on the shroud matches the big stain. And then the edge of the forehead stain runs right. along the epsilon shape streak of blood on the shroud, and you can see this follows the beard, and it matches pretty exactly. It's a little messy to look at like that, so I created another version where you can see kind of the mask, how it fits like that. And I have a way for you to do it yourself, if you want to do it. I would love to. All right. I would love to. What we have here, I've got an overlay. You can see that.

Here's the nose of the shroud. So if we register the nose to the nose and this dot, that bloodstain, to that or to this bloodstain right below the three. Okay, here's the nose on the shroud. And we register that dot. Look at what happens. Wow. Everything fits exactly. Okay.

It doesn't have to be resize or anything. It fits about as exact as you can expect. Okay, it's never going to be 100% because remember, this is the shroud would have been on a body that is laying there. It's not moving. Whereas the Sudarium was wrapped around a head that's in three different positions and is getting moved. Right. And was actually rewrapped because it's only doubled back in that first position. So after they get him onto the ground, they wrap it all the way around.

They do a little bit of a rewrap. So it's never going to be a 100% match, but it's a pretty compelling match. Oh, it's incredibly compelling. For me, it's, for me, it seals the deal. So I, I think it's, um, it's a wild match. And it's, it's something that just really puts into perspective as to the complexities of the two being paired together. And it, you can say, oh, are you reaching, you're trying to, you know, just pull this out of thin air?

This is absolutely a complex analysis of these two pieces of material that seem to match incredibly close. It's pretty compelling, but that's not all, because there's the backside. That's just the face. If you go to the backside, so that's what it, this is what it looks like if you map it out to a sculpture that is very, a very accurate recreation of the body on the shroud, a three-dimensional recreation.

But on the backside, if you outline the little wounds that you see and also the big butterfly shape and you compare it to the backside of the head, it's another pretty compelling match because you have the same sort of stains over here, but

then this shape right here, I don't know how well you can see it, but this funnel shape is the long hair. So if the man in the shroud had, did he, if he wore his hair stylistically as a ponytail, then it would have been the anchor that they could pin the Sudarium in and that's

where they start the wrap. If he didn't wear a ponytail, then they would have gathered his hair together and they run the pins in. Either way. But once you get this blood, this blood clot, in this ponytail, that will hold the hair together even after the pseudarium's removed, which is why you would still have this kind of funnel shape of hair on the back of the shroud.

So if you do the overlay, it looks like that. You can see how the blood stain fits right into the funnel shape of the hair and how those wounds in the back of the head are so similar. Yeah, that's wild. That's absolutely wild. And so you were showing me earlier, I believe it was on a map, the route that these two relics took over the years. And I think you were mentioning how there was other tests that were done to this. I believe it was with pollen. Yeah. That kind of points to a very specific area. Yes. Okay. So if you would, there's two ways. go about this because the pollen is a scientific

corroboration of the documentary evidence, the historical evidence in both cases and vice versa. The historical evidence ends up matching what you find in the pollen. It's a really cool double

line of evidence here. So the idea is which one do you want to do first? I'll do the shroud first. Go ahead. Yeah. So, you know, the question is, with all this scientific evidence, the question is, well, if it, you know, everything seems to point to its authenticity. If it really did exist prior to showing up in Europe in 1355, where was it? I mean, the guy never said where he got it from or anything like that.

So where was that? Is there any evidence for it in history? And it turns out that there is. And so if we document it. the oldest evidence for it comes from the church historian Eusebius, who was the Bishop of Cessaria. He was at the first council, first acumenical council. He was Constantine's biographer. About 324, he writes the most important early history of the church.

And he includes things like, you know, where we get the books of the New Testament, and some of the books that get left out and why. and what happened to the apostles. And he includes a lot of different stories and traditions that he is copying from earlier documents that he quotes extensively and preserves them once they're lost to history, which is one of the reasons why he's important.

One of the stories he tells is about the king of Edessa named Abgar. Now, okay, when I tell you the story of, of the early days of the shroud, up until it hits Constantinople, there is a general thread for the story, but there are different traditions and sometimes contradictions to it.

And I'll point out what they are. But I'm going to tell you the general story, and then I'm going to show you where it kind of like splits apart. But you'll see that there is one consistent narrative. That's pretty fascinating. So Eusebius tells this story about, the king of Addessa, Abgar, and that he lived at the time of Jesus and that he suffered from some kind of disease. And we think it was probably leprosy and or really bad arthritis. So he

sends a messenger to get Jesus to come back to Edessa and heal him. And Edessa is a city in Turkey right along the Syrian border. These days, it's called Irfa or Sanley Irfa. So the messenger shows up and Jesus says he can't go. But according to Eusebius, Jesus writes a letter to give to the messenger, to give to Abgar that says he can't come, but he will send somebody. And then shortly afterwards, Jesus is crucified. And after his resurrection, he, the apostle Thomas, gives the burial shroud to the disciple Faddeus. So, in Luke 10, I believe there's the 70 disciples who get sent out by Jesus. One of them traditionally is Thaddeus, and in Syrian, his name is Adai. So Thaddeus slash Adai takes the burial shroud, goes to Edessa, he appears before Abgar, and he puts it on top of Abgar. He like drapes it on him, and Abgar is healed and becomes a Christian. And so Abgar takes it and he mounts it or he wraps it up or folds it and puts it kind of in a box, maybe with a window cut out so you can see the face,

unsure about that. But he puts it in a niche above the city gate, which is where there was a pagan idol, and you were supposed to pay tribute to the pagan idol when you went into the city. And so he had that taken down, and he had the image put there. And then when he died, his son was a Christian, and he left it there. And then when he died, either his son or Abgar's grandson came to power and reverted to paganism. And so the bishop at the end of the first century thought that the image might get destroyed. And so he hit it by bricking it up in the niche.

And people remembered that there was this cloth with the face on it, but they didn't know where it was. And that's where it stayed for 400 years. And in the year 544, the Persians came and they laid siege to the city of Edessa. And during the siege, the bishop of Adessa received a vision, and the vision told him to go get the image out of the wall and told him where to go get it. And so he opens up the wall in that spot and there's the image. And then he parades it around the city to bring protection to the city and he got to a certain spot in it. And a bunch of copper pots were hanging there and they started rattling. And this is how the people of Edessa

discovered that the Persians were digging a tunnel underneath the city so they could come up in the middle of the city. So the people of Edessa dug a hole down to the tunnel and they poured in a bunch of oil and set it on fire and burn the Persians. And this is how they break the siege. And so the image of Edessa becomes very, very famous. And, okay, so let me pause.

Okay. That whole story is not in Eusebius. Eusebius doesn't mention an image or anything like that. He mentions the letter. He mentions Abgar. There is another history where there's a book called The Doctrine of a Die from the late 4th century that says that the messenger from Abgar was a painter, and he paints Jesus' image.

And that's what gets taken back. There's another tradition that says Jesus, while he was talking to the messenger, takes a cloth and he wipes his face. and it imprints his image on it. And that's what the messenger takes back. So there are a couple different threads there about what's happening. In the year 590, I believe, you have the history of this siege with the Persians. And that's where it talks about an image that's called an archa poieta or an image not made by human hands.

And so you can, there's always some image, almost not in Eusebius, but otherwise, all the traditions always mention an image, and it always goes to Abgar, and it's always in Odessa. There's no competing tradition for it. There's some evidence that some scholars believe it may have gone through Antioch on the way to Odessa, but it's always Adessa, it's always Abgar, and there's almost always an image. There is another tradition that says that there was a flood that, that Dan, you know, that

damaged the city walls to Addesson about the year 525, and that's how the image gets rediscovered, but it's still paraded around the city in 544, and that's still how they break the siege. So you can see the common thread that gets you this far, even though there's variations and sometimes contradictions in the details of it. So now we're in 544. Image of Edessa is very, very famous. So it's known as the image of Edessa or the mandillion. Sometimes we think of the mandillion is only a cloth with the face on it.

And the reason is probably because of how it was presented, which is in a box with only the face showing. So nobody knew there was a whole body there. But it stayed in Odessa for another 400 years. And then the emperor Romanus in 943 brings it to Constantinople. Because that's the seat of the empire. that's the seat of Christianity. That's where all the relics are being taken.

And it's just like relic central in Constantinople. So it gets taken there and it arrives in 944. And it stays there for 250 years. And in the year 1203, there was a crusader during the Fourth Crusades who goes around to the different palaces and churches and kind of makes a diary, a travelogue of all the different relics he's seen. And he goes to this certain church called My Lady St. Mary of Blasjarnay, and he says that there he sees the burial shroud of Jesus that was raised up, made to stand up every Friday. And which is kind of an interesting way of describing it.

It doesn't sound like it's just a sheet with a face on it. It sounds like a whole body. And one of the things that the strip team discovered is that linen retains a memory of its. fold really well, however it's been folded. And they discovered that one of the ways it has been folded in its history is around a mechanism that allows it to be raised and lowered out of a chest. And this may be what this guy saw. And then a few months later in April 1204 is the sack of Constantinople, where the Western Church sacks and attacks the Eastern Church in Constantinople instead of going around to Jerusalem, which is what they were supposed to do in the Fourth Crusades.

Instead, they just stop and they loot and destroy a bunch of Orthodox riches and take them back to Europe. And this is where the letter of Jesus had been taken, and it's said to have been destroyed at this time. To be very clear, I don't believe the letter of Jesus ever existed. I think this is an apocryphal part of the story, because I think if Jesus, there's only one, thing we know that Jesus actually wrote, and that's when he writes in the dirt during the, you know, the story of the woman caught in adultery. And even that probably isn't original to scripture, even though it's probably an authentic happening of Jesus. So if Jesus ever wrote anything, we would absolutely have a copy of it. And if he only ever wrote one thing in his entire life,

it probably wasn't a note that says, sorry, I can't come right now. So I don't think this is. Yeah, I mean, like, if we consider just the supernatural preservation of Scripture, like, you would think Jesus and what he wrote would be something that God would ordain to be preserved. Yeah, you know? Right. So, you know, for you and I, we see, we factor in God's providence and how he preserves and transmit scripture. So for skeptics, you know, they need other sorts of it. It means nothing.

So at this point, during the sack of Constantinople, it disappears for like 150 years. And then it shows up in 1355 in Larry France. When it shows up in Larry France, it's displayed by a knight named Jeffrey Descharni. And he doesn't ever explain where it came from or anything like that. It doesn't mean there's no evidence. There's very little evidence, but the evidence that we have does seem to tell a very plausible story. And then there's a whole speculative line of where the shroud may have been. And it's super fascinating, but there's no evidence for it. And yet you could see how it still might play into the story as well. So what we know is that the year after the sack of Constantinople in 1205, the king of Thessaly, so the northern part of Greece, wrote a note, wrote a letter to Pope Innocent the 3rd, and said that during the sack of Constantinople,

all sorts of relics get looted, and they were taken back to France or Venice. And one of the things it went missing is the burial shroud of Jesus. And that has turned up in Athens. So 1205, we've got this letter to the Pope, says the burial shrouds in Athens. What makes this interesting is the king of Athens was from France, from Byzance in France, and his name is Othon de la Roche. And he was made the king of Athens because of his service at the Fourth Crusades.

And his service in the Fourth Crusades was at Constantine, he was at the sack of Constantinople, and it was his job to protect the palace of Blasharnie, where the church of my lady, St. Mary Blasharnay was, where the shroud was seen by Robert DeClaherry in 1203. So he's the guy in charge of defending the place where the shroud was kept, and now the shroud's in Athens. And what makes this important is his great-great-granddaughter was named Gene DeVergy, and she married Robert DeClahery, who shows the shroud in 1355 in France.

So that's about as good as you get that we have. The other thing is that in Byzantz, in France, if you go to the Othon-Delroche Castle, there's a chest there that says this is what the shroud was kept in, what it was brought back to Europe in. So that's the most credible line, probably. There's another theory, though, that the shroud was in the custody of the most powerful group of people in the world at that time. which is the Knights Templar, and that they had custody of it. And what makes this interesting isn't that there's actually no evidence for this whatsoever. It's just kind of like if you thought, all right, well, who's powerful enough to have control of this thing? Now, one other factor is

the reason why the Deloches may have kept their possession of it secret or not publicized it at least, is because in the year 12-15, Pope Innocent, the third made a proclamation that nobody could sell or display relics without the church's permission. So, you know, if he, like, comes clean and says, I've got the shroud, then it's just going to be taken from him. Right. So you get, you see motive for him to, to keep it on the down low, right? But if he didn't have it, then, you know, you speculate that this powerful order of warrior monks, the Knights Templar, they would be a really good candidate to think, you know, they would have it. And so that's also been a theory. Like I said, there's no evidence, but there is some,

there are a couple of very interesting make you think things. Yeah. Number one of them is when, number one of them, one of them, one of the things it makes you think is in 1314, the Knights Templar were outlawed and their leader, Jacques D. Malay, was executed. in Paris, and he was executed along with the preceptor of the Templars, whose name was Jeffrey Descharni. But it's 40 years before the shroud shows up in Europe in Lerie, France. And so it's not the same guy, and they're not spelled exactly the same.

One's A-Y and one's Y, but there's no standardized spelling at the time, so you can't, like, make a big argument out of that. and the Knights Templar took vows of chastity. So if he was true to it, it wouldn't be his son or grandson, but it may be, you know, a cousin or a nephew or something like that. But when the Templars were outlawed, they confessed in their two, part of their secret ceremonies was the worship of the image of a bearded head. And nobody could, nobody really knew what that meant. but in 1951, we learned what that meant because in Temple Cone, England, there was an old building that was used by the Templars and a storm rolled through the area and rattled the building so hard that some of the ceiling fell in. So you can see the backside of the roof and there was a panel on the backside of the roof that had this image on it right here, the image of a bearded head, which looks pretty close to the face of the, of the,

Trout of Turin. Yes, it does. So that's about as good as you get. Like I said, there's no evidence that supports the Templar theory at all. It falls more on the Othandela Roche side. But there you. So even with this, with the bearded head and all of that, the Templars could know about it, but not have custody of it.

So it could be a little bit of a both-and in the story as well. So, okay, so that's the history of. where we get it. So a hundred years later, the Descharnay family falls on hard time. So they sell it to the king of Savoy. Savoy is an autonomous area that's now part of southern France or northern Italy. And the king puts it in the cathedral at Shamboree, which is now Shamboree, which is now Shamboree, and 1532, that's when there's a fire there. And so that's when you see all these triangles across the shroud. Those are patches because those are where holes were because the shroud was folded up and put in a silver box when it wasn't on display. And the box in the fire got so hot that the corner of it was melting silver onto the corner of the shroud. And because of the way it was folded, it left these 16 holes. So the nuns there put these patches on it. And that's what you see. And they also put a backing cloth on it as well. So from there, about 50 years later, he moved his capital to the other side of the Alps, which is now Turin, Italy, and he put it in the cathedral there.

And that's how it becomes known as the shroud of Turin. So that's the history part. Now, you asked about Paul. I did. Okay. Just real quick, though, I just want to make an observation that the, the, the, the, way the scorch marks happened. I mean, can you imagine if it was moved over just a little bit, a little higher, and you know what I mean? We could not have the face right now. I know. It's incredible.

But it's been in several fires. And in fact, you can see a mineral deposits from the water damage from putting it out during these fires on several parts of it, not just that 1532 fire, but from a couple others as well. So, yeah, and you know what? I'll show you one other thing, but while we're talking about damage on the shroud, that is really fascinating, is if you look at,

you can see these four holes that make this L shape that gets mirrored across the shroud. This is from when the shroud was folded up in a different way. It was likely sitting on an altar and there was an incense sensor above it and some live embers fell and burned all the way through. Just four of them happened to be in this L shape and they burn all the way through and that's where you get that. So you've got all sorts of damage that gives it these interesting characteristics.

Those holes, the burn holes from the incense, I'll show you a super cool piece of evidence here in a minute. So as far as the pollen goes, in 1978 during the investigation at that time, one of the people who did a test, so what happened is the the shroud of Turin Research Project was given 120 hours to do about two dozen tests or so. But really, the first 12 hours were given to the Italian team. Because they're the home court, right? So it was polite. And they ran some tests. But the Italian team invited a Swiss criminologist to do the very first test. His name is Max Fry.

And he was at the cutting edge of all the forensic science, CSI stuff. He pioneers this whole field back in the 1940. 40s and he works all the way into the 80s. And one of the things he came up with was this fascinating idea that he could place suspects at crime scenes using pollen. And the way he would do it was he would just take regular tape, cellophane tape, and press it into the close of a suspect and try to pull off pollen that matched the pollen at a crime scene.

Okay. So in 1973, there was just a preliminary test done on the shroud. where a slight piece of cloth was cut away for a couple of tests. And they let him come with his tape and tape some samples off the shroud looking for pollen. So in 1978, the very first thing that happens is they invite Max Fry to come down and take some more samples off. And so this is him with his regular sticky tape word on the street. I don't know if it's true is that he stopped at the drugstore on the way to the cathedral. I'm going to say, it looks so unscientific.

That's exactly what he's got. And look how happy he is to be there. I mean, happy too. Yeah, he's having a good time. But look at the tension he's putting on the cloth, right? The Sturp team is standing there going, what in the world is going on? Because not only is that just regular old tape that's going to leave all this residue on it, but it's putting this tension on the cloth, it's damaging the cloth.

So they actually wanted to prevent any of this. So they had the 3M Corporation create proprietary tape that wouldn't leave any residue and had their own special applicator that wouldn't put any tension on the cloth or at least not enough to do damage. But when the Sturp team examined all of their samples that they took with the tape, there was no pollen. And when Max Fry looked at his samples and he had 38 different samples between the two times he did it,

he was able to identify 58 different kinds of pollen. And so this is what the pollen looks like when it's trapped in the weave. And this is what it looks like when you magnify it. So if you had known samples of pollen from different parts of the world, different plants, and you had a whole lot of patients where you could take a comparison microscope and look at what you're looking at in the tape with the different samples, you'd be able to figure out what you were looking at. And that's what he did.

And so he was able to identify 58 different kinds of pollen. And it turns out the pollen comes from the northern part of Italy, the southern part of France, Turkey, the area specifically around Constantinople, Palestine, and the area specifically around Jerusalem. some of the pollen from Jerusalem was in bloom, which only happens in the springtime. And the majority of the pollen can be found in the area around Jerusalem. So just full disclosure, that's not super specific. Some of it is extremely specific. Some of that pollen that is found around Jerusalem is just found around the Mediterranean in general.

So it doesn't lead you straight there. But when you factor in all the others, things, it leads you straight there. It replicates the itinerary that you see in the historical documents. I mean, this map looks like something you would see on a missionary journey of Paul's or something, you know, just the way maps around and stuff. So it really kind of just shows you the route that this took and, or at least theological, or the theological, hypothetical.

Yeah. But, you know, Jerusalem being a point of contact is a huge deal. It's incredible. It's incredible. In the time of a year. So then, you know, when people start becoming aware of the pseudarium, one of the first things they do is scientists go, well, where this thing came from? So in 1978, they had max or 79, the year after the shroud examination,

Max Fry came down and he did tape samples on the pseudarium. And he pulls off 16, or I can't remember how many. samples he takes, but he discovers and identifies 16 types of pollen on there. Turns out the pollen is from northern Spain, central Spain, the area around Toledo, northern Africa, probably the area around Alexandria, and Jerusalem. He traces it in a different way. And since then, 25 other species of pollen have been identified on the pseudarium. So the question is, where did the pseudarium come from? What kind of historical background do you have for the Sudarium? Yeah.

And there's not nearly as much, partly because nobody knows what to call this thing, right? It's, there's all sorts of names for it, face cloth, napkin. And there's just not as much documentary evidence. In the early 11th century, there was a bishop in Oviedo named Pileo, who decided he was going to get to the bottom of it. So he does the digging through the historical documents. And there's, so we know. know exactly we have all of these documents, not just his word for it, but he's the research who kind of puts the puzzle together. And so the oldest piece of the puzzle we have is from the sixth

century from a travelogue from a pilgrim named Antonius Martyr. He visits the Holy Land, I believe in 570. And he goes out to the area where John the Baptist had his ministry. And he said that there's a cave there that has seven nuns, and they are guarding the, one of the things that it was in their possession that they guarded was the napkin that was around the head of Jesus. And so Palaio does his research, and what he says Antonio's martyr saw was, according to tradition, the disciples of the apostles built a wooden chest. and they put relics in it, and that chest was what was there. And then in the year 614, the Persians show up again, and they lay siege to Jerusalem.

And on the way, the Christians move the chest out of the area. So they take it to Alexandria, Egypt. And in 616, or they take it to North Africa, probably Alexandria. In the year 616, the Persians move into northern Africa. so the Christians put the chest on a boat and they send it to Cartagena, Spain, where it was taken by the bishop immediately to Seville. The Bishop of Seville takes it there. He has possession of it until he dies 20 years later,

and then it was taken to Toledo. Stays in Toledo until the year 7-Eleven, and this is when the Muslims invade the Iberian Peninsula, and they start to conquer Spain. And so in 7-11, it gets moved up to the mountains of Asturias, and that becomes the one place that the Muslims never conquer in Spain, one of the only places. And the king of Asturias attributes his success in 761 to defeating the Muslims to the protection offered by the relics in the chest, which includes the pseudarium. So he builds the town of Oviedo, and then he builds the cathedral there, which is, that's the cathedral. It's not what he built.

What he built looks like that. And it's called the camera Santa, the chamber of sacred relics. And within there are a bunch of relics, and that's the chest. That's the actual chest? That's the actual chest. When it was opened by Palo and the king in the early 11th century, they, inventoried all the relics. They're all still in there except for the Sudarium, which was removed and put in its own reliquary. And then the king

had it adorned with all this kind of silver decoration. And what you see behind it is a replica of the pseudarium that covers the window of the reliquary holding the actual pseudarium. And so when you take away the replica, that's the pseudarium in place. It gets exhibited three times a year. But who gets to see it? Anybody who shows up. Really? But it's always the same three days. So I believe it's a good Friday and then there's two feast days in September when it is exhibited. Put that on my calendar. Yeah, yeah. When I was there last year, nobody seemed to know the thing was there.

I mean, I always stood in the sacred chamber, my wife and I for at least half an hour before somebody else showed up. We had it totally to ourselves. That's incredible. is amazing. Nobody seemed to be, you know, it's a, it's a beautiful cathedral and there's all sorts of things to see. But that's like, to me, the main draw. And, you know, it's, it's popular. But I thought I was going to have to fight the crowds. There's no crowds. This is nothing. Good to know. We're interested in things that nobody cares about so we can skip the lines. You do skip the line. So, so there you go. So that you have the, that's the best, historical evidence we have for it, and the pollen seems to follow the same itinerary. And in both cases, the pollen and the historical evidence leads back to Jerusalem. Do you have a map of both

routes put together? I don't. Okay. Because visually in my head, I'm seeing both, and it's, I find it interesting because really the only commonality is Jerusalem, right? That is correct. So they both went opposite directions. And what the route is, that you're showing here, this route is also backed up by the pollen that was on it, right? Yes. So this isn't just like, I went through the historic corrections. This is what I think. It's also backed up with the pollen that we've tested and has been found on it.

Yep. And by the time it leaves Jerusalem or the area around the Jordan, if this is all true, by that time, the shroud had been recovered. in Addessa. Wow. That's incredible. So let's get into what I think is really fascinating. And I think I have it here, the radiation hypothesis. Because, you know, that in my mind, and I understand everybody has their own thresholds of belief and things like that.

But for me, it's like, it takes the shroud, the story that we read in the Gospels of Christ being crucified, being a man, being crucified, dying on the cross, being buried, and this idea of resurrection. And I feel like it takes that last part of resurrection. And it's like, this might point to that. And I really feel like it's the other piece of a puzzle that can really put people that are more scientifically minded to be like, hmm, that's a really interesting thought process to go down. Yeah.

So regarding the hypothesis you're talking about, the way this comes about is the Sturp team in 1978 was headed up by a physicist from the Air Force Academy named John Jackson. And so just be, so you know, the Sturp team gets mischaracterized by skeptics as a group of scientists made up of evangelical Christians who believe this was real and went over looking for evidence to back up what they already believed as if, you know, it was some sort of confirmation bias project. And that's not the case at all. Okay, there were 33 scientists. The majority identified as Christians. Some were Catholic, some were Protestants, some were liberal Protestants, some were evangelical. They didn't all believe that the shroud was authentic. And then there were guys on the team who were atheists and they were Jews. So there was no uniformity as to whether this thing was authentic or not. What you know, the team. What they had in common is that they all were experts in their field. They all had PhDs or the equivalent terminal degree in their area of expertise as scientists. And they all worked at highly credible institutions like Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Caltech and Los Alamos National Labs, the Air Force Academy, Air Force Weapons Lab. These were serious scientists

who worked at highly reputable institutions, and they were just interested in what you could know. So this goes to the point that this is more than a relic. Now, this is an object of scientific inquiry regardless of what your religious beliefs are. And so they had two dozen tests or so, and they got permission to go do it. And so at the end of it, they end up with results that were,

it took like three or four years to publish them in over 20 different peer-reviewed scientific journals. This wasn't a pop culture type of thing. They didn't go to Christianity today or, you know, USA Today or any kind of, you know, news magazines or anything like that. And I'm not, I'm not putting those things down, but that's not how you report your scientific data. They reported it as within the bounds of academia. that this was their world. They were scientists reporting scientific findings so that other scientists, their peers, could review it.

And all of their test affirmed, didn't prove it was all consistent with the authenticity of the shroud. And they determined that it was not made by any known artistic or natural process.

So the question is, Well, what made it then? So John Jackson's, he's still alive. He has remained a shroud researcher this entire time. And so he has a really interesting spreadsheet where he takes about a dozen or 15-so features of the shroud that you need to account for by any theory that you have for how the shroud was made. So if you think the shroud was faked, then whatever process that you are going to propose has to come up, has to account for these features. And there is no proposed theory, artistic or otherwise, that can account for all the features of the shroud. And it turns out you can make a replica of the shroud.

You can make something that looks identical to the shroud that doesn't have the features of the actual shroud. This is identical to the actual shroud, and it doesn't share the features. Because by the time you print that image onto the cloth, it's absorbed into the cloth, for example. It's not just on the outermost 0.2 microns of the thread. It's made in an entirely different way. Right. So there's things like that that it doesn't account for, even though it's an exact replica. So as a physicist, he thought, all right, what do you got to do to make an image with these properties on it?

what as a physicist is required and chemically what's required. And so he came up with a theory called the fall through radiation hypothesis. And the idea is this. So I have an image here of the sculpture that's been made based on the shroud. You can see the body's in rigor mortis. There's the, it's hunch forward and the knees are bent. And then that's roughly how the shroud wraps around the body. So in the fall through radiation hypothesis, the idea is that radiation emits from the body at the vacuum ultraviolet wavelength in a burst as it dematerializes, which allows the cloth to fall through it.

Okay? So a burst of radiation comes from the body at that specific wavelength as it dematerializes, which lets the cloth fall through it. That would imprint the cloth with the image as the way we see it. And yet, you can't, it doesn't happen in nature. You can't replicate it. You can't test it in a lab. You can't go out and observe it. That's just the best we got.

The closest that we have to being able to replicate it is a scientist, a physicist recently have been able to use a, a laser at vacuum ultraviolet and a very incredibly short burst, like millisecond, short burst at that range that left a superficial imprint on the cloth on both sides,

but not the middle. And that's about as good as we got. It doesn't mean that's how it happened. It means that's the, as close as anybody's ever gotten to replicate it. And is this considered the same thing as the, I think it was called the light burst theory or something?

Yeah. It's the same thing that we're talking about here. There is a, okay, so. I feel like the light burst theory is like the, the elementary way of describing this. It is the elementary way. And that's not saying anything, you know, I'm not putting you down,

but that's like how it gets popularized. Right, right. So then, you know, you end up kind of quantifying the light and it sounds like this, it is, the light burst is what that is. It means that it's a very, very, extremely short pulse

of this particular wavelength of radiation. That's the light bird. So is this this theory based on the idea that when they came and they saw that he wasn't

in the tomb, the body was gone and that this is how it was printed onto the cloth then? Or was this like resurrection a resurrection process, I suppose. I don't even know how to describe this. Well, okay, as far as the scientific evidence goes,

this is where the period is put on the sentence. Right, right, right. Okay, so at this point, though, because of all the stuff that we know, and, you know, to be clear, we have a theology where we embrace the resurrection. So we have like, we've got a way to fill in the gaps. Yeah.

So we see kind of this next step, like, okay, this sounds like maybe it's like natural residue from the miracle of the resurrection. I believe that. Okay, I could be wrong and that's fine. Doesn't change the reality of the resurrection if I'm wrong. That's what I think we're looking at. You just can't get there scientifically. You can just go all the way up to the wall and look over.

That's where I close the door on scientific. I'm like, I'll take it here. I'll take it from here, guys. Yeah. So, yeah, that would be if the resurrection is a real historical actual event, and I believe it was, then this might be the kind of thing that is the natural artifact created by it. And so, and this is, I mean, maybe from your understanding the best possible theory as to how that was made? it's not even a theory. It's a hypothesis.

You can't even test this. They're just like, okay, this is not the best we got. But that's the best we got. That's the best we got. It doesn't mean that's the best we'll ever have. That's the best we have right now. That's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. So I also want to, this is a little bit of backtracking, but I feel like we hinted on it. I don't want to skip over it either. Okay. The dating of this. The radiocarbon dating. Right. And so that's something that was, relied on by skeptics. And is there a new form of dating that we've come out with now?

Or we've started implementing that has redated the shroud? Because from what I understand, the skeptics had said that, oh, well, we, we, Carbon 14 dated the, the shroud. And I think it was six or seven hundred years old they had been saying. And is there a new form of dating or how does this all work? The answer is there is a new dating method, but before I tell you about it, okay. We got to work through the radiocarbon dating method because, I mean, that sounds like

that's just going to settle how old the cloth is. And so the radiocarbon dating to the shroud happened because the strip team was so successful. Everybody was like fascinated by all the data. It doesn't conclusively show it's authentic, but there was no the data was all consistent with it being authentic. There was no outliers saying like, yeah, it looks like this thing could be faked up or whatever. There was nothing. And so the Strip team proposed another round of tests.

And one of them was radiocarbon dating. So to answer the question, how old is the cloth? And that seemed like such an important thing to answer. It got separated out as its own thing to deal with. And the other test ended up not getting done for various reasons. The Sturp team ended up breaking up. And so you had guys from the Sturp team who were still involved in the radio carbon dating. And so in the mid-80s, there was a group of people who were advising on how to go about this.

And so it was a couple guys from the Sturp team. There was the scientific advisor to the Vatican. there was the archbishop of Turin, who is the custodian of the shroud. So just a little bit about the shroud. Remember, it was the king of Savoy is who owned the shroud. And he owned the shroud up until the year 1983. That's when the last hereditary king of Savoy died. So he bequeathed it to whoever the sitting pope is.

So the sitting pope owns the shroud. So when the 1978 test is done, it's done with the permission of the King of Savoy. Now, in the mid-80s, now that it belongs to the Pope, the church has far more of a say in it. So the Pope owns it, but really kind of the caretaker of it is, the archbishop of Turin. So they all get together and they talk about how they're going to go about it. It's non-binding kind of protocol that they come up with, but they do come up with the protocol. So the idea is that they're going to take seven different samples from at least three different locations to give to seven different labs who used one of two different kinds of radiocarbon dating. And that would give a big enough data set that you could rely.

give a date range. So that's the idea. And then before the sample was cut in 1988, there were rumors that went out that the scientist caught wind of that the Archbishop wasn't going to adhere to these decisions to the protocol they came up with. And so they warned him that, you know, there's letters to one that said that, you know,

if you use fewer samples or fewer labs or whatever, it's a hit to the integrity. and it's not going to be as trustworthy as a result. When the time came to cut the sample, he, in fact, changed everything. And instead of seven different samples, he allowed one sample to be cut. And that sample was given to three different labs

who used all the same radio carbonating technique to do the work. So almost everything about it was changed. he never explained why he didn't have to and I'm not trying to vilify him because I mean if you think about if you were the person in charge of the shroud of Turin and you're kind of like

yeah that'd be great to figure out you know what the how old it was and and in theory let's cut a sample and figure it out and then the time came to actually do it okay it's like saying okay Tony

we're going to cut off part of your body. And so we can do some tests on you. What part do you want cut off? Yeah. You know, and they're thinking, you know, maybe the scientists are going, and, you know, it'd be really helpful if we cut your eye, you know, that'd be the most helpful or a piece of your brain.

And you're, you totally back out of him and go, no, you can have like the knuckle off my pinky toe, you know, and that's what he did. Because they also said, he didn't just change all. those rules. They also advised him not to take the sample from a couple different spots on the shroud because they showed a high likelihood of contamination. And when the time came to cut the sample, that's where he allowed it to be cut. That's the only place. And so that spot is the upper left-hand corner. Now, this replica is a photograph taken in 1978. This is the Sturped team photo. So that is what got tested.

You're looking at a photo of what got tested in that upper left-hand corner there before it was cut. So on the screen, I've got the area right here. Okay, that's what gets cut. Now, you can see this is a, this is where the backing path cloth is because some stuff has already been cut away. Dignitaries used to come visit the shroud and they would cut little pieces off and give it to them. So this is already chopped away. This is dirty backing cloth. This is cleaner backing cloth because this little fin shape was cut away in 1973.

That becomes important in a minute. This is the strip that gets cut for the test in 1978. And so this is the cut being made. So when the cut gets made, what happens is the person supervising it is the head of the Italian team. from 1978. His name's Giovanni Rigi. So what they do, when they do the cut, is the first thing is this gets cut in half, and Rigi gets to keep this part, and he puts it in his safe back in Italy. And then this part gets cut into three equal weights, and that's what's distributed to the three different labs. And so they each do their tests on it, and six

months later, they make an announcement at a press conference that the date is between 1260 and 1380. So it's, you know, this gets popularized in the press as it's a medieval fake. The Sturpe teams scientists were all shocked because this is an outlier. You've got over two dozen tests that indicate authenticity, and you've got one outlier test that says, not authentic. for whatever reason, this test takes on more weight than all the other two dozen tests or so. And so the possibility that this could be medieval scares off a lot of the scientists who are doing this research and they're not interested in the shroud anymore because it's a fake. So, I mean, who cares what it is? Cool image. We just don't care anymore.

So a lot of the scientists just drop out. The church then disallows any more scientific investigation on the cloth, and they focus on its conservation. So shortly after this, well, about the year 2000, they end up with the high-tech reliquary that it is in now, which is, you know, fireproof, atmosphere-proof, and light, you know, protects it from light and all of that. So that's what they're really focused on. But the Sturp team type of investigation has never been allowed since them. So this just kind of gets locked away. But there were some scientists who were like, something's not right about this because everything seems to be indicating authenticity.

And then you got this one thing that doesn't really make sense. So there were a couple of researchers who hung in there and kept doing some more work. And there was a husband and wife team in the late 90s, early 2000s, that got a hold of a high-resolution photograph of one of the samples given to one of the labs that was dated. And they showed it this image to several different textile experts, didn't tell them what it was, and didn't tell them they were showing it to other experts, and they all came back and said, well, it looks like, you know, an ancient piece of cloth that's been patched. there's something else

it's mixed together and one of them even said that this is a technique known in the Middle Ages called an invisible re-weave and so they proposed this theory that the nuns probably at the time

they put the patches and the packing cloth on the shroud fortified a weak part of the shroud and introduced cotton in an invisible re-weave to support that part of the shroud. And so the chemist on the Sturp team,

a guy named Raymond Rogers, whose career was spent at Los Alamos National Labs, you know, where like Oppenheimer takes place, he hears this report, and he does not buy it. He does not think, he knows that the shroud is linen. He's handled the shroud. He actually has threads taken from the main body

of the shroud in his lab. He knows their linen. So he thinks this is kind of a crazy idea, or at least he doesn't buy into it. But he decides to demonstrably prove this is false. So the way he does it is he also has threads from the 1973 sample, this spot right here, okay, taken adjacent to the area cut in 1978. So this, what was cut right here, he's got threads from that in his office. and so he does a chemical analysis of the thread he has from the middle of the cloth from 1978 and it's just linen.

This is exactly what he thought. And linen comes from the flax plant. Then he goes and looks at the 1973 thread and he's shocked because it's cotton from the cotton plant woven into linen in this incredibly hard to detect integration of one cloth, the other, and the cotton has been coated in plant gum, probably to make it look like the linen. So it's a mixture. And not only is that a bit of shock because the main body of the cloth is linen, but it doesn't make sense in terms of Jewish tradition, which forbids the mixing of these two claws together,

right? So it's not even Jewish at this point. It's not part of a Jewish tradition to have these two materials mixed together. So this is totally shocking to him. So he thinks, well, what did they test in 1978? So he reaches out to Giovanni Rigi, the guy who's got half of the sample still in his safe. And Rigi sends him threads from what got cut as the sample. And he does the test.

and it's a mixture of cotton woven into linen coated in plant gum. Wow. And so he publish his result in early 2005 in a peer-reviewed scientific journal for chemists. And he conclusively demonstrates that what got tested in 1988 to get this radiocarbon date is not representative of the shroud. But it's only in this academic, you know, this. journal for chemists who read it, so it's not, hardly anybody knows about it. But, you know, he doesn't prove the shroud is from the first century. And it, he doesn't, uh, he doesn't say the

scientists did anything wrong. He doesn't impugn them at all. Um, there are people who, you know, some people when the, when the radio, the, the 1988 date came out, they start attacking the scientists. Oh, well, you just have a conspiracy of a bunch of atheists who don't want this thing to, you know, verify Jesus or whatever. And this, you don't have to go there. Okay. And there are some people who say, well, maybe the fires that have been in it have skewed the data because the change, you know, in the chemical composition of the thread. And that might be true too.

We just don't have any data to support that. That's just kind of speculation. You don't have to do any of that because of Raymond Rogers' work. What you find is that the radiocarbon date does not represent cloth that is representative of the main body of the shroud. So the answer is with the radiocarbon date, it doesn't represent the main body of the shroud. And therefore, no one knows how old the cloth is. We have no scientific evidence for how old the cloth is. Then you asked about a new method.

Yeah. And this comes from 22. So a couple years ago, there was a new test that was done using something called WaxS method, which is a wide angle x-ray scattering technique, which is, okay, so just to be clear, I am not a scientist. My dad is a physicist. So when this report came out, I called my dad. I'm like, okay, tell me, does this make any sense whatsoever? And so my knowledge, I'm just reporting.

Okay. So can't quiz me too hard on this. My understanding is WaxS is not a new technique at all. It's a known trusted method, but it hasn't ever been used to date textiles before. This is the innovation. And so the way it gets reported in the pop press is that, there's a new date done on the shroud that proves it's from the first century with a new way of dating. And this is not what happened.

What happened is with the waxess dating, it's not actually dating. What the waxess does is it, when it's performed on linen, it gives a measurement for the degradation of the cellulose and the linen thread. All it does is give you a measurement. It doesn't tell you a date. So to get a date, what you have to do is have a sample of a known age that you also do it to. And then you compare it. So what the test did is it performed this on thread from the shroud. They had a linen sample from the 2000s, a linen sample from the middle ages,

a linen sample from the first century from around the year 550 to 74 AD. found it Masada, and then I believe a 3,000 BC Egyptian burial cloth. So they ran the waxess on all of it, and the first century cloth from Masada was almost a dead match for the degradation value that they had come up with. And therefore, it is consistent with the first century cloth. So that's what that is. What's not fully appreciated here, and that's fascinating. And it's, I love that they did that. Yeah.

What's not fully appreciated is that apparently the environment affects the degradation of the, that they're measuring. And that unless you know the known environment for the entire time of its existence, then it's not nearly as apples to apples as it sounds like because you don't know where the shroud has been. you don't know where the first century burial shroud of Masada has been. You don't know where the medieval cloth has been. You probably only really have provenance for the cloth from the 2000s. So that's kind of the asterisk on this that also needs to be appreciated. It doesn't mean it's not worth anything.

It just means that that's one of the things it has to be considered. Also, because it's an innovative use of this technology to date like this, you just got to let it have time to be vetted by the scientific community and see if it's accepted or not as well. So fascinating, but we don't want to put too much weight on it. Yeah. So if I have this straight original dating from 78, I believe, or was it 80? 80.

88 is flawed, flawed dating because of... It's not flawed dating, it's flawed sample. Right, okay, so it's a flawed sample. We have no, let's say, let's just believe everything about the scientists, they did it with integrity. Sure. And, okay, do not impuging any of their work, zero. They had no idea. They just tested what they had.

Okay. What they had was a contaminated sample. It's not representative of the shroud. That's the best way to put it. Okay. So that initial dating, which people, maybe if they don't know, were still relying on, hey, this has been debunked because you said that it was published in a journal, but nobody read the journal. So nobody even knew that it's been reanalyzed. And so this in 22, three years ago, we have this new methodology that shows promise, but there is flawed aspects of it as well because we don't. know the historical route that this thing has taken over thousands of years. Right. So to this day, I guess what I'd like to do is maybe bringing it in for a landing with this line of thinking for you to maybe ponder on. Is, do you know of anything that is on the

horizon that might be able to lead towards a very accurate dating that we would say that the shroud is 2,000 years old. Or are we still kind of at a point in time where we're still playing with dating and just seeing, you know, what's going to come up? Because we don't know what's going to happen and develop in the scientific realm in the future. Right. So are we still kind of, I guess, in a waiting game as to the actual accurate dating of the shroud?

Yeah. Now, you know, you're asking somebody who's got a degree in theology and art. Right. Okay. So I can't tell you what's on the scientific horizon. But, you know, we see the type of advances that occur in science very quickly. So I'm very optimistic that other methods will be developed. And maybe even this one, the wax test will be refined.

And there's ways to get through the asterisk that we have there right now. And to be fair, the scientists who do that test don't say, well, this proves its first century. All they, you know, it's consistent with the first century cloth. It's the way it gets reported that gets overstated. And that's kind of what we're trying to fight through to get to the real data here, the way we're talking about it. But there is one other fascinating line of evidence for the authenticity of the shroud. It's totally different than anything we've talked about.

Can we do that before we land? Absolutely. Okay. Because this has to do with art history. and the idea behind this comes from a something that a researcher, shroud researcher in the 1930s recognized. And he saw that among the images of Jesus, particularly Byzantine icons starting around the middle of the 6th century,

they all have this uniformity to it. In fact, a very high percentage of them have the same 15 features or so. And yet before the middle of the 6th century, there's this wide variety of ways to depict Jesus that doesn't have any of this. And he started trying to figure out what the best way to explain this was. So to fully appreciate it,

you need to get a sense of what Jesus looked like in the earliest days of Christianity. So here is just kind of a representative sample going from the very earliest image of the crucifixion, which is that graffiti. But it gives Jesus a horsehead, so that doesn't really count. But that's the earliest thing we got. With that graffiti, though, I feel like I've seen this before where that graffiti was meant to actually be insulting to the Christians, right?

Right, right. That's why I had a horse head. That's right. You're making fun of this like, you know, our buddy's God. This is who he's worshipping. And that's what they draw. So, but that's the earliest actual depiction of Jesus, although it's meant to mock him because of the horsehead. But the other images range from second century to the early fifth century.

And you can see he's got long hair. He's got short hair. He's bearded. He's clean-shaven. He's enthroned. He's a wonder worker, a shepherd, a fisherman. it's all sorts of different ways. Augustine even complains in writing about how many depictions of Jesus there are.

And then suddenly, in the middle of the sixth century, this is what happens. Where Jesus looks like Barry Gibb, like across the board. Barry Gibb is one of the Bee Gees, by the way. I'm talking like a dad rock guy. So there are, so there are features that, are common in almost every one of these icons. And this is, again, just representative. This isn't all the data we have. So there's like this weird kind of triangle between the eyebrows. There's a line across the forehead. And all of them, he's got these big, heavy, owlish eyes. He's got

the same shape and size nose. His hair is parted in the middle. And it's usually got strands hanging down like that. He's got a forked beard in most of them. The way the tunic hits across the chest is in all of them. And so the guy was like, okay, how do you explain that? What happened in the middle of the sixth century that would all of a sudden make these writers of the Byzantine icons believe

that there was like, all of a sudden, it's like there's an exemplar, they're all trying to match. So what happened? And in the year 544 was the recovery of the image of Edessa, and that image has, all of the features that are being replicated in all the other images.

And so this became this area of interest for art historians to dive into. In the late 70s and early 80s, there was a psychiatrist at Duke University who went way down this rabbit hole. So he started comparing images of the face on the cloth to these different Byzantine icons. And a couple of Byzantine icons become very important. especially this one because this is called a panacrater icon. It's from St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of the traditional Mount Sinai in Egypt. And the monks there believe it was painted after with the exemplar of the burial shroud of Jesus.

And it's dated to the year 550, around 550, six years after the recovery of the image of Addessa. So what this guy would do, this guy from Duke, was before there was, he didn't have a Mac to work on at this point. So what he had was two slide projectors, and each one of these images in the slide projectors, he'd project them onto his wall at the same time, and he had two polarized lenses. One was horizontal, one was vertical,

and then he held a third polarizing lens, and he would twist it, and he would be able to identify places where these two images, when they're overlaid match identically, and he counts about 175 of them, or 170 of them. I mean, just looking at it, the nose is incredibly similar. The nose is incredibly similar.

And yet, at the same time, when they're side by side, you kind of go, all right, you know, long-haired guy, real similar nose. He's bearded, but really 170 points. And to be fair, I have never seen a map showing all 170 points. Never, it doesn't

mean it doesn't exist. I just have never seen one if it does exist. But you don't really need that because I'm going to do an overlay using Photoshop filters and you can see just what he's getting at because you don't have to count the points once you see it.

So if you stare at the tip of the nose here you will see the eyes just kind of open up and the eyebrows fill in. The nose, as you pointed out, is an exact match. The beard matches. This weird stain under here becomes the top of the tunic. And then the hair parts, everything. So just look at the tip in the nose. Ready?

Wow. All right. Whoa. Here comes again. Unreal. So here's another version of it. So slightly lighter version of the shroud and a different overlay. It's exact. It's crazy. That's incredible. And so here's yet another version.

So this is a naked eye version of the shroud, but with the contrast amped up and the flesh just fits right on top of it. Is that not amazing? That's wild. So this panacrata icon image is the closest image we have in existence to the face on the shroud. So a couple of years ago, it kind of became a thing for a certain. for people to try to use AI to create the, you know, take the data from the face on the shroud to see what he look like. So as a graphic designer, I use this program as well.

But I know that you can't just put in the data from the face on the shroud and extrapolate a face out of it with any kind of realism. What you need is an example image. and to also feed it as an example. So the images that you see, there's very powerful and very realistic, but they're also based on another image. You know, so it's like, you know, they find an image of a long-haired guy

that they think basically looks the same and they include that in the data. So when I did it, I used, this is what the, this is the data that I use, you know, these two images, because this is the closest we have. So when the data from these two images are combined in mid-journey, this is the image I came up with.

Wow. So whether that's, you know, realistic or not, we don't know. Plausible if the Panicrata icon is really reflecting the way that Jesus looked and the face on the shroud is actually Jesus. Right? All sorts of caveats. Yeah. But it's a pretty compelling image. It's absolutely compelling.

So, I mean, we've gone from ancient times to 70s and 80s to now we're in 2025 using AI to pull the image and data from this ancient relic. I mean, if this is accurate, I mean, accurate, I use that loosely. But, I mean, with AI, we could be looking at the face of Christ. It's way more compelling than the images I grew up within the 70s where Jesus looks like he just walked off stage with Kenny Lod. You know, he was like, this is a shampoo commercial and all that. It's totally different. So he also did it with this image. This is a coin from the year 695 or so. And it's the first time Jesus appears on a coin. That's a depiction of Christ on a coin? Yes. Wow. And in fact, I was just in Istanbul a couple of weeks ago and at the Archaeological Museum. They've got three of these coins on display. So you can see it. They're tiny. They're about the size. of a dime at the most. So this is zoomed in quite a bit,

but he did this same overlay technique and found 140 places where it matched. And so when you do this match, watch the nose. It overlays exactly again. That's wild. That's incredible. And then I'll show you one more piece

of art history evidence. And this has to do with a book called the Hungarian Prey Codex. And this, or Hungarian pray manuscript, it's dated from around the year 1195. That's 65 years earlier than the oldest end of the radiocarbon dating date, which is 1260. So it's 1260 or 1380 is the radio carbon dating. This is from 1195.

And it shows this top panel is an image of the burial of Jesus. Look at the position of the body, his right arms over the left. so it's the same position as the man in the shroud. But what's fascinating, let me flip this over, is this pattern on the cloth is really unusual. But this pattern is the same as the weave of the shroud, which is called a three over one herringbone pattern. So this distinct weave in the shroud is actually depicted in this cloth,

But even weirder than that, look at the detail that is included. These four circles in the L shape, which match the poker holes right there, which would be a really weird detail to include on a burial shroud that doesn't exist yet, according to the radiocarbon dating. Wow. Wow. Not only that. But look at this extra cloth there.

What in the world is that? might be the pseudarium. Wow. It's the other cloth. Whether the people who made that image for the Hungarian prey manuscript knew about the pseudarium or not, it looks like they're depicting

the other cloth found in the tomb. Wow. So that steals it for me. Yeah? That seals it for me. That's incredible. My work is done here. Yeah. I mean, I think we just cracked the case. I mean, that, I'm so glad you shared that here

because that really, I mean, especially you pointed out, I don't know how long we've been going, but at least an hour ago, you pointed out the L shape and to bring that full circle really, and just so I understand, this artistic piece predates the radio carbon dating. By 65 years. By 65 years. Incredible. Wow.

Well, Mr. Doug, pal, I appreciate you joining me and letting me come out here and do this conversation with you. in front of all these replicas. I mean, this has been absolutely fascinating for me. Well, thanks. Can I land the plane? Please. All right.

Yes. I want to reiterate that the authenticity of these two things does not, it's not what the faith is based on. Right. That the truthfulness of Christianity does not rely on whether these two things are authentic. They could be proven to be false and nothing would happen to the the truth claims of Christianity or my faith or my theology. But if they are authentic and you've seen the evidence, then this is the modest case

that I'm making. It's very compelling. It's very compelling that these things are actually artifacts that we read about in John 20. And as a result, they become corroborations that these are real historical accounts, that this really happened. but even more importantly, and it gives additional information, which is also important. But the most important thing is that as Christians, we believe that Jesus shed his blood

for the forgiveness of our sins. And we hear that so often, you know, it's a precious truth to us. It's central to our faith. But we hear it so much, it becomes abstract or spiritualized, and it loses its kind of concreteness, its historicity to us. But think about it. If these things really are authentic, then the blood that was shed for the forgiveness of your sins, that's it.

Right there. That's what you're looking at. That's the blood of the covenant that was shed for the forgiveness of many. That's what makes these things important. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't have said it any better. I appreciate you sharing that.

Oh, thanks. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. All right, Tony, there's one more thing that I've got to have you do here. Okay. And you're going to need your phone to do it. Got it right here. So open up your settings and go to accessibility.

Okay. And display and text size. Okay. And then scroll down to find classic invert. Okay. Turn that on. And then close the settings and go to your camera. Okay.

Oh, boy. You got it? Yeah. All right. Turn around and check out the face. of the shroud. I got to get up for this. Whoa.

Take a picture of this. Goes close as you want. Whoa. That is incredible. And look at the hands over here. It's just, it's like, wow. It's like an x-ray machine on my phone. Right.

So this is what Secunda Pia, the guy who took the first photograph, experience. Wow. Let me take a video of this. That is incredible. Whoa. And that's something that anybody watching this at home can do too. You even just on a computer screen, get a picture of the shroud and you can flip your phone around and do this.

Incredible. I can't believe that.