What about the Shroud?
A photo negative, centuries before cameras.
In 1898 an Italian lawyer named Secondo Pia took the first photograph of the Shroud of Turin, a 14-foot linen cloth stained with the faint outline of a man who was flogged and crucified. When he developed the glass plate, the negative showed what the eye can't see on the cloth: a clear, lifelike face. The image on the linen works like a negative itself. So is this the cloth that wrapped Jesus? Many who have studied it think so. The American science team that examined it up close in 1978 concluded:
We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist.
Tap a date to see it happen.
- The cloth first appears in history, on show at a small church in Lirey, France.
A medieval pilgrim's badge of the Shroud, found in the Seine in 1855. It carries the coats of arms of the Charny and Vergy families, who owned the cloth when it first went on show at Lirey. Drawn in 1865 by Arthur Forgeais; the badge is in the Musée de Cluny, Paris. Photo: Arthur Forgeais · Public domain - The team spends five days with the cloth. They find no paint, dye, or brush strokes making the image, and the blood stains test as real blood.
The whole Shroud as a negative: the front of the body on one half and the back on the other, joined at the head. The dark triangles are patches sewn over holes burned in a fire in 1532. Photo: Unknown photographer · Public domain - Three labs carbon-date a strip cut from one corner: AD 1260–1390. Headlines call it a medieval fake.
- Raymond Rogers, a chemist from the 1978 team, studies threads from that corner and argues it was a medieval repair, not the original cloth. (The lab that ran the test disputes this.)
- Physicists at ENEA, Italy's national research agency, hit linen with short, intense bursts of ultraviolet light. They get the same straw color, on only the outermost fibers, like the Shroud. Some believers wonder whether the image is a trace of the light of the resurrection. That's a hope, not a lab result, but the experiment is real.
- Statisticians who finally got the labs' raw data say the samples disagree too much to trust the date.
- An Italian team dates a thread with a new X-ray method that measures how much linen has aged. The result fits the first century, like cloth found at Masada from AD 55–74.
So is it real? Scientists are still split. But John hints that the grave clothes were no small detail. Peter found “the strips of linen lying there,” and the head cloth “still lying in its place, separate from the linen.” Then the other disciple went in, and “he saw and believed” (John 20:6–8). He hadn't seen Jesus yet, only the cloths. What did he see in them? John doesn't say. Whether or not the Shroud is that linen, the Christian claim never hung on it. It hangs on an empty tomb and on hundreds of people who saw Jesus alive again.
The color sits only on the very top of the linen fibers, with no paint or brush strokes, and nobody has fully reproduced it. Whoever or whatever made it produced a negative, which no one could see properly until photography. And the wounds match the Gospels in grim detail: punctures around the scalp, scourge marks across the back, a wound in the side.
If it's genuine, it's a picture of what John already told us. If it isn't, John's account still stands.
John 19:1–3, 34More real photo · tap to enlarge