An apparent new discovery regarding the Shroud of Turin has some speculating that this ancient relic may be a record of the life and death of Christ himself. The implications for our faith are profound. Here lies potential proof not just of Christ s existence, but of his passion, his suffering, his love for humanity, and his resurrection.
00:03:36.000It could be a testament and a silent witness to the historic, physical life and resurrection of Jesus.
00:03:45.000Imagine this very shroud, once perhaps displayed in the majestic city of Constantinople, influencing the hands of medieval artists.
00:03:56.360Their brushes, guided by more than just inspiration, might have painted the face of Christ from this very image.
00:04:05.780Every stroke, every stroke, every shade, could have been a memory of the divine, passed down through time.
00:04:13.020The same way that we know that the medieval monks meticulously copied the Bible, word for word, for hundreds and thousands of years.
00:04:24.020This is why the medieval art matches the face that we see on this shroud.
00:04:30.260The implications for our faith are profound.
00:04:32.760Here lies potential proof, not just of Christ's existence, but of his passion, his suffering, his love for humanity, and his resurrection.
00:04:43.620If this shroud is genuine, it's as if we've been given a relic from the very moment of our redemption, a physical connection to the divine sacrifice.
00:04:54.840So for centuries, skeptics have questioned, but now with science as an ally, we stand at the cusp of a new understanding.
00:05:02.760This shroud could be the bridge where faith meets fact.
00:05:06.760It challenges us to see beyond the skepticism, to touch the hem of history, to feel the weight of the cross in our hands.
00:05:16.920This isn't merely about a cloth, it's about the heart of Christianity and Western civilization.
00:05:23.980The shroud, if truly from the time of Christ, speaks to the very essence of our belief, the incarnation, the crucifixion, and yes, the resurrection.
00:05:34.380It invites us to a deeper reverence, to witness the tangible reality of God's love for us.
00:05:41.120And so, in this episode of the Chronicles of the Christians, let's ponder this mystery with awe and wonder.
00:05:50.040For if this shroud is what we believe it to be, then it's not just a piece of history.
00:05:55.320It's a piece of heaven on earth, a silent sermon of the greatest love story ever told.
00:06:03.080And may this revelation guide us closer to the truth, closer to Christ, and closer to the peace that only he can bring.
00:06:12.620Join us as we bring you to and tell you the story of the shroud of Christ.
00:09:12.760Some people think that it's actually just the face or the head, but it is actually, in fact, a full-length shroud.
00:09:18.700And the idea is that many Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Catholics believe it to be the actual burial shroud of Christ.
00:09:29.520And therefore, the image and the stains, essentially, that are associated with this cloth are actually the image and stains of Christ himself.
00:09:39.740And so we'll get into all of that because it is a bit confusing when people ask serious questions.
00:09:45.200And of course, this has been met with a lot of skepticism over the years.
00:09:49.820There was a carbon dating study back in the 80s that really led a lot of people to kind of put cold water on it because the carbon dating study came back and said,
00:09:57.740hey, we think this thing is a forgery, it's not 2,000 years old, and yet there are new studies which were completed this year that actually tell a different story.
00:10:09.340So given that sense, and we'll talk a little bit more about the history of it coming up,
00:10:13.740what are these new studies that purport to actually supersede that old carbon dating study?
00:10:22.880So, Jack, many of us grew up hearing from secular sources like PBS, like History Channel, all of the background of the shroud,
00:10:32.240which is that it does, in fact, have real bloodstains, and there's analysis showing like ferritin, for example, is inside of it.
00:10:40.000And so the story was, well, it was a medieval forgery to be used as an evangelism tool, tourism, cash money making.
00:10:49.660It was made to look real and just look at the carbon dating.
00:10:53.920So this is the story of documentaries that we saw when many of us were in our formative years.
00:10:59.560And it turns out that the carbon dating of the particular fabric seems to, in fact, be from a part of it that was repaired.
00:11:11.160And so what's carbon dated is, in fact, the repair, not the shroud itself.
00:11:16.020The new evidence that's come out is through x-rays and through isotope testing.
00:11:21.780And the x-rays of the natural aging of the fiber seems to reveal that it is at least 2,000 years old.
00:11:32.380And the isotope testing seems to indicate that the fiber is from the Western Levant, specifically from the modern day Israel and surrounding areas.
00:12:35.400But it turns out that the part that was carbonated actually was from the repair.
00:12:39.480It would be like saying that, oh, Notre Dame is only five minutes old because you tested a piece of it that was just repaired, you know, this year.
00:12:47.440Obviously, these things, these relics, they do have repairs over time because life happens.
00:12:54.400And we'll get into a little story about why it is potentially that it required repairs coming up in the program.
00:13:00.900But I want to dig in some more on the actual cases.
00:14:30.300But the way that this new technology has shown is the shroud itself has to be approximately 2,000 years old, given the signs of aging that have been demonstrated.
00:14:45.260And so you might say that carbon-14 stands are down bad right now.
00:14:54.060And so when it comes to this chemical analysis, what were some of the chemicals that were used?
00:15:00.080And basically what they do, if I understand correctly, was they were comparing it to other – they had test cloths, basically, that they knew precisely where they had come from.
00:15:10.760And so they had European cloths, they had cloths from the Mediterranean, they had cloths from the Levant, and they were doing comparative analysis to determine which one it lined up most directly with.
00:15:22.280That's right, yes, and when this story first broke, and we had a conversation about this a few months ago, Jack, it was pointed out that this shroud and its, let's say, its origin or its provenance, you might say, is eerily similar to those that have been found from Masada,
00:15:41.960which, of course, is the Jewish revolt fortress that fell to the Romans, and there's incredible artifacts that are still around to this day from the siege of Masada, and that, of course, is in Israel, and that's almost four decades after the life on earth of Jesus Christ.
00:16:03.620And by the way, Masada is – and longtime viewers of Human Events Daily will remember that we did an episode at Masada, actually climbing it two years ago, and that is practically right down the road, maybe 30 minutes drive from the cave at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, right on the banks overlooking the Dead Sea.
00:16:29.120And one of the reasons – and one of the reasons that you can get materials that were preserved so well there is because along the banks of the Dead Sea, it is so arid and so dry that when these materials, the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, were preserved in sealed clay jars and then sealed with wax, that those conditions were perfect.
00:16:55.780It was a hermetic seal, and there was – because of no humidity, there was no damage done whatsoever to these documents.
00:17:03.420This is why the Dead Sea Scrolls were so important.
00:17:06.180And so it makes an obvious use case to say, hey, if we've got some material from the same area that is cloth or linen, and it was the Essenes were the group that had stayed at the Dead Sea Scrolls area,
00:17:19.920so why not take some of the cloth from that same area just down the road at Masada and say, let's test that because we know for sure that this was part of the Jewish revolt, which happened.
00:17:32.740And it's dated pretty closely to about 70 A.D., so we're talking just a couple of decades after Christ's death and rebirth and resurrection in 33, give or take A.D., 33 or 40, depending on your source.
00:17:51.000I'm not going to get into that right now.
00:17:52.120But the idea being was this was a major battle.
00:17:56.060We are able through Roman sources and Jewish sources and all sorts of contemporary sources to really pinpoint down when Masada took place.
00:18:05.260And that's the piece of cloth that the Shroud of Turin was most closely dated to, 2,000 years old, not just a couple of hundred years old, meaning they didn't have the technology back then to create a forgery this sophisticated.
00:18:25.080Getting some more into that next with Joshua Leising.
00:18:35.260All right, Jack Posobiec, Human Events Daily, the Chronicles of the Christians, the Shroud of Christ.
00:18:58.300This is our episode with Joshua Leising, providing an update on the possible authentication of the Shroud of Turin.
00:19:08.660Major news that took place this year, possibly with all the political and geopolitical news that's going on, this may actually have implications that are far beyond any other story or any other event that took place in 2024.
00:19:24.060And so that's why we thought that it was so important to actually tell this story and do an entire episode on the Shroud of Turin.
00:19:33.180So just a quick backstory for anyone who really doesn't know where it came from or how it ended up in Italy.
00:19:40.640So wait, obviously people know that the biblical narrative, of course, in the Gospels, that this all took place in Jerusalem.
00:19:49.880Well, during the Crusades, and we did the episode on the Crusades with Blake Neff, as the Muslims, as the Caliphate were sacking the Holy Land, many of the Crusaders realized that so many of these holy relics and so many of the issues that were going on at the time were potentially going to be lost or destroyed in these great battles,
00:20:14.400that they took it upon themselves to preserve them and then actually bring the relics to Europe for safekeeping.
00:20:23.480And so the earliest documented appearance of the Shroud is actually in France and in the possession of Geoffrey de Charnay,
00:20:31.180who was a French knight who had been in his family had been associated with the Crusades.
00:20:39.560And in fact, going going back even further, there are references through the Crusades during one of the battles of Constantinople.
00:20:51.080And a French knight in 200 years prior to this, and this is really interesting, 200 years prior to this,
00:21:00.840had written that when he was in Constantinople, he saw a cloth that was hanging up on full display within a major church in Constantinople.
00:21:12.300This is, again, the heart of Byzantium, and we talked in the Crusades episode about how the Crusades actually were a call from the Orthodox Church
00:21:23.260to the Western Church, to the Roman Church, saying, come and save us from these barbarians.
00:21:29.800They're flooding throughout our lands.
00:21:31.620They're flooding throughout the Holy Land.
00:21:35.480And so it was the Western Church coming to the aid of the Eastern Church, not some, you know, colonialism narrative, which is, of course, taught today.
00:21:46.120So it really was a major effort and kept them at bay up until about 1400s.
00:21:52.840So this French knight who's Robert de Clary is writing that when he was in Constantinople, he saw a cloth that bore the face of Jesus.
00:22:04.400And he referred to it as the image of Edessa, also known as the Mandylion, which was brought from Edessa, which is in Ankara, now southern Turkey, sort of on the border with what is today Syria, and all the way back in 944 AD.
00:22:22.840So even prior to the First Crusade, about a thousand years before the First Crusade, and basically the idea being that this image, this cloth, which bore the face of Christ, was in fact the Shroud of Turin that we know today, and that these could have been the same cloth.
00:22:44.840That it makes its way to Constantinople, which is the heart of Byzantium, the heart of Byzantium, the heart of the Eastern Empire, and then as the Eastern Empire falls, the Crusader Knights bring it back to Europe, France, and then later Italy for safekeeping.
00:22:59.840And so the theory is that it was used during Easter rituals, where it would have been displayed in the way that Christ would have been during the actual Passion, during the actual Holy Week itself.
00:23:16.220And this is actually interesting, that recent research has found microparticles of gold on the Shroud, which actually match the composition of gold that was used in Byzantium coinage during certain periods.
00:23:30.840And this suggests that the Shroud may have been kept in Constantinople during those times, potentially displayed or kept with other relics in a setting that included gold.
00:23:42.380And one of the interesting pieces of this story, by the way, so Joshua, there we get the warfare, the fact that the Shroud has been protected and preserved throughout the years.
00:23:53.000But again, the gold coinage that was found also matches the gold coinage of Byzantium, which has always been the sort of oral history of the Shroud, that it made its way through Byzantium to Constantinople and then made its way to Europe.
00:24:10.220So again, when they've conducted scientific analysis of the various, you know, it's sort of like Christian CSI, if you will, that it all matches up with the story that's always been told.
00:24:25.120And a key point that I want to make here, and I'll ask you, in 944 AD, did the Byzantines have the ability to fake this type of chemical analysis, to fake this type of gold?
00:24:37.980Obviously, we know that alchemy was being tried at this time quite proficiently, and people were attempting to do this.
00:24:45.560But as far as I know, it wasn't ever actually achieved.
00:24:52.740We don't have reason to believe it was possible to have forged something like this back then, especially to make it look to modern audiences like ours as if it was authentic.
00:25:03.020So this is what is worth understanding about forgeries.
00:25:06.260The idea of a forgery is to trick people in your present moment, your present place, in your present time that something is real.
00:25:12.900And it's often for money-making purposes.
00:25:17.920There's often a financial motivation for it to sell the thing.
00:25:20.280By the way, you saw this with a lot of those missing link fossils and the skulls, you know, and someone would say, this is how it happened in Europe and in the UK a lot.
00:25:29.880They say, oh, this is the missing link between ape and man.
00:25:33.140And it turned out to be just, yeah, Piltdown Man.
00:25:35.880And it turned out to be like someone took a chimpanzee skull and someone's jaw and fused them together.
00:25:42.660Yeah, Piltdown Man was just a, I believe it was the story, it was a pig's tooth and then a reconstructed skull was put around it to make it people believe.
00:25:49.580But the point of that was to make money, have this exhibition, charge for admission.
00:25:55.480And it's a sort of a quick scam that you don't want to get found out soon enough.
00:25:59.000So the Shroud of Turin does not show what we would anticipate to be a quick scam to make some money off of people who don't know any better.
00:26:09.600Now, what I find interesting about its story is the, and you can look up a number of studies on this,
00:26:18.840the types of other, let's say DNA evidence associated with it show that it has been touched by a lot of people
00:26:26.740and it has traces of pollen and other plants from Western Europe, all the way across the Mediterranean, South, South Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and to the Middle East and back again.
00:26:41.380And so the story of its adventure is in the Shroud itself.
00:26:49.720Well, so what we have done is we have debunked the debunking.
00:26:54.540I remember when the Passion of the Christ was released, the Bell Gibson film in theaters in 2004,
00:26:59.480every public radio and public television station was wanting to do some sort of a public interest show
00:27:05.560around various Christian relics associated with the crucifixion and the resurrection.
00:27:09.820And of course, there was this great debunking of the Holy Sepulchre.
00:27:12.920Well, it turns out that beneath everything, there is a slab with a cross stamped into it, which dates to approximately 100.
00:27:22.340And this is, of course, after people have said, well, obviously, this is not the spot.
00:27:26.040This is built by Constantine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:29:39.640And then in fact, people actually did believe it.
00:29:41.460And they spent untold sums of money in order to invest in this.
00:29:45.920And so the same, I suppose, rubric would then pretend to the idea that these relics that when found were actually probably checked out very scrupulously
00:29:58.160by the very same people who found them.
00:30:02.240They were just going to take the word of some knight who shows up and says, hey, guys, look what I got.
00:30:06.640No, in fact, that the church and the monks and the priests and the folks who were there actually did take very close care to determine whether or not these things were authentic.
00:30:19.240The same way that St. Helena, when she went to the Holy End the first time in 300, 325 A.D.,
00:30:25.200that she was actually talking to people and conducting an investigation into where the site of the crucifixion was,
00:30:36.640that so many of these things were actually not done out of some wanton, cynical belief,
00:30:43.180but in fact, were done out of devout and fervent belief that they were true.
00:36:29.060Let's just go into that a little bit more.
00:36:30.360So the idea being that people have conducted, scientists have conducted experiments with
00:36:36.880linen and attempted to create images on the linen.
00:36:41.280And there have been instances where they've been able to do so, but they've only been able to do so with
00:36:49.420intense bursts of radiation using essentially something akin to ultraviolet light.
00:36:56.760And this is extremely advanced technology, nothing that would have been available to anyone in the
00:37:03.900Middle Ages through any, you know, through any secular process, shall we say.
00:37:09.560And in doing so, the problem is that it creates an intense amount of heat at the same time.
00:37:17.200So they're able to create the image, but the linen itself is usually burned and perhaps destroyed in the process.
00:37:26.120And so the idea that essentially what's on the image is sort of like a photographic negative that when you see an intense burst of light, we all remember, or I suppose the Zoomers in the audience might have to learn about this in history books about what a photo negative is and how that process works.
00:37:46.860So it is created through the use of flash photography and an intense burst of light.
00:37:54.020The only problem being then, if you had that amount of light with the radiation in order for the linen itself to survive, it would require an intense burst of light emanating from the inside of the linen.
00:38:10.120So emanating from whatever was enclosed within this linen in all directions, so three-dimensional in all directions at the same time, but without heat.
00:38:22.440So intense light without heat, and scientifically we know that that is really the only answer to what could have created this linen.
00:38:32.200The only problem is we don't have the technology to do something like that now, and certainly at no point in the medieval period or even in the Renaissance period did anyone have this level of technology.
00:38:49.440And as we say, the linen itself has been dated back, and in fact, the stains have been dated back to 2,000 years.
00:38:57.940The question is, would it have had to have been some process that is other than natural?
00:39:04.560Yes, so this is what I find interesting.
00:39:08.280The same time the AI Jesus comparing the Shroud of Turin to the earliest paintings and drawings and illustrations of Jesus, and it's like, why do they all look the same?
00:39:18.920From all over both Western and Eastern, the earliest depictions of Jesus all look the same.
00:39:24.340Why is that? Were they copying one another? What was the original image?
00:39:30.560Around the same time of the viral memeing of the AI-based Jesus, the Shroud turned into an AI image.
00:39:41.680Around the same time, there was another little visual that went viral, which is that apparently, and you can look this up yourselves, I highly recommend it.
00:39:52.720At the moment of conception, when a sperm meets an egg cell and life is created, there is a zinc-based reaction that emits a powerful flash of light.
00:40:05.420So search, moment of conception, light.
00:40:09.840And there's an incredible burst of light.
00:40:13.180And I'm not the only person who put those two together.
00:40:16.020These are both going viral everywhere.
00:40:17.920However, at the same time, is there, now I could just be simply comparing the two, no relation whatsoever.
00:40:28.720But is it possible that a scientific analysis of a resurrection of a corpse from being a dead body to being a living one again,
00:40:39.140emits an immense flash of light because this is a biological process of where to believe the story of Jesus?
00:41:30.060They did not go to try to find a fossilized pig's tooth, for example, because the goal of a forgery is to scan people very quickly.
00:41:40.040And so the bigger question for us is, could this forgery actually not be a forgery at all?
00:41:46.340All right, Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lyszek.
00:42:09.240We are back, final segment of the Shroud of Christ, this installment of the Chronicles of the Christians.
00:42:17.900We told you the story connecting the Crusades to the history of the Shroud.
00:42:25.000We've shown you how through chemical, x-ray, and even materials analysis that the Shroud does, in fact, stand up to scrutiny.
00:42:36.320And so, Joshua, one of the questions that a lot of skeptics always give to believers is that, well, you know, if all of this were true, you know, why didn't God leave some proof?
00:42:47.140Why didn't Jesus leave some proof of his resurrection?
00:42:49.980Why not leave some, you know, source, source, you know, like the classic Reddit response?
00:42:55.740And for so many, for so many years, it's always been taken as an article of faith and that, well, we have faith in the gospel.
00:43:03.860We have faith in the Old Testament, which, by the way, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s, there were people who said the Old Testament was just a bunch of stories.
00:43:13.980And then people found the Dead Sea Scrolls, which lined up exactly.
00:43:19.420And we talked about the meticulous copying of the Bible word for word down through the centuries.
00:43:25.620Well, suddenly you've got a copy from almost day one, you know, a sort of unedited version.
00:43:33.940And they went back and they found it was a one-to-one.
00:43:37.060It was one-to-one in terms of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the current Bible, that in fact, the work of those monks and those monasteries over the centuries was done with reverence.
00:43:52.760And it was not edited for political purposes or things like that.
00:43:56.920And certainly other editions have been, but we could talk about that some other time.
00:44:01.660And the point being is that so many items from the Old Testament, the location of Sodom and Gomorrah, has actually been uncovered.
00:44:13.580So many things have been uncovered that people are really going back and questioning that, well, if all of this is true, and wait a minute, the Shroud of Turin, suddenly the idea is, well, perhaps the evidence has been with us all along.
00:44:29.080And perhaps the evidence was given to people with this copy of the Shroud of Turin.
00:44:39.180The implication of this is that the days of projecting skepticism, doubt, cynicism onto relics and rituals of faith, those days are coming to an end.
00:44:52.460And I remember how when people would think about some of these most famous relics and places, this idea is, well, okay, well, obviously people would say it's the real shroud or it's the real veil or it's the real cross of Christ or it's the real spear that pierces Jesus' side or it's the real whatever.
00:45:10.680However, if I was doing that, well, I would just be doing that to make money off of people trying to trick the believers and I would just try to make them, right?
00:45:18.900It's that modern day money-focused projection from the Western skeptic.
00:45:25.060But when you understand, for example, that, and this is my understanding, that in the Catholic tradition, in order to confirm, the process of confirming a miracle having occurred is nothing like the evangelical megachurch experience where someone will report that they've had a miracle.
00:45:42.960There will be no tests and then they will go viral and then they will get a New York Times bestselling memoir book deal out of the experience and cash in on their claims.
00:45:51.800But in the process of confirming a miracle has occurred in the Catholic tradition, you must demonstrate you have not received any kind of compensation for your story or for your claim.
00:46:03.840There must be multiple religious and secular physicians associated with your previous diagnosis, and there must be a diagnosis, there must be a paper trail.
00:46:13.520So the process of confirming a miracle has occurred is to remove all skepticism, to remove all alternate explanations of it having occurred.
00:46:24.060That is the same, let's say, worldview or process that has been applied to the protection of the Bible, of these relics.
00:46:36.560It has been very expensive, as you and Blake have talked about, in order to do these things, in order to hand copy the Bible, in order to maintain accuracy.
00:46:45.340And skeptics will say, well, there's an occasional typo.
00:46:48.220Yeah, okay, well, what does that show?
00:46:49.740All good books have typos in them, right?
00:46:51.620And so the meta-narrative here that we're observing is that we have reason to be skeptical about the skepticism, and that this doubt that we see surrounding Christian rituals and stories and doctrines is based on cynicism, and the want not to believe it, a desire not to accept it.
00:47:11.300And sometimes it's, well, I had a bad experience with this church when I was a kid.
00:47:15.400I had an abusive parent who was very devoutly religious, therefore all religion is bad, and I will be a new atheist, and I'll read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
00:47:24.120Well, even Dawkins himself has pointed out that he considers himself a cultural Christian because the stories of Christianity bring about Western civilization, and if we lose that, we lose the West.
00:47:34.940And that's why atheism is falling out of public favor, and it's a low-status position now to put on that you're an atheist.
00:47:43.360And we're seeing this great sea change also with the election of Donald J. Trump and him wishing happy birthday to the Blessed Virgin Mary with his posting of St. Michael's, the Archangel's Prayer on his social media and other activities that he's done honoring the Roman Catholic Church, honoring Christians in general of all denominations.
00:48:06.360And so now faith is not this silly little thing for silly people, but you're seeing the enlightened, the intelligent, the educated finding meaning in this, finding meaning in Christianity that had been lost and realizing rejection of Christianity was based on projection of doubters, skeptics, naysayers who had their own ends and means for doing so.
00:48:34.040And really, as it comes in, it's almost like, and just as we finish up here, it's almost, and by the way, we encourage skepticism, I certainly do, I'm skeptical of the mainstream narrative, but the problem is you don't want to make skepticism your religion either, and you don't want to make it an article of faith.
00:48:55.140And so, Joshua, and I know you said this earlier this year, but congratulations to you on, through the process of all of this, regaining your faith as well.