The face of God
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09/19/2026
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The face of God
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WORLD Radio - The face of God
Some people are insisting that the Shroud of Turin is physical evidence of the resurrection–what if it is?
People view the “Holy Shroud” on display at the Cathedral of Turin, Italy, April 19, 2015. Associated Press / Photo by Massimo Pinca, File
ANNOUNCER: ...not only does it contain bloodstains from a crucifixion, but it bears the faint full body image of a man who was tortured and crucified…
LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars.
We recently sent Gretchen Whittington to Los Angeles to visit a museum dedicated to the Shroud of Turin. She’s a graduate of our Patrick Henry College journalism program. She spoke with a bunch of people.
GRETCHEN WHITTINGTON: So one that I always ask everyone is how would you introduce the Shroud to somebody who's never heard of it before or just is curious?
ALINE VARGAS: It's like, this is a burial cloth; it's linen cloth. It bears a front and back image of a naked man, which many believe to be Jesus. So many believe that this is the cloth in John 20.
BOB RUCKER: And they’ll see these bright lines coming down … and their eyes will get big, and they’ll go, oh, I see an image in between…
CHERYL WHITE: I think it’s an invitation for every single person to enter into the sort of the … limitless study of this, the mystery of it, and to encounter that in their own way.
BRIAN WALSH: You want to meet Jesus?
The Shroud of Turin is supposedly the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. The gospels say that his disciples wrapped him in a burial cloth after his crucifixion, and then placed him in the tomb.
John saw burial cloths when he first entered the empty tomb. John 20 says, quote: “Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself.”
The Shroud is a flax linen sheet about 14 feet long and three and a half feet wide. It’s now kind of a tan color with dark blotches and faint lines. If you look carefully, you can see the double image of a crucified man. Maybe five-foot-ten or so. His front is on one half and his back is on the other. Heads toward the center. It looks like someone stretched the cloth out, placed a body on one half and then folded the cloth over, from the head down.
Except, and this is a major part of the puzzle, the image is inverted. It’s like someone imposed a photographic negative of the body onto the cloth. Nobody recognized this until the first time it was photographed in 1898 by an Italian amateur photographer.
Jeremiah Johnston, a Shroud expert and president of the Christian Thinkers Society, told that story at a World Economic Forum event last year.
JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Why I changed my mind: So in 1898, when Secondo Pia is taking a photograph down in the Turin Cathedral, the Saint Giovanni Cathedral in Turin, he takes a picture. The exposures took 14 minutes and 20 minutes. He had to bring in a generator, one of the first flash photographies.
INTERVIEWER: Right
JOHNSTON: He takes the photo, and in the dark room, this is what he sees on the screen, and he never more appropriately utters the following three words: "Oh my God!” He thought he was looking at the face of Jesus.
And that, of course, is the question. When we look at the Shroud of Turin, is that an image of the Son of God? Jesus Christ. The one who said, “I and the Father are one”?
What Pia saw you too can find with a simple internet search. The image of a man shows up clearly on the negatives: a body, with facial features, hair, mustache and beard, muscles. And even wounds consistent with someone who’d been crucified. A lot of wounds. Seven hundred of them.
The man’s large eyes are closed. His hair, parted in the middle, falls down almost to his shoulders. He has a strong nose and a narrow face. He doesn’t look scared or like he’s in pain at all. He just looks … kind of noble. Some of the AI-generated images based on the Shroud do kind of resemble the actor from The Chosen.
A lot of Christians, especially Protestants, would say it doesn’t matter if the Shroud is real. You don’t need things like “relics” to have faith. You just need to remember the solas. Scripture alone. Faith alone. Grace alone. Christ alone. As WORLD Opinions Editor Albert Mohler once wrote, “The obsession with relics comes at a grave cost — the confusion of the Gospel, the marginalization of Christ, and the subversion of the Bible’s sufficiency.”
And anyway, it’s obviously a medieval fake. There’s a long history of chicanery linked to the veneration of objects supposedly connected to Christ or a saint. Especially in Catholic tradition. John Calvin quipped in his 1543 “Treatise on Relics” that there are so many supposed splinters of the “true cross” littering up cathedrals and towns across Europe that they would fill a ship’s cargo hold.
On the other hand, Catholics have a long tradition and theology built around venerating relics and saints. They insist they don’t “worship” artifacts, but relics can be a spiritual encouragement.
I’d heard of the Shroud but never thought much about it until I interviewed Charles Murray last year about his book, Taking Religion Seriously. Murray is a famous social scientist who gradually realized that his strict materialism just wasn’t true to reality. One major factor in his shift toward faith was looking into the Shroud of Turin.
CHARLES MURRAY: The fact is that the Shroud of Turin is so weird that if it were ever proved that it was done by a medieval forger, that would be very nearly as miraculous as the resurrection, because the features of that that simply cannot be explained by science are incredible.
When he told me that, I thought, really? That sounds pretty interesting.
Some people will say that we shouldn’t have done this episode. That by broaching the topic we’re introducing confusion among believers. Encouraging people to put their faith in objects rather than in Christ.
I disagree. The claims are out there, and they’re about the most important event in history. It seems like the kind of thing Christians ought to be aware of, at least.
But the critics are right that the issue is faith. And it raises some important questions about faith. Apologists have long pointed out that faith is not believing despite the evidence. If Christianity is true, it does not require us to believe anything contrary to reason or evidence.
Christians have for 2,000 years asserted on the basis of evidence that the resurrection happened. The consistent testimony of eyewitnesses and Scripture. Historical records. The behavior of the disciples. The rise and longevity of the Church. It all points in one direction.
But Christians have never had physical, empirical evidence tied to Christ’s resurrection. Evidence that can be measured, tested, and repeated. And now, Shroud proponents are insisting that, yeah, we have that kind of evidence. And if Shroud investigators like anything, it’s measuring and testing.
It turns out that there’s a museum for the Shroud that just opened in November of 2025 in Orange County, California. It’s about 10 minutes from Disneyland. Right in the heart of a tourist region. It’s one of several Shroud museums that have opened in the last few years. So we sent Gretchen out there to try to figure out what’s going on.
So today on Doubletake, a mystery, plain and simple. But not just any mystery. A story about scientists and historians who are convinced there is physical evidence of the greatest, most important event in all of history: the resurrection of Christ.
Here’s Gretchen.
ANNOUNCER: Today, your journey begins in Theater 1: Immersed in the Life of Jesus. Surrounded by 12 pivotal moments from his life in our 360 degree theater…
GRETCHEN WHITTINGTON: The Shroud of Turin: An Immersive Experience is a museum next door to Christ Cathedral in Orange County, California. It’s on the second floor of a tall building covered with imagery of the cloth and of icons of Christ. It had opened just a few months before I visited this past spring.
The exhibit’s claim to fame is its groundbreaking 360-degree theater. It has swivel chairs and projectors that cover all four white walls and the floor. There’s also a themed lobby, two more small movie theaters, and a larger museum that wraps around the outside of the theaters.
AGNES GREEN: And I understand that the color has never been able to be duplicated on the cloth…
PAT POWERS: No, no… it really is amazing… and you know, they stored it in a bank vault…
Two other folks were on the tour with me when I visited back in May. One was Pat Powers, the museum’s vice president and our guide. The other was Agnes Green–a local member of the Christ Cathedral’s congregation and a curious layman.
Together, we went through the life of Christ, descriptions and visuals of his death and burial, and then scientific theories about his resurrection and the Shroud. That’s the key to the Shroud, after all–not only is it supposedly the cloth Christ was buried in, but the one he resurrected out of, too, Powers told me.
POWERS: Because St. Paul said that if there was no resurrection, our faith is in vain. We’re just, like, kidding ourselves–wasting our time. And so we wanted to show people that you’re not wasting your time: there was a resurrection, Christ died and was resurrected just like he said.”
The first theater focused on the life, works, and death of Christ through a hybrid of live action and AI adaptations of the Gospels. You feel like you’re really there–surrounded by the visual and audio of places like the Sea of Galilee…
ANNOUNCER: Exhausted fishermen slouched in their boat after a fruitless night’s work, their nets filled with nothing but seawater. Through the morning’s haze, a figure appeared on the shoreline…
And the camp of the disciples.
ANNOUNCER: The two stared at each other, understanding flooding their thoughts. ‘Were not our hearts burning within us when he talked?’
That theater leads into another that’s shaped like a cave with only one screen. There you learn about the resurrection of Christ from his tomb. Then, you go into a third theater. It interprets the life of Christ after resurrection and the acts of the church through animations of medieval art.
The exhibits were concise and pretty clear, but still I felt overwhelmed by the mass of information. Powers said I wasn’t the first to feel this way.
POWERS: They’re kind of blown away by it; they kinda come in here, and they just go, ‘I had no idea, I had no idea, I had no idea’ …
But one thought stood out to me more than any other. All I could think was, ‘They really think it’s real.’
To these scholars, the Shroud is more than just a symbol. People are basing their entire lives on this piece of cloth that’s rarely even displayed in public.
Why? I asked myself. What convinced them?
I’d never heard of the Shroud before Les assigned me this story. He told me it was a relic. Supposedly the burial cloth of Christ. I had a rough idea of what a relic was. Some kind of old object that was supposedly the body part of a saint. Or maybe something that they’d blessed? That part I wasn’t really sure about.
It’s currently stored in Torino (or Turin), Italy. It features a variety of stains: blackened holes and edges where fires once ate away at the edges of the cloth; bright red stains that are commonly agreed to be blood; and darker yellow spots, probably water stains from being stored in a scroll jar at some point.
Then I talked to Shroud researcher Russ Breault.
RUSS BREAULT: What we see on the cloth is literally the exudate of wounds that were already in the process of clotting on the body, and then it was wrapped.
The fact that the blood was clotting is consistent with the Gospel accounts, too: that there was a delay between his death and burial. What’s more, the image is actually on top of these stains. And it’s about half a micron thick. A typical human hair is 50 to 100 microns thick. So it isn’t just on the surface of the linen. It’s only on the very surface of the microfibers of the linen.
BREAULT: But here's a here's a real important piece of data, is that there's no image under the blood. This is really important because if there's no image under the blood, then that tells you the order of events. That tells you that the, that the, that the whole pattern of blood stains had to be there first, followed by the image. When did the image get there? I don't know. Maybe three days later. I don't know. But it makes sense if it's authentic. Good Friday followed by Easter Sunday.
And despite years of research, speculation, and testing, no one has figured out how to replicate exactly the cloth’s unique image. We’ll get into the date of the Shroud later, but we can confidently trace it back to the 1300s. Certainly no one in the medieval era had the technology to put a micron-thick mark on a linen cloth. Let alone in the image of a man.
And who in the medieval period would have thought to make it look like a photographic negative? When in 1898 Secondo Pia developed his glass plates, he was amazed that the negative revealed a clear, life-like image of a man. It showed a striking amount of anatomical detail. Far more detail than the washed-out pale version we can see on the Shroud itself with the naked eye. On the negative, we can see the man’s teeth, his wounds, and far more of his features.
Researchers say that the images of the wounds match exactly what you would expect on a corpse that’s been crucified in the way described in the Gospels. Brutal scourge marks on his back. Puncture wounds on his head from a crown of thorns. A gash in his side from a spear. The cartilage in his nose has been dislocated.
Most depictions of Jesus crucified show his feet nailed to the front of the cross. But the Romans instead usually pinned the victim’s heels to the upright, one on either side. And the image on the Shroud has wounds through the heels, not through the top of the feet. The same is true for the hands, which are pinned through the wrists rather than the palms. It’s exactly what you’d expect if it were real.
ROBERT SPITZER: You put it together and it’s a perfect anatomical replication. How would you possibly, how would a medieval forger even begin to know how to do this …
Father Robert Spitzer is a Catholic priest and researcher, and is one of the Shroud experts I talked to at the museum.
SPITZER: … even if he could produce a perfect three-dimensional photographic negative image with imaging from the inside of the body on a non-photographically sensitive linen cloth.
WHITTINGTON: It’s just impossible.
SPITZER: It's impossible. It's like, this is like, you know, reaching for straws or worse. You know, it's kind of reaching for air.
He’s sure that the image is impossible to recreate as a photonegative. And it showed details we couldn’t have known. Like many other pro-authenticity researchers, he believes that a burst of radiation created the image. More on that later.
What I’ve said so far has been endlessly discussed for years. The online debate can be fierce. Major TV networks have documentaries on it, and there are entire academic journals dedicated to it. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have done podcast episodes on it. There’s even an academic certification for experts on the Shroud. Sindonologists, they’re called.
So I decided to call on a few of them myself.
Brian Walsh runs a little Shroud Center down in Richmond, Virginia. It’s attached to a nearby Catholic Church.
WALSH: Fortunately for us, the image that's on the cloth, which you see up here, the head of the man, et cetera, was basically unharmed except for the shoulder area and upper arms, you can see it here and here, where the scorch marks, that's kind of wiped that out…
I happened to catch him during Lent, which meant he was offering weekly 2-hour lectures on different aspects of the Shroud. I’d seen the place on shroud.com, which turned out to be a useful source.
WALSH: And because he has to try to breathe, he will pull up and down while he's on the cross several times before he passes away. And in the case what he ends up getting, each time he moves, is a change in the blood flow pattern, which you can see here on the arms.
The Shroud Center of Richmond was barely a room. There were a few rows of chairs, some prints of medieval paintings along the walls, and a projector screen. But it did have a massive, life-sized photograph of the Shroud, which had been cut up into four sections to fit the back wall of the room, and was lit from behind. Walsh was already lecturing when I got there. The exhibit was in the back of the church’s private school cafeteria, so it took me a while to find it.
Walsh lectured that Saturday morning about the history of the cloth. He called it “one” history. Reliable historical records for the Shroud go back to the mid-1350s, so accounts of the Shroud prior to then are pretty speculative.
All four of the Gospel accounts mention Jesus being buried in a linen shroud. Some mention a second cloth too, that would have been used to cover his head. Two of the four mention those same cloths left behind in the empty tomb. The Gospel of John even specifies that the cloths were separated, with some off to one side and the face cloth “folded up in a place by itself.”
What happened to it after that is unclear.
One version of the story says that the apostles and the early Church kept it hidden in various places until it was carried off to Constantinople. Coins struck in the Byzantine Empire between the 600s and 900s A.D. bear an image that seems remarkably similar to the one on the Shroud.
It was probably in Constantinople until the thirteenth century. That’s when some scholars believe it was stolen and hidden away by a French crusader. It stayed hidden in France for nearly 150 years.
This account is one way the Shroud could have ended up in Lirey, France in the 1350s. A famous French knight built a church in that town and displayed the Shroud, attracting large crowds of pilgrims. Contemporary accounts talk of medallions being struck to commemorate the event. From that point, documented evidence traces the Shroud’s progress through France and eventually into Italy.
BRIAN HYLAND: My name is Brian Hyland. … My title is senior curator here at Museum of the Bible.
That’s in Washington, D.C. He curated the Museum of the Bible’s 2022 exhibit, “Mystery and Faith: The Shroud of Turin.”
Hyland told me about how, in the Middle Ages, people looked to the Shroud for hope during seasons of plague. During the COVID pandemic, its caretakers provided a video stream of the Shroud for believers to take comfort. For some visitors to the Museum of the Bible, seeing a replica of the Shroud and learning more about it during the pandemic was encouraging, Hyland told me.
Anyway, for about 200 years the Shroud was in France. Then in 1578 Bishop Charles Borromeo proposed to journey on foot from Milan to France to give thanks after his city was released from a plague.
HYLAND: Now, at that time, it was in Chambray, which would have meant that this bishop with kind of frail health would have had to walk barefoot over the Alps.
WHITTINGTON: Oh, my goodness.
HYLAND: So the Duke of Savoy at the time decided for a couple of reasons, but he moved it from Savoy to Turin so that he wouldn't have to climb the Alps.
Local artillery heralded the arrival of the Shroud in Turin. Its home has been in Italy ever since, with showings on very special occasions. It currently resides in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud, next to St. John the Baptist Cathedral.
The first modern, scientific examinations of the Shroud happened in the 1970s. In 1978 the Shroud of Turin Research Project was officially formed. It’s known as “STURP.”
John Jackson was one of the lead scientists and helped organize the team. This is from a 1999 interview.
JOHN JACKSON: I was in an environment, a scientific environment, in New Mexico, with a lot of the labs, the national laboratories …
The team included a multi-disciplinary group of elite American scientists. There were biophysicists, a thermochemist, nuclear physicists, a forensic pathologist, and researchers from nearly every forensic discipline you can think of. Thirty-three in all. They went to Turin and worked around the clock for five straight days–120 hours. A National Geographic film crew went with them.
They had one goal: not to prove whether or not the Shroud was authentic, or even to prove where it came from, but to understand it as we see it today. What is it made of, and what caused that distinct image?
JACKSON: Because we didn’t really know what we were dealing with here, we wanted to design a protocol of studies that would allow us to have sort of a shotgun approach to it ….
Remarkably, the team couldn’t explain the image. They did everything. Spectroscopic examinations. Ultraviolet photographs. Some even used sticky tape to pick up pollen stuck to its surface. But they couldn’t figure out any way that the Shroud could have ended up with all of the same imagery, stains, and other things it exhibits today. It showed no signs of paint or dye. The red stains were indeed blood, and they were in places you’d expect if they came from the wounds on the image. The STURP report said, quote,
“Briefly stated, we seem to know what the image is chemically, but how it got there remains a mystery. The dilemma is not one of choosing from among a variety of likely transfer mechanisms but rather that no technologically credible process has been postulated that satisfies all the characteristics of the existing image.”
The team found that the image was the result of a series of reactions in the fibers of the linen itself: “oxidation, dehydration, and conjugation of the polysaccharide structure,” the report says. In English, that means that the Shroud’s very fibers were changed by some sort of chemical process. But as we mentioned, the changes only go a fraction of a micron deep. They’re at the very surface of the cloth.
So it’s more than just that scientists couldn’t say how someone could have produced the image. They couldn’t figure out what sort of process would have caused the discoloration itself.
Shroud skeptics have offered a variety of suggestions to try to explain the discoloration. Lactic acid from the body, or maybe a bit of heat applied just so. But none would produce those chemical changes in the linen only half a micron deep. None of them are plausible.
Not only that, but whatever happened to the cloth gave it a sort of “fluorescence.” The image actually shines at different brightnesses under ultraviolet light. Almost like a sparkle.
And there’s something else, too. The cloth napkin that some historians think covered Jesus’s head when they carried him off the cross is known as the Sudarium. It has bloodstains and images that match up almost exactly with the bloodstains and images on the Shroud. If somebody did fabricate the Shroud as a hoax, they also made a matching head covering to go with it.
There is one big reason why many people have dismissed the Shroud though. Those who argue that it’s authentic have to address this issue constantly. In 1988, three small pieces of the Shroud were sent off for radiocarbon dating tests. They went to three different labs in Tuscon, Arizona; Zurich, Switzerland; and Oxford, England. The results came back with an average date of around 1260, plus or minus 65 years.
The radiocarbon dating test is not that complicated. The idea is that living things absorb from the atmosphere trace amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14. Plants and animals stop absorbing carbon-14 when they die. Further, carbon-14 decays steadily into carbon-12, with a half-life of about 5,730 years.
So in a given bit of dead plant or animal tissue, the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 provides a decent estimate of how long the organism has been dead. It’s a well-accepted test in many scientific circles. So when the results put the Shroud in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, many called it the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. They dismissed the Shroud as a fake.
But pro-authenticity sindonologists point out the testing itself had serious problems. All three bits sent off for testing came from the same corner of the shroud, yet they came back with significantly different dates. Some shroud proponents believe the bits came from patches on the original. Probably done in the medieval era. That would explain the remarkable coincidence that the three pieces tested are from the medieval period. Many others say that the corner the samples came from had been regularly handled every time the Shroud went on display. That contaminated the sample.
Another piece of pro-Shroud evidence is really hard to explain: the three-dimensional information within the Shroud’s image. I mentioned earlier how Secondo Pia discovered that the image of the man is very detailed. But it’s also a bit distorted. Stretched out.
A device called a VP-8 image analyzer shows what the man would have looked like in three dimensions. The VP-8 was designed in the 1970s for analyzing x-rays and satellite imagery. If you put a regular photo into a VP-8, it produces a distorted image. But it converts the right kind of picture into something that looks like a topographical map. A 3D rendering.
And when researchers fed images of the Shroud into a VP-8, it produced relief images of the man on the Shroud. That shows that different parts of the images on the Shroud have varying amounts of “density.” That’s what allows the VP-8 to render a life-like image of a man.
When Bob Rucker first heard about the VP-8 imaging,
RUCKER: Well, immediately I thought that's radiation. That's radiation that's being absorbed in the air, diminishing as as the radiation is transported across the air gap between the body and the cloth.
Rucker is a retired nuclear physicist and Shroud scholar. He believes that radiation could have lightly scorched the linen microfibers. A burst of incredibly strong radiation only lasting a fraction of a billionth of a second. That produced the image with the 3D information coded into it.
RUCKER: So, how do you retain the the information in order to communicate a good image to the cloth to determine which fibers have to be discolored and the the length of that discoloration on each fiber? How do you retain that in a form that's good information? That means that the radiation has to be vertically oriented, like a billion lasers going off inside the body. Each one pointed vertically up and vertically down.
Rucker believes it came from inside Jesus at the moment of the resurrection. When Jesus came back to life, a certain kind of molecule, “heavy hydrogen,”
RUCKER: … was split by a vibration in the body …
It sounds kind of science-fiction-y. Like a super-hero origin story. Then again, we’re talking about the power of God here.
And it’s a power all believers will one day experience for themselves. For, as Paul tells the Corinthians,
“Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”
The Vatican hasn’t released any more pieces of the Shroud for testing. But sindonologists are looking hopefully to Turin and Pope Leo XIV for future opportunities. He’s hinted that the Shroud might be back on display, and that might lead to more chances to study the actual artifact.
But the sindonologists I spoke with emphasized that there’s a balance. Sure, lots of people would like to study the cloth. Test it some more. If this was indeed Christ, sindonologists believe the image on the cloth is the only image we have of Him. It’s the only physical evidence we would have of Christ’s resurrection.
But I’ve come to realize that the Shroud is about more than just physical evidence.
Dr. Cheryl White is a history professor at Louisiana State University. She’s been studying the Shroud for more than 30 years.
WHITE: No one has been able to successfully reproduce the exact kind of image that is there using only the materials that we have in the twenty-first century. And at the same time, we have to concede that it is a real artifact. It’s a real image; it really exists, and so we can’t say that it’s not something that’s real, that’s worthy of study…
She says that the Shroud is neither reproducible nor falsifiable. It can’t be recreated and so it can’t be proven to be fake. But that doesn’t mean it’s real, or that it’s the result of Christ’s resurrection.
Her background is in relic history and their veneration over the centuries. White says the idea of relics comes from God being in creation. Anything that He’s made is filled with His presence. It’s something that’s left behind.
In the Incarnation, Christ, fully man and fully God, came to Earth and touched it. He lived in it. Thus, a relic is …
WHITE: … a way to use something physical to encounter something supernatural. But the emphasis is always on the supernatural. It's not on the thing itself. We don't worship relics. We venerate them because they can bring us into a higher reality.
Of course, some relics are fakes, White says. But just because some relics are fake doesn’t mean they all are. That’s one reason why the Shroud is interesting. It’s a representation of the incarnation of Christ on earth.
Rucker points out that nobody should worship the Shroud. Idolatry is when
RUCKER: … a person forms an image that can be worshiped, but the images on the Shroud of Turin were not formed by human beings. They were formed in Jesus' resurrection from the dead by a process that God determined before the foundation of the world,
But if we can’t know either way, what’s the point?
“Who is Christ?” It’s a question that has slipped into every conversation I’ve had about the Shroud over the last few months. All of the experts I talked to believed one thing: the Shroud casts an entirely new perspective on the Resurrection of Christ.
Here’s Brian Hyland of the Museum of the Bible.
HYLAND: Well, I think what it represents–and this is true whether it is medieval, authentic, or a 21st century facsimile–is the message is that it's a visual representation of the Gospels, of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And so the tie-in is that it is a visual form of the Gospels. And so as the gospels stay relevant throughout time, so does something like this.
Russ Breault says God preserved the Shroud to provide details left out of the Gospels.
BREAULT: The Scripture is amazingly understated. … Pilate had Jesus scourged. That's it. That's all we get. But the shroud, as a gospel, … shows you the extent of the scourging. It shows you how badly he was brutalized. You know, so where the where the Scripture itself just just gives you enough information to make a forensic identification, the the shroud itself fills in all the blanks.
Part of the appeal of the Shroud is that it seems to offer a peek behind the curtain. Actual physical evidence. We don’t want to say that our faith depends on something like the Shroud. But it sure would be nice if we had something concrete that supports our faith. We crave certainty, and if the Shroud is real it seems to get us a step closer.
But God declines to provide assurance in the way we would sometimes like. The Shroud is a mystery, and God doesn’t just permit mystery. He creates it. It’s a reminder to be humble in the face of all we don’t know.
BREAULT: All the deep things of God are all mysteries …
Breault again.
BREAULT: … I mean, can anyone explain, you know, how, how you feed a, a 5000 people on a hillside with a, with a boy's lunch. I mean, it just doesn't happen. Now we the church would call them miracles, but they're mysteries.
But Breault says the Shroud exists for the same reason as the Gospels themselves: to testify to the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
BREAULT: And it is a gospel written on linen, and it is there for people who for people who need it. There are many people who don't, and that's just fine. That's just fine. But there are people who do, … and so for those, that's why I do what I do, for those that that that need something like the Shroud …
The Shroud may not bear Christ’s image. I’m inclined to say that it does, but you can examine the evidence for yourself.
Several sindonologists pointed me to Matthew 16, verse 15, which says, Jesus said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’
It’s the question that the Shroud asks. Regardless of whether the Shroud is real, we will all be asked one day who Christ is. We can say that He was a prophet, or a rabbi, or even an ordinary man who was crucified.
But Paul told the Philippians that, one day, at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
In the meantime, we’re left to wonder whether the Shroud is the world’s first selfie, so to speak. A clue left embedded into a linen sheet. And when we get to heaven and see Jesus, will he seem oddly familiar? Will we ask ourselves, where have I seen that face before?
SILLARS: Gretchen Whittington reported this story, and Gretchen and I wrote it. I’m Les Sillars.
Thanks to listening to this episode, and to this season of Doubletake. This is, I’m sad to say, the last episode of Season 4. If you’re listening to this on the Doubletake channel, next week and the week after we’ll re-run episodes that first aired on The World and Everything In It in February. But they’ll be new to this channel. I think you’ll really enjoy them.
But we’re already working on Season 5. Lord willing, it’ll be out next summer. And it’ll be a really big help to us if you respond in some way. Let us know you’re out there. Rate us or review us on your podcast app. Send a letter or voice recording to editor@wng.org to let us know what you think. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.
Until then, thanks for listening. We’ll see you next season.
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