The Resurrection

Here's another guest post from dear ole dad...

“The Jesus Family Tomb” TV documentary and book attack the central doctrine of Christianity: the death of Jesus on the cross on Good Friday and his resurrection in the tomb on Easter. The writer and producer invoke science to suggest that Jesus did not die on the cross and did not rise from the tomb in his glorified body. To that, most Christians reply, “I’ll continue to believe in the resurrection on faith.”

Here’s good news for the faithful. Thanks to dedicated researchers who have examined the Shroud of Turin, the resurrection is now confirmed on a scientific basis. To their faith, they can now—as St. Peter suggested his Second Epistle (1:5)—add knowledge.

According to tradition, the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus. It resides in the Cathedral at Turin, Italy (and can be viewed on line at its official web site). The provenance of the Shroud has now been established well enough to say with great certainty that it did indeed cover Jesus in the tomb.

Prior to its placement in the cathedral, the Knights Templars had possession of the Shroud and kept it folded in a wooden container with a viewing window, so that the face of the Man in the Shroud was visible as an object of worship for them. (They were, after all, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.) The viewing window was framed with wooden latticework. We know this thanks to the scholarship of Frank Tribbe, whose 2003 book The Holy Grail Mystery Solved builds on the work of Noel Currer-Briggs’ The Holy Grail and the Shroud of Christ.

Tribbe explains that the term “Holy Grail” originated with the Templars and that the Old French word greille, which referred to the lattice frame or grillwork on the Shroud’s container, was transliterated over time into the English “grail.” (The transliterated word’s meaning was corrupted, however, because “grail” etymologically means cup or bowl, and the various Grail-story authors wrongly told the public that the Holy Grail is the cup of the Last Supper or a bowl which caught Jesus’s blood while he was on the cross.) The wooden frame itself was not holy, of course. Naming it “the holy greille” was simply a shorthand way of referring to the tangible evidence of holiness which it displayed—the cloth imprinted with the image of the risen Christ formed at the moment of resurrection. So the true Holy Grail is the Shroud of Turin. (Sorry, Dan Brown—you got it wrong.)

The Shroud itself is now the most important religious relic in the world because it has been subjected to such rigorous scientific testing and its authenticity has been established. Although a carbon-14 test in the late 1980s apparently showed that the Shroud was no older than the 13th century—and therefore was a hoax—it has now been shown that those test results were badly flawed due to several factors. First, the piece of Shroud used for testing was taken from what is now recognized as a 14th century “patch” or repair of the Shroud, woven “invisibly”—i.e., not immediately visible to the naked eye. Second is the presence of biological material—mold or microorganisms—growing on the fibers of the piece of fabric tested. These materials skewed the C-14 data toward a more modern date.

New chemical tests move the age of the Shroud back in time to the first century A.D. Furthermore, the weaving of the linen Shroud is now recognized as consistent with the weaving of first century Palestine but not 14th century Europe. Moreover, new research has identified pollen grains on the Shroud which could only have come from the vicinity of Jerusalem during the months of March and April—Passover time—when such vegetation is in bloom. For these and other research-based reasons, the Shroud is now clearly established as an authentic first-century relic from the Near East, precisely as legend holds.

The Man in the Shroud

As for the image of the Man in the Shroud, research likewise indicates it is no hoax. The blood stains are real (type AB) and contain human male DNA. Tribbe notes in his just-published book Portrait of Jesus? that the closest science can come to explaining how the image of the Man in the Shroud got there is by comparing the situation to a controlled burst of high-intensity radiation similar to the Hiroshima bomb explosion which "printed" images of incinerated people on building walls. Shroud researcher Ray Rogers, a physical chemist from Los Alamos Laboratory, said, "I am forced to conclude that the image was formed by a burst of radiant energy—light if you like." In other words, the image is recorded on the cloth as if by a photoflash of brilliant light radiating from the body of the Man in the Shroud. Another researcher, Prof. Alan Adler of Western Connecticut State College, concluded that the Shroud image could have been created only by a form of energy which science cannot name.

The image of the Man in the Shroud was venerated by the Templars because it visibly demonstrated the central fact of Jesus’s teaching: the conquest of death. The face-image was created by a mysterious—call it miraculous—process which science does not understand but nevertheless can recognize. The Templars understood it, however. At least, they understood that the Shroud was mute testimony to the fact that Jesus transubstantiated himself in the grave through an act equivalent to a self-controlled nuclear explosion which transformed his flesh, blood and bone into a body of light—the resurrection body—and thereby conquered death. He attained enlightenment to the ultimate degree; he actually became light and is now known as the Light of the World. That was the object of Templar worship.

The Shroud of Turin Web site was created in 1996 by Barry M. Schwortz, the Official Documenting Photographer for the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) since 1978. An Orthodox Jew, Schwortz says he is still involved with the Shroud of Turin because “knowing the unbiased facts continues to convince me of its authenticity.”

The Sudarium of Oviedo

Aadditional confirmation of the Shroud’s authenticity is the recent research on the Sudarium of Oviedo, an ancient bloodstained linen cloth the size of a small towel which is claimed to have covered the head of Jesus after his crucifixion (see John 20:5-7). Sudarium is Latin for “face cloth”. The cloth has been known historically as the Sudarium Domini and has always been associated with Jesus. It has been kept as a holy relic in the cathedral at Oviedo, in northern Spain, since the 8th century and dated back to the 7th century by historical documents. It seems highly probable, from other historical records, that it goes back to first century Jerusalem. Pollen on it comes from Palestine, Egypt and Spain, confirming the oral tradition that the Sudarium was taken from Jerusalem through North Africa to Spain.

The Sudarium is severely soiled and crumpled, with dark flecks which are symmetrically arranged but form no image, unlike the markings on the Shroud of Turin. Only disconnected bloodstains are visible to the naked eye, not a complete image of a face. When the Sudarium was placed on the dead man’s face, it was in a folded-over condition. Counting both sides of the cloth, there is a fourfold stain in a logical order of decreasing intensity. The cloth was draped over the face temporarily, but apparently was removed in the tomb and placed aside. (The Gospels state exactly that.) Thus the Sudarium was not in contact with the face of the man when the resurrection event occurred; perhaps that is why the image of a face is absent. Nevertheless, the bloodstains correspond precisely with those of the Shroud and reveal typically Jewish features, a prominent nose and pronounced cheekbones.

Research since the 1980s shows that the Sudarium’s blood stains are type AB, matching those on the Shroud. One type of pollen found on it is identical to that found on the Shroud; it grows only east of the Mediterranean Sea as far north as Lebanon and as far south as Jerusalem. Scientific studies validate the ancient claim that the cloth had covered the head of a long-haired, bearded man with bleeding scalp wounds who died in an upright position. Residue of what is most likely myrrh and aloe have been discovered in the Sudarium, in accord with the Jewish burial custom of Jesus’s time. The Sudarium and the Shroud have so many bloodstains which match up—70 on the face side and 50 on the rear side—that the only possible conclusion is that the Sudarium of Oviedo covered the same face as the Shroud of Turin.

Both tradition and science indicate the Sudarium was used to cover the head of the dead body of Jesus. No evidence points away from that conclusion except for one radiocarbon dating to the 7th century, and the researcher who obtained that age of the cloth acknowledges that his results are questionable. See various web sites for research data and the 2001 book Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo by Janice Bennett (P.O. Box 2001, Littleton, CO 80127-0005).

John White