Further Thoughts on the Shroud of Turin

Further Thoughts on the Shroud of Turin April 30, 2016

Here’s a video I did for Seedbed, meant to tease your mind into active thought. Having read through the comments a couple of points should be added: 1) in the video sometimes I say cross when I meant cloth. It was taped in one sitting, so c’est la vie; 2) there are various junctures and ways Jesus’ nose could have been broken— during the flagellation, when he fell with the cross, when he was hit in the face while speaking to the high priest. I’m not suggesting all the abuse took place while Jesus was on the cross. 3) the cloth, after the fire in Torino, had an extra border sown around it to protect the tattered edge. While the cloth sample that was tested by the STIRP team was from the original part of the cloth, clearly enough it was from the singed part of the original cloth, not from the material added later. In any case the fire may have singed the whole original cloth, so we may never be able to date the thing, even if we took a sample from the image portion of the original cloth; 4) HOWEVER, if we tested the residue of the bloodstain against what DNA we could derive from the bone shards found in the James ossuary and there was a partial match—– THEN we would really have something, as I was saying at the end of the video. No one’s faith should be based on such an investigation of possibilities and probabilities which can never produce absolute certainty about a relic from the past, but the Shroud may provide some additional confirmation of the Gospel story for the skeptical and agnostic and wavering.


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