The Shroud of Turin: The Real Burial Cloth of Christ?

My PhD was on the Gospels’ treatment of Jesus’ physical appearance.

When I tell people this, perhaps the most common question I am asked concerns the Shroud of Turin. Does the Shroud give us a reliable indication of Jesus’ appearance?

The Shroud, which many believe is the burial cloth of Christ, is housed in the Cathedral of John the Baptist in Turin. It is over 4.5m in length and 1.1m wide.

I am a biblical historian, not an expert of the Shroud. Yet with an increasing interest in the shroud online – with many taking it to be Jesus’ own burial cloth – I want to explain why the shroud seems to me 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.