The Burial Cloth Science Can't Explain: The Shroud of Turin and the Resurrection

Introduction: A Photograph That Shouldn't Have Worked

On the evening of May 28, 1898, an amateur photographer named Secondo Pia stood in the cathedral of Turin, Italy, preparing to take the first-ever photograph of a famous and controversial relic. The cloth he was photographing had been venerated for centuries, but to the naked eye it looked like little more than a faded, yellowing length of linen marked with ghostly brown stains. Pia made his exposures, retreated to his darkroom, and began developing the glass plate negatives.

What he saw as the image emerged stopped him cold. In the negative, the blurry stains on the cloth resolved into the clear, three-dimensional face of a calm, bearded man with closed eyes. The negative of the cloth, in other words, looked like a positive photograph. Pia later said he nearly dropped the plate. If the cloth was a painting or a forgery, why would its image behave like a photographic negative, nearly six decades before the invention of photography?

That question has driven more than a century of debate. The cloth is the Shroud of Turin, a piece of linen roughly 4.4 meters (14 feet 3 inches) long and 1.1 meters (3 feet 7 inches) wide, bearing the faint front and back image of a naked man who appears to have been scourged, crowned with thorns, and crucified. For millions of believers, it is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. For a smaller but determined group of scientists and scholars, it is something more: physical evidence that the Resurrection happened.

Thesis

Defenders of the Shroud's authenticity argue that three features of the cloth, an image that resists every known artistic explanation, wounds that match both the Gospel accounts and Roman crucifixion practice, and the absence of any sign that the body was removed from the cloth by ordinary means, together point toward a body that was wrapped in the linen and then left it in a way that suggests the Resurrection. This article presents that argument at its strongest, and then weighs it against the serious scientific and historical objections, most notably the 1988 radiocarbon dating, that have led most researchers to conclude the cloth is medieval.