Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - The Chronicles of the Christians - Part III： The Shroud of Turin

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00:00:25.780 The Poso Daily Brief.

00:00:30.000 This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.

00:00:40.600 A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.

00:00:46.980 This is Human Events with your host, Jack Poso.

00:00:50.220 Christ is King.

00:01:00.000 An apparent new discovery regarding the Shroud of Turin.

00:01:24.180 Reports say there is new evidence the Shroud is 2,000 years old, which coincides with our Lord's life and crucifixion.

00:01:31.700 These reports originally surfaced in 2022.

00:01:34.640 But what appears to be new are studies concluded earlier this summer.

00:01:39.240 They were focused on bloodstains and scourge marks found on the Shroud and allude to Christ's death

00:01:44.180 by being nailed to a cross, a common method of execution by the Romans at the time.

00:01:49.900 The Shroud of Turin.

00:02:19.900 The tomb is open.

00:02:22.700 He's alive.

00:02:24.660 That's not possible.

00:02:25.860 I saw him.

00:02:26.940 Mary, maybe it was someone else.

00:02:29.740 You think I'm mad?

00:02:31.860 Peter, see the tomb for yourself.

00:02:35.060 Now, do you believe me?

00:02:44.020 Now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to today's edition of the Chronicles of the Christians. 0.56

00:02:52.240 And in this chronicle, we delve into the sacred mystery that's puzzled and inspired the faithful for centuries.

00:03:00.820 The Shroud of Turin.

00:03:03.600 Our tale today, The Shroud of Christ, speaks of a revelation that might just bridge the chasm between faith and science.

00:03:13.920 Through the meticulous work of modern science, chemical analysis has whispered to us truths long veiled by time.

00:03:23.060 This shroud, believed by many to be the very cloth that wrapped our Lord after his crucifixion,

00:03:28.100 has now been authenticated to the time of Christ himself.

00:03:32.020 So this may not just be a fabric.

00:03:36.000 It could be a testament and a silent witness to the historic, physical life and resurrection of Jesus.

00:03:45.000 Imagine this very shroud, once perhaps displayed in the majestic city of Constantinople, influencing the hands of medieval artists.

00:03:56.360 Their brushes, guided by more than just inspiration, might have painted the face of Christ from this very image.

00:04:05.780 Every stroke, every stroke, every shade, could have been a memory of the divine, passed down through time.

00:04:13.020 The same way that we know that the medieval monks meticulously copied the Bible, word for word, for hundreds and thousands of years.

00:04:24.020 This is why the medieval art matches the face that we see on this shroud.

00:04:30.260 The implications for our faith are profound.

00:04:32.760 Here lies potential proof, not just of Christ's existence, but of his passion, his suffering, his love for humanity, and his resurrection.

00:04:43.620 If 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.

00:04:54.840 So for centuries, skeptics have questioned, but now with science as an ally, we stand at the cusp of a new understanding.

00:05:02.760 This shroud could be the bridge where faith meets fact.

00:05:06.760 It challenges us to see beyond the skepticism, to touch the hem of history, to feel the weight of the cross in our hands.

00:05:16.920 This isn't merely about a cloth, it's about the heart of Christianity and Western civilization.

00:05:23.980 The shroud, if truly from the time of Christ, speaks to the very essence of our belief, the incarnation, the crucifixion, and yes, the resurrection.

00:05:34.380 It invites us to a deeper reverence, to witness the tangible reality of God's love for us.

00:05:41.120 And so, in this episode of the Chronicles of the Christians, let's ponder this mystery with awe and wonder.

00:05:50.040 For if this shroud is what we believe it to be, then it's not just a piece of history.

00:05:55.320 It's a piece of heaven on earth, a silent sermon of the greatest love story ever told.

00:06:03.080 And may this revelation guide us closer to the truth, closer to Christ, and closer to the peace that only he can bring.

00:06:12.620 Join us as we bring you to and tell you the story of the shroud of Christ.

00:06:18.040 CHOIR SINGS 0.64

00:06:26.960 All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back.

00:06:54.160 The Chronicles of the Christians, and we're going through many of these Christian stories that haven't been told,

00:07:02.320 and you're not going to hear this anywhere else, and certainly not in the mainstream media.

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00:08:46.080 I wanted to invite Joshua Lysak here on the program.

00:08:49.840 You know Joshua, he was the co-author of the books Unhumans and Bulletproof,

00:08:54.720 but he's here today to talk to us about the Shroud of Turin.

00:08:58.380 Joshua, how are you?

00:09:00.040 Doing well.

00:09:00.620 Thanks for having me back on, Jack.

00:09:02.580 Of course.

00:09:02.980 So I think people, most people generally know the Shroud of Turin.

00:09:06.440 It's this, it's the shroud.

00:09:08.880 It's in Turin, Italy.

00:09:10.140 It is a full-length body shroud.

00:09:12.760 Some people think that it's actually just the face or the head, but it is actually, in fact, a full-length shroud.

00:09:18.700 And the idea is that many Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Catholics believe it to be the actual burial shroud of Christ.

00:09:29.520 And therefore, the image and the stains, essentially, that are associated with this cloth are actually the image and stains of Christ himself.

00:09:39.740 And so we'll get into all of that because it is a bit confusing when people ask serious questions.

00:09:45.200 And of course, this has been met with a lot of skepticism over the years.

00:09:49.820 There 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,

00:09:57.740 hey, 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.

00:10:09.340 So given that sense, and we'll talk a little bit more about the history of it coming up,

00:10:13.740 what are these new studies that purport to actually supersede that old carbon dating study?

00:10:20.000 Yes, that's right.

00:10:22.880 So, Jack, many of us grew up hearing from secular sources like PBS, like History Channel, all of the background of the shroud,

00:10:32.240 which is that it does, in fact, have real bloodstains, and there's analysis showing like ferritin, for example, is inside of it.

00:10:40.000 And so the story was, well, it was a medieval forgery to be used as an evangelism tool, tourism, cash money making.

00:10:49.660 It was made to look real and just look at the carbon dating.

00:10:53.920 So this is the story of documentaries that we saw when many of us were in our formative years.

00:10:59.560 And it turns out that the carbon dating of the particular fabric seems to, in fact, be from a part of it that was repaired.

00:11:11.160 And so what's carbon dated is, in fact, the repair, not the shroud itself.

00:11:16.020 The new evidence that's come out is through x-rays and through isotope testing.

00:11:21.780 And the x-rays of the natural aging of the fiber seems to reveal that it is at least 2,000 years old.

00:11:32.380 And the isotope testing seems to indicate that the fiber is from the Western Levant, specifically from the modern day Israel and surrounding areas.

00:11:45.300 Well, isn't that interesting?

00:11:46.580 And so this story of the shroud in public consciousness needs to be updated because for approximately 40 years, it's been incorrect.

00:11:58.060 Oh, that shroud is obviously a forgery.

00:12:00.980 It's a fake.

00:12:01.740 Of course, people of faith want to explain it away.

00:12:03.880 But I'm smart because I'm a skeptic.

00:12:06.140 And this is a story that the public has told themselves.

00:12:09.340 And so now that we know these revelations, oh, shoot.

00:12:14.560 It's 2,000 years old from Israel.

00:12:17.260 Does that mean it could be?

00:12:18.920 It totally could, couldn't it?

00:12:22.760 So let's go through this again.

00:12:25.300 The earlier carbon dating, as it turns out, was on a piece that was actually repaired.

00:12:31.060 And so it was a classical repair.

00:12:33.860 It was not done in modern times.

00:12:35.400 But it turns out that the part that was carbonated actually was from the repair.

00:12:39.480 It 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.

00:12:47.440 Obviously, these things, these relics, they do have repairs over time because life happens.

00:12:54.400 And we'll get into a little story about why it is potentially that it required repairs coming up in the program.

00:13:00.900 But I want to dig in some more on the actual cases.

00:13:04.840 Tell me.

00:13:05.200 So there were two studies.

00:13:06.400 Essentially, one was a material chemical study and the other was an x-ray study.

00:13:10.740 Walk me through those.

00:13:12.560 Yes.

00:13:12.960 So the x-ray, it's called a wide angle x-ray scattering, W-A-X-S.

00:13:19.560 And the goal is to analyze the flax fibers, how much aging do they show?

00:13:27.480 So there's a baseline for how flax fibers that the shroud is made of, how they age, right?

00:13:34.800 Is this fresh?

00:13:36.700 Is this a few decades old?

00:13:37.920 Is it a few hundred years old?

00:13:38.940 Or is it possibly thousands of years old?

00:13:41.200 And so the testing that's done here is far superior to the testing that was done with the carbon business.

00:13:49.420 Because the way carbon testing is done is, you know, carbon-14 is one of the more common types of testing.

00:13:54.960 And it's how long has the carbon in this material been decaying for?

00:13:59.660 That's the evidence that it shows.

00:14:01.960 So that's when the thing died and was cut down.

00:14:06.080 Now, this is how a lot of people will say, well, what about carbon dating of fossils?

00:14:10.300 Well, that's a little bit more difficult because if there's not organic matter in it, you can't exactly tell how old it is.

00:14:18.500 And so there have been a number of skeptics of the skeptics for the age of various things.

00:14:26.440 And we could go, that's a fun little rabbit hole to chase down.

00:14:29.200 We don't have to do that right now.

00:14:30.300 But 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.

00:14:45.260 And so you might say that carbon-14 stands are down bad right now.

00:14:50.460 Yeah, no, they really are.

00:14:54.060 And so when it comes to this chemical analysis, what were some of the chemicals that were used?

00:15:00.080 And 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.

00:15:10.760 And 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.

00:15:22.280 That'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,

00:15:41.960 which, 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.

00:16:03.620 And 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.

00:16:29.120 And 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.

00:16:55.780 It was a hermetic seal, and there was – because of no humidity, there was no damage done whatsoever to these documents.

00:17:03.420 This is why the Dead Sea Scrolls were so important.

00:17:06.180 And 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,

00:17:19.920 so 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.

00:17:32.740 And 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.

00:17:51.000 I'm not going to get into that right now.

00:17:52.120 But the idea being was this was a major battle.

00:17:56.060 We are able through Roman sources and Jewish sources and all sorts of contemporary sources to really pinpoint down when Masada took place.

00:18:05.260 And 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.

00:18:25.080 Getting some more into that next with Joshua Leising.

00:18:35.260 All right, Jack Posobiec, Human Events Daily, the Chronicles of the Christians, the Shroud of Christ.

00:18:58.300 This is our episode with Joshua Leising, providing an update on the possible authentication of the Shroud of Turin.

00:19:08.660 Major 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.

00:19:24.060 And 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.

00:19:33.180 So just a quick backstory for anyone who really doesn't know where it came from or how it ended up in Italy.

00:19:40.640 So wait, obviously people know that the biblical narrative, of course, in the Gospels, that this all took place in Jerusalem.

00:19:47.820 So what's the Shroud doing in Italy?

00:19:49.880 Well, 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,

00:20:14.400 that they took it upon themselves to preserve them and then actually bring the relics to Europe for safekeeping.

00:20:23.480 And so the earliest documented appearance of the Shroud is actually in France and in the possession of Geoffrey de Charnay,

00:20:31.180 who was a French knight who had been in his family had been associated with the Crusades.

00:20:39.560 And in fact, going going back even further, there are references through the Crusades during one of the battles of Constantinople.

00:20:51.080 And a French knight in 200 years prior to this, and this is really interesting, 200 years prior to this,

00:21:00.840 had written that when he was in Constantinople, he saw a cloth that was hanging up on full display within a major church in Constantinople.

00:21:12.300 This 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

00:21:23.260 to the Western Church, to the Roman Church, saying, come and save us from these barbarians. 1.00

00:21:29.800 They're flooding throughout our lands.

00:21:31.620 They're flooding throughout the Holy Land.

00:21:34.360 We need help.

00:21:35.480 And 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.

00:21:46.120 So it really was a major effort and kept them at bay up until about 1400s.

00:21:52.840 So 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.

00:22:04.400 And 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.

00:22:22.840 So 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.

00:22:44.840 That 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. 0.56

00:22:59.840 And 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.

00:23:16.220 And 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.

00:23:30.840 And 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.

00:23:42.380 And 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.

00:23:53.000 But 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.

00:24:10.220 So 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.

00:24:25.120 And 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?

00:24:37.980 Obviously, we know that alchemy was being tried at this time quite proficiently, and people were attempting to do this.

00:24:45.560 But as far as I know, it wasn't ever actually achieved.

00:24:48.120 So how would they have forged it?

00:24:51.340 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:24:52.740 We 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.

00:25:03.020 So this is what is worth understanding about forgeries.

00:25:06.260 The idea of a forgery is to trick people in your present moment, your present place, in your present time that something is real.

00:25:12.900 And it's often for money-making purposes.

00:25:17.920 There's often a financial motivation for it to sell the thing.

00:25:20.280 By 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.

00:25:29.880 They say, oh, this is the missing link between ape and man.

00:25:33.140 And it turned out to be just, yeah, Piltdown Man.

00:25:35.880 And it turned out to be like someone took a chimpanzee skull and someone's jaw and fused them together.

00:25:42.220 Or maybe the other way.

00:25:42.660 Yeah, 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.

00:25:49.580 But the point of that was to make money, have this exhibition, charge for admission.

00:25:55.480 And it's a sort of a quick scam that you don't want to get found out soon enough.

00:25:59.000 So 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.

00:26:08.320 It is sophisticated.

00:26:09.600 Now, what I find interesting about its story is the, and you can look up a number of studies on this,

00:26:18.840 the types of other, let's say DNA evidence associated with it show that it has been touched by a lot of people

00:26:26.740 and 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.

00:26:41.380 And so the story of its adventure is in the Shroud itself.

00:26:49.720 Well, so what we have done is we have debunked the debunking.

00:26:54.540 I remember when the Passion of the Christ was released, the Bell Gibson film in theaters in 2004,

00:26:59.480 every public radio and public television station was wanting to do some sort of a public interest show

00:27:05.560 around various Christian relics associated with the crucifixion and the resurrection.

00:27:09.820 And of course, there was this great debunking of the Holy Sepulchre.

00:27:12.920 Well, it turns out that beneath everything, there is a slab with a cross stamped into it, which dates to approximately 100.

00:27:22.340 And this is, of course, after people have said, well, obviously, this is not the spot.

00:27:26.040 This is built by Constantine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:27:28.420 You know the story.

00:27:29.760 So the secularists are down bad.

00:27:31.180 We have the story of the veil of Veronica, which is, of course, the relic that was associated with the woman Veronica

00:27:42.080 who wiped Jesus' face on his way to be crucified.

00:27:46.160 It seems as if the original one was destroyed in a fire in the 16th century.

00:27:51.600 But reports from that time, writings from that time, is that the depictions of Jesus' face, which go back many centuries,

00:28:00.420 match the appearance of the face on the veil of Veronica, which is interesting.

00:28:04.940 So we don't necessarily have all relics that remain.

00:28:07.780 But those that we do have access to, the debunking around them is being debunked.

00:28:13.780 The more science is advancing.

00:28:15.960 And so this idea that these are sophisticated forgeries or even simple forgeries meant to make a quick buck off of poor, 0.98

00:28:23.520 illiterate, devout religious believers who are silly and easily deceived because they want to be, 0.98

00:28:29.120 that's the story that new atheism has put out there. 0.98

00:28:32.300 Well, that is being eliminated.

00:28:35.620 It's no longer a reasonable belief system.

00:28:38.720 And I'm almost imagining the bell curve meme that we've all seen,

00:28:42.280 where you have the simpleton and then you have the enlightened one and then there's the enlightened midwit. 0.88

00:28:47.260 So the self-enlightened, self-important, egotistical midwit in the middle. 0.69

00:28:51.380 Well, it seems like the ends of the bell curve are the shroud is real.

00:28:57.060 And then we have the enlightened atheist in the middle who is running after all of the reasons it could be fake.

00:29:02.740 And in our previous episode, our lead-off episode here for Chronicles of the Christians,

00:29:09.340 Blake Neff and I depicted how Christians and Christian monks and patrons of Christianity

00:29:16.460 were spending the equivalent of billions of dollars to meticulously copy down the Bible word from word,

00:29:23.800 to build the great monasteries, the cathedrals.

00:29:27.240 And in fact, every indication was that this wasn't done out of some cynical power grab and people lost.

00:29:35.560 I mean, there was no money return.

00:29:37.820 There's no investment return on this.

00:29:39.640 And then in fact, people actually did believe it.

00:29:41.460 And they spent untold sums of money in order to invest in this.

00:29:45.920 And 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

00:29:58.160 by the very same people who found them.

00:30:02.240 They were just going to take the word of some knight who shows up and says, hey, guys, look what I got.

00:30:06.640 No, 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.

00:30:19.240 The same way that St. Helena, when she went to the Holy End the first time in 300, 325 A.D.,

00:30:25.200 that she was actually talking to people and conducting an investigation into where the site of the crucifixion was,

00:30:36.640 that so many of these things were actually not done out of some wanton, cynical belief,

00:30:43.180 but in fact, were done out of devout and fervent belief that they were true.

00:31:06.640 All right, Jack, so we're back here.

00:31:18.760 The Chronicles of the Christians, the Shroud of Christ. 0.82

00:31:21.320 Now, Joshua, let's get into the actual image that was found on the Shroud itself.

00:31:26.180 So we've talked about the Shroud, the materials, the gold, the chemical analysis, the x-ray analysis.

00:31:31.380 But obviously, the most striking thing that people see is the image itself and that face.

00:31:38.700 It went viral so widespread a couple of months ago when the story started.

00:31:43.960 Also, there was then, I believe, an AI recreation done of a potential using the entire Shroud

00:31:51.820 to put together the face that people could see from the Shroud.

00:31:58.280 And it just looks identical to the Byzantine art that was done of Christ at the time,

00:32:04.900 showing that there has to be some kind of link between these.

00:32:08.740 And I think, in my mind at least, it lends a lot of credence to the theory that

00:32:12.660 the Shroud of Turin was, in fact, the cloth that was shown on full display in Constantinople

00:32:18.160 prior to the sack of Constantinople.

00:32:20.640 And it goes back to those crusades and all the history there.

00:32:24.220 And the Western church's attempt to save the Eastern church, and did so for hundreds of years,

00:32:31.600 by the way.

00:32:32.560 But how could an image like this have been made?

00:32:37.180 Clearly, we don't see image.

00:32:39.620 You know, when I go and rub my face, I don't see images like this.

00:32:43.360 And even when I have an injury, I don't create images like this on any cloth.

00:32:47.880 And I've never seen any hospital show something like this.

00:32:51.160 So why would a cloth have an image like this on it?

00:32:56.140 Yes.

00:32:56.680 So the very first hypothesis I heard was from skeptics who claim that they could recreate

00:33:03.480 something like this, where if you laid out, let's say, a face, a body, whether living or

00:33:11.200 dead, and you wrapped this cloth around them tightly for long enough with the right oils,

00:33:16.740 you would have an imprint left over afterwards.

00:33:20.460 And so the hypothesis was that the whole backstory of going back to the crusades was completely

00:33:24.760 made up.

00:33:25.660 And it was performed, this forgery in the 15th century, for tourist attraction and making

00:33:31.160 money off of people.

00:33:32.000 That's the cynical hypothesis of the skeptics that I first heard when I was a kid.

00:33:38.020 And the idea was that a real corpse that had real blood on it, hence the bloodstains, was

00:33:46.280 used to try to recreate a crucifixion victim, because that's what it does seem to indicate

00:33:53.000 that it shows, the shroud.

00:33:55.140 And so these were skeptics who wanted to rip off believers and tell them that this was the

00:33:59.660 real thing.

00:34:00.120 And so they went through the rigmarole of taking a corpse and giving it wounds to look

00:34:05.420 like it was a crucifixion victim, and then laid it out after putting right oils on it,

00:34:10.260 leaving it out in the sun for a number of days to try to imprint that facial appearance

00:34:17.440 and the body.

00:34:18.220 And what we see is like the imprint of a person in the shroud.

00:34:21.900 That's the hypothesis that I first heard in order to debunk the faith position that this

00:34:29.260 is the real deal, in addition to the carbon dating.

00:34:31.920 Well, now that the carbon dating we know is not, it does not stand up compared to the X-ray

00:34:37.520 and the isotope-based analysis.

00:34:39.500 Well, what about this imprint idea?

00:34:42.680 Well, that then goes to show, okay, it was then forged by sophisticated people 2,000 years

00:34:50.800 ago?

00:34:51.920 Why?

00:34:53.180 There wasn't a motivation or a means to make money off of believers, pilgrims, because there 1.00

00:35:01.860 really wasn't pilgrimage yet 2,000 years ago, the way that we think about it.

00:35:06.700 At that time, the early church was plural.

00:35:09.600 It was churches in various places that the apostles themselves had planted.

00:35:16.420 There are Christian, let's say, art symbols like the exodus, the fish, right? 0.87

00:35:22.100 We have the cross.

00:35:23.900 We have the name of Christ that goes back to the very end of the first century, depictions

00:35:27.740 of that time.

00:35:28.760 But these are a new faith, a new religion, small groups of people, not a sophisticated

00:35:34.860 operation to make money off of them.

00:35:37.280 The New Testament had not yet been entirely compiled yet.

00:35:41.140 So the hypothesis of we're going to scan people, make a quick buck off of a forgery completely

00:35:46.080 breaks down when you realize that it's 2,000 years old.

00:35:49.180 Okay, then how did the face and the body and the shape of this crucifixion victim get there?

00:35:54.560 Then the hypothesis is that it was a flash of light that effectively burned this image into

00:36:02.460 the fabric.

00:36:03.560 The idea being that the moment a corpse became a living person again, at the moment of the

00:36:12.120 resurrection, there was an immense flash of light that burned the reversal of death itself

00:36:18.680 into the shroud, which is a powerful story.

00:36:21.840 And skeptics will, of course, start protesting and screaming and coping.

00:36:27.000 Well, then let's go into that.

00:36:29.060 Let's just go into that a little bit more.

00:36:30.360 So the idea being that people have conducted, scientists have conducted experiments with

00:36:36.880 linen and attempted to create images on the linen.

00:36:41.280 And there have been instances where they've been able to do so, but they've only been able to do so with

00:36:49.420 intense bursts of radiation using essentially something akin to ultraviolet light.

00:36:56.760 And this is extremely advanced technology, nothing that would have been available to anyone in the

00:37:03.900 Middle Ages through any, you know, through any secular process, shall we say.

00:37:09.560 And in doing so, the problem is that it creates an intense amount of heat at the same time.

00:37:17.200 So they're able to create the image, but the linen itself is usually burned and perhaps destroyed in the process.

00:37:26.120 And 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.

00:37:46.860 So it is created through the use of flash photography and an intense burst of light.

00:37:54.020 The 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.

00:38:10.120 So emanating from whatever was enclosed within this linen in all directions, so three-dimensional in all directions at the same time, but without heat.

00:38:22.440 So intense light without heat, and scientifically we know that that is really the only answer to what could have created this linen.

00:38:32.200 The 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.

00:38:49.440 And as we say, the linen itself has been dated back, and in fact, the stains have been dated back to 2,000 years.

00:38:57.940 The question is, would it have had to have been some process that is other than natural?

00:39:04.560 Yes, so this is what I find interesting.

00:39:08.280 The 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?

00:39:18.920 From all over both Western and Eastern, the earliest depictions of Jesus all look the same.

00:39:24.340 Why is that? Were they copying one another? What was the original image?

00:39:27.180 Well, we may very well have it now.

00:39:30.560 Around the same time of the viral memeing of the AI-based Jesus, the Shroud turned into an AI image.

00:39:41.680 Around 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.

00:39:52.720 At 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.

00:40:05.420 So search, moment of conception, light.

00:40:09.840 And there's an incredible burst of light.

00:40:13.180 And I'm not the only person who put those two together.

00:40:16.020 These are both going viral everywhere.

00:40:17.920 However, at the same time, is there, now I could just be simply comparing the two, no relation whatsoever.

00:40:28.720 But is it possible that a scientific analysis of a resurrection of a corpse from being a dead body to being a living one again,

00:40:39.140 emits an immense flash of light because this is a biological process of where to believe the story of Jesus?

00:40:45.840 Well, that's interesting, isn't it?

00:40:48.760 The skeptic's arguments don't hold up because the technology required to do this, as you've described, did not exist in the 15th century.

00:41:00.300 It did not exist in the 12th or 13th century.

00:41:02.220 It certainly didn't exist 2,000 years ago.

00:41:04.280 And the means and the motive for creating a forgery had not existed yet.

00:41:12.240 We're going back to the ancient times.

00:41:14.600 Then people will say, well, they took a 2,000-year-old piece of fabric in the 15th century.

00:41:19.740 But that's not how forgeries were done.

00:41:21.720 They grabbed a pig's tooth from a field in the early 1900s and said, look, it's the real deal.

00:41:28.260 It's the missing link.

00:41:29.060 It's millions of years old.

00:41:30.060 They 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.

00:41:40.040 And so the bigger question for us is, could this forgery actually not be a forgery at all?

00:41:46.340 All right, Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lyszek.

00:42:09.240 We are back, final segment of the Shroud of Christ, this installment of the Chronicles of the Christians. 0.92

00:42:17.900 We told you the story connecting the Crusades to the history of the Shroud.

00:42:25.000 We've shown you how through chemical, x-ray, and even materials analysis that the Shroud does, in fact, stand up to scrutiny.

00:42:36.320 And 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?

00:42:47.140 Why didn't Jesus leave some proof of his resurrection?

00:42:49.980 Why not leave some, you know, source, source, you know, like the classic Reddit response?

00:42:54.740 Why didn't you leave a source?

00:42:55.740 And 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.

00:43:03.860 We 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.

00:43:13.980 And then people found the Dead Sea Scrolls, which lined up exactly.

00:43:19.420 And we talked about the meticulous copying of the Bible word for word down through the centuries.

00:43:25.620 Well, suddenly you've got a copy from almost day one, you know, a sort of unedited version.

00:43:33.940 And they went back and they found it was a one-to-one.

00:43:37.060 It 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.

00:43:52.760 And it was not edited for political purposes or things like that.

00:43:56.920 And certainly other editions have been, but we could talk about that some other time.

00:44:01.660 And the point being is that so many items from the Old Testament, the location of Sodom and Gomorrah, has actually been uncovered.

00:44:13.580 So 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.

00:44:29.080 And perhaps the evidence was given to people with this copy of the Shroud of Turin.

00:44:36.640 What are the implications of this?

00:44:39.180 The 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.

00:44:52.460 And 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.

00:45:10.680 However, 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? 0.67

00:45:18.900 It's that modern day money-focused projection from the Western skeptic.

00:45:25.060 But 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.

00:45:42.960 There 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.

00:45:51.800 But 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.

00:46:03.840 There must be multiple religious and secular physicians associated with your previous diagnosis, and there must be a diagnosis, there must be a paper trail.

00:46:13.520 So the process of confirming a miracle has occurred is to remove all skepticism, to remove all alternate explanations of it having occurred.

00:46:24.060 That is the same, let's say, worldview or process that has been applied to the protection of the Bible, of these relics.

00:46:34.580 And it is a great undertaking.

00:46:36.560 It 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.

00:46:45.340 And skeptics will say, well, there's an occasional typo.

00:46:48.220 Yeah, okay, well, what does that show?

00:46:49.740 All good books have typos in them, right?

00:46:51.620 And 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.

00:47:11.300 And sometimes it's, well, I had a bad experience with this church when I was a kid.

00:47:15.400 I 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. 1.00

00:47:24.120 Well, 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.

00:47:34.940 And 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.

00:47:43.360 And 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.

00:48:06.360 And 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.

00:48:34.040 And 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.

00:48:55.140 And 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.

00:49:05.520 Where can people follow you?

00:49:07.600 I'm on X, YouTube, everywhere, at Joshua Lysak.

00:49:12.580 At Joshua Lysak.

00:49:13.880 Ladies and gentlemen, Shroud of Turin, Shroud of Christ.

00:49:18.380 This has been Chronicles of the Christian. 0.87

00:49:20.940 Stay tuned because we have so much more.

00:49:23.360 Ladies and gentlemen, as always, you have my permission to lay ashore.

Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - December 30, 2024

The Chronicles of the Christians - Part III： The Shroud of Turin

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