An Icon Not Made by Hands
A major point in Christianity's favor that sets it apart from other religions and bolsters its truth claims is the historicity of its central events. Unlike other traditions' myths of demigods and divinized heroes, Christ's birth, ministry, and death are not said to have occurred in some nebulous age of legend. Scripture takes pains to ground the Gospel in concrete details. Key events are dated to this king's reign or that governor's tenure. Public figures are not only mentioned, but directly involved. People who were widely known and still alive when the Apostles spread the Gospel are cited as eyewitnesses.
The Gospel's historicity is why smug atheists looking to show how smrt they are have stooped to ham-fisted attempts at debunking not just Christ's divinity, but His existence. These attempts always rely on hair-fine degrees of scrutiny to which no other ancient personage is subjected, because no other personage could withstand them. Their first step is always ruling the Bible inadmissible on arbitrary grounds. That's akin to disqualifying your great-grandmother's recollections of her father as proof of your great-great-grandfather's existence. With a pre-Social Security, pre-driver's license world where only a sliver of the populace was ever photographed not that far gone, applying the smrt set's standards consistently would force us to deny that most people born before the early 20th century existed.
But the debunkers have another problem--specifically the wealth of evidence for Jesus' existence outside the Bible.
Which is why they really have a hate on for this:
For the few who don't recognize it, the picture above is a full-length photo of the artifact known as the Shroud of Turin. The single sheet of linen bears two images of a 5' 10" man with a powerful build marked with wounds that map to current understandings of Roman crucifixion--complete with multiple small puncture wounds on the head, nail holes in the wrists and feet, a single large puncture wound in the side, and signs of scourging on the back.
Skeptics' first shot at debunking the shroud was to dismiss it as a medieval painting of Christ's crucified body. This theory fails to hold water on several grounds.
First, the wounds shown on the shroud aren't consistent with portrayals of Christ's wounds in Medieval art.
Even the late medieval painting above locates the nail wounds in Jesus' palms, instead of the wrists where later archaeological research showed the Romans actually placed the nails. Unlike pretty much all medieval crucifixion art, the shroud gets this vital detail right.
Also, note the polar opposite dispositions of the bodies in both pics above. The medieval painting shows Christ recumbent in serene victory, complete with halo and loincloth. In sharp contrast, the shroud shows a naked, beaten, and bloody corpse in all its messy humanity. To the medieval mind, those features would have been strikes against the shroud's authenticity, not evidence for it.
Perhaps most damning to the medieval painting theory is that the shroud wasn't painted. In fact, to this day no one is sure exactly how the image was made. We do know there are no pigments on the linen. If a medieval artist produced the shroud image, he did it with invisible brush strokes and some kind of unknown substance that didn't soak into the threads. What did soak into the threads was human blood of type AB, the same type that's definitive of Eucharistic miracles.
But the definitive proof against the shroud being a painting is that photographic negatives of paintings don't turn out like this:
Do not adjust your screen. Negatives of the shroud actually do reveal more detail--3D detail, in fact. That suggests the shroud itself may be some kind of 3D negative.
Again, nobody can reproduce a version of the shroud with all these features. Even if future advances in technology eventually let them pull it off, that's not much argument against a miracle. It would be like saying, "St. Joseph of Cupertino couldn't really fly. He simply used a jet pack."
Here is the point when shroud skeptics play their trump card: "Radiocarbon dating done in 1988 proved the shroud linen dates from the 13th-14th century! The image can't be older than the underlying fabric!"
This theory, too, is replete with holes--pun intended, as you'll soon see.
First of all, researchers have unearthed volumes of historical evidence indicating the shroud's existence prior to the 13th century.
The Pray Codex, a 12th century Hungarian manuscript, depicts Jesus' burial cloth with a pattern of L-shaped dots remarkably similar to the "poker holes" on the shroud of Turin.
Those burn holes provide a host of other clues, such as the fact that folding the shroud four times perfectly aligns the dots so that they could have been caused by a single hot implement, hence the "poker holes" moniker.
Folding the shroud four times also leaves you with what looks like a single cloth bearing a faint image of Jesus' face. That fact is significant, since it provides a missing link from the shroud of Turin to another famed Christian relic, the Image of Edessa.
Edessa was a small city in Mesopotamia whose church boasted a true wonder: an image "not painted by hands."
Shroud skeptics brush off the Edessa image, pointing out that it was said to be an icon only of Christ's face and that its background lore made no mention of it as Jesus' burial cloth.
What they miss is that a faint image of a humiliated, bloody, and naked Jesus would have scandalized ancient Eastern Christians even more than their medieval Western brethren. They also overlook accounts from Pope Stephen III in 755, a 10th century Vatican manuscript, and 11th century Byzantine relic inventories describing a full-body image.
The presence of burn marks, though not the poker holes specifically, may drive the final nail in the radiocarbon dating canard.
That the shroud suffered significant damage in a fire in 1532 is beyond doubt. Two years later, a group of Poor Clare sisters mended the worst of the damage. Their repairs included sewing on patches and re-weaving certain sections. All of the samples taken for radiocarbon dating came either from those sections, or parts of the shroud adjacent to those sections. If a mix of 1st century and 16th century threads were radiocarbon tested in 1988, we'd expect the mean age of the fabric to be a little over 700 years, which nicely matches the actual results.
To sum up, author Mike Flynn has come up with a highly plausible chain of custody for the shroud.
Peter takes Shroud to Antioch, where it is hidden away in the Cherubim quarter against discovery by Jews and Romans.
During reign of Commodus, it is taken to Edessa to "seal the deal" with Lucius Agbar. The story is eventually projected onto an earlier time period.
Becomes dangerous once more to show your head. Shroud is hidden, forgotten, until flood or earthquake opens its hiding place in the wall of the Cherubim Gate. The district becomes known for its special icon.
When Persians destroy Antioch, the Shroud is moved to Edessa, where it plays a folkloric role in foiling a Persian siege. Folded up and kept in a box, it becomes the famous Image of Edessa.
The Roman Emperor decides the Image belongs in the City and the Image is taken to Constantinople, where it becomes known as the Holy Mandylion. Gradually, people seem to become aware there is a full body, and it begins to be associated with the burial shroud of Christ.
Othon de la Roche takes the Shroud to Athens as part of his booty from the Sack of Constantinople and then sends it to Besançon.
Othon's great-great granddaughter Jeanne inherits and she and her husband Geoffrey de Charny house the Shroud at Lirey. (A painting replaces it at Besançon and is eventually destroyed by the French in a Revolutionary hissy fit.)
Margaret de Charny pulls the Shroud from Lirey and puts it in Montfort for safekeeping. The Livey monks never get it back.
Margaret turns the Shroud over to the House of Savoy, who keep it first at Chambéry (where it is damaged in a fire) then at Turin (where it remains to this day).
Applying a standard of evidence consistent with other historical figures, we find that the shroud's authenticity as the burial cloth of a man who was crucified in 1st century Palestine is a less miraculous explanation than the medieval forgery theory.
Think of it this way: If the shroud of Turin were reputed to be the burial cloth of anyone besides a biblical figure, secular researchers would declare it a highly useful source of knowledge about Roman crucifixion and let the matter rest. Instead, because the mere possibility of Jesus' existence sends secular Moderns into CogDis fits, they have to go into full-on Fact Check™ mode.
In other words, the Shroud of Turin is a pictorial Witch Test. That alone lends credence to its divine pedigree.
For a metaphysical thrill ride with a healthy dose of Christian horror, read my award-winning Soul Cycle.
