The only records of Christ's burial are in the Bible, and these cast doubt on the Shroud of Turin.

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Is the Shroud of Turin a fake?

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Some people believe the Shroud of Turin is the cloth that covered Jesus Christ during His burial. There are strong biblical and scientific reasons why it may not be. We urge our readers against hastily accepting it as genuinely showing an image of the body of Jesus Christ.

Many people believe that the famous Shroud of Turin is the cloth that covered Jesus Christ at His burial. There are serious problems with this view, even if we ignore carbon dating tests in 1988 that showed the cloth may be only 600 or 700 years old.

We admit that carbon dating can give crazy results, and carbon dating results from the shroud have brought major criticisms, so this is not proof of the shroud's age. Even so, there are serious problems with the view that this shroud shows a picture of Christ.

1. It is clear from the Bible and from Jewish burial customs that several pieces of cloth bound Christ at His burial — not one large sheet like the shroud.
2. In John 20:5-7 we find there was a separate piece wrapped around Christ's head. Yet the Shroud of Turin depicts a face on the sheet.
3. The size of the shroud is 14 feet 3 inches by 3 feet 7 inches (434 centimetres by 109 centimetres). But the Bible says linen strips bound Jesus, not an enormous cloth (see John 19:40).
4. The Bible is the authoritative record of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, and the Bible mentions nothing of a shroud.
5. Walter C. McCrone, head of a Chicago research institute and a specialist in authenticating art objects, examined the shroud. He found a pale, gelatin-based substance speckled with particles of red ochre on fibres from the part of the cloth that supposedly showed the figure of Christ. He also found that fibers from the “wounds” had stains, not of blood, but of particles of a synthetic vermilion developed in the Middle Ages. He said the practice of painting linen with gelatin-based temperas began in the late thirteenth century and was common in the fourteenth.
   McCrone concluded that a fourteenth century artist had forged the shroud, and defended this view right up until he died on July 10, 2002.
6. In the 1980s, Jesuit priest Robert A. Wild expressed surprise that the bloodstains, if they were blood, showed no trace of smearing after all the movement and transport the body would have endured. Wild also noted that the hands of the body masked the genitals. He said this couldn't be right. No matter how you arrange a body after rigor mortis, he said, the hands cannot cover the genitals unless you prop up the elbows on the body and bind the hands tightly in place. Yet this is not what the shroud's image shows.
7. The first record of the shroud's appearance was in 1353, when Geoffrey de Charny presented it to the small local church in the French town of Lirey. Three years later, in 1356, the bishop of the region wrote to the pope, in Latin, telling of his annoyance that certain people wanted this “painted” cloth displayed as the burial cloth of Christ. The bishop added that his predecessor, Henry of Poitiers, “after diligent inquiry and examination,” had found the artist who painted it. The artist testified that “it was the work of human skill and not miraculously wrought.”
8. Interestingly, this date accords with the carbon-14 tests, which dated the shroud to about the first quarter of the 1300s. It also agrees with art expert Walter McCrone's estimate of the age based on known painting styles (see 5th point above).
9. The verses that tell of Joseph of Arimathea's wrapping Jesus in linen cloth are Matthew 27:59, Mark 15:46, Luke 23:53, and John 19:40. Look in Vine's Expository Dictionary, Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, and the Ryrie Study Bible. They all tell us the Greek words used in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (entulisso and eneileo) mean “to roll in, wind in”, “to twist, to entwine”, “to enwrap”, “to wrap by winding tightly”. Winding, twisting and entwining imply wrappings, or strips of bandage, rather than a single shroud.
   But if they did mean a single sheet, then Matthew, Mark, and Luke would conflict with John 19:40, which is clearer by using the Greek word othonion, meaning “linen bandage” (Strong's concordance). If the Bible writers had meant a single linen sheet like the shroud, the word used should have been othone (a single linen cloth, a sail, or a sheet). From this, it seems that all four Gospel writers were telling us that normal long strips of linen covered Jesus.
10. The Catholic Church itself does not accept the shroud as authentic. When we last checked, in May 2008, the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on the Shroud of Turin admitted a number of reasons to doubt its authenticity. These included:
    • the awkward fact that many similar shrouds existed which their owners claimed showed the genuine image of Christ
    • a pope in the 1300s issued a pronouncement that when the shroud was exhibited, the priest must “declare in a loud voice that it was not the real shroud of Christ”
    • the admission that “no intelligible account, beyond wild conjecture, can be given of the previous history of the Shroud” before it appeared at Lirey around 1353
    • this shroud, like the others, “was probably painted without fraudulent intent to aid the dramatic setting” at Easter
    • witnesses in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries said the image was then so vivid that the blood “seemed freshly shed.” But the blood is now dark and hardly recognizable.
      On the supposition that this is an authentic relic dating from aroound the year AD 30, “why should it have retained its brilliance through countless journeys and changes of climate for fifteen centuries, and then in four centuries more have become almost invisible? On the other hand if it be a fabrication of the fifteenth century this is exactly what we should expect.”

Even if the Shroud of Turin proves to be 2000 years old — and it hasn't — there are strong arguments against its being Christ's burial cloth.

Historical note: The Shroud of Turin has been kept since 1578 in a chapel at the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy.

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• How UFO pictures are faked.
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• Is this really a picture of Noah's Ark?
• Did Charles Darwin have a deathbed conversion and reject evolution?
• What was the star of Bethlehem that led the wise men to Christ?
• How can you believe the Bible if you can't be sure it's true?
• How do people get eternal life?

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