Jeremiah Johnston defends the Shroud of Turin as Jesus’ burial cloth, citing its 14-foot linen weave matching first-century Jewish tradition and 56 Jerusalem pollen types. The image—showing Roman crucifixion details like wrist/heel nail wounds and a side wound between ribs five/six—resists replication despite 600,000 hours of study by labs like Sandia and JPL. He dismisses the 1988 carbon dating as flawed due to suppressed cotton contamination in a patched corner, instead favoring vanillin analysis and X-ray scattering for first-century validation. Johnston accuses critics of bias, ties the shroud’s survival to resurrection physics, and links its suppression to broader academic skepticism of biblical artifacts like the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguing Christianity’s historical credibility hinges on overcoming institutional resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
The Shroud 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.
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 the Jewish tradition, similar to a pita, how a pita, if you get a pita, 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.
It's one to one, 14 feet four inches by three feet seven inches, or 8.8 by 2 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 shroud in that period.
It's made from the flax plant, and this has a unique herringbone weave.
The only reason I know what herringbone is is my wife has a herringbone backsplash 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 as consistent in the resurrection traditions embedded in the Gospels.
Joseph of Arimathea gives Jesus not only his own family tomb, a new tomb hewn in stone, but he actually gives him his own burial cloth as well.
We have hundreds of burial shrouds from the land of Israel.
We have hundreds of them from Qumran.
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.
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 a Jewish historian of the first century, exactly.
And so when these tombs have been excavated, not only are ossuaries 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.
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 5'9.
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 see consistent with all the first century or late second temple.
This is why when you read the gospels and women are coming to the tomb of Jesus on that, 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 rigomortis.
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.
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 in those niches are these bone boxes called ossuaries, 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 ocellagium.
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 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.
For example, on the shroud, we have blood all over it.
And the blood is interesting.
It's been tested.
It's type AB blood, which is Semitic blood.
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 pre-mortem and post-mortem 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 differs from the other pre-mortem blood on the shroud.
So so many of these factoids 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.
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So we know that crucifixion was a best historical practice.
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 or the same, the Roman emperors of the same period, which is remarkable.
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 3rd, AD 30.
We know the exact date, which is fascinating to know that.
And then we have 11 AD 30, right?
And so we have 11 sources that talk about this Jesus, this Crestus.
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.
Those are all followers of Jesus, but you have non-hostile witnesses who give voice to the historicity of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
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.
Secondapilla believes that he's looking at the face of God.
And that image, of course, he was immediately accused of being a fraudster, a hoaxer, because photography is so new.
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 AB blood, pre-mortem, post-mortem, 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 AB 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 stay with me.
The image is only two microns thick.
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 in 1 40th of a billionth of a second.
A physicist, my friend Paulo DeLazzo at ANEA 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 140th 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 don't know the mechanism.
We have no way to quantify how this happens.
The best scientific laboratories, when you look at Sandia Labs, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Lab, ANEA Laboratories in Rome, the world's best scientists cannot reproduce this image that's in the shroud.
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 lied 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 lied-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 CIA, CSI experiment.
When you look at the Shroud, it's amazing.
And then we have the pseudarium 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.
And then in 1931, Henri, 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 Henri's image of the face of the crucifying 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 Turin seriously enough to have a picture of it above his mantle in his bedroom, where he's the first thing he saw every morning when he put his feet on the ground, I wanted to take it more seriously.
This is where I went from being a shroud skeptic because I was conditioned in Oxford in my residency that we, you know, 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 Summertown 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 soundbite, 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 being, 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 produced peer-reviewed journals, studies, and cases for all the different aspects.
And when I say, 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 DeLazo, studying the lasers, like my friend Bruno Barberis, the mathematician from University of Turin.
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 calcanaeus, the heel, which is interesting.
We'll talk about that.
The scourge marks from, and then the petibulum abrasions, the cross beam.
When he factored all of those probabilities together, Bruno Barberis, the mathematician, said there is a one in 200 billion chance it's anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth.
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, Koine Greek, he also made crucifixion fashionable throughout his Hellenization of the world.
The Romans come along and they take crucifixion that they learned from Greek Hellenization and they perfect it for 700 years.
Remember, Josephus tells us that during the Jewish revolt, AD 66 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 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.
You know, 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, Ewengelion.
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.
It maximizes torment while minimizing the, 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 creatinine, which means he was suffering from kidney failure, high levels of ferritin.
His body had inflammation all over it.
He was dehydrated.
You read John's Gospel.
Remember in John's Gospel, Jesus, one of the certain 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 pseudarian of oviedo, the face cloth.
It's six parts pulmonary edema, one part blood.
Again, a hoaxer is not going to make this stuff up.
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.
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 in 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.
And thinking about the heel, you know, you think about the first gospel message.
It's actually called the Protevangelium in Genesis 3.15.
Remember that first prophecy 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 3.15, 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, no, 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 and made it the symbol of their religion.
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.
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 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 put all of your currency in the Syrian, or excuse me, yeah, in the Syrian, or excuse me, the Tyrian temple tax, and they were ripping everyone off, and they made God's house a den of thieves.
Jesus clears the tables.
That's a messianic sign.
He's like, no, who can do that?
But God himself cleanse his house.
My house shall be called a house of prayer.
And so that's when they begin to decide to kill him.
Who's they?
The Sanhedrin.
The 70 members of the Jewish ruling council ask Pilate to crucify Jesus under the reign of Caiaphas, who is the after Jesus rolls into the temple and overturns the tables of 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, Pilate had to sanction that.
And so Pilate, 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 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.
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, prophesy to us, preacher, who struck you, you know, because they blindfolded him.
And then he is led from there to Herod Antipas, who's, I've, you know, I find no fault in him.
Send him back to Pilate.
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.
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 to inflict as much torment as possible.
And so sometimes you would have phlagrums 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 phlagrum that the Romans would use.
And actually, according to the hematological reports, 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' home, is also hugely, I mean, it's like he's been in a heavyweight boxing match.
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 like a sweatband 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' 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.
If you were to recreate, if you were to take the gospel accounts and Josephus and the 21 total accounts of Jesus' crucifixion, which I think is accepted by everyone, atheist and Christian alike, as a historical fact.
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 risked their academic reputation.
And again, why I'm so grateful you're bringing this to light today on your program.
Max Fry, who's now dead, spends five years of his life studying the pollen spores on the shroud.
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.
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 Frye, those 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, AD 30, 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.
And again, the shroud is constantly escaping the caliphates of the time.
So it goes from Constantinople in around 1200 through Athens, finally up to Leary, France, with a knight, Jeffrey de Charnay, 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 Schonbury, France, and it's under the House of Savoy.
And then it becomes very political because the Savoys then relocate their kingdom to Turin, Italy.
And to solidify their political rule, they make sure they bring the Shroud with them in the 16th century to Turin, Italy.
So he's standing on the shoulders of historians before him.
And so this is a long-standing historical tradition in the church.
One of the things that's interesting to me and one of the things I had to get over as 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 Shroud 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.
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've mentioned.
Islam killed the bishops, the Bibles, and the buildings.
And 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 remarkable.
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, Pantocrot, Lord Overall, which is currently at St. Catherine's Monastery, where it's been since the sixth 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-journey and created an AI rendering of what Jesus would have looked like.
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.
And I really 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.
So like, what are all these people looking at if the shroud was invented, you know, like the liberal scientists want us to believe and the liberal Bible scholars who are apostate, you know, in the 14th century?
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.
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 Henre 1930s image that C.S. Lewis had in his bedroom, and they put it through the VP-8 image analyzer.
And they realize there is a 3D, there are 3D information encoded in the Shroud of Turin.
No other picture does that.
I want to make sure this sets in.
There's 3D information.
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 their hands.
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 Shroud of Turin Research Project, the scientific STIRP 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 Shroud 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's, 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 use, I haven't used this word yet until this point in our interview.
The STIRP 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 STIRP 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 hoax.
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 religiously minded people who think that like we're violating the second commandment right now, looking at this, we're not violating the second commandment, Tucker.
So if we have a written record of the shroud going back to the fourth century, how were scientists, scientists Scientists allowed to say that it, I mean, if we know it existed because contemporaneous sources described it, then how are they allowed to say it was a Renaissance creation?
This was in Schaumbury, France, 1532, before it moves to Turin 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 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-scientist can see is a contaminated sample.
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 date it 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.
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 data.
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.
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 8070, 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 vanillin in it, vanillin.
And it takes hundreds, if not thousands of years for there 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.
There have been other scientific studies that have been suppressed that can all of the other studies, to answer your question, have proven that the shroud is 2,000 years old from a scientific standpoint.
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 in 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.
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, whose job is to search for the truth, that's what science is, the pursuit of truth, that they would hide facts 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.
Yeah, a Bedouin shepherd boy throws a stone into a cave.
Here's 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 Prime, a little before.
Correct me if I'm wrong on the fact that this monastic community called the Qumran community in Qumran.
And they're, 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 Qumran scrolls like that are in custody?
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 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.
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 the world's great religions, how can a government be allowed to hide those?
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-skeptical 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 Überlifrongs Geschichte, 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 PhD viva in England, you can never do a redo again.
You get what's called an M fill and there's no do-overs.
So I come to my defense, Tucker, and I have a 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?
This is changing people's lives, this truth, because 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.
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 AUB 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.
Are there other physical artifacts extant that you're satisfied are genuine, whose providence is knowable, that point to the historical reality of Jesus?
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 of proof, archaeology is Christianity's closest cousin.
And well, I mean, I know atheist Jews who are archaeologists, and they use six sources to make sure their archaeological sites exhibit verisimilitude, that they're digging in the right place.
And you've probably heard of these sources, Tucker.
Are you ready for this?
These are atheist or agnostic Jewish archaeologists in the land of Israel.
There's around 100 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 archaeologists are going to use our sources because they're so good, I'm going to use them too.
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