The Exorcist Files - The Shroud of Turin

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Father Martins interviews one of the world's leading experts on the Shroud of Turin. Grab a copy of Father's Book- FatherCarlosMartins.comRocket Money- Do an exorcism of your own finances and find hundreds of dollars of savings. Click Here- Exodus90- The ultimate mens spiritual formation challenge. Join their Advent Challenge TodayLearn a new language and impress your friends with our sponsor Babbel. Get up to 60% off at Babbel.com/exfilesJoin the Vault for Exclusive ContentWant an amazing resource for news, especially Christian education? Check out The LionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome back to The Exorcist Files. We hope you had a wonderful holiday and are enjoying your December so far. As promised to our Kickstarter backers, we want to bring you one of our long-awaited bonus episodes, an episode where we can say in the eternal words of St. Bonnie Tyler and St. Meatloaf, Turin around, bright eyes. That's right, today we begin our first exploratory episode into that most famous shroud, shrouded in mystery, the shroud of Turin. Father Martins will be getting to do the interview today, so you get a break from yours truly.

Before we start, however, a few announcements. If you haven't grabbed a copy of Father's book, The Exorcist Files, it's out now, and it's fantastic. It has a really awesome list of endorsements, too. For example, Archbishop's sample of Portland, Oregon called it, quote, an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the reality of Satan and demonic activity. Head on over to Father Carlos Martens.com to order a copy, or just go wherever you get your books. We also want to give a special thank you to Exodus 90. Men, if you haven't signed up yet for their Advent challenge, this is the week to do it. It's an incredible way to grow an intimacy with God

and contemplate the real reason for the season. Go to Exodus 90.com slash X-Files, that's EX files, and sign up. Father really loves this as a spiritual formation tool. We also want to give a shout out to the lion. Okay, I know there's a lot of places to get news about what's going on in the culture, but if you're a parent and you care about education especially, check out readlion.com. That's R-E-A-D-Lion.com. They have incredible reporting, and it's just a really fun way to stay up to date

on what's happening in the world. So with that, let's Turin it over to Father Martins. Hello, friends, Father Martins here. I'm excited to bring you an interview I did with my friend, Dr. John Jackson, perhaps the world's foremost authority on the Shroud of Turin. Some may be wondering, why does the Shrout of Turin matter, especially for an exorcism show? Well, the Shrout of Turin, if it is the burial cloth of Jesus, it is a relic.

And relics, as the church fathers tell us over and over again, relics are exorcistic. But some of you may remember the account I gave in episode 13 of season one, where I talked about having used a thread from the shroud, a thread that is part of my ministry, that I had Dr. Jackson examined because, frankly, I didn't know if it was or wasn't. It came from the archives of Cardinal Fassadhi, who was the Archbishop of Turin during the 1930s and 40s. So I gave it to him to examine, and he wrote a 120-page report on it and venerated it as a part of the Shrap. And he concluded that in his scientific opinion and that of his colleague who vetted his research that in fact came from the shroud. But I used that relic in an exorcism.

And I put it up against a demon who identified himself as Satan. Now, this is not one of my personal cases. It's a case of a colleague of mine. And I'd been helping him with this case for several years. I would, several times a year, I would go down and be present at one of the sessions and offer my assistance. and I pulled out the relic and I put it up against this demon. Now, this demon is easily the most strongest, most belligerent, most stubborn demon that I have ever encountered.

And when I put the relic up against him, he wailed. So he had never made a sound before. And he got down prone on the floor in the position of the man in the shroud, in the position of the depiction of our lord in the shroud, with his hands crossed over his midsection, body leaning to one side and whimpering as if he were the man in the shroud. So I could talk about how smart Dr. Jackson is, but I'll just let him describe his credentials. I did my undergraduate work in physics at Colorado State University, finishing that I went to

the Air Force, and I entered the Air Force as a second lieutenant. My first assignment was to go to the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey, California for a master's degree involving physics. And then I then converted it with Air Force permission to a four-year PhD program at that school where I did my PhD work in the area of general relativity and cosmology. I do have a PhD in physics. I have a Bachelor of Arts and Religious Studies from the College of Santa Fe, Christian Brothers. I was the president of Shroud of Turin Research Project, formed an organization called the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado. Dr. Jackson was interested in the Shroud from an early age. One of his most vivid childhood

memories is when his mother introduced him to the Shroud. Well, my experience, I guess you might say, started with my mother. I was born and raised in Denver, and she showed me a picture of the Shroud. And I was expecting to see a body image from what she told me, but it turned out to be the face. I didn't write. recognized that at first, and suddenly when I was trying to make everything work, I realized I was looking at the face, and that that face was looking at me. I was about 14 years old. And at that point, that's where I started my interest, you might say, an awareness of something like the Shrout of Turin. Although Dr. Jackson's life led him to pursue his study of physics, the Shrout of Turin was always pulling on his mind. Like so many of us who see the face of Christ, you can't walk away on He was deeply affected, and this attraction only increased as he worked on his PhD and became one of the leading physicists in the country. But during that time, I was gaining interest in the Shroud from more of a scientific point of view.

And then as time rolled on, I started to work on the Shroud. And in 1978 in October, I had the privilege of leading a team of scientists about 30 of us. from various scientific laboratories like Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Atomic Bomb Lab, for example, Sandia, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We had 30 of us, and we were given five days around the clock's opportunity to study the shroud with then high-tech equipment. So we gained a lot of scientific information. We didn't know what we were going to find.

No preconceptions, just do the best science that we could do. And so we wound up with a considerable amount of introductory but sophisticated scientific data for the shroud. And then in the years that passed since 1978, I formed an organization called the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado. We call it TSC. So in this interview, if you hear, TSC means TURN Shroud Center of Colorado. I have a colleague who is Dr. Keith Prop, another physicist, who has been volunteering with me for 35 years, and we work on the scientific problems in our science lab that we have on the shroud.

It's not every day that someone gets to run in-depth scientific experiments on an object like the Shroud of Turin. I asked Dr. Jackson how exactly he got permission to access the Shroud. Well, it started by holding workshop in, Elbe Cookey, New Mexico. This was around the middle of the 1970s. And it was centered around this three-dimensional discovery that we made on the shroud. I was now a new, brand-new PhD in physics. I was a captain in the Air Force. In New Mexico, I was in reach of many really powerful scientific laboratories that are in New Mexico. We started to show this discovery to

other scientists. They became instantly interested in this because this is not something you normally expect, especially when we showed them the three-dimensional image that you can construct by your computer of that. So we decided to hold a workshop, and a lot of these scientists decided they wanted to present papers at it. And so we did it. And then the second day, we decided to talk about what could you do with the shroud scientifically, what kind of testing capability exists that we could use in a non-destructive manner on the shroud. We talked about that for a lot. And finally, at the end of that workshop, a potential benefactor who was there said that

this needs to be proposed as a delegation to the authorities. and he says he'll pay for that delegation to go there. So that was my first trip to Italy with some others. And we presented our proposal. So we waited a number of months and just waiting and hoping for a positive answer. And we also had a priest named Father Rinaldi, who was born and raised in Turin, Italy, where the shroud is. but he was a pastor of a church in New York. He was a good go-between on this.

Finally, on one afternoon, April 26, 1978, he called and says, you have permission to put a team together and study the shroud. And, of course, you could push me over with a feather on that one. I had another colleague who was helping me at that time. His name was Eric Jumper. and we started to look at the parameters of this and it turns out that we would have to put this whole expedition together

and we had to be on site ready to go with all of our experiments with our team in Italy in October of that same year. So it was a daunting task to do this. So the first thing we did was to hold another workshop but we did this in Colorado Springs where I was living. And the idea was to put together the... The concepts were how these different experiments would work. We knew we had to build a table that would accommodate all these experiments,

because each experiment could have different requirements. So we had to raise money to do this expedition. We organized the Sturip Expedition. We had to get ourselves registered so that we could accept donations. We had to have all these, this equipment, whether we buy it, we borrow it, or however, but we had to have it in Connecticut by September 1978, all of it. While they were going to put together boxes to ship over to Turin. It turned out we had like 55 big shipping crates containing all the scientific equipment

that had to be built during that summer while raising the money. And by the way, all of this had to be done on our own time. We were treating ourselves as volunteers to our own nonprofit organization to do this. But we were pretty motivated because we thought we really had something here. And I think a big motivator of that was that three-dimensional image. That was the thing that was sort of the catalyst. So then we went to Turin, flew there, and everybody took vacation time. We did this during October of 1978.

The days were October 8th through 13th. That's when we actually were able to do the testing. When we got there, we had the problem of getting our equipment through Italian customs, and they were very reluctant to grant permission to bring all that scientific information through customs so we could do the experiments. Well, that put us in kind of a bind because at the time we didn't have the money to do this expert. Well, we had enough money to get us there in the equipment, but we didn't have the money yet

raised to get the equipment and the money back. And the problem was if we can't do the experiments because of this customs problem, then we've really be up a creek, you know. I mean, who would want to fund a project that has all this equipment, just to bring equipment back for some scientific experiments that you weren't being allowed to perform? And so Father Rinaldi really went to bat for us, and so did the Cardinal of Turin, who was at that time,

the Vatican did not own the shroud. It was owned by the exiled king of Israel. Italy. The Italian customs agent said that when Father Rinaldi confronted him, says, how would you like to be the person who's going to stop the world exposition on the shroud just because of a customs problem. But he says, what we're going to have to do is you're going to have to post a bond equal to the value of that equipment, which at that time is probably several hundred thousand dollars. Cardinal Bellisdraero posted the bond for us. We were asking for permission to study the shroud, but he's the one that gives permission. But in addition,

then posted the bond equal to the value of our equipment. So we had a lot of problems. So people might think that this was an easy job to do. No, it was. It was one problem after the other. But we somehow, and I think with God's grace and providence here, we managed to get through these. Before we left for Italy, our team said they were concerned that the church, Catholic Church, if they were to say that they had to review, we had to pass our scientific data through their filter in order for us to be able to get it back to the United States to work on it, that that would be a violation of academic freedom. And the team said, we all voted on this. I agreed with it. That if that were to happen, we would refuse to do the experiments on the shroud. Moreover, on the day we

launched our expedition, I was called by our logistics person. on our team, said, have you heard the latest news? I said, what news? He said, Pope John Paul I just died. I said, you can't be serious. He said, yes, he just passed away suddenly. We were launching our expedition right then and there. And so we talked. We said, do you think we ought to do it? As I said, we didn't have the money to bring the team back at that point. And if we go, we might not be able to get back. How do we fund all that? That'd be a lot of money. But it's one of those times you have to make your decision quickly because we're ready to go.

And I was president of the project. And so I had to make that decision. And what I said was, if we don't do this, we'll never get a chance to see the shroud. We're going. That was the right decision because we were afraid that they would call off the exposition. See, we were going to do this right after the third time that the shroud was shown in the 20th century. And so we were being able to go right at the tail end of that. that before they put the shroud back into its reliquary.

Amen. Father Martin's here. I want to do a quick plug for one of the most powerful tools I've seen for breaking free and growing closer to Christ. Exodus 90. The Exodus 90 challenge begins this year on January 20th, but this isn't just a 90-day program. Exodus 90 is a spirituality for modern men that is built on three ancient pillars, prayer, self-sacrifice, and fraternity. We all long for something more. We long to be the men God created us to be, sons of a loving father. It's time to turn away from our idols. It's time to break free from the pharaohs that hold us in bondage. If you're ready to make a fresh start and embark on a journey to uncommon freedom in Jesus Christ, then download the Exodus 90 app today.

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God bless you. So where we left off, Dr. Jackson was telling us the story of how he and his team got to study the shroud before it was put back into its reliquary. Finally, it arrived, we set it up, and then we started to get ready to execute. Now, this other problem that I told you about, if there's any problem about our academic freedom to we draw our own scientific conclusions and not being, having the church get in the way of that, we would refuse to do the testing. Well, as it happened, I suddenly was presented with a letter saying exactly that, that you have to agree to let all the scientific data stay there in turn when you guys go back

and we're going to make decisions about what data you're going to get to study effectively. And I was presented this with the Cardinals' science representative. So I thought, oh, geez, we're in a tight position. So what I said was, oh, this is not necessary. I was bluffing, really. This is not necessary. We have a signed agreement that we're going to have a confidentiality agreement for three years while we do the testing. so we're not going to be releasing this.

I didn't know how that that would be taken. And the Cardinal Science Representative says, me and you've never been presented, never been told you're going to sign this? I said, no, never. He says, I smell a rat. He went back, told the Cardinal about it, and the Cardinal was absolutely furious,

as I understand. That was not what he wanted. There were some other priests that did this on their own. He was very absolutely furious, and he says, I want this scientific team to have totally, total freedom to study the shroud and come to the conclusions they see fit. And I think that's important to mention when we're talking about studying a scientifically

object of religious significance, something like the shroud. With decades of firsthand experience researching the shroud of Turin, Dr. Jackson has had the rare privilege to run many scientific tests on this item, which holds great religious significance to millions. I was curious to hear how he was going to approach. the scientific task of evaluating the Shroud of Turin, given its age and tumultuous history. Well, you know, it depends what the questions are that you're asking, first of all. Let's talk about what science is, first of all.

Science is a process designed for the human mind to try to obtain physical understanding. You'd like to zero in on scientific truth, whatever that happens to be, because science always finds new things, which you can then use in your... analyses. But basically science is based on what's called the scientific method where you form hypotheses about a given phenomena or object. And then what you do is you then design experiments that can gain that information about those objects. And then the idea is not to try to prove your hypothesis, but rather to test it. So you test with various experiments or observations that have the a priori capability of disproving the hypothesis, falsifying it. So it's in the process of being

rejected by the scientific method that hopefully you can look at the last hypothesis standing, and that would be the one that is consistent with all observations as we know them. But of course, as science progresses with its capabilities and technology, we find new ways of study a given problem. I'll give you an example. I was looking with Dr. Keith Pratt on a shroud sample, an alleged shroud sample. And one of the things we were looking at was, does this sample have any chemical characteristics that were reported by the Sturrup team in 1978, where we still think is very important? Well, at the time, the way they looked for this chemical group that's on the sample, they use the method of staining. So you apply a stain, this type of stain would then attach to the

group that we're looking for, the chemical group. And if you see that happening, you say that this chemical group looks like it's on the shroud. Well, fast forward from 1978, there's another way to test this, and that's with the Laser Ramon spectrometer, which we now have. And we can look now for that same chemical group using the Ramon spectrometer, not the method of staining. and we think that's going to be a more tight and probably quantitatively objective way of looking for this and testing that hypothesis. So that's an example of a hypothesis that is being promoted and advanced because technology is advancing to help us be able to do that. As Dr. Jackson notes, all testing done on the Shrad of Turin was done according to the scientific method. His contact with it allows him to share some unique findings.

Here's what he had to say. Well, there's various issues and questions you'd like to ask about it, I think. The first question that comes to mind is that is this or is this not the historic burial cloth of Jesus? That's not a faith or religious question. That's a science question because science has the ability to test that hypothesis, pro or con. The image is so remarkable.

The image on the shroud, as I alluded to a while back, shows us the image of a human form. But it's not just a real shadowy, obscure image, photographic like in its resolution. And it's full size on this shroud, which is 14 feet long and about 3 feet 7 inches wide. And the image represents itself as a brownish discoloration on the surface of the cloth. and we would like to know what is the genesis of that image. How did that get from the body to the cloth? The way we tend to look at it is more of an information transfer because what you see there is in the varying intensities of this image,

which is very high resolution. We see information characteristics of a body shape on the cloth. And one of the things that science has given us is that the varying intensities are such that they, appear to vary with expected cloth to body distances. If you would take this cloth as a burial cloth over a body, or the cloth is over the body, and then varying the distance between the body and the cloth at various points,

you have various intensities. And with our computer analysis of that, it's really quite remarkable. I was able to publish that result in the Journal of Applied Optics in 1984. So that's available to anybody who wants to go to the library to look at it and you can see all the characteristics and how we analyze that, but you also see how that one characteristic, which is present in high resolution image,

how it can discriminate between various hypotheses. That's what that paper does. In his 1984 paper, a comprehensive examination of the various stains and images on the Shroud of Turin. Dr. Jackson concludes that the Shroud shows consistent characteristics with a burial cloth that would have been used around the time of Christ. The blood on the cloth is real human blood, and the image was not done by painting nor by pressing. We can show that the shroud, for example, we don't think it's a painting or the work of the human hand

because of that 3D quality that the shroud has. We don't think it's the result of a diffusion process. We don't think it's direct contact, like you put the cloth over a body and then just where the cloth touches the body have image and where it doesn't, you don't have image because of the variation image intensity is everywhere, not just over contact points.

You can tell what the shroud image is not, but we're more interested now in taking that and trying to form a hypothesis as to what formed the image on the shroud. So now a question, if the shroud is not a painting, nor was it made by pressing to some type of statue or mold,

than what made it? This is a very difficult prophecy. We have a variety of hypotheses that various scientists, people, researchers have proposed. Not necessarily us, but there's other ones. And we have those listed,

and then we have all the observations that we think are relevant that we know scientifically from the shroud. So then it's kind of like a truth table in a way. It tells you which of the hypothesis or the observations are incompatible with the hypothesis, and it's checked where we have this incompatibility. So you see it right there,

and this is all explained in this 120-page book that we have right now. And there is one hypothesis there. It happens to be our hypothesis, but that doesn't have any checkmarks in it. So it passes all the tests right now, if you will, from the observations. The hypothesis is this. The image on the shroud looks like it's a cloth that was around a body, a three-dimensional body, and then something radical happens to the body, such that the cloth is able to fall into the space where the body was occupying.

As it does so, a radiant volumetric radiation then interacts with the cloth in such a way as to give us the image discolourations that you see on the shroud. So our hypothesis, radical though it may be seen, is what in our minds can explain all the current observations of the shroud. For example, that 3D characteristic I told you about, that's explained by the cloth following through the body at different times, and therefore you get different intensities that correlate with the initial body cloth information in their distances. So that hypothesis explains that observation,

but a painting doesn't do that. we've done experiments with painters, try to encode this three-dimensional image intensity. And this is in the Journal of Applied Optics that we were able to publish. And the artists tried to paint these images three-dimensionally, and they failed. And you can see the computer renditions of those failures, for example.

So it's quite a problem. But if there's another observation that comes to light in the future, which is contrary to that hypothesis that I just told you, then we would have to as scientists reject it. But the more observations that you can have, and they're independent from each other, that support a given hypothesis, the more confidence you have in that.

And so that's where I think we are right now. That's where I am anyway. Of course, if the shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus, then it must be something else as well. Well, if this is the burial cloth of Jesus, then logically it would have to be his resurrection cloth too. And we have to realize that the Gospels don't tell us what happened inside the tomb. But if the shroud is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus, then it would have to be his resurrection cloth that wrapped the body.

And then if the resurrection event, which Christians for 2,000 years have been calling the resurrection, had physical consequences to that cloth such that they could modify it in some way, then you could scientifically characterize that and think of the shroud as being a silent witness, if you will, silent observer to what happened aside the two. So that is a possibility that is something that's very important to do. But then you have another piece of scientific data. I'll bring this up, and that's the radiocarbon date that happened about 30 years ago. Dr. Jackson is referencing the 1988 carbon dating study that was done by three independent labs.

Their measurement of the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 dated the shroud to the Middle Ages instead of to the time of Christ. Their testing has come under criticism in the modern era due to their method and the specific claims they make from the limited data that they obtained. Other scholars like Dr. Liberado de Caro in Italy have used other respects. methods to arrive at a different dating. Nevertheless, the 1988 carbon dating study was the shot heard around the world. I asked Dr. Jackson about this perceived discrepancy. So what do we do with that? That is a scientific measurement, ratios of carbon 14 to carbon 12 that were measured

by an accelerator mass spectrometry technique, and that's the result that it came up with. and had three labs that did that, and they both all agreed with that. The problem is that there's also a lot of other data that comes from more of archaeological, even the biblical work. For example, we've done crucifixion experiments. I mean, real crucifixion experiments without nails going through bodies, people, volunteers. I mean, I've been up on this, our apparatus, but it allows the body to be attached according to the way the shroud of Turin. You can calculate this from the shroud, and this is going to be in our coming,

book. We're going to talk about this. But basically, you have the body on the cross, and then you can see which way the blood flows and how the blood flows. It was really intriguing about that is that the blood flows that we can see coming from that experiment that we did on the volunteer persons. Those blood marks are seen in very subtle manners on the shroud of Turin. That shroud looks like it was really honestly the result of a crucifixion. But then you got a body image on that clover on that cloth that has this three-dimensional quality, and we don't have any other way we can reproduce that image. If you didn't have the carbon date, you'd see this corpus of various observations that we have the shroud, and you'd say, gee, this is a real thing. But that the carbon 14 says no.

So I think we have to be careful because in 1984, we wanted to have a follow-up study of the shroud. We really had an experience now with the shroud, and so we presented another proposal, which I put together on behalf of our team, and we presented it to the Vatican authorities because we're in 1984, the Shrout became the property of the Pope in 1983. In this case, Pope Francis right now is the current owner of the Shroud. We had 26 work packages, in other words,

26 different experiments we wanted to do on the Shroud, all non-destructive, give us more information. And what they decided was, well, the only one that makes any difference is the car, carbon-14 test, so we're only going to do that. This allowed all of the other 25 experiments. And what that did, it takes away the element of peer review on the carbon 14 test, because what we would have done, we would have subjected the sample to be tested under radio carbon with non-destructive, non-invasive, with experiments that would help characterize the sample.

so if there is a question one way or the other, we would have scientific data to test it. No experiment in science should be able to have the privilege of standing by itself, like the radiocarbon date, has and still does, without adequate peer review. And that, unfortunately, was what happened. There's not a lot we can do with that carbon-14 data other than try to look at other pieces of data on it. Some have hypothesized that the carbon dating process used fibers taken from repair patches that were added to the shroud during the Middle Ages

in an effort to repair it. Dr. Jackson does not think this occurred. Okay, well, here's the way science works on that. You have a hypothesis that where the radiocarbon sample was taken, that came from a 14th century reweave on the shroud, and that's why you get a 14th century radiocarbon date. It would be a clean way to explain

the radiocarbon date. The only problem is we have scientific observations that can disqualify that hypothesis. And the data is that during our 1978 testing, we took reflectance, imagery, and transmission imagery of the shroud. And so what we showed is that the image, when you compare them to reflect it in the transmitted light images, the image resides only on the surface of the cloth, which is very important and that demonstrable characteristic that this image only is superficial, the body image, on the shroud. But what you also see in there is you can see bands of striation that go through the cloth in the transmitted light image. And you don't see any place where a part of that cloth has been rewoven, cut out, and these bands of striation go

uninterruptedly through the shroud, including the site of the radiocarbon date. So I would offer that as hard evidence, that hypothesis, even though it might give me somebody the idea, the conclusions that they like they prefer, is not valid. That's not a way to reject the carbon 14. Okay. So the carbon dating was done on an actual piece of the shroud and not on a medieval patch that was placed to repair it.

But the question can be asked, how reliable is carbon dating? How far can we trust it? Yes, you can trust it if certain assumptions hold relative to it. You have to have the idea that there's nothing that has intervened in the history of the sample when you radio carbon date. And radiocarbon date, I don't like that word. I'd prefer the radiocarbon measure.

A date is something that you infer from the measurements based upon certain assumptions that you make about the measurement. So, or in this particular case, you have to assume that nothing has intervened that could possibly, alter the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12. Other than the amount of carbon 14 relative carbon 12 changing because of its radioactive decay time, which is a nuclear clock that can tell you how old that sample is when it was taken out of equilibrium. And then if we're able to do that,

then the carbon 14 daters would have to come back and show how their radio carbon method in 1988 supersedes those of that kind of an objection. But again, the problem is we don't have access to those samples in an unambiguous way that we can do good scientific testing on the shroud. Finally, I asked Dr. Jackson the most important question of all. Do you believe the shroud is, in fact, the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ? Yes, I do.

But that's a faith belief. I think the better way to say it would be. if you agree, I think that it is the burial cloth of Jesus. And my answer to that is, yes, I do. Even in spite of all of this right now, that's what I think, based on scientific data and evidence and experiments. See, one thing we can do is we can do experiments, like, for example, how do samples age to sculler with time. That's a very important thing. I've got a paper in a journal of applied optics that deals with that. there are people that try to date the shroud using a more chemical-based, not nuclear-based,

but chemical-based techniques like aging discolorations or crystallinity in cellulose and that changes with time. But the problem there is you have to almost know what the history of the shroud is, in this case, in order to date it. But we know the shroud went through a 1532 fire, which is a thermal event, which can cause all kinds of funny things chemically. to happen. So you've got to be very careful on that stuff. See friends, I told you he was smart. Now as far as what I believe, I agree. I think the evidence is sufficient given the science. The Shroud of Turing is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. While there is one scientific test, the carbon dating, that is inconsistent with the shroud being 2,000 years old. And to be fair,

there were three labs that arrived at that result, not just one. When we're talking, about an object as old as the shroud, one that has been handled by as many people as it has, and having existed in such various places and locations, it is not unreasonable that there could be carbon contamination. I know two scientists completing research, outlining a theory that will show precisely how this was the case. Since the research has not yet been published, I'm not at liberty to comment on it, but it is fascinating. Even small amounts of carbon contamination can significantly alter the age of a sample.

And if that contamination has altered certain chemical states of the shroud, even careful cleaning and handling procedures during carbon dating won't give an accurate measurement of its age. Regardless, the shroud is just another beautiful clue left behind by our Lord to help inspire and point us towards him.

God loves being sought, and he has left us these fascinating gifts like the shroud that point the way to him. The shroud offers just enough for us to rationally acknowledge what it is, but is still vague enough that it requires faith. God bless you all, and thank you for listening.