The Tucker Carlson Show - Jeremiah Johnston: Shroud of Turin, Dead Sea Scrolls, & Attempts to Hide Historical Proof of Jesus
Episode Date: August 8, 2025For decades, experts dismissed the Shroud of Turin as fake. New science suggests they were wrong, and probably lying. Jeremiah Johnston with the evidence that it is in fact the actual burial shroud of... Jesus. (00:00) What Is the Shroud of Turin? (11:09) The Historical Evidence of Jesus’ Crucifixion (16:33) What Kind of Scientific Testing Has Been Done on the Shroud? (28:28) The Gruesome Details Crucifixion (54:50) Where Did the Shroud Come From? (59:59) The Face of Jesus Paid partnerships with: Cozy Earth: Go to https://CozyEarth.com/Tucker for up to 40% off best-selling temperature-regulating sheets, apparel, and more. PureTalk: Go to https://PureTalk.com/Tucker to make the switch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
What's the shroud of Turin?
The Shrout of Turin is believed to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.
It's a very unique artifact because we get in this singular artifact, the death, burial, and resurrection of the historical Jesus, and no other artifact does that.
What is a burial cloth?
Right.
A shroud, which is mentioned in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is simply burial clothes.
It's a linen garment that a corpse is wrapped in.
and in a Jewish tradition, similar to a pita, how a pita, if you get a pita, like pita bread?
Yeah, literally.
It just wraps from over your feet, over the head, and then back around the front of the feet as well.
And that is laid, that's when the body is laid to rest within the burial shroud.
That's a shroud.
So you believe that this piece of cloth, which is represented right there, is that life, is that the actual size?
That is one to one, 14 feet, four inches by three feet, seven inches, or 8.8 by two Assyrian cubits, which was the standard unit of measurement in the Roman Empire.
Okay, so that, so the first fact we can ascertain is that this would have been, these would have been the dimensions of a burial tract in that period.
In the first century in antiquity.
Is it a continuously woven piece of cloth?
It is.
It is.
Pure linen.
Pure linen.
What is linen?
The herringbone weave.
It's made from the flax plant.
And this has a unique herring bone weave.
The only reason I know what herring bone is is my wife has a herring bone back splat.
in our home. That was very costly. So it has this amazing three to one herringbone weave,
which is indicative that a wealthy man would have purchased this actual burial garment in his own
pre-death planning. And that's exactly what we see is consistent in the resurrection traditions
embedded in the gospel. Joseph of Arimathea gives Jesus not only his own family tomb, a new tomb,
hewned in stone, but he actually gives him his own burial cloth as well.
Okay. And it says that in the gospels.
Correct. Okay.
all four so you're saying that this cloth represented right here one to one covered Jesus's body
the historical Jesus and it's not a death cloth I actually believe it's a resurrection cloth
resurrection cloth what's fascinating is this cloth is unique we have hundreds of burial shrouds from
the land of Israel we have hundreds of them from kumran we have them from all over antiquity really
but what's unique about this burial cloth Tucker is that it has embedded in it the image
of a crucified man that has complete correspondence with what we know of crucifixion in the Roman Empire
specifically as it relates to Jesus of Nazareth.
How do we have hundreds of burial clause from that period?
Well, it turns out that the Jewish burial traditions were an extremely serious matter,
that even Josephus says that the Romans were sensitive to Jewish burial traditions.
And so we have...
Josephus is a Jewish historian.
Jewish historian of the first century, exactly.
And so when these tombs have been excavated, not only are assuaries found, which are bone boxes that have generations of family bones within them, there's also burial shrouds that have been found, both in Jerusalem and in Masada and other places around the land of Israel.
The climate being dry enough to preserve.
Absolutely. Absolutely. For thousands of years.
Thousands of years. In fact, we have people say, well, the shroud of Turin, it couldn't be Jesus is. You're saying it's 2,000 years old. We actually have linen garments that are much older.
they antedate the shroud by 3,000 years.
We have the tarcan dress from Egypt.
You can Google it, and it's a beautiful linen blouse, and it's 5,000 years old.
So given the right circumstances, linen will last forever.
Amazing.
So it's not a shocker that we have barrel claws from antiquity.
It's not a shocker that we have pure linen burial claws.
The shocker is the image that's embedded in the cloth.
Okay, I have many questions.
And I'll ask.
I'm excited about this.
First question last, which is, wait, I thought the shred of turn had been thoroughly discredited by modern science.
Right.
And we'll get to that, but let me just provide a partial spoiler by saying what is factually true, which is, no, it has not been.
Correct.
And actually, that science has been updated as it so often is, and we know that it has not been discredited.
But anyway, okay, what image is on this cloth?
This is an image of a bearded man, a strong man, a muscular man, height of 510 to 511, which is interesting because the average Jewish height in the first century was 5'7 to 5 foot 9, so this man would have been taller.
He weighs around 170 to 180 pounds, and since this is a contiguous cloth, it's not strips.
We're not talking about mummification, right?
The Jews didn't embalm.
They had to bury the dead on the day of their death, and that's what we seek.
consistent with all the first century or late second temple.
They did not embalm.
They did not embalm late.
And so they didn't practice mummification.
This is why when you read the Gospels and women are coming to the tomb of Jesus on what became that first Easter morning, which we know is April 5th, AD 30, or April 9, AD 33, depending on which year you go with, women are coming to complete the spicing of the body.
Why?
Because the body would stink.
The body's in rigamortis.
Jews would mourn the dead for seven days.
inside the family tomb. They would mourn, they would spice the body. And so the women are coming there
on that first Easter morning not realizing they're going to be the first evangelists of the Christian
faith because the tomb is empty and they see Jesus alive again. What does it mean to spice a body?
They would perfume it with myrrh, with aloes because of Jewish burial traditions. Remember when Lazarus
dies, he's been dead for four days. And Mary and Martha are like Jesus, don't open the tomb. The body
stinketh according to the King James version. Well, that's why they would spice the body because for seven
days you mourn the dead at the family tomb. So you have to sit next to the corpse and the corpse is rotting.
Yeah, I've been in hundreds of Jewish burial tombs. They're all like the shape of our hand. And so you
would walk in the tomb. It's always cut out of limestone. And the tomb has different niches.
So the fingers represent the niches. But you would pray, you would worship, you would mourn the
dead inside essentially a gathering point within the tomb of Jewish burial traditions.
And there'll be slots cutting these niches. Right. And in those niches are these bone boxes
called aschewaries because one year after your family member, your loved one died, you would
collect the bones. And those bones would then be placed in a bone box. This is a thing called
oscillegium. And that's why when you go to the land of Israel today and you see 150,000 bone boxes
on the Mount of Olives, that's all Jewish burial traditions. And so this is a thing. This is
very insightful because we see a correspondence with everything we learn about the shroud, and it bears
correspondence with the first century world of Jesus. Okay, but of the hundreds or thousands of
shrouds like this that exist, why do we think this one has an image of Jesus on it? Because all of it
matches the way in which Jesus was crucified, and that's what's powerful about the shroud.
okay for example for example on the shroud we have blood all over it and the blood is interesting it's
been tested it's type a b blood which is semitic blood the few the fewest amount of people in the
world only 6% of the world's population has type ab blood and so this is human blood it's male blood
it's not blood of an animal it's not a hoax you would have to actually kill someone if you were
trying to reproduce the shroud because we have premortem and postmortem blood all over the shroud
So that's interesting. So this tells us that someone died a torturous death, a death where he was
flogged. We see scourges. There are hashes all over the front and back images. What we have is the
front on the left, lined up perfectly here in the middle of the camera. We see the face of the
crucified man. And what sticks out, you can actually see between rib five and six a gash in the
side. Well, Jesus, we know from John's gospel, he is penetrated through rib five and six by a
spear. And that spear, John says, blood and water comes out. Well, that's post-mortem blood. We know that
that blood, it differs from the other pre-mortem blood on the shroud. So, so many of these factoid
are indicative that this was a man who had suffered crucifixion under the Romans. They were experts
at it. And we see that all of this bears correspondence with what we read in the Gospels about how
Jesus died. How do we know that the man pictured on this shroud was crucified? That's a great question,
because there are crucifixion nail wounds.
You can actually see in the forearms of the crucified man.
We see, by the way, wrist, hands, the entire hand, it's all the same Greek word.
And so Jesus, we know that the nail penetrates through the wrist and the palm.
And that's how the Romans would crucify their victims.
In fact, we have 21 different evidences of crucifixion with nail penetrations just in the land of Israel in the first century.
So this was a common way that the Romans had perfected in killing people.
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the earth. So we know that crucifixion was a, was an historical practice. Absolutely. And it's the best
established fact of the ancient world, Jesus' death by Roman crucifixion. What does that mean?
Meaning that if we can't know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion based on the historical record,
we shouldn't believe anything from history at all. We have as much evidence for the crucifixion of
Jesus that we have from Roman empires of the same, the Roman emperors of the same period, which is remarkable.
Where does that, it is remarkable. Where does that evidence come from?
It comes out of all of the sources Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian. We have 11 different sources within, and I always use what the most critical scholars use, within 100 years of the time of Jesus, which his ministry begins in 26 to 27 AD. He's crucified, as we said, on that first Easter weekend, April 5, he's resurrected. He's crucified April 3, 80, 30. We know the exact date, which is fascinating to know that.
And then we have 11 sources, 8030. Right. And so we have 11 sources that talk about this Jesus, this Crestis. He's spelled in variant ways, but they're all talking about the same person, this Jesus Christ who's crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate at the hands of the Jews. And that's written in Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus. There's some remarkable work coming out with Josephus recently that Josephus, who we've already mentioned, the first century Roman historian, he would have had a
firsthand knowledge, he would have had friends who were at the trial of Jesus, and he writes about
that. He was not a Christian. No. So of those 11th, obviously you got the authors of the four
Gospels who testified to this. You have Saul, Paul. You have Paul. Yep. Those are all followers of
Jesus, but you have non-Christian. Absolutely. You have hostile witnesses who give voice to the
historicity of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Interesting. So what does the face tell us?
This is remarkable.
When you look at this, this is truly remarkable.
So let me back up for a minute.
In 1898, the first photograph is taken of the shroud.
Okay, remember, photography has only been invented in the 1840s.
And so in 1898, when the shroud has been on display,
the shroud has only been on public display a few times in its entire history.
And right now, you have to see it through a private viewing.
Very few people.
This is the closest.
This is what's so cool about our broadcast today.
I mean, this is the closest the audience will ever get to the Shrout of Turin,
what we're bringing today on your network.
What's amazing when you look at the face is we see an actual image in Seconda Pia
when he takes the photograph in 1898 of the shroud.
There was no electricity in the church, Tucker, so he had to bring in generators.
He had to take flash photography.
The exposures took 14 minutes and 20 minutes.
When I was in turn, Italy recently, I saw the actual camera he used.
It looks like a dorm refrigerator.
He used glass plates to take the picture.
And in the dark room, now, Sikonda Pia is a lawyer.
and he's just a hobbyist photographer
because who was a professional photographer
at the end of the 19th century.
And he's in the dark room.
And I want to show you what he sees using my cell phone.
And when I speak on our tour events,
I have our entire audiences do this.
If you take your phone and if you put it in classic invert
and you just bring up the camera
and if you focus in, I want you to do something,
I'm going to hand you my phone.
I want you to focus in on the image
and you're going to see exactly what Seconda.
That is wild.
Secondapia saw this image, and he's a follower of Jesus, and he believes he's looking at the face of Jesus Christ.
Keep in mind, he would be the first one to see the face of Jesus since the apostles.
And what does he say in the dark room in 1898, never more appropriately?
Oh, my God.
And so in 1898, he sees this.
That is really, it's so much clearer in this is photographic negative.
Right.
the negative is actually the positive. And so if you trace and go to the back, I want you to look at the
back of the image, the head, the blood, the back, all of those hash marks, the abrasions, I estimate
there are 700 wounds on the crucified man of the shroud. No one was crucified the way Jesus was
crucified in antiquity, the crown of thorns. So you ask about the face. So Condopeia believes
that he's looking at the face of God. In that image, of course, he was immediately
accused of being a fraudster, a hoaxter, because photography is so new, the dark room. This can't be
an image, right? He had to have faked this. I don't understand just as a kind of physics question,
like how would a photographic negative be clearer? Right. Isn't that fascinating? I mean,
that's the thing about the shroud. The physics contradict the chemistry. The chemistry contradict the
physics that welcome to Shroud of Turin. You're being red-pilled on the shroud right now.
I'm being baffled right now.
So the image, what's remarkable about this image is that you have to stand at least eight feet away to see it with the naked eye as we are right now.
The image vanishes if you get closer. It's hard to trace because the image is superficial, Tucker.
I mentioned the blood earlier and there are pints of type A, B, blood, pre-mortem, post-mortem.
Pints?
Pints of blood all over it.
I mean, this was a very, very badly wounded man.
So, again, indicative what we know of crucifixion.
pints of blood type a b blood and then in addition to that when you look at the shroud and you see
this and you see all of the image itself that's left the blood absorbs all the way through the
linen but the image is superficial now this is where you have to say with me the image is only two
microns thick it is it does not absorb all the way through so if this was a hoax if this was a work
of art if there was pigment if there was dye if there was paint it would absorb fully but if we
took a razor to the actual shroud, we could shave off the image because it's that thin. And this
is what the best scientists in the world cannot replicate. That's what's fascinating about the
shroud. The image, there's no paint, there's no dye, there's no ink. The image is actually
something chemically has happened, and we believe it happened at the moment of resurrection.
34,000 billion watts of energy and one 40th of a billionth of a second.
A physicist, my friend Paulo Delazzo at Ania Laboratories, right outside of Rome, spent five years.
He's a laser expert.
He's a physicist who works with lasers.
And they were able to duplicate the chemical change of what happens with the linen fibers,
34,000 billion watts of energy at pick power.
But the thing is, it was a cold energy.
It happened in 1.40th of a billionth of a second.
And that is what changed the chemical structure to leave this image on the shroud.
So that answers your question.
How is there a photograph?
Well, scientists doesn't know the mechanism.
We have no way to quantify how this happens.
The best scientific laboratories, when you look at it, Sandia Labs, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Las Alamos National Lab, Ania Laboratories in Rome, the world's best scientist cannot reproduce.
produce this image that's in the shroud.
Does any other of the many burial shrouds from the region and the period, any of them Canadian images?
None.
We have blood on them.
We have Hansen's disease, the tomb of the shroud.
We actually had a...
Leprosy.
Yeah, exactly.
That was discovered.
The Bible deniers said there was no such thing as leprosy, so Jesus couldn't have healed lepers.
Well, we have a shroud that actually has leprosy on it.
None of the shrouds that we have have this image, which you've just seen, which is...
It's mysterious because the shroud is...
the most light about artifact in the world, Tucker. And that's why I so appreciate you having me
on your program today. It is the most hated artifact in the world. It's the most light about
artifact. It's the most misunderstood artifact in the world. I have an allergic reaction to
Catholic relics. There are over 20,000 relics in the Catholic Church. And then a relic is
interesting because it has this apocryphal history to it, and yet it can't be studied by
the physical sciences. The Catholic Church has only two artifacts now that we can call both
an artifact and a relic. We have the shroud of Turin because it can be tested through history,
through sciences. We're going to get to the pollen spores. I mean, this is like a C-I-S-I experiment. When you
look at the shroud, it's amazing. And then we have the Sudarium of Oviedo in Spain, which is the
face cloth that John's gospel talks about that covered his face that was in the corner of the tomb
when the disciples came to see that the tomb was empty that first Easter morning in John chapter 20.
So, and that cloth also has human blood.
Guess what the blood type is?
Type baby.
You can't make this stuff up.
It's mind-boggling.
So that was not really clear to people until 1898.
1898, the first photograph.
And then in 1931 on Ray, the first professional photographer takes these high-resolution images for his day.
And that sent shockwaves throughout the scientific.
community. So much so that you have thinkers like C.S. Lewis. I used to live in Oxford when I did
my residency, and I would often go to the kilns to Lewis's home. And you can go in the bedroom of
Lewis's home, where the man lived, the great thinker of the 20th century, who was an atheist,
who became a Christian. And I look up and above the mantle in his bedroom, I can see it right now
in my mind's eye. He has on Ray's image of the face of the crucified man. Because every morning
that C.S. Lewis woke up. He wanted to be reminded our God has a face. Jesus narrates God to us.
If you want to know what God's like, look at the face of Jesus. And Lewis needed that reminder.
And so if C.S. Lewis takes the shroud of turn seriously enough to have a picture of it above his mantle and his bedroom,
where the first thing he saw every morning when he put his feet on the ground, I wanted to take it more seriously.
Amazing. And he was, of course, Anglican. Right. Not Catholic.
What kind of testing has been done, scientific testing?
That is such a great question.
This is where I went from being a shroud skeptic
because I was conditioned in Oxford in my residency
that we deny miracles, we deny anything supernatural.
Oxford is really a factory for creating apostate Bible scholars by and large.
I can say that having been there and been in Faculty of Theology
in Keeble College, I know that's not popular, but it's true.
I would often go home to my flat in summertime
after reading the Greek New Testament with my cohort.
And I would ask my wife, Audrey,
am I the only one who actually believes in Jesus in this group?
And that's okay.
And I was conditioned that this is a Catholic relic.
There's no historicity behind this.
It's a joke.
And I was conditioned by that.
And then I was scary.
And this is why your voice is so important, Tucker.
So many people, they know enough to be dangerous.
They're TikTok smarter.
They're YouTube smart.
They have a sound bite, but they have no substance.
to their faith. And I want to have a substance to my faith. I'm a truth addict. I follow truth
wherever it leads. And my pastor, Jack Graham, began encouraging me to just look into the primary
sources for the shroud. Not to pay attention to the blogosphere, but to pay attention to what do the
scientists actually tell us. And once I began to look at the scientific studies that undergird
all of the facts I'm sharing with you, I remember it took my breath away. The evidence was so compelling.
So to answer your excellent question, given that framework, 102 scientific disciplines have studied the shroud and produce peer-reviewed journals, studies, and cases for all the different aspects.
And so when I tell you it's the most studied artifact in the world, I mean it.
102 academic disciplines have spent 600,000 scientific hours like my friend Paul DeLazzo, studying the lasers, like my friend Bruno Barbaris, the mathematician from University of Termin.
not a theologian, not a preacher, great guy, good friend of mine.
Bruno is a mathematician, and he took all of the excellent questions you're asking me,
the correspondence of how do we know he was crucified, how was he crucified, what blood type,
crown of thorns, nail print hands, nail scarred side, nail prints in the calcaneus, the heel,
which is interesting, we'll talk about that, the scourge marks from, and then the pitibulum abrasions,
the cross beam, when he factored all of those probabilities together, Bruno Barbaris,
the mathematician said, there is a one in 200 billion chance it's anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth.
One in 200 billion. I like my odds.
Because the physical, the representations in this image track so precisely to the accounts.
Exactly. Not only with scripture, but with what we know of crucifixion from Josephus,
from Philo, from all of the other first century historians as well.
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What do you mean there are holes in his heels?
Yeah, this is amazing.
Can you describe crucifixion?
What was it?
What was the purpose?
How did they die?
Crucifixion was the most heinous
way to die. It turns out humans are really good at figuring out terrible, tragic ways how to
destroy ourselves. And crucifixion brings that to a fever pitch. The Persians likely invented it,
Alexander the Great, who gives us the language of the Bible, Quine Greek. He also made crucifixion
fashionable throughout his Hellenization of the world. The Romans come along and they take crucifixion
that they learn from Greek Hellenization and they perfect it for 700 years. Remember Josephus tells
that during the Jewish Revolt, AD 60, 6 to 70,
Titus and Vespasian are crucifying 500 Jews a day.
And so they were experts.
Now, it wasn't like they had a crucifixion manual.
There were 30 provinces in the empire during the time of Jesus.
Remember, we have Pontius Pilate, who's governor.
We have first Augustus, who's emperor,
and then we have the other emperors who followed during the time of Jesus.
there's 30 provinces and the provinces would practice crucifixion in different ways but it was in the
it was in the syrian province where judea was where it was particularly heinous i already mentioned
we have 21 different records of crucifixion with nail piercing nails were iron i actually have a
nail artifact that i'm going to show you in fact this is a great time to do that
I want you to hold the replica of the crucifixion nail.
This is a crucifixion nail.
It was circular on top, and then it was actually a spike.
It was an iron spike, and the Romans would drive this crucifixion nail through the wrists,
through the palm area, and then through the heel, the calcaneus.
Our heels are very brittle, and so they had to be very accurate when they would pin someone to the cross,
and they would likely straddle the heels on either side of what was called.
There you have the petibulum, and then you have the cross beam,
then you have the center vertical beam,
and the heels would be fastened, straddling the beam.
And the victim would be crucified completely naked.
There was no loincloth.
I know we see that represented in traditional Christian art,
but Jesus would have been crucified naked
because the Romans were saying something with this.
the Romans were saying, don't ever defy us. We are the truth. Remember, Augustus was called the
son of God. And so when Mark comes along and says, no, Jesus is the son of God, I mean, those
were seditious words for the time, because Augustus was called the son of God. When Augustus gave
good news, it was called the gospel. Christianity takes that term Eugenelion. No, it's not the gospel of
Augustus. It's not the gospel of the Roman Empire. It's not Pax Romana. No, this is the gospel of the
true son of God, Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead. And so he's crucified. And the Rome...
And so crucifixion was, I mean, at least one gospel account describes the other man on other side as
criminals or rebels. Malfactors. Who got crucified? Well, this is interesting. It turns out we really
hate to crucify slaves and we want to do it in the worst way possible. That was the Roman view.
and so non-Roman citizens however we do have citizens like antigonus the last of the hasmanian rulers who's a roman citizen but he defies rome
this guy named mark anthony who becomes augustus crucifies antigonus in a really despicable way he actually beheads him first and then crucifies him we have all of his remains
it's interesting because these crucifixion nails were thought to be something like amulets philactories they were thought to bring you good luck
And what's interesting is crucifixion nails were reused again and again.
So the very nails that pinned Jesus to the cross had probably been used many times before that to kill other Roman victims.
Because, you know, ironwork is expensive.
Right.
And again, the Romans, you know, they were a slave machine.
They knew how to kill people.
They knew how to enslave.
You know, 40% of the empire were slaves.
And so they had to know how to crucify them.
And so you have this slave crucifying machine that is the Roman Empire.
and then if you were a citizen but you defied the empire you would be crucified too how does crucifixion
kill a man it's really interesting were women crucified by the way yes in fact they were crucified
naked often facing in facing towards the cross just for pornographic reasons oh how does it kill you
it kills you in a variety of ways it doesn't kill you quickly it maximizes torment um while minimizing
it actually maximizes the length of death, and it prolongs death.
And so when we study the blood work, so there are some amazing hematological reports
that I've enjoyed reading thoroughly.
When we study the blood that's on the crucified man, it bears correspondence with that
Jesus, there's high levels of creatin, which means he was suffering from kidney failure,
high levels of ferretin, his body had inflammation all over it.
He was dehydrated.
You read John's Gospel.
Remember in John's Gospel, Jesus, one of the seven sayings, I thirst, he's dehydrated.
We know that Jesus likely lost one-third of his blood volume during flagellation.
So he was dying of a variety of things.
Many thinkers believe that he died of suffocation, asphyxiation because of pulmonary edema.
And we see that pulmonary edema reflected both on the shroud cloth and on the Sudarian of Oviedo, the face cloth.
It's six parts pulmonary edema, one part blood.
But again, a hoaxer is not going to make this stuff up.
I mean, it becomes so crazy.
Well, Mary, so your lungs fill with fluid.
Fluid, blood, and a mixture.
In fact, there is a translucent mixture of fluid around the side wound.
We looked at the side wound there between rib five and six just above that triangle, which is really a patch from a burnhole.
There's actually a translucent serum around that.
That, again, is consistent with what John's Gospel said.
Blood and water flowed out of Jesus because he was already dead.
And so the crucifixion would prolong that.
High levels of ferritin, high levels of creatin,
Jesus is suffering liver failure, kidney failure,
his body has inflammation all over it.
I believe, though, that Jesus died of cardiac arrest.
Massive heart failure, congenital heart failure,
because he has labored breathing.
We know all of this from the blood samples.
The New Testament, one account says that his tormentors wanted him off the cross
by the Sabbath, by Passover.
That's Deuteronomy 21, actually before nightfall.
Before nightfall.
Right.
So they broke his legs, or they were planning on breaking his legs.
They didn't because he died.
And that's consistent with messianic prophecy in David's Psalm 22.
Yes.
But why would breaking the legs of a crucified man hasten his death?
A wonderful question.
Thank you for asking it.
So the one way you could prolong your life is you would kind of essentially try to stand up
while you were being crucified, even though your feet were nailed straddling the cross.
And you would just edge up ever so often while you're trying to breathe.
And that would prolong your life.
So if you broke your legs, obviously you can't stand up.
So you can't.
So the point is when you're hanging by your wrists, you can't breathe.
Exactly.
And you suffocate.
You die in your own blood, essentially.
And so you can't do that.
And so that's why, but they come to Jesus, even though they break the legs of the criminals on the right or left,
indicating that Jesus suffered a different kind of torment than they suffered.
And his flagellation, we'll get to that here in a moment.
But they didn't need to break his legs because he was already dead.
In fact, they're surprised.
Remember, Pilate is shocked that he was so soon dead.
Jesus begins the crucifixion around noon.
He's dead by 3 p.m.
The Jewish day would begin at 6 p.m.
And so they only have about three hours to get Jesus off the cross,
ask for the body of Jesus from Pontius Pilate and then lay him in a tomb that was not far,
probably 150 feet away from where Jesus was crucified.
So this is the coolest Christmas present I'll get this year.
This is a leather alp pouch logo right there gets on your belt made in the United States out of actual leather.
If you carry, you can put the firearm on one side and a loaded tin of alp on the other.
It will never be far from you.
And it is legit cool.
I'm going to be wearing it.
Recommend you do the same.
Alpouch.com.
That's where you can find this.
The leather alpouch.
Alpouch.com.
What does it mean that they carried the crossbar?
Yeah.
What's the crossbar?
That is such a great question.
So, and this is what's so amazing.
When again, I don't privilege this.
I just look at this through historical eyes.
When you look at the back, the dorsal image on the shroud,
you can see that there are scourge marks all over it.
but in the right shoulder, coming down at a diagonal, there are abrasions all over the back.
We mentioned that Jesus, the crucified man of the shroud, weighed around 175 to 180 pounds.
The petibulum, which is just the cross beam.
So they didn't carry the whole cross.
They would only carry the cross beam.
And again, that wood was scarce as well, by the way, in the Roman Empire.
So that cross beam would have been used again and again for other crucifixion victims.
And so Jesus experiences the scourging, and then he's asked to carry the cross,
and that cross, the cross beam, the pitibulum, weighs around 125 pounds, and he can't carry it.
He falls.
And this is one of the most moving experiences for me when I was studying the signatures of the pollen.
We actually have not just pollen, but we have limestone and clay soil that is native only to Jerusalem.
and it's on three parts of the crucified man in the shroud.
Are you ready for this?
It's on the feet, obviously, because he walked barefoot.
It's on the knees and then the tip of the nose.
So when Jesus is carrying the pitibulum, he falls.
And he not only falls, he falls hard.
He collapses and his face gashes the ground.
Because we have in the tip of his nose actual soil from the land of Israel, from Jerusalem.
So the cross beam is the piece of wood to which his...
Right, fastened.
His wrist are nailed.
and that's tied to the vertical post.
Yeah, to match the Greek letter tau.
So it would look like a capital T.
We see that.
And he's tied to that post, but he's nailed to it.
Make no mistake, he was nailed to it.
Right, but the cross is tied.
Exactly.
Why the letter tau was there a significance?
There wasn't.
The Christian movement makes it significant.
We call the staurogram where you write the letter tau,
and then the letter row, so the two letters, and we actually see that used in early Christian
scriptures. It's essentially just a quick way of saying Jesus was crucified. It becomes an early
Christian icon. It's just, so this is not really an execution method per se as much as it's like a way
of torturing someone to death. It's like the rack or the spiked coffin or.
But much, but yeah, but even worse, because it prolonged the agony as long as some would be
crucified outside of Jerusalem, they'd be on the cross three, four, five days.
So this was for the most reviled enemies of the state. Like, there's no respect at all.
This is not like executing a man by beheading or firing squad in later periods. This is like
for the, this is for slaves, insurrectionists, like the worst of the worst.
And thinking about the heel, you know, you think about the first gospel message. It's actually
called the Prote Evangelium in Genesis 315. Remember that first prophecy that
that his heel, he would crush his head, but the enemy would strike his heel. And we know that the
enemy did his best to crucify Jesus and did strike his heel. And then you look at that blood that
was prophesied even as far back as Genesis 315, that Jesus would smash the enemy's head with
his feet, even though his foot was crucified and pierced. And we see that it did take blood and a lot of
blood. And I think sometimes we can look at this so academically we forget. Now, this was a real
historical person who suffered this torment. It's just kind of wild if you think about it that
the early church took a torture device, like the scariest and most humiliating of all torture
devices. Right. And made it the symbol of their religion. Totally. And I mean, again, if you're not,
well, if we were making up a religious movement, we would never start there. I don't think so. Make no
mistake. I mean, if you and I want to. No, because you'd
want your God to be triumphant. You wouldn't want your God to be humiliated. Certainly not crucified.
Not by some colonial governor and a bunch of local, dumb religious leaders. Right. And I think the
message in this, and there are so many points of application, many people wonder if God really loves them.
And they say, well, how do I know God loves me? Or if I send away God's love for me, Paul wrote in Romans 5-8,
but God demonstrated his love for us. And that, well, we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And the shroud
is a beautiful demonstration. It's a great reminder that God gave his best for us, Tucker,
when he sent his son. He didn't give us second best. He gave us his very best.
But wait, I mean, if God's going to come to earth and redeem humanity,
why would he allow himself to be like ritually humiliated and tortured in the most
embarrassing possible way? Wouldn't he show up and be like, I'm God? Like, you're all wrong.
I'm here now, Daddy's home, like, knock it off, I have all power. He wouldn't, like, why would
he submit to some, like, ludicrous local authority and die with criminals on either side?
It's like the opposite of what you would imagine. It smacks of authenticity to me.
Well, I agree with that, because it's so not what you would expect. No, you wouldn't. And Second
Corinthians 521 says, God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might be the righteousness
of God. And so that means that God treated Jesus, and we see that very clearly and depicted in
the shroud, as if he lived your life and mine. So in Christ, and this is the beautiful message of
grace, he could treat us as if we live the life of Jesus. And that's the message of grace. It doesn't
make sense. There's not an equation that's going to help us make sense of grace. But it's like the
early church decided to brag about its weaknesses. Right. And that's the foolishness of preaching that
Paul talks about. It's the foolishness of preaching. It's the wisdom of God to those who believe
and foolishness to those who deny it. Walk through in clinical detail the torture that this man
endured before the cross. Tucker, it's something I'm still learning about because it takes my breath
away, even though I've, I mean, I've published 250,000 words and academic works on the resurrection
and on the physical torment of Jesus. I've published several popular books on it. I've talked about it,
and I can't get over it
because there's a realism to it
that reminds me of how shameful my own sin is.
Remember...
But pretend you're a police reporter here.
Right.
So Jesus is with his disciples at night.
Judas shows up
in the bunch of olive trees
are kind of standing around.
Romans show up,
local religious stories show up,
grab Jesus.
He goes on trial,
walk us through what happens.
Absolutely.
Well, it started before that.
It would have started before that night because Jesus cleanses the temple.
And he literally reserves his fiercest words for the corrupt religious establishment.
Jesus hates hypocrites.
He hates corrupt religion.
In this case, it was the corrupt Jewish priesthood.
It was the corruption of what was happening and taking place at the temple, the money changers.
You had to print all of your currency in the Syrian, or excuse me, the Tyrion temple tax.
they were ripping everyone off and they made God's house a den of thieves. Jesus clears the tables.
That's a messianic sign. Who can do that? But God himself cleans his house. My house shall be called
a house of prayer. And so that that's when they begin to decide to kill him. Who's they?
The Sanhedron. The 70 members of the Jewish ruling council ask Pilate to crucify Jesus under the reign
of Caiaphas, who is the high priest. When after Jesus rolls into the temple and overturns the
tables the money changers and says get out they're like we're going to crucify him we're going to kill him
we want him dead and again they pilot had to sanction that and so pilot being the politician he was
he says okay we'll do it and so jesus is arrested he's taken to the home of caiaphas you can go to
this home today it's uh the the first century steps that jesus would have been led to caiaphas's home
he spends his final night there which would have been Thursday night he is beaten he's tortured um
They put a blindfold on him.
They began to hit him.
They club him.
There are marks on the crucified man that are different from the scourging.
He's clubbed.
Someone took something that's the equivalent of a bat and struck him with like a rod.
And that's when they're saying prophesied to a preacher, who struck you?
Because they blindfolded him.
And then he has led from there to Herod Antipas, who's, you know, I find no fault in him.
Send him back to Pilot.
You know, everyone's trying to.
Herod Antipas was one of the.
He was the tetrarch of Galilee.
He was one of the Jewish leaders who was put in place by the Roman Empire who beheaded John the Baptist.
He was the one who killed Jesus' friend John Baptist.
He was like a local guy who was a stooge of the Roman government.
Totally.
But from Galilee, but they all came to Jerusalem for Passover.
So this is not unusual.
And then ultimately, Jesus ends up in Praetorium at the hands of Pilate.
What's Praetorium?
It would have been right off the temple mount, this structure.
where the Romans were headquartered to keep peace in the city.
So you have the Jewish priests,
and they have their armed forces that arrest Jesus like their Jewish police,
and then Jesus is handed over to the Roman authorities to be crucified.
And in John 191, I think it's one of the most overlooked,
understated passages in all the Bible,
and Pilate had Jesus flogged.
And if we read that too quickly,
we just don't understand the impact of it.
And that's why I've brought these artifacts for you.
I want you to, this is a phlegrum that we had commissioned.
I want you to hold this, Tucker, and I want you to get it in your hand.
It's a phlegrum.
This is a flagrum.
Okay, so this is wooden dowel with three rawhide lines coming off it and lead balls on the end.
Right.
And I have two of them because we know from the crucified man that there were two torturers.
So Jesus is being whipped simultaneously by two different executioners.
So the purpose of the lead balls on the end of the rawhide is?
Is to inflict as much torment as possible.
And so sometimes you would have phlegrums with bone ends,
but there are all these barbell shapes on the hash marks of the crucified man,
which leads me to believe that it was used in something just like this.
So this is, again, a one-to-one phlegrum that the Romans would use.
So if you hit someone with a length of rawhide and a piece of lead balls at the end,
I mean, you kill someone with that.
Right.
And this is where Jesus loses one third of his blood volume.
And I want you to understand something for the benefit of our audience.
Notice how short this is.
I mean, this is not like an Indiana Jones whip.
Right.
I mean, there was a demonic intimacy to this torment.
And the blood of Jesus would have been splattered all over the executioners.
And so they floged Jesus.
there are 200 wounds on the dorsal on the back image so if we took time right now to count them up there's over 200 on the back there's 172 on the front there is not an area of jesus's body that has not been tortured including the pelvic region we have we do not have in the crotch with this again and again with lead tips
and not only that.
You just take the skin right off a man's body with that.
And actually, according to the hematological report,
to Jesus is we think his right eye was blinded.
So there's not only, we'll get to the Crown of Thorns here shortly,
so hold your breath for that one.
But there's his right eye, there are wounds consistent with flagellation.
So we don't know if the guys were drunk or if they were just going to town on him,
but they whip him.
And at some point, the scourge hits him, probably from the,
back of the head in the eye right here and likely blinds him in the right eye because his right
eye is severely punctured in the image of the crucified man and also his left cheek probably from
the rod beating at caiaphas's home is also hugely i mean it's like he's been in a heavyweight
boxing match i mean he can't see out of his right eye his left cheek is raised and so this is the
flagrum so this was before his this was before he was
sentenced to crucifixion before he sends to death. Pilot, again, he brings Jesus after, and again,
so 372 wounds that we count, but again, we don't have the lateral side. So again, I want to reiterate,
he's probably, there's probably 700 wounds on his body if you count them up and if you just,
you couldn't survive that long term, right? And this is where Pilot then fashions a crown of thorns,
and he places it on Jesus, his head, and let me set these so he can make some ring. So that's,
halo of thorns no actually not let me show you i thought it was a halo because you and i we've
both been so influenced by early christian art and specifically medieval art but this is what took
my breath away and i want you to be careful with this because these are bethlehem thorns this is
the crown of thorns this is the helmet of thorns this was not a wreath tucker this was not a
like a sweat band you wore around your forehead. They fashioned this diabolical crown of thorns,
these Bethlehem thorns, that when they dry, they're as sharp as nails. You can feel that.
I mean, it pricks your finger right to the touch. And they ram this on Jesus's head.
And I want you to let this set in because there's 50 puncture wounds on the head,
both the forehead, the top, and the back of the head of the crucified man of the shroud. 50 puncture
marks and so you can imagine and that's all that's all detectable on the shroud on the shroud you can see
the back of the head that all of the blood pooling in the back of the head from this crown of thorns being
rammed on his head so jesus has 700 scourge marks and then they slam this on his head
and this is where pilot brings jesus before the jewish mob and this is where we hear in the
latin echohomo behold the man pilot says and he's bledied how does he even stand we don't know
his love compelled him to stay standing in our behalf and this is the point you imagine seeing a man
in this state he will very quickly be dead and it's not enough for the crowd they begin to yell
crucify him crucify him crucify him demons and this is where pilot says i should also note as a
historical fact he never did anything wrong like he was never even accused he was never accused of
hurting anybody remember all of the false witnesses came forward when jesus is in
this dummy trial at Caiaphas's home, and they say, well, he's a bastard. Remember, Jesus
is accused of being an illegitimate child. He's accused of blaspheming, of casting out demons
by Bielzebub, by the worker, by the prince of demons. All of these false accusations are
brought against him, and Jesus doesn't open his mouth. But just to be clear, even if the false
accusations were real accusations, if they were true, he's still never accused of hurting
anywhere. Right. He committed no sin. No sin. No
sin was down in. But he's not even accused of it. Right. Right. So, um, right. So just to put it in context. So it's like, they didn't even claim like he, he killed a man in Reno, you know, shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. You know, there's nothing like that at all. No. He cheated people out of money or he, you know, kicked out the money changers and stole the money. Exactly. Nothing like that. Right. This was diabolical in every sense of the word, as you rightly point out. And this crown of thorns, the first time I saw was in Jerusalem. And Tugger, it took.
my breath away, it still takes my breath away. So the reason that you've revised or you're going
with the modern revision to the common halo of thorns is based on the blood record right there.
Absolutely. The punctures, the wounds, basically the pathology of his head and his face
and the back of his head. And this is what, you ask, how do we know this is Jesus? Well,
the helmet of thorns leaves it beyond all doubt in my mind. I believe that,
is a slam-dunk case that the crucified man is the historical Jesus, without a doubt, based on the evidence.
If you were to recreate, if you were to take the gospel accounts in Josephus and the 21 total accounts of Jesus' crucifixion, which I think is accepted by everyone, atheist and Christian alike, as a historical fact.
Right. If you were to take all those facts from the record and try and create an image of them,
Could you create this?
No. No. That's the fascinating thing. The best scientists in the world cannot explain how there's an image there and they cannot replicate it.
And it couldn't be replicated now.
No. Even with our best technologies today, it can't be replicated in any way.
So this brings us to, I think, one of the central questions, which is the provenance of this. Where did it come from? What do we know?
That's the fascinating thing. About where this has been for the last 2,000 years.
Well, it turns out there's a scientist, a criminologist by the name of Max Fry, who was involved in the Nuremberg trials, a very respected criminologist. He spent five years of his life. Again, this is where I say 102 academic disciplines. These are men and women who risk their academic reputation. And again, why I'm so grateful you're bringing this to light today on your program, Max Frye, who's now dead, spends five years of his life studying the pollen spores on the shroud.
What's a pollen spore?
Well, I have it on me from this beautiful state we're in right now from traveling here and all of the allergies here right now.
But there are 56 different specimens of pollen that max-fried detects.
From plants.
From plants, from plant life, botany.
And what's amazing about it, again, if we're making this up or trying to hoax this, we would not have known this 700 years ago in medieval Europe.
Right.
There are certain pollen flower plants that bloom only in springtime, where in the land of Israel, where more specifically, in Jerusalem, and that pollen is on the shroud.
So you have pollen flowers that only bloom in April in the land of Israel, and that pollen signature, according to Max Fry, that pollen species, we have 56 of them, is embedded in the shroud chemically.
What's fascinating is we don't just have pollen from the land of Israel.
we have pollen that traces the provenance of the shroud from Jerusalem, AD30, to Edessa, which is far eastern Turkey, where it's there for 900 years.
And then we have pollen from Constantinople.
The Eastern Roman Empire.
Right.
Constantinople.
And again, the shroud is constantly escaping the caliphates of the time.
So it goes from Constantinople and around 1,200 through Athens, finally up to Leary, France.
with a knight, Jeffrey Descharnay, who we don't, he never says how he got it, but he has it.
And then ultimately, he sells it for two castles to the Savoy family of France.
And then it's moved to Schaumbary, France, and it's under the House of Savoy.
And then it becomes very political because the Savoys then relocate their kingdom to turn Italy
and to solidify their political rule.
They make sure they bring the shroud with them in the 16th century to turn.
in italy where it's so where as a matter of written record yeah great question leaving aside the
you know the the modern chemical analysis of of the of the shroud how far can we trace it back so
we know it was where we can trace it first of course as i already mentioned the shroud has mentioned
in all four gospels and then we have eusebius who's the most respected church historian he's at the
council of nicaa in 325 talking about the face cloth the image cloths
of Jesus. He's the one who gives us the story of the shroud going from the land of Israel to
King Abgar, who's the king of Edessa, where it stays for 900 years. And we know it was there.
Right. Okay. So. And it's known by different names, though. This is the thing that I want to say.
I'm a huge Kansas City Chiefs fan. Kansas City Chiefs were not always the Chiefs. They were the
Dallas Texans before they moved to Kansas City. It's very similar with the shroud. It's known by
different names. But it's the same object. Yeah, the Mandillion, the image of Edessa, the face
cloth. And as we continue to red pill ourselves with this, Tucker, you have the pollen that
matches it. You have the textual records that match it. Eusebius. We have these other wonderful
early Christian historians who are talking about this face cloth. When's the first written reference
to it? Uzius, the great church historian, early 4th century. Early 300s. Right. 325 AD is Council
of Nicaea, so it antideate that. So early, early 300s. Okay. So. And he's Bishop of
And keep in mind, what is Eusebius?
Wait, but hold on, but just so as a, okay, so we know this has existed for at least 1,800 years.
Exactly.
So that's kind of, the written record shows it.
So that's kind of not in dispute.
Right.
So if this were a forgery, it would have to have been a forgery at least as early as the fourth century, the 300th century.
Exactly.
And so that right there kind of tells you, like, if.
modern science can't replicate this.
Good point.
Probably not possible in 20 AD.
Right.
Incredibly not.
Okay, so I didn't know that.
No, nobody does.
Because I was told by Reader's Digest in the 70s.
No, I'm serious.
I first, strange stories and amazing facts.
It was a Reader's Digest book that I read in 1980 in summer camp and I read about
this and I'm like, this amazing thing and photographic negative, but we know it's a product
of the Renaissance or the late Middle Ages. False. But there was already a written record of it going back
to the greatest historian of the early church Eusebius, who I was going to mention it. He's in Cessaria.
He has a library. We don't know the sources he had, but he had an incredible library. Yeah.
So he's standing on the shoulders of historians before him. And so this is a longstanding
historical tradition in the church. One of the things that's interesting to me and one of the things I had to get over is I began
studying the shroud, Tucker, is I thought it was a Catholic relic. Now, we need to, again, I want
to just hammer on this because you have a lot of Protestants that watch your program and a lot of
Christians who think, oh, that's just a Catholic relic. I'm not interested in the Catholic
Church, therefore I'm not interested in the shroud. The Catholic Church did not take control of the
Shrout of Turin until 1983, two years of probate court, the last King of Savoy, bequeathed the
shroud to the current Pope, who was Pope John Paul II at the time, and after two years of
probate court, finally, the Catholic Church becomes the custodian of the shroud in the 1980s.
So it was in private hands, family hands. So you said it was in Eastern Turkey for 900 years,
where? In Edessa, which is eastern Turkey, it was a stronghold of the Christian movement,
as it was, escaping the, but then when the Muslim invasion started, and again, the 7th
century, it escapes to Constantinople and then Athens and then beyond that, as I mentioned.
It keeps moving west. Right, exactly. As the Ottoman Empire rises. Totally. And Islam sweeps over
the land of the Bible. Because remember, Islam killed the bishops, the Bibles, and the buildings.
Yeah. So it's escaping that. So it's amazing the embarrassment of riches we have from an
artifactual standpoint. And then when you actually look to, there's something else we haven't touched
on. The iconography, the early Christian art, Tucker, I mean, is remote.
Markable. On my social media, we created a AI image. My friend Doug Powell and me, Doug gets all the credit. He's an amazing artist. He imported the information of the face of the crucified man and compares it with the icon Pantocrotter, Lord Overall, which is at the currently at St. Catherine's Monastery where it's been since the 6th century. This is an icon of Jesus. It's famous. When he put those two images, the face of Jesus,
in the shroud and the icon Pantocrotter in Sinai.
He put that into mid-jurney and created an AI rendering of what Jesus would have looked like.
It is so moving. It's powerful to look at.
It's interesting, the face of Jesus on the shroud before us, even at this distance, it's recognizable as the Jesus from antiquity, from the artistic representations of Jesus all the way up until George Floyd became Jesus in 2020.
Not the gay-looking Jesus of the medieval era.
Right, yeah, no.
I mean that if you look at Jesus' depictions in the medieval era,
it's a very effeminate Jesus, no facial hair, weak, small, a white Jesus.
That's not what we have reflected.
So, again, if we were a hoaxer in the medieval era,
we would have created the Jesus of our time, which is this effeminate Jesus.
No, what do we have in here?
We have a man's man, a long-haired man.
A man, you know, we know Jesus walked 20,000 miles in his ministry.
if you just add up his trips to Jerusalem and his public ministry,
Jesus being about 30, according to Luke's gospel,
when he begins his ministry.
Jesus was walking all the time.
There was no Uber's or ride share apps.
He was pound for pound, a strong man, a physically fit man.
And that's why he could probably take the brutality that he endured as well.
That's such a, that's just so interesting, though.
But the face is distinctive and the face is reflected through Christian art,
a long way. Like if you just show me that face, I'd say, oh, that's Jesus's face.
Exactly. So the question always was like, well, how do we know what Jesus looks like?
And this is the answer. Yeah. And so all the icons, what we call them is all the iconography,
all the icons of Jesus, there's over 200 of them. They seem to have the same source material.
And when you compare it to the shroud, it's like they all trace the face of Jesus off the man of the shroud.
Wild. And not only that, you have the numismatics. This is the study of coinage from the ancient times.
and you have all these Byzantine coins that look just like the image of the face of the man of the shroud.
Yes.
So, like, what are all these people looking at if the shroud was invented, you know, like the liberal scientists want us to believe in the liberal Bible scholars who are apostate, you know, in the 14th century?
So that's the claim.
The claim is based on one fact, the carbon dating of 1988 that you brought up.
1260 to 1390 is what they wrote on the chalkboard in October of 1988 that the carbon dating said that this was a medieval.
So let's get into that in some detail, if you don't mind.
I would love to.
So everybody remember, so I guess I misremembered.
I was told it was probably fake in 1980, but it was, you're saying, it was not until 1988.
October 88.
October 88, there was a carbon date, radio carbon dating of the shroud itself.
Right.
Before you debunk it, if you wouldn't mind just explaining who did that.
Right.
So the agreement was, again, the Catholic Church did not take control.
of the shroud until the mid-80s. First, if you don't mind, could I just back up to 1978, Tucker,
to the original scientific research? So, I mean, this is amazing, which I'm glad we have this time.
In 1976, and I'll get to it, I want to set the context, two Air Force Academy professors,
Eric Jumper and John Jackson, use a machine that was developed to study the effects of the nuclear
bomb called a VP8 image analyzer. It's a brightness map.
and they would use that to scan the impact of the nuclear bomb.
So that's what the machine is.
These are not pastors.
These are not theologians.
These are professors at the Air Force Academy.
They get an image of the Shroud of Turin, likely the Henri 1930s image that C.S. Louis had in his bedroom.
And they put it through the VP8 image analyzer.
And they realize there is a 3D, there are 3D information encoded in the Shrout of Turin.
No other picture does that.
I want to make sure this sets in.
there's 3D information.
What does that mean?
There's like a holographic topography, brightness map of the man of the shroud.
That looks like you're looking at the surface, you know, geography, topography of land.
There's like depth.
There is depth.
There's 3D.
The way they said it, analytically, there's 3D information encoded in the image of the crucified man.
And when they put pictures of their grandchildren through it, it was just smeared 2D images.
So no other image does this.
So that VP8 image analyzer, you can go on YouTube and watch it done, is what gave rise to what's called the Shrout of Turin Research Project, the scientific Sturp team, which consists of 33 scientists, 26 who went to Turin Italy.
They had five days.
They had 120 hours to study the shroud.
Keep in mind, the Savoy family allowed this, not the Catholic Church.
This is controversial, but I don't believe the Catholic Church would have ever allowed the Shrout of Turin to be researched.
And that's not my saying. That's Barry Schwartz, who was the documenting photographer who photographed the shroud in 1978.
It was the private family, the Savoy, the House of Savoy, who allowed this research team, 33 scientists to study the shroud for five days.
Okay. So they took four years. They didn't go on Twitter. Didn't exist. They didn't go on social media. Didn't exist.
They took four years to publish all of their findings. And I haven't used this word yet until this point in our interview.
The STERP team, these 33 scientists, by the way, Roy Rogers says, give me 15 minutes in the scientific method and I'll prove it's a hoax.
He wasn't saying that after 15 minutes of studying the shroud.
They all thought they had a free trip to Italy.
They were in the lobby, Barry Schwartz, one of the original Sturp teams, and I met many of them.
Sadly, many of them are now dead.
But they're meeting over drinks in the lobby of the Italy Hotel in Turin, which is a beautiful city to visit.
And they're all joking that they have a free trip to Italy to debunk this hope.
no one was saying that a few days later so these 33 scientists publish and they prove this is the word
i'm going to use it's proven the shroud is not a work of art it is not a man-made image they can't
tell you how it's made but they prove there's no pigment there's no dye there's no paint
they cannot explain how the image is there but it is not man-made so for the christians out there
or or religiously minded people who think that like we're we're violating the
the Second Commandment right now looking at this. We're not violating the Second Commandment, Tucker,
so we can be at ease. What's the Second Commandment? You shall not worship a graven image. A graven image is
by definition a man-made object, a handmade object. The Shrout is not man-made. It's otherworldly.
So we're not violating the Second Commandment. So that allows people to read easier.
And what's otherworldly about it? The 3D?
That the image, here's the cool part about the shroud. I believe we're looking at the moment of Jesus's
resurrection ultimately all of this conversation leads that something powerful happens on that first
easter morning it's electromagnetic radiation that's so powerful we don't have this amount of watt
power on earth 40 billion literally 40 billion watts of energy but it happens it's pick power
it's not like the power when you flip on it took me a while to learn this it's almost like a
cold energy because it happens so quickly in a twinkling of an eye. But it doesn't evaporate the linen.
That's what the labs. The labs could heat up and essentially tattoo the shroud, but it would
burn up instantly. It would scorch. This didn't scorch. It was the pulse rate, which was so,
and I know we're getting deep, but it's important to be nuanced in this conversation and precise.
The pulse rate power, 40,000 billion watts traveling at 1.40th of a billionth of a second, we believe is that
moment that Jesus' body is resurrected. And that's what leaves this image.
But whatever it was, it was a process that chemically changed the fibroles at a point
to depth, which is surface level, to leave this image.
And that cannot, just for the fifth time, that cannot be applied with a brush.
No, it can't be duplicated. And it hasn't been. One man in Britain offered a million pounds
to anyone who could replicate the shroud and no one's taken them up on the offer.
So if we have a written record of the shroud going back to the 4th century,
how were scientists, scientists allowed to say that it, I mean, if we know it existed
because contemporaneous sources described it, then how were they allowed to say it was a renaissance
creation?
Well, how are they allowed to say anything that's unfactual?
They're liars.
And they hate truth and they hate God.
Well, yeah, where of that?
But like just on logic grounds, how could, I don't know, did anybody say, well, wait a second, we've been, you know, someone in the 320s wrote about this.
Right. Well, they don't know that, honestly. Scientists, they don't read these truths. They don't read Christian history. Most, you know, most media people have never read the Bible. They don't even know what you're talking about.
Yeah, but if they're studying the shot of turn, you think they would have some grounding in the shot of turn. Right. Right. Exactly. So they do radiocarbon dating. This was the headline from 88, I guess.
Right. That it's a, so that, so thank you. So that was the science.
scientific launch to the, so then in the mid and the late 80s, thank you for bringing me back.
It's agreed upon that seven laboratories would do blind research, carbon dating of the shroud.
And the scientists who studied it said, whatever you do, don't take the sample from the
fringes because the shroud has been repaired. There's two things we're looking at, Tucker, that
took me again a minute to, it took me a minute to learn all this. There's these parallel those lines.
Those are burn marks. Those are scorch marks. These 16 triangular shapes. Those are patches. The shroud survives a fire in 1532. The nuns stitched it up with a backing cloth. And they also, many...
Where was the fire? This was in Seanbury, France, 1532, before it moves to turn in 1578. So it survives this fire. It's doused. The shroud has survived at least three fires. And so there are also water stains.
You can see those watermarks as well on the shroud.
This is what's amazing.
Like, if this was a work of art, it would have diluted it.
The image would have smeared or vanished.
None of that happens.
The image is still, as you just saw, with the classic invert on my phone, very apparent.
And so it survives all of that.
But it did come in contact.
I mean, millions of people have likely touched this shroud.
I mean, it would be brought out for baby baptisms.
That upper right corner would be cut off.
Like, if I really loved you, Tucker, I would give you a piece of the shroud.
to take home with you after having dinner with me if you visited me in one of my castles.
I mean, so it's known that aspects of the shroud were given out even for indulgences.
So in the top left, you can see with the naked eye, anyone who pulls up the shroud can see
it's it is a contaminated area of the shroud.
It's dark.
It's been touched a lot.
It's the fringes of the shroud.
And so there's an invisible weave there that many great scholars believe that was patched.
And so the scholars said, whatever you do,
Don't carbon date the corners of the shroud because it's been so contaminated.
It's a contaminated sample.
Get in the middle of the shroud and carbon date those samples.
So what did this community do?
These seven labs that were supposed to carbon date it, actually only three labs did.
No one ever answered why seven labs didn't do it.
It wasn't done blindly.
Three labs, Tucson, Arizona, Zurich, Switzerland, and Oxford, England, carbon date the shroud.
what part did they take?
The upper left-hand corner
that any non-scientists can see
as a contaminated sample
and they carbon-dated that
sample. Well, it's a patch. Exactly.
Thank you for noticing that. Exactly.
You're talking about the very top left.
That's a different color.
Right. It's dark. It's...
That is what they carbon dated.
And then, ironically,
the British
Museum suppresses the
data, the raw data of the carbon dating for 29 years. Only in 2017 through a French attorney,
who I'm going to be with very soon at the International Shroud Conference in St. Louis,
I encourage people to check it out. The French attorney through the equivalent of a Freedom
of Information Act finally got the raw data released for the carbon dating. And what did they find?
The sample that was used to carbon data has cotton within the sample, not.
fine linen. The rest of the shroud is fine linen. That's indicative it was patched. So this whole
bias towards the shroud is based on bad science and suppressed science, by the way, 29 years
suppressed. I don't know that there was there cotton in Europe or the or the Middle East.
There was in Europe because they would use it for patchwork, these invisible weaves, these seamstresses.
Right. But 2,000 years ago. No. Yeah. This was fine linen. We don't.
have any other shrouds with cotton. This is the patchwork that was done in medieval Europe to protect
the shroud to preserve it. And so that is what the carbon. So if we're stacking up all of the
evidence for and against the shroud, we're in the middle of presenting a voluminous amount of
evidence for the authenticity of the shroud and that it is indeed Jesus' burial cloth. And we have
one bit of evidence to deny the shroud, this erroneous carbon-14 dating. Has anyone ever carbon-dated
the linen? No. No, it's not been allowed to be dated since. I don't understand how you could
carbon date what's obviously a patch that I can see from here. Well, we weren't even made aware of what
was dated until the data came out. So they knew that there was cotton in the sample, which just
immediately disqualifies it. Exactly. It's a contaminated sample. And they knew that and they hit it for
almost 30 years. Right. We're sure. Welcome to Shroud of Turin research.
Yeah, and Ray Rogers, the chemist, who said, give me 15 minutes in the scientific method,
debunked it in a scientific journal, and then sadly died a month later of cancer,
and his debunk of the carbon dating got no traction.
So I'm happy to bring it up on your program and give him all the credit.
So why has, why not just take, I mean, it's kind of a significant question, right?
Right.
If it's 2,000 years old, it kind of...
Well, because the Catholic Church is afraid of it.
And the Catholic Church has still never come out in support of the shroud.
Are you aware of that?
Like they're ambivalent about it.
They're indifferent about it.
They're only, and I was just intern, so I'm thankful for everyone there who welcomed me.
I met all of the scientists.
My friend Enrico, the chemist, who the shroud is now currently kept in what's called a reliquary.
A little, it's the exact size of the shroud.
The company, this is fascinating information.
The company that creates all of the materials for the International Space Station is based in turn.
That same company created the box that preserves the shroud.
So where is it in a church?
It's in the cathedral of St. John the Baptist in this reliquary, this box. You can walk in and see it today, but it's a covered box, and it's 99% argon gas because the two enemies of the shroud right now are light and oxygen. And so they're preserving it. So the Catholic Church has no interest in educating people about the shroud. Again, I'm thankful that you're having me on.
I don't understand why. Their only interest is in conservation. So they're conserving the shroud right now. The shroud hasn't been on to say.
display since 2015 publicly. We don't know when it will be on display again. And yet it's this
key to the whole message of Christianity. I mean, it is the death pre-owned resurrection in an
artifact. Nothing else does that outside of the Bible except the shroud. But I'm confused. Why would
a Christian church want to hide what appears to be physical proof of the resurrection?
Of the core story of its religion. Right. What's the answer?
I wish I knew.
Who makes that decision?
The Pope.
So technically the Pope is the custodian of the shroud.
And that's because...
It was left to the Pope, not the Catholic Church.
And I was there during Conclave, which was an interesting experience.
But I just don't, it doesn't seem to make any sense.
Do you think they're worried that it would turn out to be fake?
Right.
I think so.
I can't spend, I don't know what's in their mind.
But just to be clear, the...
So far as you know, the shroud itself, the actual linen cloth, has never been radiocarbon dated, just the patch.
Just the upper left corner, which is a contaminated sample.
So it was the patched sample, not a fine linen sample.
Yeah, so not the real thing.
And that's not just me.
That's Paulo Delazzo.
That's Bruno Barbaris.
I mean, there's Ray Rogers, I would encourage people to study these scientists for themselves.
Is there any way, doesn't radiocarbon dating destroy the sample?
Absolutely. Right. So, I mean, I mean, 25% of CR14 dating is thrown out anyways. So my area's specialty is paleography and code ecology, how we date Bible manuscripts. And we date Bible manuscripts through paleography, not through carbon dating. We date it through handwriting styles to get a date range for roughly 100 years to date Bible manuscripts. We don't do that because to your point, excellently, it destroys the actual artifact. Is there any other way to date it? Yes. In fact, it's been date. That's the thing.
Again, thank you so much for asking these questions, Tucker.
It has been dated in four other scientific ways that conclusively all show that it's a first-century artifact.
We have breaking news on your show.
Wide-angle X-ray scattering out of the Institute of Crystallography in Rome has shown that the shroud has been getting old.
It's been decomposing.
It's been degenerating for 2,000 years.
They took a sample of a shroud from Masada that's conclusively dated to 80-70.
and they compared the shroud of Turin using wide-angle waxes, wide-angle x-ray scattering.
This is the Institute of Crystallography.
And what they found is that the samples have both been getting old at the same time for 2,000 years.
So it's not been getting old for 700 years.
It's been getting old for 2,000 years.
There was another study done.
Linen is made from flax, and it has a substance called vanilla in it vanillin.
And it takes hundreds, if not thousands of years for their,
to be no trace elements of vanillin in the fine linen. Guess how much vanillin there is in the
shroud of Turin? Zero. So if it was 700 years old, there would still be traces of vanillin
chemically. There's no vanillin in the shroud. So I don't want to bore you with these details,
but they're very important. They're not boring at all. There have been other scientific studies
that have been suppressed that all of the other studies, to answer your question, have proven that the
Trout is 2,000 years old from a scientific standpoint. I think it's pretty wild that the authorities,
the British Museum, is that what you said? Right. Would hide relevant data. Suppress it for 29
years. I mean, the professor. How can you do? How is that science? How I don't understand?
One of the lab officials, Tucker, I mean, this is all, I mean, if people just read for themselves
and think for themselves, I mean, one of the professors who wrote on the chalkboard,
1260 to 1390 was given a $5 million endowed shared right after this announcement in 1988.
By whom?
By his cabal that was backing him.
So again, people need to follow where the evidence leads.
And again, I'm following forensic science.
I'm following the iconography.
I'm following, I mean, the blood samples alone, the hematology, if we wanted to fake the shroud,
do you realize we'd have to kill someone?
We would have to get blood pre-mortem blood.
and then we would have to stab them in the heart
and get post-mortem blood
and translucent pulmonary edema
and smear that.
I mean, and then we'd have to know
that there are certain plants
that only bloom in Jerusalem and April.
We would then have to get,
we'd have to know the provenance of the shroud.
I mean, there's over 30 things a hoaxer
would have to know to fake the shroud.
And then you'd have to apply it
in some unknown fashion
that cannot be replicated even now.
And then we would have to know
how do we change two microns deep,
so surface level and you know every so we have a traveling exhibit right now that we're doing where
I have 50 artifacts that show these things through infographics and we have panel 13 in our
traveling who is the man of the shroud exhibit shows each fiber each thread has around 250 to 200 fibers
so you think about 0.2 microns of each fiber of each thread I mean that's how superficial the
image is we couldn't fake that no one can we don't
have the technology to do that.
I just, I'm fixated on the idea that the custodians of the science around this at the British
Museum, which is the most famous museum in the world, whose job is to search for the truth,
that's what science is, the pursuit of truth, that they would hide facts. Right. And mislead
the public on purpose. So that, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised because this is a religious
artifact that speaks to the veracity of the world's greatest religion, which has many opponents.
Exactly.
So it does raise questions about other archaeological finds that are relevant to Christianity.
And the big one, of course, are the Coomeron Scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls found right after
the Second Royal War by a shepherd.
1948, a Bedouin.
Yeah, a Bedouin shepherd boy throws a stone into a cave.
Here's this, something pottery breaking goes up there
and all these jars with these scrolls in them.
That, of course, was the same year
that Israel became a nation, 1948,
and they become the custody,
or some of them become the custody of the Israeli government.
And they're written right around the time of Jesus
pretty me a little before.
Correct me if I'm wrong on the facts here.
250 BC.
This monastic community called the Qumeron Community and Qumeron.
Right.
And there are, you know, many portions
of what we refer to as the Old Testament, at least that's what we've been told.
But then I've always wondered, like, these are in the custody largely of a government
and they slow-rolled.
I mean, they could just, like, take pictures of every single fragment and put them on the internet.
Right.
And anyway, there are a lot of questions, but my main question to you, I think you know something
about this, is do we have all the Kumeron scrolls that are in custody?
Are they available to the public and to scholars?
No, because they keep coming to.
light. I mean, there's the Cairoganesa fragments. So there's also Dead Sea Scrolls outside of the
Dead Sea, if that makes sense. So, like, there's the Cairoganesa fragments. This brings up a great
question. I mean, the antiquity of all artifacts is sketchy, to be clear. And, you know, when you
look at the great artifacts from history, how people come into control of these artifacts, there's a lot
of money involved. There's a lot of corruption involved candidly. But could it be, is it plausible,
or is there any evidence that scripture from the Cumaon cache, the Dead Sea Scrolls, has been suppressed?
Oh, certainly, absolutely.
Certainly?
There's absolutely ways in which all, I mean, there is a demonic hatred towards anything biblical.
I mean, I've not just in the Dead Sea Scrolls community.
I mean, I've seen this with all biblical fragments.
There's a hyper-scepticism towards biblical fragments that, a framework, a word.
worldview that we don't foist on anything else except biblical fragments.
You know, as long as they're available to the public, I'm okay with that.
Right.
As long as people can, you know, have the information decide for themselves.
But my concern is that they're not available to the public.
Well, I worked in the Griffith Paprology Lab in Oxford, which is formerly known as the
Sackler Library.
They took the Sackler name off it.
But when I was there was the Sackler.
They're killing a lot of people.
Yeah. So now it's just the Ashmolean. So in the Griffith Paprology lab, I mean, we have a half million fragments that have not been categorized. They have not been cataloged. So, I mean, I say this as one who does this. I mean, yeah, there are biblical fragments that have not been brought to light. Why? Well, I mean, it's a great... How hard is it to take a picture of them and put it on the Internet? Exactly. And there are great people doing it. I mean, my friend Dan Wallace at the Center of Study of New Testament manuscripts, their entire aim is to photograph as many biblical texts as they can and to make them available. So there are a great.
groups out there that are doing it. But the hoops they have to jump through with these libraries
and where these manuscripts are located. Why would it be controversial to take a 2,000-year-old fragment
of scripture, take a picture of it, and upload it on the internet? Why would that be,
why would someone want to prevent that? I can only speak to my experience. And so many of the
paparologists who I've worked with, so many of the, those are people that work with the papyri.
So biblical fragments are papyri first. And then that was the original work.
of the scripture and then of course scrolls honestly so many of them so pariah made from papyrus plants
they grow in wetlands the early church was innovative it used something called a codex it did not take scrolls
from jews it wanted to have this book form um with writing on the recto and verso the front and back
of each page and it was cheap it was an expensive it could be hidden unlike these scrolls that were
i mean i have jewish scrolls they're they're beautiful but they're heavy they're hard to transport
they're only written on one side
you had to unroll the whole thing
and they're made of animal skins
right parchment
parchment would be
uh it bovine they're all bovine
they're animal they're calf
yeah okay um
so
but any of this stuff
is not
I mean like what would be the justification
for keeping it from the public
yeah well I mean
so much of it comes out of the
Enlightenment movement of Europe
I mean coming out with what we called
higher criticism, the German scholars, the height of German scholarship in the 1800s, that Jesus
didn't exist. If he did, he was probably gay with a mortgage. No, I get it. I get it. And then you have
this Pontius pilot didn't exist. And so much of that influenced modernity in a way that, I mean,
has wreaked havoc on all of our div colleges. Sure, but I'm just saying now, 2025, if you have
a bunch of scrolls that are found in a cave in 1948, that speak
directly to, you know, the world's great religions, is how can a government be allowed to hide those
from? But you're immediately accused of being a sensationalist. I've been ridiculed and attacked for
bringing the shroud to light. I mean, you're called a popularizer. I mean, this is a very
high view, hyper-sceptical community that catalogs biblical manuscripts. All you have to do is go to
society of biblical literature with 5,000 Bible scholars to see how crazy some of these people are. I'm sure
there is a hatred towards truth. I mean, the man who I defended my thesis, I write about this in my
book, Body of Proof, I've spent three years studying the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus.
I've written a 93,000 word, Ubeliefrong's gashishta, history of resurrection belief in the Judeo-Christian motif.
And I come to my Viva, where in England, it's past fail. So if you fail your Ph.D. Viva in
England, you can never do a redo again. You get what's called an M-Phil, and there's no do-overs.
So I come to my defense, Tucker, and I have a body.
Bible scholar who did not believe in the miraculous, did not believe in the historicity of the
resurrection. And he looks at me and he says, Jeremiah, do you actually believe the resurrection
happened? Or is that just imaginative storytelling? Yeah. Well, that doesn't surprise me at all.
You know, that people who, I mean, how many Episcopal priests believe in God?
Yeah, none. None. No, I know some who do, but like the minority. Yeah, that doesn't shock me that
they would you know the corruption exists it's the suppression of information it's wikipedia that
drives me crazy it's gatekeeping information that prevents the public and interested parties researchers
from even knowing that that information exists like that is so sinister i'm a victim of it i mean
i was taught that the shroud was a catholic relic and there was no science behind it at all i mean i was
taught that at the intellectual Jerusalem that is Oxford. I mean, so I'm a victim of this. I understand
it completely. And I guess I'm numb to it, Tucker, that it's my world. I've been in it professionally
in the Academy since 2009. It's just a miracle of truth actually gets out. And that's why I'm so
grateful for your program. Do you have hope that there will be further study of the shroud, or do we
not need any? I'm doing all I can to make that happen. This is changing people's lives, this truth,
when we look at this mystery, it actually reveals the message of Christianity, God's love for us,
and that he sent Christ to die in our place and raise from the dead. That's the gospel. That's the good news.
And that this event actually happened in history. Jesus physically bodily rose from the grave,
and there are great reasons to believe that. I have another artifact I want to hand you, though, Tucker.
Yep.
I want you to hold the replica of the spear. So this is amazing. This is a replica. There's a
weight to it. Now, you mentioned that they did not break Jesus' legs, but let's make sure he's
really dead. So they take this spear, this lance, and they stab Jesus according to John's
gospel. And remember, John's gospel, this is not a scientific or medical journal. It says that
blood and water came out of the body of Jesus. Jesus is stabbed between rib five and six, and we see
that reflected on the shroud with the post-mortem type AB blood that pools just above.
that triangle, right parallel with rib five and six. And you're holding in your hand the spear
that would have inflicted that punishment on Jesus' dead corpse by the Roman executioners.
Damn. And so the spear likely had an iron tip on it. Exactly. And it punctures about three
centimeters wide. And again, the scripture said, Isaiah foretold it, by his stripes were healed,
by his stripes were vindicated
and we see that reflected in the spear,
the lance wound that Jesus body
and we see that reflected on the shroud
which is just fascinating to think about
last question
are there other physical
artifacts
extent that you're satisfied
are genuine whose providence
is knowable that point
to the historical reality of Jesus
Oh, absolutely. We have an embarrassment of riches of artifacts, archaeology. This is the beauty of Christianity. This is the beauty of our faith, Tucker, that our faith intersects with archaeology, where I often say that, and I say this in body, prove archaeology is Christianity's closest cousin. What's amazing is...
What extent can Christians, I mean, because all this is taking place in a non-Christian country.
Absolutely. And, well, I mean, I know atheist Jews who are archaeologists, and they use six sources to make sure there are.
archaeological sites exhibit verisimilitude that they're they're digging in the right place and you've
probably heard of these sources Tucker are you ready for this this these are atheist or agnostic jewish
archaeologists in the land of Israel there's around a hundred archaeological sites at any one time
most of them are secular completely secularists but they still use six sources to make sure they're
digging in the right spot matthew mark luke john the book of acts and josephus so if the critical
archeologists are going to use our sources because they're so good, I'm going to use them, too.
But, I mean, why should we try, I mean, if you have people who are, you know, opposed to Christianity,
you know, is there oversight? Like, are there, do we know that historical information isn't being
suppressed? No, I mean, there's, there needs to be more integrity to it, for sure.
Are there people who aren't attached to that government who are on the archeological,
sites watching the stuff.
I have great friends who are there who have incredible credibility.
Like my archaeologist friend, Scott Stripling, he's the lead digger at Shiloh, or what
the rest of the world calls Shiloh.
He's in season five.
So there's great archaeologists out there doing great work, but they're fewer and far
between.
That's why we need more people to do what we do.
Trimai, thank you for all of us.
Love your program.
Love you.
And this is a horrifying device.
Thanks.
Thank you.
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