The Shroud of Turin: The Real Burial Cloth of Christ?
The Shroud of Turin: The Real Burial Cloth of Christ?
My PhD was on Jesus’ physical appearance.
Or, more specifically, the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus’ physical appearance.
To some, however, such a project might seem misguided. Surely, we already know what Jesus looked like? Is his image not imprinted on the Shroud of Turin?
I am a biblical scholar, not a Shroud of Turin expert. And I have no desire to demean the shroud’s significance for believers. The materiality of such relics has longed played a critical part in Christian devotion.
Yet with an increasing interest in the shroud online – and many taking it to be Jesus’ own burial cloth – I want to explain why the shroud seems to be a false trail in the quest for Jesus’ appearance.1
The History of the Shroud
Let us begin with the history of the Shroud. The first clear documentary evidence of the Shroud is a 1389 letter from the Bishop of Troyes to Pope Clement VII.
The Bishop claims that a painter had confessed the work to be a fake some decades before. In turn, the Pope decreed that when the cloth was displayed, the priest should make known that the cloth was “not the real shroud of our Lord Jesus Christ.”2
The fact that the first clear reference to the Shroud appears in the medieval period presents a huge problem for Shroud apologists. How could the shroud be in the possession of the Church for this long, without anyone’s knowledge?
In an attempt to salvage some pre-history, some point to the Mandylion, a cloth bearing the face of Christ. The problem is that this face-cloth has its own discrete history, which bears no connection to the full-bodied burial shroud.3
While I cannot claim to offer a comprehensive analysis of the data, let us take a look at four or five strands of evidence which point to a medieval date:
First, the shroud’s carbon-dating points to its medieval origins.
In 1988, samples of the cloth were radio-carbon tested in three separate laboratories, giving a dating between 1260 and 1390. Remarkably, this corroborated the first appearance of the shroud in the fourteenth century.
It is sometimes claimed that the tests were taken from a part of the cloth which was not original, but repaired. However, the original study claims that the sample “came from a single site on the main body of the shroud away from any patches or charred areas.”4 Moreover, the idea of an ‘invisible reweaving’ has been discounted.
Second, the weave itself is medieval, not first-century.
Textile historian, Orit Shamir, describes the weave of the shroud as follows:
“The Turin shroud is made of linen Z-spun in a 3/1 herringbone twill pattern. All the linen textiles from the Land of Israel until the medieval period are S-spun, plain weave tabby.”5
As Joan Taylor highlights, this makes it a very different garment to the types found in Judea at the time of Jesus. The Turin Shroud has “38.6 threads per centimetre for the warp and 25.7 threads per centimetre for the weft when Judaean textiles of Jesus’ time have only 10 to 15 threads per centimetre for the warp and 15–20 threads per centimetre for the weft.”6
Taylor further notes the Shroud does “not conform to types of shrouds found in archaeological excavations from the time of Jesus in Judaea and its environs, which are invariably cloths and clothes.”7
Third, the shroud’s image does not fit the Gospels or their context.
There are two major problems with the appearance of the shroud as it relates to Jesus.
First, the Shroud depicts a man with long hair. This matches many depictions of Jesus prior to the medieval period, and fits the popular depiction of the later Letter of Lentulus, a fifteenth century forgery which describes Jesus’ physical appearance.
However, it doesn’t match what we know about male appearances in the time of Jesus. According to Paul, it was against ‘nature’ for man to have their hair long (1 Cor. 11). This judgement matches the fashion of the time, in which men wore their hair short.
The second problem is that the shroud is a full-body image. But the Gospel of John seems to suggest that the linen of the body was separated from the head:
‘Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.’ (John 20:6-7)
If the shroud left the imprint of Jesus’ body, it is also surprising that the Gospels do not mention it. As John Calvin once questioned,
“How is it possible that those sacred historians, who carefully related all the miracles that took place at Christ’s death, should have omitted to mention one so remarkable as the likeness of the body of our Lord remaining on its wrapping sheet? This fact undoubtedly deserved to be recorded.”8
Fourth, the creation of the shroud fits the medieval period.
The medieval period was a time of intense speculation in the wounds of Christ; a period when the practice of self-flagellation – the wounding of oneself in an offering of penance and participation in the sufferings of Christ – was common.
This may give us a further insight into why and how the shroud was created. For, according to a number of recent scientific studies, it looks like the yellow stain on the shroud could have been produced by a real, decomposing body.9
Joan Taylor, in her fascinating 2018 study, What did Jesus Look Like?, invites us to consider the following scenario:
‘… a man has grown his hair and beard to imitate Christ and has been inflicted with wounds and cuts from whipping with various scourges. He is then covered with a pungent mixture designed to replicate the sweat-and-blood Christ himself was supposed to have perspired (including all over his hair and beard), maybe with some chemical additions designed to replicate spices. His head is bound round with a cloth from beneath his chin over his ears and around the top of his head, and he is wrapped in a long cloth that runs from toe to head underneath him and head to toe on top. He is laid in a sepulchre, and a lid and packing is pressed on to him. The mixture, along with the blood from his recent wounds, impregnates the cloth as he lies as if dead in the tomb (and perhaps he really is dead). The faint yellow stain image of the Turin Shroud would then be the end result of a performative process. It is subsequently enhanced with pigment.’10
In Taylor’s view, this scenario makes sense of several lines of evidence: the first documented dating of the shroud, the medieval interest in flagellation (and even self-crucifixion), as well as the fibres which have been found on the shroud.
Taylor’s scenario may be supported by the marks on the shroud themselves. According to Andrea Nicolloti, the marks “coincide with the forms of the scourges that men of the Middle Ages were familiar with and artists were accustomed to representing. Everything is fully compatible with the...first half of the fourteenth century.”11
If Taylor’s scenario is correct, then Shroud apologists are correct in one important sense: the Shroud is not a ‘forgery.’ It is not an attempt to produce Christ’s own burial shroud. Rather, it is an object in imitation of Christ.
A Challenge to Shroud Apologists: Why not re-test it?
Some apologists for the Shroud will insist that all of these threads, woven in a specifically medieval context, can be untangled. They will insist that the Shroud is not only an artefact of faith, but of history; that it is even evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.
Such aficionados have gone down this rabbit-hole longer than me, and I am sure their arguments will appear convincing to some. Yet I would ask them an obvious question:
If the evidence clearly points to a first-century provenance, why is the shroud not re-tested?
I recently saw a Catholic priest and Shroud-apologist asked this question. His answer was that it would be too expensive for the Roman Catholic Church.
The interviewer didn’t bat an eyelid, and the conversation went on - as I’m sure it will for many decades yet. In my eyes, however, it might as well have ended there.
In what follows, I am indebted to the fine discussion of Joan E. Taylor, in What did Jesus Look Like? (London: T&T Clark, 2018).
See Hebert Thurston, “The Holy Shroud and the Verdict of History,” The Month 101 (1903): 17–29 (28) cited in Dale C. Allison, Jr, The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: T&T Clark, 2022), 317.
On the story of the Mandylion, or ‘Image of Edessa’, see Taylor, Jesus, 43-67.
P.E. Damon, et al. “Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin,” Nature, 337 n. 16 (Feb. 1989): 611-615.
Orit Shamar, “A Burial Textile from the First Century CE in Jerusalem compared to Roman Textiles in the Land of Israel and the Turin Shroud,” SHS Web of Conferences, 15, 000010 (2015).
Taylor, Jesus, 60.
Taylor, Jesus, 60.
Allison, Jr, Resurrection, 318.
See, for example, Thomas de Wesselow, The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection (London: Penguin, 2012), 117-59.
Taylor, Jesus, 67.
Andrea Nicolotti, “The Scourge of Jesus and the Roman Scourge: Historical and Archaeological Evidence,” JSHJ 15 (2017): 57 cited in Allison, Resurrection, 318.