The Tucker Carlson Show - Jeremiah Johnston： Shroud of Turin, Dead Sea Scrolls, & Attempts to Hide Historical Proof of Jesus

00:00:00.240 What's the Shroud of Turin?

00:00:02.540 The Shroud of Turin is believed to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.

00:00:07.440 It's a very unique artifact because we get in this singular artifact the death, burial, and resurrection of the historical Jesus, and no other artifact does that.

00:00:17.840 What is a burial cloth?

00:00:19.800 Right. A shroud, which is mentioned in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, is simply burial clothes.

00:00:26.400 It's a linen garment that a corpse is wrapped in, and in a Jewish tradition, similar to a pita, how a pita, if you get a pita and enjoy it.

00:00:35.040 Like pita bread?

00:00:35.540 Yeah, literally. It just wraps from over your feet, over the head, and then back around the front of the feet as well.

00:00:42.060 And that is laid, that's when the body is laid to rest within the burial shroud. That's a shroud.

00:00:56.400 So, you believe that this piece of cloth, which is represented right there, is that the actual size?

00:01:15.680 One-to-one, 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches, or 8.8 by 2 Assyrian cubits, which was the standard unit of measurement in the Roman Empire.

00:01:29.660 Okay, so that, so the first fact we can ascertain is that this would have been, these would have been the dimensions of a burial shroud in that period.

00:01:40.280 In the first century, in antiquity.

00:01:43.100 Is it a continuously woven piece of cloth? That's one piece of cloth?

00:01:46.720 It is. It is. Pure linen.

00:01:48.640 Pure linen. What is linen?

00:01:49.760 It's a herringbone weave. It's made from the flax plant, and this has a unique herringbone weave.

00:01:54.760 The only reason I know what herringbone is, is my wife has a herringbone backsplash in our home that was very costly.

00:02:00.340 Exactly. So, it has this amazing three-to-one herringbone weave, which is indicative that a wealthy man would have purchased this actual burial garment in his own pre-death planning.

00:02:11.420 And that's exactly what we see is consistent in the resurrection traditions embedded in the Gospels.

00:02:16.260 Joseph of Arimathea gives Jesus not only his own family tomb, a new tomb, hewn in stone, but he actually gives him his own burial cloth as well.

00:02:25.700 Okay, and it says that in the Gospels.

00:02:27.380 Correct.

00:02:27.860 Okay.

00:02:28.160 All four.

00:02:29.380 So, you're saying that this cloth represented right here, one-to-one, covered Jesus' body?

00:02:37.720 The historical Jesus, and it's not a death cloth. I actually believe it's a resurrection cloth.

00:02:41.980 Resurrection cloth.

00:02:42.960 What's fascinating is this cloth is unique. We have hundreds of burial shrouds from the land of Israel. We have hundreds of them from Qumran. We have them from all over antiquity, really.

00:02:53.080 But what's unique about this burial cloth, Tucker, is that it has embedded in it the image of a crucified man that has complete correspondence with what we know of crucifixion in the Roman Empire, specifically as it relates to Jesus of Nazareth.

00:03:07.220 How do we have hundreds of burial cloths from that period?

00:03:11.400 Well, it turns out that the Jewish burial traditions were an extremely serious matter, that even Josephus says that the Romans were sensitive to Jewish burial traditions.

00:03:20.680 And so, we have…

00:03:22.060 Josephus is a Jewish historian.

00:03:23.600 Jewish historian of the first century, exactly. And so, when these tombs have been excavated, not only are ossuaries found, which are bone boxes that have generations of family bones within them, there's also burial shrouds that have been found, both in Jerusalem and in Masada and other places around the land of Israel.

00:03:40.680 The climate being dry enough to preserve them.

00:03:42.160 Absolutely. Absolutely.

00:03:43.700 For thousands of years.

00:03:44.520 Thousands of years.

00:03:45.160 In fact, we have people say, well, the Shroud of Turin, it couldn't be Jesus's. You're saying it's 2,000 years old. We actually have linen garments that are much older. They antedate the shroud by 3,000 years. We have the Tarkan dress from Egypt. You can Google it. And it's a beautiful linen blouse, and it's 5,000 years old. So, given the right circumstances, linen will last forever.

00:04:06.080 Amazing.

00:04:06.520 So, it's not a shocker that we have burial cloths from antiquity. It's not a shocker that we have pure linen burial cloths. The shocker is the image that's embedded in the cloth.

00:04:18.420 Okay. I have many questions. And I'll ask…

00:04:22.020 I'm excited about this.

00:04:22.640 My first question last, which is, wait, I thought the Shroud of Turin had been thoroughly discredited by modern science.

00:04:30.460 Right.

00:04:30.680 And we'll get to that, but let me just…

00:04:32.660 Yeah, stay tuned.

00:04:33.300 …provide a partial spoiler by saying what is factually true, which is, no, it has not been.

00:04:39.340 Correct.

00:04:39.540 And actually, that science has been updated, as it so often is, and we know that it has not been discredited. But anyway, okay, what image is on this cloth?

00:04:49.520 This is an image of a bearded man, a strong man, a muscular man, height of 5'10 to 5'11", which is interesting because the average Jewish height in the first century was 5'7 to 5'9", so this man would have been taller.

00:05:03.880 He weighs around 170 to 180 pounds. And since this is a contiguous cloth, it's not strips. We're not talking about mummification, right?

00:05:13.660 The Jews didn't embalm. They had to bury the dead on the day of their death. And that's what we see consistent with all the first century or late second temple.

00:05:22.360 They did not embalm.

00:05:23.340 They did not embalm, and so they didn't practice mummification. This is why when you read the Gospels and women are coming to the tomb of Jesus on what became that first Easter morning, which we know is April 5th, A.D. 30, or April 9th, A.D. 33, depending on which year you go with, women are coming to complete the spicing of the body. Why? Because the body would stink. The body's in rigor mortis.

00:05:46.160 Jews would mourn the dead for seven days inside the family tomb. They would mourn. They would spice the body. And so the women are coming there on that first Easter morning, not realizing they're going to be the first evangelists of the Christian faith because the tomb is empty and they see Jesus alive again.

00:06:02.840 What does it mean to spice a body?

00:06:04.440 They would perfume it with myrrh, with aloes, because of Jewish burial traditions. Remember when Lazarus dies, he's been dead for four days.

00:06:15.600 And Mary and Martha are like, Jesus, don't open the tomb. The body stinketh, according to the King James Version. Well, that's why they would spice the body, because for seven days, you mourn the dead at the family tomb.

00:06:28.260 So you have to sit next to the corpse, and the corpse is rotting.

00:06:32.080 Yeah, I've been in hundreds of Jewish burial tombs. They're all like the shape of our hand. And so you would walk in the tomb. It's always cut out of limestone. And the tomb has different niches.

00:06:43.740 So the fingers represent the niches, but you would pray, you would worship, you would mourn the dead inside, essentially a gathering point within the tomb of Jewish burial traditions.

00:06:53.360 And there'll be slots cut into the niches.

00:06:54.980 Right, these niches. Right. And in those niches are these bone boxes called ossuaries, because one year after your family member, your loved one died, you would collect the bones.

00:07:05.680 And those bones would then be placed in a bone box. This is a thing called osselegium. And that's why when you go to the land of Israel today, and you see 150,000 bone boxes on the Mount of Olives, that's all Jewish burial traditions.

00:07:17.300 And so this is very insightful, because we see a correspondence with everything we learn about the Shroud, and it bears correspondence with the first century world of Jesus.

00:07:29.720 Okay, but of the hundreds of thousands of Shrouds like this that exist, why do we think this one has an image of Jesus on it?

00:07:38.540 Because all of it matches the way in which Jesus was crucified. And that's what's powerful about the Shroud.

00:07:46.920 Okay. For example?

00:07:48.740 For example, on the Shroud, we have blood all over it. And the blood is interesting. It's been tested. It's type AB blood, which is Semitic blood. The fewest amount of people in the world, only 6% of the world's population has type AB blood.

00:08:02.420 And so this is human blood. It's male blood. It's not blood of an animal. It's not a hoax. You would have to actually kill someone if you were trying to reproduce the Shroud, because we have premortem and postmortem blood all over the Shroud.

00:08:16.260 So that's interesting. So this tells us that someone died a torturous death, a death where he was flogged. We see scourges. There are hashes all over the front and back images.

00:08:26.920 What we have is the front on the left, lined up perfectly here in the middle of the camera. We see the face of the crucified man. And what sticks out, you can actually see between rib 5 and 6, a gash in the side.

00:08:39.920 Well, Jesus, we know from John's Gospel, he is penetrated through rib 5 and 6 by a spear. And that spear, John says, blood and water comes out. Well, that's postmortem blood.

00:08:51.520 We know that that blood, it differs from the other premortem blood on the Shroud. So, so many of these factoids are indicative that this was a man who had suffered crucifixion under the Romans. They were experts at it.

00:09:03.800 And we see that all of this bears correspondence with what we read in the Gospels about how Jesus died.

00:09:08.480 How do we know that the man pictured on the Shroud was crucified?

00:09:12.400 That's a great question because there are crucifixion nail wounds. You can actually see in the forearms of the crucified man. We see, by the way, wrist, hands, the entire hand, it's all the same Greek word. And so Jesus, we know that the nail penetrates through the wrist and the palm. And that's how the Romans would crucify their victims.

00:09:32.600 In fact, we have 21 different evidences of crucifixion with nail penetrations just in the land of Israel in the first century. So this was a common way that the Romans had perfected in killing people.

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00:12:53.820 So, we know that crucifixion was a historical practice.

00:12:58.920 Absolutely.

00:12:59.300 And it's the best established fact of the ancient world, Jesus' death by Roman crucifixion.

00:13:04.020 What does that mean?

00:13:05.560 Meaning that if we can't know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion based on the historical record,

00:13:11.080 we shouldn't believe anything from history at all.

00:13:13.040 We have as much evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus that we have from Roman empires of the same,

00:13:18.740 the Roman emperors of the same period, which is remarkable.

00:13:21.980 Where does that, it is remarkable.

00:13:23.760 Where does that evidence come from?

00:13:25.440 It comes out of all of the sources, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian.

00:13:30.520 We have 11 different sources within, and I always use what the most critical scholars use,

00:13:34.880 within 100 years of the time of Jesus, which his ministry begins in 26 to 27 AD.

00:13:41.140 He's crucified, as we said, on that first Easter weekend, April 5, he's resurrected.

00:13:45.980 He's crucified April 3rd, AD 30.

00:13:48.260 We know the exact date, which is fascinating to know that.

00:13:51.120 And then we have 11 sources.

00:13:53.760 AD 30, right.

00:13:55.340 And so we have 11 sources that talk about this Jesus, this Crestus.

00:14:00.780 He's spelled in variant ways, but they're all talking about the same person,

00:14:04.060 this Jesus Christ who's crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate at the hands of the Jews.

00:14:09.800 And that's written in Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus.

00:14:14.080 There's some remarkable work coming out with Josephus recently that Josephus, who we've

00:14:18.860 already mentioned, the first century Roman historian, he would have had a firsthand knowledge.

00:14:23.860 He would have had friends who were at the trial of Jesus.

00:14:26.940 And he writes about that.

00:14:28.120 He was not a Christian.

00:14:29.880 No.

00:14:30.960 So of those 11, obviously you've got the authors of the four Gospels who testified to this.

00:14:34.760 You have Saul, Paul, you have Paul.

00:14:36.400 Yep.

00:14:36.940 Those are all followers of Jesus.

00:14:38.300 Right.

00:14:38.560 But you have non-Christians.

00:14:40.020 Absolutely.

00:14:40.500 You have hostile witnesses who give voice to the historicity of the death, burial, and resurrection

00:14:45.120 of Jesus.

00:14:46.280 Interesting.

00:14:47.640 Interesting.

00:14:48.840 So what does the face tell us?

00:14:51.720 The face is remarkable.

00:14:53.580 When you look at this, this is truly remarkable.

00:14:56.000 So let me back up for a minute.

00:14:57.280 In 1898, the first photograph is taken of the shroud.

00:15:01.140 Okay.

00:15:01.300 Remember, photography has only been invented in the 1840s.

00:15:04.440 And so in 1898, when the shroud has been on display, the shroud has only been on public

00:15:09.060 display a few times in its entire history.

00:15:11.580 And right now, you have to see it through a private viewing.

00:15:14.780 Very few people.

00:15:15.220 This is the closest.

00:15:15.940 This is what's so cool about our broadcast today.

00:15:17.680 I mean, this is the closest the audience will ever get to the Shroud of Turin, what

00:15:20.880 we're bringing today on your network.

00:15:22.860 What's amazing when you look at the face is we see an actual image in Seconda Pia when

00:15:30.080 he takes the photograph in 1898 of the shroud.

00:15:33.340 There was no electricity in the church, Tucker.

00:15:35.280 So he had to bring in generators.

00:15:36.760 He had to take flash photography.

00:15:38.300 The exposures took 14 minutes and 20 minutes.

00:15:40.560 When I was in Turin, Italy recently, I saw the actual camera he used.

00:15:43.860 It looks like a dorm refrigerator.

00:15:45.440 He used glass plates to take the picture.

00:15:48.540 And in the dark room.

00:15:49.640 Now, Seconda Pia is a lawyer, and he's just a hobbyist photographer, because who was a

00:15:53.820 professional photographer at the end of the 19th century?

00:15:56.420 And he's in the dark room.

00:15:58.160 And I want to show you what he sees using my cell phone.

00:16:01.040 And when I speak on our tour events, I have our entire audiences do this.

00:16:05.000 If you take your phone, and if you put it in classic invert, and you just bring up the

00:16:09.080 camera, and if you focus in, I want you to do something.

00:16:12.240 I'm going to hand you my phone.

00:16:13.260 I want you to focus in on the image, and you're going to see exactly what Seconda Pia saw this

00:16:21.360 image.

00:16:22.320 And he's a follower of Jesus, and he believes he's looking at the face of Jesus Christ.

00:16:27.900 Keep in mind, he would be the first one to see the face of Jesus since the apostles.

00:16:31.500 And what does he say in the dark room in 1898, never more appropriately?

00:16:36.300 Oh, my God.

00:16:39.540 And so, in 1898, he sees this.

00:16:42.060 That is really, it's so much clearer.

00:16:45.960 Right.

00:16:46.300 And this is photographic negative.

00:16:47.980 Right.

00:16:48.540 The negative is actually the positive.

00:16:50.220 And so, if you trace and go to the back, I want you to look at the back of the image,

00:16:54.620 the head, the blood, the back, all of those hash marks, the abrasions.

00:17:00.680 I estimate there are 700 wounds on the crucified man of the shroud.

00:17:06.160 No one was crucified the way Jesus was crucified in antiquity, the crown of thorns.

00:17:11.380 So, you ask about the face.

00:17:12.880 Seconda Pia believes that he's looking at the face of God in that image.

00:17:17.300 Of course, he was immediately accused of being a fraudster, a hoaxster, because photography

00:17:21.700 is so new.

00:17:22.460 The dark room, this can't be an image, right?

00:17:24.400 He had to have faked this.

00:17:25.860 I don't understand, just as a kind of physics question, like, how would a photographic negative

00:17:34.280 be clearer?

00:17:35.340 Right.

00:17:35.700 Isn't that fascinating?

00:17:36.600 I mean, that's the thing about the shroud.

00:17:38.120 The physics contradict the chemistry.

00:17:40.480 The chemistry contradict the physics.

00:17:42.120 Welcome to Shroud of Turan.

00:17:43.420 You're being red-pilled on the shroud right now.

00:17:46.140 I'm being baffled right now.

00:17:47.880 Um, so the image, what's remarkable about this image is that you have to stand at least

00:17:54.180 eight feet away to see it with the naked eye, as we are right now.

00:17:57.520 The image vanishes if you get closer.

00:17:59.540 It's hard to trace because the image is superficial, Tucker.

00:18:03.180 I mentioned the blood earlier, and there are pints of type AB blood, pre-mortem, post-mortem.

00:18:08.380 Pints of blood all over it.

00:18:10.300 I mean, this was a very, very badly wounded man.

00:18:14.500 So again, indicative of what we know of crucifixion.

00:18:17.100 Pints of blood, type AB blood.

00:18:19.700 And then in addition to that, when you look at the shroud and you see this and you see

00:18:24.120 all of the image itself that's left, the blood absorbs all the way through the linen, but

00:18:29.660 the image is superficial.

00:18:31.240 And this is where you have to say with me, the image is only two microns thick.

00:18:36.060 It is, it does not absorb all the way through.

00:18:38.740 So if this was a hoax, if this was a work of art, if there was pigment, if there was dye,

00:18:43.320 if there was paint, it would absorb fully.

00:18:45.920 But if we took a razor to the actual shroud, we could shave off the image because it's

00:18:49.900 that thin.

00:18:51.280 And this is what the best scientists in the world cannot replicate.

00:18:56.860 That's what's fascinating about the shroud.

00:18:59.000 The image, there's no paint, there's no dye, there's no ink.

00:19:03.760 The image is actually something chemically has happened.

00:19:07.100 And we believe it happened at the moment of resurrection, 34,000 billion watts of energy

00:19:13.900 in one 40th of a billionth of a second.

00:19:17.580 A physicist, my friend, Paulo Delazzo at Aenea Laboratories right outside of Rome, spent

00:19:21.780 five years.

00:19:22.560 He's a laser expert.

00:19:23.740 He's a physicist who works with lasers.

00:19:25.380 And they were able to duplicate the chemical change of what happens with the linen fibers,

00:19:32.200 34,000 billion watts of energy at pick power.

00:19:36.240 But the thing is, it was a cold energy.

00:19:38.560 It happened in one 40th of a billionth of a second.

00:19:41.840 And that is what changed the chemical structure to leave this image on the shroud.

00:19:47.220 So that answers your question.

00:19:48.340 How is there a photograph?

00:19:49.700 Well, scientists doesn't know the mechanism.

00:19:51.840 We have no way to quantify how this happens.

00:19:54.240 The best scientific laboratories, when you look at it, Sandia Labs, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

00:20:00.340 Los Alamos National Lab, Aenea Laboratories in Rome, the world's best scientist cannot reproduce

00:20:08.540 this image that's in the shroud.

00:20:11.280 Does any other of the many burial shrouds from the region and the period, do any of them

00:20:16.120 contain images?

00:20:17.120 None.

00:20:17.880 We have blood on them.

00:20:18.860 We have Hansen's disease, the tomb of the shroud.

00:20:21.220 We actually had a-

00:20:22.040 Leprosy.

00:20:22.380 Yeah, exactly.

00:20:23.420 That was discovered.

00:20:24.480 The Bible deniers said there was no such thing as leprosy.

00:20:27.580 So Jesus couldn't have healed lepers.

00:20:29.080 Well, we have a shroud that actually has leprosy on it.

00:20:31.940 None of the shrouds that we have have this image, which you've just seen, which is, it's

00:20:36.320 mysterious because the shroud is the most light about artifact in the world, Tucker.

00:20:40.540 And that's why I so appreciate you having me on your program today.

00:20:43.320 It is the most hated artifact in the world.

00:20:45.340 It's the most light about artifact.

00:20:47.080 It's the most misunderstood artifact in the world.

00:20:49.860 I have an allergic reaction to Catholic relics.

00:20:53.300 There are over 20,000 relics in the Catholic Church.

00:20:56.080 And then a relic is interesting because it has this apocryphal history to it, and yet

00:21:01.220 it can't be studied by the physical sciences.

00:21:04.180 The Catholic Church has only two artifacts now that we can call both an artifact and a

00:21:09.760 relic.

00:21:10.080 We have the Shroud of Turin because it can be tested through history, through sciences.

00:21:14.640 We're going to get to the pollen spores.

00:21:16.520 I mean, this is like a CSI experiment.

00:21:19.800 When you look at the shroud, it's amazing.

00:21:21.580 And then we have the Sudarium of Oviedo in Spain, which is the face cloth that John's gospel

00:21:27.260 talks about that covered his face that was in the corner of the tomb when the disciples

00:21:32.460 came to see that the tomb was empty that first Easter morning in John chapter 20.

00:21:36.240 So, and that cloth also has human blood.

00:21:39.020 Guess what the blood type is?

00:21:40.360 Type A.B.

00:21:41.880 You can't make this stuff up.

00:21:43.400 It's mind-boggling.

00:21:46.940 So, that wasn't, that image was not really clear to people until 1898.

00:21:54.320 1898, the first photograph.

00:21:55.820 And then in 1931, Henri, the first professional photographer, takes these high-resolution images

00:22:02.060 for his day.

00:22:03.520 And that sent shockwaves throughout the scientific community.

00:22:07.160 So much so that you have thinkers like C.S. Lewis.

00:22:10.240 I would, I used to live in Oxford when I did my residency, and I would often go to the kilns

00:22:15.120 to Lewis's home.

00:22:16.460 And you can go in the bedroom of Lewis's home where the man lived, the great thinker of the

00:22:20.620 20th century who was an atheist, who became a Christian.

00:22:23.180 And I look up, and above the mantle in his bedroom, I can see it right now in my mind's

00:22:28.480 eye.

00:22:29.080 He has Henri's image of the face of the crucified man.

00:22:33.100 Because every morning that C.S. Lewis woke up, he wanted to be reminded our God has a face.

00:22:39.180 Jesus narrates God to us.

00:22:41.220 If you want to know what God's like, look at the face of Jesus.

00:22:43.960 And Lewis needed that reminder.

00:22:45.400 And so, if C.S. Lewis takes the Shroud of Turin seriously enough to have a picture of it

00:22:50.020 above his mantle in his bedroom, where he, the first thing he saw every morning when

00:22:54.040 he put his feet on the ground, I wanted to take it more seriously.

00:22:59.340 And he was, of course, Anglican and not Catholic.

00:23:04.580 What kind of testing has been done, scientific testing?

00:23:07.200 This is, that is such a great question.

00:23:09.320 This is where I went from being a Shroud skeptic because I was conditioned in Oxford in my residency

00:23:14.800 that we, you know, we deny miracles, we deny anything supernatural.

00:23:20.340 Oxford is really a factory for creating apostate Bible scholars, by and large.

00:23:24.680 I can say that having been there and been in faculty of theology in Keeble College, I know

00:23:28.060 that's not popular, but it's true.

00:23:30.000 I would often go home to my flat in Summertown after reading the Greek New Testament with my

00:23:34.720 cohort.

00:23:35.420 And I would ask my wife, Audrey, am I the only one who actually believes in Jesus in this

00:23:39.340 group?

00:23:39.700 And that's okay.

00:23:40.540 And I was conditioned that this, this is a Catholic relic.

00:23:45.740 There's no historicity behind this.

00:23:48.340 It's a joke.

00:23:49.780 And I was conditioned by that.

00:23:51.500 And then I was scary.

00:23:52.760 We're, and this is why your voice is so important, Tucker.

00:23:55.020 So many people, they're, they know enough to be dangerous.

00:23:58.240 They're TikTok smart or they're YouTube smart.

00:24:00.280 They have a soundbite, but they have no substance to their faith.

00:24:02.680 And I want to have a substance to my faith.

00:24:04.200 I'm a truth addict.

00:24:05.060 I follow truth wherever it leads.

00:24:06.520 And my pastor, Jack Graham, began encouraging me to just look into the primary sources for

00:24:13.280 the shroud, not to pay attention to the, to the blogosphere, but to pay attention to what,

00:24:17.020 what did the scientists actually tell us?

00:24:19.100 And once I began to look at the scientific studies that undergird all of the facts I'm

00:24:24.720 sharing with you, I remember being, it took my breath away.

00:24:27.960 The evidence was so compelling.

00:24:29.420 So to answer your excellent question, given that framework, 102 scientific disciplines

00:24:34.260 have studied the shroud and produced peer reviewed journals, studies, and cases for

00:24:39.820 all the different aspects.

00:24:41.620 And when I, so when I tell you it's the most studied artifact in the world, I mean it.

00:24:45.800 102 academic disciplines have spent 600,000 scientific hours, like my friend, Paul Delazzo,

00:24:52.200 studying, studying the lasers, like my friend, Bruno Barbaris, the mathematician from University

00:24:58.960 of Turin, not a theologian, not a preacher, great guy, good friend of mine.

00:25:02.660 Bruno is a mathematician and he took all of the excellent questions you're asking me, the

00:25:07.200 correspondence of how do we know he was crucified?

00:25:09.840 How was he crucified?

00:25:11.000 What blood type, crown of thorns, nail print hands, nail scarred side, nail prints in the

00:25:16.860 calcaneus, the heel, which is interesting.

00:25:19.160 We'll talk about that, the scourge marks from, and then the patibulum abrasions, the cross

00:25:24.040 beam, when he factored all of those probabilities together, Bruno Barbaris, the mathematician

00:25:28.960 said, there is a one in 200 billion chance it's anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth.

00:25:34.520 One in 200 billion.

00:25:35.640 I like my odds.

00:25:37.260 Because the physical, the representations in this image track so precisely to the account.

00:25:44.940 Exactly.

00:25:45.200 Not only with scripture, but with what we know of crucifixion from Josephus, from Philo,

00:25:50.740 from all of the other first century historians as well.

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00:27:10.180 We did an interview with Casey Means.

00:27:13.040 She's a Stanford-educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.

00:27:18.600 What Casey Means is the co-founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels.

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00:28:10.660 What do you mean there are holes in his heels?

00:28:13.940 Yeah, this is amazing.

00:28:15.080 Can you describe crucifixion?

00:28:16.920 What was it?

00:28:17.900 What was the purpose?

00:28:19.700 How did they die?

00:28:21.420 Crucifixion was the most heinous way to die.

00:28:24.160 It turns out humans are really good at figuring out terrible, tragic ways how to destroy ourselves,

00:28:29.560 and crucifixion brings that to a fever pitch.

00:28:32.680 The Persians likely invented it.

00:28:34.760 Alexander the Great, who gives us the language of the Bible, Koine Greek, he also made crucifixion

00:28:40.640 fashionable throughout his Hellenization of the world.

00:28:43.460 The Romans come along and they take crucifixion that they learned from Greek Hellenization

00:28:48.580 and they perfect it for 700 years.

00:28:52.000 Remember, Josephus tells us that during the Jewish revolt, AD 66 to 70, Titus and Vespasian

00:28:58.140 are crucifying 500 Jews a day.

00:29:01.340 And so they were experts.

00:29:03.000 Now, it wasn't like they had a crucifixion manual.

00:29:06.300 There were 30 provinces in the empire during the time of Jesus.

00:29:10.180 Remember, we have Pontius Pilate, who's governor.

00:29:14.720 We have first Augustus, who's emperor.

00:29:17.020 And then we have the other emperors who followed during the time of Jesus.

00:29:21.320 There's 30 provinces.

00:29:23.360 And the provinces would practice crucifixion in different ways.

00:29:27.260 But it was in the Syrian province where Judea was, where it was particularly heinous.

00:29:34.060 I already mentioned we have 21 different records of crucifixion with nail piercing.

00:29:40.020 Nails were iron.

00:29:42.000 I actually have a nail artifact that I'm going to show you.

00:29:44.880 In fact, this is a great time to do that.

00:29:48.340 I want you to hold the replica of the crucifixion nail.

00:29:53.060 This is a crucifixion nail.

00:29:54.780 It was circular on top and then it was actually a spike.

00:29:58.740 It was an iron spike and the Romans would drive this crucifixion nail through the wrists,

00:30:05.060 through the palm area, and then through the heel, the calcaneus.

00:30:09.580 Our heels are very brittle.

00:30:11.640 And so, they had to be very accurate when they would pin someone to the cross.

00:30:15.480 And they would likely straddle the heels on either side of what was called,

00:30:19.960 there you have the patibulum and then you have the cross beam.

00:30:23.620 Then you have the center vertical beam and the heels would be fastened, straddling the beam.

00:30:31.040 And the victim would be crucified completely naked.

00:30:34.320 There was no loincloth.

00:30:35.640 I know we see that represented in traditional Christian art,

00:30:39.380 but Jesus would have been crucified naked because the Romans were saying something with this.

00:30:44.760 The Romans were saying, don't ever defy us.

00:30:47.000 You know, we are the truth.

00:30:48.220 And remember, Augustus was called the son of God.

00:30:50.860 And so, when Mark comes along and says, no, Jesus is the son of God.

00:30:56.240 I mean, those were seditious words for the time because Augustus was called the son of God.

00:31:00.200 When Augustus gave good news, it was called the gospel.

00:31:03.760 Christianity takes that term euangelion.

00:31:06.040 No, it's not the gospel of Augustus.

00:31:08.280 It's not the gospel of the Roman Empire.

00:31:10.960 It's not Pax Romana.

00:31:12.240 No, this is the gospel of the true son of God, Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead.

00:31:16.700 And so, he's crucified, and the Roman—

00:31:21.160 And so, crucifixion was, I mean, at least one gospel account describes the other men on other side as criminals or rebels.

00:31:30.680 Right, malefactors.

00:31:32.040 Who got crucified?

00:31:33.580 Well, this is interesting.

00:31:34.480 It turns out we really hate to crucify slaves, and we want to do it in the worst way possible.

00:31:39.840 That was the Roman view.

00:31:41.600 And so, non-Roman citizens.

00:31:43.340 However, we do have citizens like Antigonus, the last of the Hasmonean rulers, who's a Roman citizen, but he defies Rome.

00:31:50.760 This guy named Mark Anthony, who becomes Augustus, crucifies Antigonus in a really despicable way.

00:31:57.200 He actually beheads him first and then crucifies him.

00:31:59.760 We have all of his remains.

00:32:00.760 And so, it's interesting because these crucifixion nails were thought to be something like amulets, phylacteries.

00:32:07.800 They were thought to bring you good luck.

00:32:09.880 And what's interesting is crucifixion nails were reused again and again.

00:32:14.040 So, the very nails that pinned Jesus to the cross had probably been used many times before that to kill other Roman victims.

00:32:22.020 Because, you know, iron work is expensive.

00:32:25.360 And again, the Romans, you know, they were a slave machine.

00:32:27.940 They knew how to kill people.

00:32:28.820 They knew how to enslave.

00:32:29.640 You know, 40% of the empire were slaves.

00:32:31.580 And so, they had to know how to crucify them.

00:32:33.700 And so, you have this slave crucifying machine that is the Roman Empire.

00:32:38.080 And then if you were a citizen, but you defied the empire, you would be crucified too.

00:32:42.760 How does crucifixion kill a man?

00:32:45.540 It's really interesting.

00:32:46.600 Were women crucified, by the way?

00:32:47.780 Yes.

00:32:48.360 In fact, they were crucified naked, often facing towards the cross, just for pornographic reasons.

00:32:56.080 How does it kill you?

00:32:59.540 It kills you in a variety of ways.

00:33:01.580 It doesn't kill you quickly.

00:33:03.000 It maximizes torment while minimizing—actually maximizes the length of death, and it prolongs death.

00:33:13.560 And so, when we study the blood work, so there are some amazing hematological reports that I've enjoyed reading thoroughly.

00:33:20.360 When we study the blood that's on the crucified man, it bears correspondence with that Jesus—there's high levels of creatinine, which means he was suffering from kidney failure, high levels of ferritin.

00:33:32.080 His body had inflammation all over it.

00:33:34.380 He was dehydrated.

00:33:35.420 You read John's Gospel.

00:33:36.640 Remember in John's Gospel, Jesus, one of the seven sayings, I thirst, he's dehydrated.

00:33:40.600 We know that Jesus likely lost one-third of his blood volume during flagellation, so he was dying of a variety of things.

00:33:50.900 Many thinkers believe that he died of suffocation, asphyxiation because of pulmonary edema, and we see that pulmonary edema reflected both on the shroud cloth and on the sudarian of Oviedo, the face cloth.

00:34:02.820 It's six parts pulmonary edema, one part blood.

00:34:05.560 Again, a hoaxer is not going to make this stuff up.

00:34:07.960 I mean, it becomes so crazy.

00:34:09.620 Pulmonary edema, so your lungs fill with fluid.

00:34:11.400 Fluid, blood, and a mixture.

00:34:13.260 In fact, there is a translucent mixture of fluid around the side wound.

00:34:19.240 We looked at the side wound there between rib five and six, just above that triangle, which is really a patch from a burn hole.

00:34:26.060 There's actually a translucent serum around that that, again, is consistent with what John's Gospel said.

00:34:31.920 Blood and water flowed out of Jesus because he was already dead.

00:34:36.040 And so, the crucifixion would prolong that.

00:34:38.700 High levels of ferritin, high levels of creatinine.

00:34:41.780 Jesus is suffering liver failure, kidney failure.

00:34:44.680 His body has inflammation all over it.

00:34:46.880 I believe, though, that Jesus died of cardiac arrest, massive heart failure, congenital heart failure, because he has labored breathing.

00:34:54.560 We know all of this from the blood samples.

00:34:56.660 The New Testament, one account says that his tormentors wanted him off the cross by the Sabbath, by Passover.

00:35:07.720 That's Deuteronomy 21, actually before nightfall.

00:35:10.420 Before nightfall.

00:35:11.200 Right.

00:35:11.420 So, they broke his legs, or they were planning on breaking his legs.

00:35:15.220 They didn't because he died.

00:35:16.760 And that's consistent with Messianic prophecy in David's Psalm 22.

00:35:20.340 Yes.

00:35:20.740 But why would breaking the legs of a crucified man hasten his death?

00:35:24.860 Wonderful question.

00:35:25.860 Thank you for asking it.

00:35:26.860 So, the one way you could prolong your life is you would kind of essentially try to stand up while you were being crucified, even though your feet were nailed, straddling the cross.

00:35:38.980 And you would just edge up ever so often while you're trying to breathe, and that would prolong your life.

00:35:44.620 So, if you broke your legs, obviously, you can't stand up.

00:35:47.380 So, you can't.

00:35:47.840 So, the point is when you're hanging by your wrists, you can't breathe.

00:35:51.060 Exactly.

00:35:52.000 And you suffocate.

00:35:53.200 You die in your own blood, essentially.

00:35:55.580 And so, you can't do that.

00:35:57.360 And so, that's why.

00:35:58.200 But they come to Jesus, even though they break the legs of the criminals on the right or left, indicating that Jesus suffered a different kind of torment than they suffered in his flagellation.

00:36:07.740 We'll get to that here in a moment.

00:36:10.500 But they didn't need to break his legs because he was already dead.

00:36:13.620 In fact, they're surprised.

00:36:14.800 Remember, Pilate is shocked that he was so soon dead.

00:36:17.880 Jesus begins the crucifixion around noon.

00:36:20.540 And he's dead by 3 p.m.

00:36:22.380 The Jewish day would begin at 6 p.m.

00:36:25.700 And so, they only have about three hours to get Jesus off the cross, ask for the body of Jesus from Pontius Pilate, and then lay him in a tomb that was not far, probably 150 feet away from where Jesus was crucified.

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00:37:06.540 What does it mean that they carried the crossbar?

00:37:09.680 Yeah.

00:37:09.820 What's the crossbar?

00:37:10.940 That is such a great question.

00:37:12.260 So, and this is what's so amazing when, again, I don't privilege this.

00:37:16.620 I just look at this through historical eyes.

00:37:19.120 When you look at the back, the dorsal image on the shroud, you can see that there are scourge marks all over it.

00:37:25.680 But in the right shoulder, coming down at a diagonal, there are abrasions all over the back.

00:37:32.400 We mentioned that Jesus, the crucified man of the shroud, weighed around 175 to 180 pounds.

00:37:38.480 The patibulum, which is just the crossbeam.

00:37:41.240 So, they didn't carry the whole cross.

00:37:43.100 They would only carry the crossbeam.

00:37:44.940 And again, that wood was scarce as well, by the way, in the Roman Empire.

00:37:48.920 So, that crossbeam would have been used again and again for other crucifixion victims.

00:37:53.160 And so, Jesus experiences the scourging.

00:37:56.260 And then he's asked to carry the cross.

00:37:58.680 And that cross, the crossbeam, the patibulum, weighs around 125 pounds.

00:38:03.660 And he can't carry it.

00:38:05.140 He falls.

00:38:05.720 And this is one of the most moving experiences for me when I was studying the signatures of the pollen.

00:38:13.160 We actually have not just pollen, but we have limestone and clay soil that is native only to Jerusalem.

00:38:21.920 And it's on three parts of the crucified man in the shroud.

00:38:25.020 Are you ready for this?

00:38:25.800 It's on the feet, obviously, because he walked barefoot.

00:38:28.320 It's on the knees and then the tip of the nose.

00:38:30.840 So, when Jesus is carrying the patibulum, he falls.

00:38:34.900 And he not only falls, he falls hard.

00:38:37.220 He collapses and his face gashes the ground.

00:38:40.540 Because we have in the tip of his nose actual soil from the land of Israel, from Jerusalem.

00:38:45.720 So, the crossbeam is the piece of wood to which his wrists are nailed.

00:38:52.080 And that's tied to the vertical post?

00:38:54.760 Yeah, to match the Greek letter tau.

00:38:57.000 So, it would look like a capital T.

00:38:58.980 We see that.

00:39:00.980 And he's tied to that post, but he's nailed to it.

00:39:04.200 Make no mistake, he was nailed to it.

00:39:06.620 Right, but the cross is tied.

00:39:09.720 Exactly.

00:39:10.980 Why the letter tau?

00:39:12.840 Was there a significance?

00:39:14.680 There wasn't.

00:39:15.860 The Christian movement makes it significant.

00:39:17.880 We call this staurogram, where you write the letter tau and then the letter rho.

00:39:22.420 So, the two letters.

00:39:23.820 And we actually see that used in early Christian scriptures.

00:39:26.900 It's essentially just a quick way of saying Jesus was crucified.

00:39:32.520 It becomes an early Christian icon.

00:39:34.280 It's just, so this is not really an execution method per se, as much as it's like a way of torturing someone to death.

00:39:40.980 It's like the rack or the spiked coffin.

00:39:44.120 Yeah, but even worse, because it prolonged the agony as long as some would be crucified outside of Jerusalem.

00:39:52.220 They'd be on the cross three, four, or five days.

00:39:54.380 So, this was for the most reviled enemies of the state.

00:39:57.320 Like, there's no respect at all.

00:39:58.700 No.

00:39:58.780 This is not like executing a man by beheading or a firing squad in later periods.

00:40:03.120 This is like, this is for slaves, insurrectionists, like the worst of the worst.

00:40:10.660 And thinking about the heel, you know, you think about the first gospel message.

00:40:14.400 It's actually called the Pro-Evangelium in Genesis 3.15.

00:40:18.100 Remember that first prophecy that his heel, he would crush his head, but the enemy would strike his heel.

00:40:27.460 And we know that the enemy did his best to crucify Jesus and did strike his heel.

00:40:32.480 And then you look at that blood that was prophesied even as far back as Genesis 3.15,

00:40:38.100 that Jesus would smash the enemy's head with his feet, even though his foot was crucified and pierced.

00:40:45.440 And we see that it did take blood and a lot of blood.

00:40:48.580 And I think sometimes we can look at this so academically, we forget, no, this was a real historical person who suffered this torment.

00:40:54.880 But it's just kind of wild if you think about it, that the early church took a torture device,

00:41:03.200 like the scariest and most humiliating of all torture devices, and made it the symbol of their religion.

00:41:10.260 Totally.

00:41:11.100 And I mean, again, if you and I-

00:41:11.820 What is that?

00:41:12.520 Well, if we were making up a religious movement, we would never start there.

00:41:15.740 I don't think so.

00:41:16.260 Make no mistake.

00:41:17.180 I mean, if you and I-

00:41:17.840 No, because you'd want your God to be triumphant.

00:41:19.720 You wouldn't want your God to be humiliated by some-

00:41:21.560 Certainly not crucified.

00:41:22.600 Not by some colonial governor and a bunch of local dumb religious leaders.

00:41:27.980 And I think the message in this, and there are so many points of application, many people wonder if God really loves them.

00:41:34.460 And they say, well, how do I know God loves me?

00:41:36.120 Or if I send away God's love for me?

00:41:38.340 Paul wrote in Romans 5.8,

00:41:40.060 But God demonstrated his love for us.

00:41:43.540 And that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

00:41:47.280 And the shroud is a beautiful demonstration.

00:41:49.800 It's a great reminder that God gave his best for us, Tucker, when he sent his son.

00:41:54.140 He didn't give us second best.

00:41:56.180 He gave us his very best.

00:41:58.260 But wait, I mean, if God's going to come to earth and redeem humanity, why would he allow himself to be, like, ritually humiliated and tortured in the most embarrassing possible way?

00:42:13.660 Wouldn't he show up and be like, I'm God, like, you're all wrong, I'm here now, daddy's home, knock it off, I have all power.

00:42:23.660 He wouldn't, like, why would he submit to some, like, ludicrous local authority and die with criminals on either side?

00:42:31.340 It's like the opposite of what you would imagine.

00:42:32.960 It smacks of authenticity to me.

00:42:34.580 Well, I agree with that, because it's so not what you would expect.

00:42:38.120 No, you wouldn't.

00:42:38.780 And 2 Corinthians 5.21 says,

00:42:41.980 God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might be the righteousness of God.

00:42:47.160 And so that means that God treated Jesus, and we see that very clearly and depicted in the shroud, as if he lived your life and mine.

00:42:56.320 So in Christ, and this is the beautiful message of grace, he could treat us as if we live the life of Jesus.

00:43:02.740 And that's the message of grace.

00:43:04.020 It doesn't make sense.

00:43:05.340 There's not an equation that's going to help us make sense of grace.

00:43:09.100 But it's like the early church decided to brag about its weaknesses.

00:43:12.780 Right.

00:43:13.100 And that's the foolishness of preaching that Paul talks about.

00:43:15.640 It's the foolishness of preaching.

00:43:17.440 It's the wisdom of God to those who believe and foolishness to those who deny it.

00:43:21.200 So walk through in clinical detail the torture that this man endured before the cross.

00:43:28.840 Tucker, it's something I'm still learning about because it takes my breath away.

00:43:31.800 I mean, I've published 250,000 words in academic works on the resurrection and on the physical torment of Jesus.

00:43:38.660 I've published several popular books on it.

00:43:40.640 I've talked about it, and I can't get over it.

00:43:42.520 But because there's a realism to it that reminds me of how shameful my own sin is.

00:43:51.440 Remember—

00:43:51.960 But pretend you're a police reporter here.

00:43:54.120 Right.

00:43:54.820 So Jesus is with his disciples at night.

00:43:58.700 Judas shows up, and a bunch of olive trees are kind of standing around.

00:44:04.300 Romans show up.

00:44:05.120 Local religious authorities show up.

00:44:06.400 Grab Jesus.

00:44:07.500 He goes on trial.

00:44:09.080 Walk us through what happens.

00:44:09.920 Absolutely.

00:44:10.300 Well, it started before that.

00:44:11.460 It would have started before that night because Jesus cleanses the temple, and he literally

00:44:16.180 reserves his fiercest words for the corrupt religious establishment.

00:44:20.540 Yeah, I noticed that.

00:44:21.480 Jesus hates hypocrites.

00:44:23.640 He hates corrupt religion.

00:44:25.120 In this case, it was the corrupt Jewish priesthood.

00:44:29.140 It was the corruption of what was happening and taking place at the temple, the money changers.

00:44:34.940 You had to put all of your currency in the Syrian—or excuse me, yeah, in the Syrian—or excuse me, the Tyrian temple tax, and they were ripping everyone off, and they made God's house a den of thieves.

00:44:45.260 Jesus clears the tables.

00:44:46.920 That's a messianic sign.

00:44:48.560 He's—who can do that?

00:44:49.700 But God himself cleansed his house.

00:44:51.760 My house shall be called a house of prayer.

00:44:53.220 And so, that's when they begin to decide to kill him.

00:44:56.340 Who's they?

00:44:57.280 The Sanhedrin.

00:44:58.300 The 70 members of the Jewish ruling council ask Pilate to crucify Jesus under the reign of Caiaphas, who is the high priest.

00:45:08.000 When, after Jesus rolls into the temple and overturns the tables of the money changers and says, get out.

00:45:13.160 They're like, we're going to crucify him.

00:45:14.960 We're going to kill him.

00:45:15.920 We want him dead.

00:45:17.300 And, again, Pilate had to sanction that.

00:45:20.120 And so, Pilate, being the politician he was, he says, okay, we'll do it.

00:45:24.180 And so, Jesus is arrested.

00:45:26.200 He's taken to the home of Caiaphas.

00:45:27.880 You can go to this home today.

00:45:29.560 It's the first century steps that Jesus would have been led to Caiaphas' home.

00:45:34.320 He spends his final night there, which would have been Thursday night.

00:45:38.580 He is beaten.

00:45:39.620 He's tortured.

00:45:41.460 They put a blind—

00:45:42.500 They put a blindfold on him.

00:45:43.820 They began to hit him.

00:45:44.760 They club him.

00:45:45.880 There are marks on the crucified man that are different from the scourging.

00:45:49.480 He's clubbed.

00:45:50.520 Someone took something that's the equivalent of a bat and struck him with, like, a rod.

00:45:54.900 And that's when they're saying, prophesy to a preacher who struck you, you know, because they blindfolded him.

00:46:00.860 And then he is led from there to Herod Antipas, who's, you know, I find no fault in him.

00:46:07.480 Send him back to Pilate.

00:46:08.580 You know, everyone's trying to—

00:46:09.800 Herod Antipas was one of the—he was the tetrarch of Galilee.

00:46:12.980 Galilee.

00:46:13.460 He was one of the Jewish leaders who was put in place by the Roman Empire, who beheaded John the Baptist.

00:46:19.740 He was the one who killed Jesus' friend, John the Baptist.

00:46:21.540 So he was like a local guy who was a stooge of the Roman government.

00:46:25.180 Totally.

00:46:25.760 But from Galilee.

00:46:26.700 But they all came to Jerusalem for Passover.

00:46:28.900 So this is not unusual.

00:46:31.820 And then ultimately, Jesus ends up in Praetorium at the hands of Pilate.

00:46:36.160 What's Praetorium?

00:46:37.080 It would have been right off the Temple Mount, this structure where the Romans were headquartered to keep peace in the city.

00:46:45.820 So you have the Jewish priests, and they have their armed forces that arrest Jesus like they're Jewish police.

00:46:52.240 And then Jesus is handed over to the Roman authorities to be crucified.

00:46:57.120 And in John 19, 1, I think it's one of the most overlooked, understated passages in all the Bible.

00:47:03.420 And Pilate had Jesus flogged.

00:47:05.900 And if we read that too quickly, we just don't understand the impact of it.

00:47:10.040 And that's why I've brought these artifacts for you.

00:47:12.620 I want you to, this is a flagrum that we had commissioned.

00:47:16.860 I want you to hold this, Tucker, and I want you to get it in your hand.

00:47:19.720 It's a flagrum.

00:47:20.720 This is a flagrum.

00:47:22.940 Okay, so this is a wooden dowel with three rawhide lines coming off it and lead balls on the end.

00:47:32.940 Right.

00:47:33.160 And I have two of them because we know from the crucified man that there were two torturers.

00:47:38.360 So Jesus is being whipped simultaneously by two different executioners.

00:47:44.700 So the purpose of the lead balls on the end of the rawhide is?

00:47:48.560 Is to inflict as much torment as possible.

00:47:51.320 And so sometimes you would have flagrums with bone ends, but there are all these barbell shapes on the hash marks of the crucified man,

00:47:59.940 which leads me to believe that it was used in something just like this.

00:48:03.520 So this is, again, a one-to-one flagrum that the Romans would use.

00:48:06.920 So if you hit someone with a length of rawhide and a piece of lead balls at the end, I mean, you'd kill someone with that.

00:48:16.340 And this is where Jesus loses one-third of his blood volume.

00:48:19.140 And I want you to understand something for the benefit of our audience.

00:48:21.980 Notice how short this is.

00:48:23.200 I mean, this is not like an Indiana Jones whip, right?

00:48:25.580 I mean, there was a demonic intimacy to this torment.

00:48:29.540 And the blood of Jesus would have been splattered all over the executioners.

00:48:34.160 And so they flogged Jesus.

00:48:36.220 There are 200 wounds on the dorsal, on the back image.

00:48:40.720 So if we took time right now to count them up, there's over 200 on the back.

00:48:44.320 There's 172 on the front.

00:48:47.020 There is not an area of Jesus's body that has not been tortured, including the pelvic region.

00:48:54.080 We have, we do not have.

00:48:54.960 They hit him in the crotch with this?

00:48:56.880 Again and again.

00:48:58.960 With lead tips?

00:49:00.280 Lead tips.

00:49:02.100 And not only that.

00:49:02.960 You just take the skin right off a man's body with that.

00:49:04.860 And actually, according to the hematological reports, Jesus is, we think his right eye was blinded.

00:49:12.880 So there's not only, we'll get to the crown of thorns here shortly.

00:49:15.900 So hold your breath for that one.

00:49:17.600 But the, there's his right eye, there are wounds consistent with flagellation.

00:49:21.960 So we don't know if the guys were drunk or if they were just going to town on him, but they whip him.

00:49:26.340 And at some point, the, the scourge hits him probably from the back of the head in the eye right here and likely blinds him in the right eye because his right eye is severely punctured in the image of the crucified man.

00:49:42.100 And also his left cheek, probably from the rod beating at Caiaphas' home is also hugely, I mean, it's like he's been in a heavyweight boxing match.

00:49:50.220 I mean, he can't see out of his right eye.

00:49:51.860 His left cheek is raised.

00:49:54.080 And so this is the phlegrum.

00:49:56.580 So this was before his, this was before he was sentenced to crucifixion, before he was sentenced to death.

00:50:03.760 Pilate, again, he brings Jesus after, and again, so 372 wounds that we count, but again, we don't have the lateral side.

00:50:11.900 So again, I want to reiterate, he's probably, there's probably 700 wounds on his body if you count them up.

00:50:18.400 And if you just.

00:50:19.060 You couldn't survive that long-term, right?

00:50:20.880 And this is where Pilate then fashions a crown of thorns and he places it on Jesus, his head.

00:50:27.940 And let me set these so we can make some ring.

00:50:29.940 So that's the halo of thorns?

00:50:32.940 No, actually not.

00:50:34.560 Let me show you.

00:50:35.400 I thought it was a halo because you and I, we've both been so influenced by early Christian art and specifically medieval art.

00:50:43.840 But this is what took my breath away.

00:50:46.120 And I want you to be careful with this because these are Bethlehem thorns.

00:50:50.040 This is the crown of thorns.

00:50:55.780 This is the helmet of thorns.

00:50:57.680 This was not a wreath, Tucker.

00:50:59.460 This was not like a sweat band you wore around your forehead.

00:51:03.240 They fashioned this diabolical crown of thorns, these Bethlehem thorns that when they dry, they're as sharp as nails.

00:51:11.420 You can feel that.

00:51:12.180 I mean, it pricks your finger right to the touch and they ram this on Jesus's head.

00:51:19.740 And I want you to let this set in because there's 50 puncture wounds on the head, both the forehead, the top and the back of the head of the crucified man of the shroud.

00:51:29.520 50 puncture marks.

00:51:30.920 And so you can imagine.

00:51:32.160 And that's all detectable on the shroud?

00:51:34.520 Right on the shroud.

00:51:35.180 You can see the back of the head, all of the blood pooling in the back of the head from this crown of thorns being rammed on his head.

00:51:41.100 So Jesus has 700 scourge marks and then they slam this on his head.

00:51:46.480 And this is where Pilate brings Jesus before the Jewish mob.

00:51:50.820 And this is where we hear in the Latin, echohomo, behold the man, Pilate says.

00:51:56.300 And he's bloodied.

00:51:57.560 How does he even stand?

00:51:58.660 We don't know.

00:51:59.920 His love compelled him to stay standing on our behalf.

00:52:03.600 And this is the point.

00:52:05.320 Imagine seeing a man in this state.

00:52:07.720 He will very quickly be dead.

00:52:09.360 And it's not enough for the crowd.

00:52:12.020 They begin to yell, crucify him, crucify him, crucify him.

00:52:16.360 Demons.

00:52:17.640 And this is where Pilate says, I wash my hands.

00:52:19.560 I should also note as a historical fact, he never did anything wrong.

00:52:22.860 Like he was never even accused.

00:52:24.220 He was never accused of hurting anybody.

00:52:26.140 Remember, all of the false witnesses came forward when Jesus is in this dummy trial at Caiaphas' home.

00:52:31.740 And they say, well, he's a bastard.

00:52:33.080 Remember, Jesus is accused of being an illegitimate child.

00:52:35.800 Right.

00:52:36.580 He's accused of blaspheming, of casting out demons by Beelzebub, by the worker, by the prince of demons.

00:52:43.160 All of these false accusations are brought against him, and Jesus doesn't open his mouth.

00:52:47.100 But just to be clear, even if the false accusations were real accusations, if they were true, he's still never accused of hurting anyone.

00:52:56.320 Right.

00:52:57.300 He committed no sin.

00:52:58.960 No sin was found in him.

00:52:59.600 But he's not even accused of it.

00:53:01.460 Right.

00:53:02.640 So, just to put it in context.

00:53:07.200 So, they didn't even claim, like, he killed a man in Reno, shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

00:53:12.000 You know, there's nothing like that at all.

00:53:13.220 No.

00:53:13.460 Or he cheated people out of money, or he, you know, kicked out the money changers and stole the money.

00:53:18.520 Exactly.

00:53:19.840 Nothing like that at all.

00:53:20.760 Right.

00:53:21.040 This was diabolical in every sense of the word, as you rightly point out.

00:53:24.900 And this crown of thorns, the first time I saw it was in Jerusalem.

00:53:28.360 And, Tucker, it took my breath away.

00:53:29.880 It still takes my breath away.

00:53:31.020 So, the reason that you've revised, or you're going with the modern revision to the common halo of thorns, is based on the blood record right there.

00:53:43.960 Absolutely.

00:53:44.540 The punctures, the wounds, basically the pathology of his head and his face and the back of his head.

00:53:51.260 And this is what, you asked, how do we know this is Jesus?

00:53:54.300 Well, the helmet of thorns leaves it beyond all doubt in my mind.

00:53:58.060 I believe this is a slam dunk case that the crucified man is the historical Jesus, without a doubt, based on the evidence.

00:54:05.800 If you were to recreate, if you were to take the gospel accounts and Josephus and the 21 total accounts of Jesus' crucifixion, which I think is accepted by everyone, atheist and Christian alike, as a historical fact.

00:54:21.580 Right.

00:54:22.640 If you were to take all those facts from the record and try and create an image of them, could you create this?

00:54:30.960 No.

00:54:31.900 No.

00:54:32.560 That's the fascinating thing.

00:54:34.000 The best scientists in the world cannot explain how there's an image there, and they cannot replicate it.

00:54:39.060 And it couldn't be replicated now.

00:54:40.860 No.

00:54:41.420 Even with our best technologies today, it can't be replicated in any way.

00:54:45.500 Okay.

00:54:46.900 So, this brings us to, I think, one of the central questions, which is the provenance of this.

00:54:52.180 Where did it come from?

00:54:53.100 What do we know?

00:54:54.140 That's the fascinating thing.

00:54:55.220 About where this has been for the last 2,000 years.

00:54:58.180 Well, it turns out there's a scientist, a criminologist, by the name of Max Fry, who was involved in the Nuremberg trials, a very respected criminologist.

00:55:07.280 He spent five years of his life.

00:55:08.900 Again, this is where I say 102 academic disciplines.

00:55:11.000 These are men and women who risk their academic reputation, and, again, why I'm so grateful you're bringing this to light today on your program.

00:55:18.240 Max Fry, who's now dead, spends five years of his life studying the pollen spores on the Shroud.

00:55:25.060 What's a pollen spore?

00:55:26.660 Pollen.

00:55:26.800 Well, I have it on me from this beautiful state we're in right now.

00:55:29.500 Yeah.

00:55:30.100 From traveling here and all of the allergies here right now.

00:55:33.460 Yeah.

00:55:33.620 But there are 56 different specimens of pollen that Max Fry detects.

00:55:39.520 From plants.

00:55:40.220 From plants.

00:55:41.020 From plant life.

00:55:42.260 Botany.

00:55:43.180 Yeah.

00:55:43.620 And what's amazing about it, again, if we're making this up or trying to hoax this, we would not have known this 700 years ago in medieval Europe.

00:55:51.220 Right.

00:55:51.480 There are certain pollen flower plants that bloom only in springtime where in the land of Israel, where more specifically in Jerusalem, and that pollen is on the Shroud.

00:56:01.100 So you have pollen flowers that only bloom in April in the land of Israel, and that pollen signature, according to Max Fry, that pollen species, we have 56 of them, is embedded in the Shroud chemically.

00:56:14.660 What's fascinating is we don't just have pollen from the land of Israel.

00:56:19.020 We have pollen that traces the provenance of the Shroud from Jerusalem, AD 30, to Edessa, which is far eastern Turkey, where it's there for 900 years.

00:56:30.020 And then we have pollen from Constantinople.

00:56:33.300 The Eastern Roman Empire.

00:56:35.000 Right.

00:56:35.860 Constantinople.

00:56:36.460 And again, the Shroud is constantly escaping the caliphates of the time.

00:56:42.020 So it goes from Constantinople and around 1200 through Athens, finally up to Leary, France, with a knight, Geoffrey de Charnay, who we don't, he never says how he got it, but he has it.

00:56:54.420 And then ultimately he sells it for two castles to the Savoy family of France, and then it's moved to Chambury, France, and it's under the House of Savoy.

00:57:06.380 And then it becomes very political because the Savoys then relocate their kingdom to turn Italy, and to solidify their political rule, they make sure they bring the Shroud with them in the 16th century to turn Italy.

00:57:19.680 So where, as a matter of written record, leaving aside the modern chemical analysis of the Shroud, how far can we trace it back so we know it was where it went?

00:57:35.920 We trace it first, of course, as I already mentioned, the Shroud is mentioned in all four Gospels.

00:57:40.020 And then we have Eusebius, who's the most respected church historian.

00:57:43.480 He's at the Council of Nicaea in 325, talking about the face cloth, the image cloth of Jesus.

00:57:49.800 He's the one who gives us the story of the Shroud going from the land of Israel to King Abgar, who's the king of Edessa, where it stays for 900 years.

00:58:00.160 And we know it was there.

00:58:01.460 Right.

00:58:02.280 Okay, so.

00:58:03.060 And it's known by different names, though.

00:58:04.440 This is the thing that I want to say.

00:58:05.480 I'm a huge Kansas City Chiefs fan.

00:58:07.620 Kansas City Chiefs were not always the Chiefs.

00:58:09.380 They were the Dallas Texans before they moved to Kansas City.

00:58:12.000 It's very similar with the Shroud.

00:58:13.260 It's known by different names.

00:58:15.080 But it's the same object.

00:58:16.480 Yeah, the Mandillion, the image of Edessa, the face cloth.

00:58:19.480 And as we continue to red pill ourselves with this, Tucker, you have the pollen that matches it.

00:58:24.660 You have the textual records that match it.

00:58:27.700 Eusebius.

00:58:28.260 We have these other wonderful early Christian historians who are talking about this face cloth.

00:58:32.840 When's the first written reference to it?

00:58:34.820 Who would be Eusebius, the great church historian?

00:58:37.900 Early 4th century.

00:58:39.800 Early 300s.

00:58:40.780 Right.

00:58:41.120 325 AD is Council of Nicaea, so it would antedate that.

00:58:44.320 So early 300s.

00:58:46.560 Okay.

00:58:47.260 So.

00:58:48.140 And he's Bishop of Eusebius.

00:58:49.480 And keep in mind, what is Eusebius's?

00:58:51.400 Wait, but hold on.

00:58:52.040 But just so as a, okay, so we know this has existed for at least 1,800 years.

00:58:59.680 Exactly.

00:59:01.100 So.

00:59:02.100 The written record.

00:59:02.960 The written record shows it.

00:59:04.600 So that's kind of not in dispute.

00:59:06.080 Right.

00:59:07.600 So if this were a forgery, it would have to have been a forgery at least as early as the 4th century, the 300s.

00:59:14.120 Exactly.

00:59:14.380 And so that right there kind of tells you, like, if modern science can't replicate this.

00:59:21.520 Good point.

00:59:22.220 Probably not possible in 3080.

00:59:24.840 Right.

00:59:26.760 Incredibly not.

00:59:28.680 Okay.

00:59:29.040 So I didn't know that.

00:59:30.200 No, nobody does.

00:59:31.820 Because I was told by Reader's Digest in the 70s.

00:59:35.280 No, I'm serious.

00:59:36.100 I first.

00:59:36.520 Yeah.

00:59:37.140 Strange stories and amazing facts.

00:59:39.040 Right.

00:59:39.200 It was a Reader's Digest book that I read in 1980 in summer camp.

00:59:42.340 And I read about this, and I'm like, this amazing thing, and photographic negative, but we know it's a product of the Renaissance or the late Middle Ages.

00:59:49.940 False.

00:59:50.060 But there was already a written record of it going back to the 4th century.

00:59:55.600 The great historian of the early church, Eusebius, who I was going to mention, he's in Caesarea.

01:00:00.220 He has a library.

01:00:02.520 We don't know the sources he had, but he had an incredible library.

01:00:05.780 Yeah.

01:00:05.980 So he's standing on the shoulders of historians before him.

01:00:09.500 And so this is a longstanding historical tradition in the church.

01:00:13.580 One of the things that's interesting to me and one of the things I had to get over as I began studying the Shroud, Tucker, is I thought it was a Catholic relic.

01:00:20.780 Now, we need to, again, I want to just hammer on this because you have a lot of Protestants that watch your program and a lot of Christians who think, oh, that's just a Catholic relic.

01:00:28.540 I'm not interested in the Catholic church, therefore, I'm not interested in the Shroud.

01:00:32.380 The Catholic church did not take control of the Shroud of Turin until 1983.

01:00:38.220 Two years of probate court, the last king of Savoy bequeathed the Shroud to the current pope, who was Pope John Paul II at the time.

01:00:47.780 And after two years of probate court, finally, the Catholic church becomes the custodian of the Shroud in the 1980s.

01:00:54.840 So it was in private hands.

01:00:56.520 So you said it was in eastern Turkey for 900 years.

01:01:00.120 Where?

01:01:00.940 In Edessa, which is eastern Turkey.

01:01:05.520 It was a stronghold of the Christian movement, as it was, escaping the—but then when the Muslim invasion started, and again, the 7th century, it escapes to Constantinople and then Athens and then beyond that, as I mentioned.

01:01:18.340 It keeps moving west.

01:01:19.160 Right, exactly.

01:01:19.940 As the Ottoman Empire rises.

01:01:21.140 Totally.

01:01:21.760 Islam sweeps over the land of the Bible.

01:01:26.020 Or Islam killed the bishops, the Bibles, and the buildings.

01:01:29.260 Yeah.

01:01:29.440 And so it's escaping that.

01:01:30.480 So it's amazing the embarrassment of riches we have from an artifactual standpoint.

01:01:35.100 And then when you actually look, too, there's something else we haven't touched on.

01:01:39.380 The iconography.

01:01:40.660 The early Christian art, Tucker, I mean, is remarkable.

01:01:43.980 On my social media, we created an AI image.

01:01:48.200 My friend Doug Powell and me.

01:01:49.960 Doug gets all the credit.

01:01:51.420 He's an amazing artist.

01:01:52.400 He imported the information of the face of the crucified man and compares it with the icon, Pantocrater, Lord Overall, which is currently at St. Catherine's Monastery, where it's been since the 6th century.

01:02:07.720 This is an icon of Jesus.

01:02:09.640 It's famous.

01:02:10.920 When he put those two images, the face of Jesus in the shroud and the icon Pantocrater in Sinai, he put that into mid-journey and created an AI rendering of what Jesus would have looked like.

01:02:21.600 It is so moving.

01:02:23.140 It's powerful to look at.

01:02:24.500 It's interesting, the face of Jesus on the shroud before us, even at this distance, it's recognizable as the Jesus from antiquity, from the artistic representations of Jesus all the way up until George Floyd became Jesus in 2020.

01:02:42.200 Not the gay-looking Jesus of the medieval era.

01:02:44.360 I mean, and I really mean that.

01:02:46.020 If you look at Jesus' depictions in the medieval era, it's a very effeminate Jesus, no facial hair, weak, small, a white Jesus.

01:02:55.380 That's not what we have reflected.

01:02:56.900 So again, if we were a hoaxer in the medieval era, we would have created the Jesus of our time, which is this effeminate Jesus.

01:03:02.620 No, what do we have in here?

01:03:03.660 We have a man's man, a long-haired man, a man, you know, we know Jesus walked 20,000 miles in his ministry.

01:03:11.400 If you just add up his trips to Jerusalem and his public ministry, Jesus being about 30, according to Luke's gospel, when he begins his ministry, Jesus was walking all the time.

01:03:20.240 There was no Ubers or rideshare apps.

01:03:22.440 He was pound for pound a strong man, a physically fit man.

01:03:26.260 And that's why he could probably take the brutality that he endured as well.

01:03:31.880 That's such a, that's just so interesting though.

01:03:35.000 But the face is distinctive and the face is reflected through Christian art going back a long way.

01:03:42.480 Like if you just showed me that, that face, I'd say, oh, that's Jesus' face.

01:03:46.260 Exactly.

01:03:46.820 So the question always was like, well, how do we know what Jesus looks like?

01:03:49.600 And this is the answer.

01:03:50.720 Yeah.

01:03:50.860 And so all the icons, what we call them is all the iconography, all the icons of Jesus, there's over 200 of them.

01:03:57.120 They seem to have the same source material.

01:03:58.780 And when you compare it to the shroud, it's like they all trace the face of Jesus off the man of the shroud.

01:04:05.680 And not only that, you have the numismatics.

01:04:08.180 This is the study of coinage from the ancient times.

01:04:11.620 And you have all these Byzantine coins that look just like the image of the face of the man of the shroud.

01:04:16.300 Yes.

01:04:16.600 So like, what are all these people looking at if the shroud was invented, you know, like the liberal scientists want us to believe in the liberal Bible scholars who are apostate, you know, in the 14th century.

01:04:27.120 So that's the claim.

01:04:28.780 The claim is based on one fact, the carbon dating of 1988 that you brought up, 1260 to 1390 is what they wrote on the chalkboard in October of 1988, that the carbon dating said that this was a medieval fordry.

01:04:40.120 So let's get into that in some detail.

01:04:41.900 Absolutely.

01:04:42.440 If you don't mind.

01:04:42.980 I would love to.

01:04:44.700 So everybody remember, so I guess I misremembered.

01:04:48.200 I was told it was probably fake in 1980, but it was, you're saying it was not until 1988.

01:04:53.820 October 88.

01:04:54.820 October 88, there was a carbon date, radiocarbon dating.

01:04:58.820 Of the shroud itself.

01:05:00.420 Right.

01:05:00.900 Before you debunk it, if you wouldn't mind just explaining who did that.

01:05:05.120 Right.

01:05:05.600 So the agreement was, again, the Catholic Church did not take control of the, of the shroud until the mid 80s.

01:05:13.280 First, if you don't mind, could I just back up to 1978, Tucker, to the original scientific research?

01:05:19.720 So, I mean, this is amazing, which I'm glad we have this time.

01:05:22.440 In 1976, and I'll get to it.

01:05:25.580 I want to set the context.

01:05:26.620 Two Air Force Academy professors, Eric Jumper and John Jackson, use a machine that was developed to study the effects of the nuclear bomb called a VP8 image analyzer.

01:05:38.640 It's a brightness map, and they would use that to scan the impact of the nuclear bomb.

01:05:44.280 So that's what the machine is.

01:05:45.320 These are not pastors.

01:05:46.320 These are not theologians.

01:05:47.300 These are professors at the Air Force Academy.

01:05:49.420 They get an image of the Shroud of Turin, likely the Henri 1930s image that C.S. Lewis had in his bedroom, and they put it through the VP8 image analyzer.

01:05:58.820 And they realized there is a 3D, there are 3D information encoded in the Shroud of Turin.

01:06:06.460 No other picture does that.

01:06:08.520 I want to make sure this sets in.

01:06:10.180 There's 3D information.

01:06:11.820 What does that mean?

01:06:11.940 There's like a holographic topography brightness map of the man of the shroud.

01:06:18.680 That looks like you're looking at the surface, you know, geography, topography of land.

01:06:24.440 There's like depth.

01:06:25.380 There is depth.

01:06:26.000 There's 3D, the way they set it, analytically, there's 3D information encoded in the image of the crucified man.

01:06:33.360 And when they put pictures of their grandchildren through it, it was just smeared 2D images.

01:06:37.640 So no other image does this.

01:06:39.460 So that VP8 image analyzer, you can go on YouTube and watch it done, is what gave rise to what's called the Shroud of Turin Research Project, the scientific STIRP team, which consists of 33 scientists, 26 who went to Turin, Italy.

01:06:54.460 They had 5 days.

01:06:56.400 They had 120 hours to study the shroud.

01:06:58.840 Keep in mind, the Savoy family allowed this, not the Catholic Church.

01:07:02.640 This is controversial, but I don't believe the Catholic Church would have ever allowed the Shroud of Turin to be researched.

01:07:08.180 And that's not my saying.

01:07:09.740 That's Barry Schwartz, who was the documenting photographer who photographed the shroud in 1978.

01:07:14.520 It was the private family, the Savoys, the House of Savoy, who allowed this research team, 33 scientists, to study the shroud for five days.

01:07:24.520 Okay?

01:07:24.780 So they took four years.

01:07:26.560 They didn't go on Twitter.

01:07:27.700 It didn't exist.

01:07:28.480 They didn't go on social media.

01:07:29.540 It didn't exist.

01:07:30.200 They took four years to publish all of their findings.

01:07:32.920 And I haven't used this word yet until this point in our interview.

01:07:37.200 The STIRP team, these 33 scientists, by the way, Roy Rogers says, give me 15 minutes in the scientific method and I'll prove it's a hoax.

01:07:45.760 He wasn't saying that after 15 minutes of studying the shroud.

01:07:48.940 They all thought they had a free trip to Italy.

01:07:51.700 They were in the lobby, Barry Schwartz, one of the original STIRP teams, and I met many of them.

01:07:56.200 Sadly, many of them are now dead.

01:07:57.940 But they're meeting over drinks in the lobby of the Italy Hotel in Turin, which is a beautiful city to visit.

01:08:03.280 And they're all joking that they have a free trip to Italy to debunk this hoax.

01:08:07.020 No one was saying that a few days later.

01:08:09.280 So these 33 scientists publish and they prove, this is the word I'm going to use, it's proven.

01:08:14.820 The shroud is not a work of art.

01:08:16.800 It is not a man-made image.

01:08:19.260 They can't tell you how it's made, but they prove there's no pigment, there's no dye, there's no paint.

01:08:25.140 They cannot explain how the image is there, but it is not man-made.

01:08:28.360 So for the Christians out there or religiously minded people who think that like we're violating the second commandment right now looking at this,

01:08:38.160 we're not violating the second commandment, Tucker, so we can be at ease.

01:08:40.660 What's the second commandment?

01:08:41.500 You shall not worship a graven image.

01:08:44.000 A graven image is by definition a man-made object, a handmade object.

01:08:48.540 The shroud is not man-made.

01:08:50.100 It's otherworldly.

01:08:51.900 So we're not violating the second commandment.

01:08:54.320 So that allows people to breathe easier.

01:08:55.720 That's probably about it.

01:08:56.720 The 3D.

01:08:58.600 That the image, here's the cool part about the shroud.

01:09:02.100 I believe we're looking at the moment of Jesus's resurrection ultimately.

01:09:05.300 All of this conversation leads that something powerful happens on that first Easter morning.

01:09:13.380 It's electromagnetic radiation that's so powerful.

01:09:16.860 We don't have this amount of watt power on earth, 40 billion, literally 40 billion watts of energy, but it happens.

01:09:25.120 It's pick power.

01:09:26.720 It's not like the power when you flip on.

01:09:28.440 It took me a while to learn this.

01:09:29.740 It's almost like a cold energy because it happens so quickly in a twinkling of an eye.

01:09:34.980 And it doesn't evaporate the linen.

01:09:37.000 That's what the labs, the labs could heat up and essentially tattoo the shroud, but it would burn up instantly.

01:09:44.380 It would scorch.

01:09:45.600 This didn't scorch.

01:09:46.780 It was the pulse rate, which was so, and I know we're getting deep, but it's important to be nuanced in this conversation and precise.

01:09:53.820 The pulse rate power, 40,000 billion watts traveling at 1 40th of a billionth of a second, we believe is that moment that Jesus' body is resurrected.

01:10:03.080 And that's what leaves this image.

01:10:04.540 But whatever it was, it was a process that chemically changed the fibrils at a 0.2 depth, which is surface level, to leave this image.

01:10:16.780 And that cannot, just for the fifth time, that cannot be applied with a brush.

01:10:21.640 No, it can't be duplicated.

01:10:25.240 And it hasn't been.

01:10:26.880 One man in Britain offered a million pounds to anyone who could replicate the shroud, and no one's taken him up on the offer.

01:10:32.640 So, if we have a written record of the shroud going back to the 4th century, how were scientists, scientists allowed to say that it, I mean, if we know it existed because contemporaneous sources described it, then how were they allowed to say it was a renaissance creation?

01:10:50.740 Well, how are they allowed to say anything that's unfactual?

01:10:53.500 They're liars.

01:10:54.820 And they hate truth, and they hate God.

01:10:57.600 Well, yeah, I'm aware of that.

01:10:59.480 But, like, just on logic grounds, how could, I don't know, did anybody say, well, wait a second, we've been, you know, someone in the 320s wrote about this.

01:11:09.040 Well, they don't know that, honestly, scientists, they don't read these truths, they don't read Christian history, most, you know, most media people have never read the Bible, they don't even know what you're talking about.

01:11:18.100 Yeah, but if they're studying the shroud of turn, you'd think they would have some grounding in the shroud of turn.

01:11:20.940 Right, right, exactly.

01:11:22.200 So, they do radiocarbon dating, this was the headline from 88, I guess.

01:11:26.180 Right, that it's, so that, so thank you.

01:11:28.700 So, that was the scientific launch to the, so then in the mid, in the late 80s, thank you for bringing me back.

01:11:35.700 Like, it's agreed upon that seven laboratories would do blind research, carbon dating of the shroud.

01:11:43.200 And the scientists who studied it said, whatever you do, don't take the sample from the fringes because the shroud has been repaired.

01:11:51.120 There's two things we're looking at, Tucker, that took me, again, a minute to, it took me a minute to learn all this.

01:11:56.200 There's these parallel, those lines, those are burn marks, those are scorch marks.

01:12:00.840 These 16 triangular shapes, those are patches.

01:12:04.420 The shroud survives a fire in 1532.

01:12:07.960 The nuns stitched it up with a backing cloth.

01:12:13.160 And they also, many believe.

01:12:15.120 Where was the fire?

01:12:16.120 This was in Chambury, France, 1532, before it moves to turn in 1578.

01:12:21.440 So, it survives this fire.

01:12:23.500 It's doused.

01:12:24.640 The shroud has survived at least three fires, and so there are also water stains.

01:12:28.380 You can see those water marks as well on the shroud.

01:12:30.700 This is what's amazing.

01:12:31.360 Like, if this was a work of art, it would have diluted it.

01:12:33.640 The image would have smeared or vanished.

01:12:36.820 None of that happens.

01:12:37.980 The image is still, as you just saw with the classic invert on my phone, very apparent.

01:12:42.560 And so, it survives all of that, but it did come in contact.

01:12:46.920 I mean, millions of people have likely touched this shroud.

01:12:49.740 I mean, it would be brought out for baby baptisms.

01:12:52.820 That upper right corner would be cut off.

01:12:55.300 Like, if I really loved you, Tucker, I would give you a piece of the shroud to take home with you after having dinner with me if you visited me in one of my castles.

01:13:03.360 I mean, so it's known that aspects of the shroud were given out even for indulgences.

01:13:07.420 So, in the top left, you can see with the naked eye, anyone who pulls up the shroud can see it is a contaminated area of the shroud.

01:13:15.400 It's dark.

01:13:16.760 It's been touched a lot.

01:13:18.160 It's the fringes of the shroud.

01:13:20.360 And so, there's an invisible weave there that many great scholars believe that was patched.

01:13:25.660 And so, the scholars said, whatever you do, don't carbon date the corners of the shroud because it's been so contaminated.

01:13:32.300 It's a contaminated sample.

01:13:34.140 Get in the middle of the shroud and carbon date those samples.

01:13:37.680 So, what did this community do?

01:13:39.860 These seven labs that were supposed to carbon date it, actually only three labs did.

01:13:45.480 No one ever answered why seven labs didn't do it.

01:13:47.800 It wasn't done blindly.

01:13:48.880 Three labs, Tucson, Arizona, Zurich, Switzerland, and Oxford, England, carbon date the shroud.

01:13:57.160 What part did they take?

01:13:58.300 The upper left-hand corner that any non-scientist can see is a contaminated sample.

01:14:04.020 And they carbon dated that sample.

01:14:06.260 Well, it's a patch.

01:14:07.080 Exactly.

01:14:07.760 Thank you for noticing that.

01:14:08.980 Exactly.

01:14:09.640 You're talking about the…

01:14:10.920 Very top left.

01:14:12.200 That's a different color.

01:14:13.740 Right.

01:14:14.040 It's dark.

01:14:15.420 That is what they carbon dated.

01:14:17.160 And then, ironically, the British Museum suppresses the data, the raw data, of the carbon dating for 29 years.

01:14:30.460 Only in 2017, through a French attorney, who I'm going to be with very soon at the International Shroud Conference in St. Louis, I encourage people to check it out.

01:14:39.060 So, the French attorney, through the equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act, finally got the raw data released for the carbon dating.

01:14:48.000 And what did they find?

01:14:49.440 The sample that was used to carbon date, it has cotton within the sample, not fine linen.

01:14:54.940 The rest of the shroud is fine linen.

01:14:56.740 That's indicative it was patched.

01:14:58.100 So, this whole bias towards the shroud is based on bad science and suppressed science, by the way.

01:15:04.720 29 years suppressed.

01:15:05.820 I don't know if there was there cotton in Europe or the Middle East.

01:15:11.060 There was in Europe because they would use it for patchwork, these invisible weaves, these seamstresses.

01:15:17.180 Right.

01:15:18.120 But 2,000 years ago…

01:15:20.080 No.

01:15:20.280 Yeah.

01:15:20.560 This was fine linen.

01:15:23.820 We don't have any other shrouds with cotton.

01:15:25.440 This is the patchwork that was done in medieval Europe to protect the shroud, to preserve it.

01:15:32.520 And so, that is what the carbon…

01:15:33.720 So, if we're stacking up all of the evidence for and against the shroud, we're in the middle of presenting a voluminous amount of evidence for the authenticity of the shroud and that it is indeed Jesus' burial cloth.

01:15:45.700 And we have one bit of evidence to deny the shroud, this erroneous carbon-14 dating.

01:15:51.600 Has anyone ever carbon dated the linen?

01:15:54.380 No.

01:15:55.740 No, it's not been allowed to be dated since.

01:16:00.180 Well, I don't understand how you could carbon date what's obviously a patch…

01:16:05.720 Right.

01:16:06.420 …that I can see from here.

01:16:07.500 Well, we weren't even made aware of what was dated until the data came out.

01:16:11.120 So, they knew that there was cotton in the sample, which just immediately disqualifies it.

01:16:15.440 Exactly.

01:16:15.900 It's a contaminated sample.

01:16:16.860 And they knew that, and they hid it for almost 30 years.

01:16:19.760 Right.

01:16:20.640 We're sure.

01:16:21.120 Welcome to Shroud of Turn Research.

01:16:22.960 Yeah, and Ray Rogers, the chemist who said, give me 15 minutes in the scientific method, debunked it in a scientific journal and then sadly died a month later of cancer.

01:16:31.560 And his debunk of the carbon dating got no traction.

01:16:35.400 So, I'm happy to bring it up on your program and give him all the credit.

01:16:37.960 Why not just take…

01:16:39.960 I mean, it's kind of a significant question, right?

01:16:42.600 Right.

01:16:42.780 If it's 2,000 years old, it kind of…

01:16:46.360 Well, because the Catholic Church is afraid of it.

01:16:48.480 And the Catholic Church has still never come out in support of the Shroud.

01:16:51.160 Are you aware of that?

01:16:51.880 No.

01:16:52.340 They're ambivalent about it.

01:16:53.760 They're indifferent about it.

01:16:54.980 And I was just in Turin, so I'm thankful for everyone there who welcomed me.

01:16:59.660 I met all of the scientists.

01:17:01.560 My friend Enrico, the chemist, who…

01:17:03.600 The Shroud is now currently kept in what's called a reliquary.

01:17:07.340 It's the exact size of the Shroud.

01:17:09.620 The company…

01:17:10.280 This is fascinating information.

01:17:11.780 The company that creates all of the materials for the International Space Station is based in Turin.

01:17:16.840 That same company created the box that preserves the Shroud.

01:17:19.600 So, where is it in a church?

01:17:21.160 It's in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in this reliquary, this box.

01:17:26.820 You can walk in and see it today, but it's a covered box.

01:17:29.660 And it's 99% argon gas because the two enemies of the Shroud right now are light and oxygen.

01:17:36.240 And so, they're preserving it.

01:17:37.660 So, the Catholic Church has no interest in educating people about the Shroud.

01:17:41.040 Again, I'm thankful that you're having me on.

01:17:43.480 I don't understand why.

01:17:45.000 Their only interest is in conservation.

01:17:47.020 So, they're conserving the Shroud right now.

01:17:49.600 The Shroud hasn't been on display since 2015 publicly.

01:17:54.140 We don't know when it will be on display again.

01:17:56.240 And yet, it's this key to the whole message of Christianity.

01:18:00.300 I mean, it is the death, burial, and resurrection in an artifact.

01:18:03.460 Nothing else does that outside of the Bible except the Shroud.

01:18:06.340 I'm confused.

01:18:06.880 I'm confused.

01:18:07.080 Why would a Christian church want to hide what appears to be physical proof of the resurrection?

01:18:16.140 Of the core story of its religion.

01:18:17.820 Right.

01:18:18.860 What's the answer?

01:18:20.200 I wish I knew.

01:18:21.060 Who makes that decision?

01:18:24.280 The Pope.

01:18:25.020 So, technically, the Pope is the custodian of the Shroud.

01:18:28.780 And that's because?

01:18:30.440 It was left to the Pope, not the Catholic Church.

01:18:32.840 And I was there during conclave, which was an interesting experience.

01:18:36.500 But I just don't, it doesn't seem to make any sense.

01:18:39.000 Do you think they're worried that it would turn out to be fake?

01:18:42.160 Right.

01:18:43.000 I think so.

01:18:45.420 I can't speak.

01:18:46.200 I don't know what's in their mind.

01:18:47.540 But just to be clear, so far as you know, the Shroud itself, the actual linen cloth,

01:18:54.520 has never been radiocarbon dated, just the patch.

01:18:57.560 Just the upper left corner, which is a contaminated sample.

01:19:00.760 So, it was the patched sample, not a fine linen sample.

01:19:06.060 Yeah, so not the real thing.

01:19:08.400 And that's not just me.

01:19:09.500 That's Paulo de Lazaro.

01:19:10.680 That's Bruno Barbaras.

01:19:11.960 I mean, there's Ray Rogers.

01:19:13.460 I would encourage people to study these scientists for themselves.

01:19:15.160 Is there any way, doesn't radiocarbon dating destroy the sample?

01:19:19.100 Yes, absolutely.

01:19:19.720 Right.

01:19:20.160 So, I mean, that-

01:19:21.560 I mean, 25% of CR14 dating is thrown out anyways.

01:19:25.280 So, my area of specialty is paleography and codicology, how we date Bible manuscripts.

01:19:30.660 And we date Bible manuscripts through paleography, not through carbon dating.

01:19:34.200 We date it through handwriting styles to get a date range for roughly 100 years to date Bible

01:19:38.840 manuscripts.

01:19:39.220 We don't do that because, to your point excellently, it destroys the actual artifact.

01:19:44.440 Is there any other way to date it?

01:19:46.580 Yes.

01:19:47.040 In fact, it's been dated.

01:19:48.000 That's the thing.

01:19:48.780 Again, thank you so much for asking these questions, Tucker.

01:19:51.420 It has been dated in four other scientific ways that conclusively all show that it's a first

01:19:57.660 century artifact.

01:19:59.160 We have breaking news on your show.

01:20:00.620 Wide-angle X-ray scattering out of the Institute of Crystallography in Rome has shown that the

01:20:07.220 shroud has been getting old.

01:20:09.220 It's been decomposing.

01:20:11.140 It's been degenerating for 2,000 years.

01:20:14.320 They took a sample of a shroud from Masada that's conclusively dated to AD 70, and they

01:20:19.600 compared the shroud of Turin using wide-angle waxes, wide-angle X-ray scattering.

01:20:25.060 This is the Institute of Crystallography, and what they found is that the samples have both

01:20:29.200 been getting old at the same time for 2,000 years.

01:20:32.060 So, it's not been getting old for 700 years.

01:20:34.300 It's been getting old for 2,000 years.

01:20:36.080 There was another study done.

01:20:38.480 Linen is made from flax, and it has a substance called vanillin in it, vanillin.

01:20:44.080 And it takes hundreds, if not thousands of years for there to be no trace elements of

01:20:50.500 vanillin in the fine linen.

01:20:52.900 Guess how much vanillin there is in the Shroud of Turin?

01:20:56.500 Zero.

01:20:57.660 So, if it was 700 years old, there would still be traces of vanillin chemically.

01:21:01.880 There's no vanillin in the shroud.

01:21:04.420 So, I don't want to bore you with these details, but they're very important.

01:21:08.140 They're not boring at all.

01:21:08.680 There have been other scientific studies that have been suppressed that can, all of

01:21:14.840 the other studies, to answer your question, have proven that the Shroud is 2,000 years

01:21:18.900 old from a scientific standpoint.

01:21:21.360 I think it's pretty wild that the authorities, the British Museum, is that what you said?

01:21:26.500 Right.

01:21:27.640 Would hide relevant data.

01:21:30.460 Suppress it for 29 years.

01:21:32.160 I mean, the professor.

01:21:33.560 How can you do, how is that science?

01:21:35.280 How, I don't understand.

01:21:36.440 One of the lab officials, Tucker, I mean, this is all, I mean, if people just read for

01:21:41.800 themselves and think for themselves, I mean, one of the professors who wrote on the chalkboard

01:21:47.740 1260 to 1390 was given a $5 million endowed shared right after this announcement in 1988.

01:21:54.960 By whom?

01:21:56.520 By his cabal that was backing him.

01:22:00.560 Huh.

01:22:01.320 So, again, people need to follow where the evidence leads.

01:22:04.200 And, again, I'm following forensic science.

01:22:06.640 I'm following the iconography.

01:22:07.900 I'm following, I mean, the blood samples alone, the hematology.

01:22:11.520 If we wanted to fake the Shroud, do you realize we'd have to kill someone?

01:22:15.100 We would have to get blood, premortem blood, and then we would have to stab them in the

01:22:19.140 heart and get postmortem blood and translucent pulmonary edema and smear that.

01:22:24.300 I mean, and then we'd have to know that there are certain plants that only bloom in Jerusalem

01:22:29.440 in April, we would then have to get, we'd have to know the provenance of the Shroud.

01:22:33.540 I mean, there's over 30 things a hoaxer would have to know to fake the Shroud.

01:22:37.260 And then you'd have to apply it in some unknown fashion.

01:22:40.260 Right.

01:22:40.400 It cannot be replicated even now.

01:22:41.960 And then we would have to know how do we change two microns deep, so surface level.

01:22:48.320 And, you know, every, so we have a traveling exhibit right now that we're doing where I

01:22:51.740 have 50 artifacts that show these things through infographics.

01:22:55.140 And we have panel 13 in our traveling, who is the man of the Shroud exhibit, shows each

01:23:00.720 fiber, each thread has around 250 to 200 fibers.

01:23:05.840 So you think about 0.2 microns of each fiber of each thread.

01:23:12.000 I mean, that's how superficial the image is.

01:23:14.040 We couldn't fake that.

01:23:15.420 No one can.

01:23:16.200 We don't have the technology to do that.

01:23:18.320 But I just, I'm fixated on the idea that the custodians of the science around this at

01:23:25.380 the British Museum, which is the most famous museum in the world, whose job is to search

01:23:29.960 for the truth, that's what science is, the pursuit of truth, that they would hide facts

01:23:36.740 and mislead the public on purpose.

01:23:39.300 So that, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised because this is a religious artifact that speaks

01:23:45.280 to the veracity of the world's greatest religion, which has many opponents.

01:23:48.840 Exactly.

01:23:49.620 So it does raise questions about other archaeological finds that are relevant to Christianity.

01:23:58.140 And the big one, of course, are the Qumran scrolls.

01:24:01.200 The Dead Sea Scrolls found right after the Second World War by a shepherd.

01:24:06.140 1948.

01:24:06.960 A Bedouin.

01:24:07.940 Yeah.

01:24:08.300 A Bedouin shepherd boy throws a stone into a cave.

01:24:11.000 Here's this, something pottery breaking, goes up there in all these jars with these scrolls

01:24:15.220 in them.

01:24:16.480 That, of course, was the same year that Israel became a nation, 1948, and they become the

01:24:22.060 custody, or some of them become the custody of the Israeli government.

01:24:26.400 And they're written right around the time of Jesus, probably a little before, correct

01:24:30.320 me if I'm wrong on the facts here.

01:24:31.520 250 BC.

01:24:32.240 250 BC.

01:24:33.660 This monastic community called the Qumran community in Qumran.

01:24:36.360 Right.

01:24:36.560 And they're, you know, many portions of what we refer to as the Old Testament.

01:24:41.800 At least that's what we've been told.

01:24:42.760 But then I've always wondered, like, these are in the custody largely of a government.

01:24:48.720 And they slow rolled.

01:24:50.840 I mean, they could just, like, take pictures of every single fragment and put them on the

01:24:54.640 internet.

01:24:55.120 Right.

01:24:55.520 And anyway, there are a lot of questions.

01:24:57.540 But my main question to you, I think you know something about this, is do we have all

01:25:02.300 the Qumran scrolls, like, that are in custody?

01:25:06.180 Are they available to the public and to scholars?

01:25:09.320 No, because they keep coming to light.

01:25:10.600 I mean, there's the Cairo Geniza fragments.

01:25:12.420 So there's also Dead Sea scrolls outside of the Dead Sea, if that makes sense.

01:25:16.080 So, like, there's the Cairo Geniza fragments.

01:25:19.540 There's, this brings up a great question.

01:25:22.300 I mean, the antiquity of all artifacts is sketchy, to be clear.

01:25:26.180 And, you know, when you look at the great artifacts from history, how people come into

01:25:30.600 control of these artifacts, there's a lot of money involved.

01:25:33.500 There's a lot of corruption involved, candidly.

01:25:35.700 But could it be, is it plausible or is there any evidence that scripture from the Qumran

01:25:43.060 cache, the Dead Sea Scrolls, has been suppressed?

01:25:48.240 Oh, certainly.

01:25:49.200 Absolutely.

01:25:49.800 Certainly?

01:25:50.020 There's, there's, there's absolutely ways in which all, I mean, there is a demonic hatred

01:25:55.840 towards anything biblical.

01:25:57.480 I mean, I've, I, not just in the Dead Sea Scrolls community.

01:25:59.980 I mean, I've seen this with all biblical fragments.

01:26:02.780 There's, there is a hyper skepticism towards biblical fragments that, a framework, a worldview

01:26:08.200 that we don't foist on anything else except biblical fragments.

01:26:13.680 You know, as long as they're available to the public, I'm okay with that.

01:26:17.380 Right.

01:26:17.580 As long as people can, you know, have the information, decide for themselves.

01:26:21.500 But I, my concern is that they're not available to the public.

01:26:26.280 Well, I worked in the Griffith Papyrology Lab in Oxford, which is in, formerly known as

01:26:31.180 the Sackler Library.

01:26:32.220 They took the Sackler name off it.

01:26:33.580 Yeah, they did, yeah.

01:26:33.760 So, but when I was there, it was the Sackler.

01:26:35.180 You're killing a lot of people, yeah.

01:26:36.160 Um, so now it's just the Ashmolean.

01:26:39.140 So in the Griffith Papyrology Lab, I mean, we have a half million fragments that have

01:26:42.580 not been categorized.

01:26:44.580 They've not been cataloged.

01:26:45.940 So, I mean, I say this as one who does this.

01:26:48.260 I mean, yeah, there are biblical fragments that have not been brought to light.

01:26:51.360 Why?

01:26:52.400 Well, I mean, it's a great-

01:26:53.440 It's hard to take a picture of them and put it on the internet.

01:26:55.440 Exactly, and there are great people doing it.

01:26:57.000 I mean, my friend Dan Wallace at the Center of Studying New Testament Manuscripts, their

01:27:00.440 entire aim is to photograph as many biblical texts as they can and to make them available.

01:27:05.180 So, there are great groups out there that are doing it.

01:27:07.260 But the hoops they have to jump through with these libraries and where these manuscripts

01:27:11.060 are located.

01:27:11.440 Why would it be controversial to take, you know, a 2,000-year-old fragment of scripture, take

01:27:18.340 a picture of it, and upload it onto the internet?

01:27:20.520 Why would that be?

01:27:21.340 Why would someone want to prevent that?

01:27:22.580 I can only speak to my experience, and so many of the papyrologists who I've worked

01:27:27.220 with, so many of the- those are people that work with the papyri, so biblical fragments

01:27:31.540 are papyri first, and then that was the original work of the scripture, and then, of course,

01:27:37.160 scrolls.

01:27:38.220 Honestly, so many of them-

01:27:39.420 So, papyri made from papyrus plants that grow in wetlands.

01:27:42.940 The early church was innovative.

01:27:44.200 It used something called a codex.

01:27:45.520 It did not take scrolls from Jews.

01:27:47.480 It wanted to have this book form with writing on the recto and verso, the front

01:27:52.540 and back of each page, and it was cheap.

01:27:55.700 It was inexpensive.

01:27:56.500 It could be hidden, unlike these scrolls that were- I mean, I have Jewish scrolls.

01:28:00.400 They're beautiful, but they're heavy.

01:28:02.140 They're hard to transport.

01:28:04.080 They're only written on one side.

01:28:05.920 You had to unroll the whole thing.

01:28:07.320 And they're made of animal skins?

01:28:08.460 Right.

01:28:08.820 Parchment.

01:28:10.500 Parchment would be-

01:28:11.180 Bovine.

01:28:12.240 They're all bovine.

01:28:13.020 They're animal.

01:28:13.700 They're calf.

01:28:14.460 Yeah.

01:28:14.880 Okay.

01:28:17.240 So, but any of this stuff is not- I mean, like, what would be the justification for keeping

01:28:25.480 it from the public?

01:28:26.120 Yeah.

01:28:26.700 Well, I mean, so much of it comes out of the Enlightenment movement of Europe.

01:28:31.400 I mean, coming out with what we called higher criticism, the German scholars, the height of

01:28:36.580 German scholarship in the 1800s, that Jesus didn't exist.

01:28:40.020 If he did, he was probably gay with a mortgage.

01:28:42.840 No, I get it.

01:28:43.640 I get it.

01:28:44.060 But-

01:28:44.280 And then you have this Pontius Pilate didn't exist.

01:28:46.720 And so, so much of that influenced modernity in a way that, I mean, has wreaked havoc on all

01:28:52.280 of our div colleges-

01:28:53.480 But I'm just saying now, 2025, if you have a bunch of scrolls that are found in a cave

01:29:00.440 in 1948 that speak directly to, you know, the world's great religions, is how can a government

01:29:08.280 be allowed to hide those from-

01:29:10.480 Well, you're immediately accused of being a sensationalist.

01:29:12.780 I've been ridiculed and attacked for bringing the shroud to light.

01:29:15.580 I mean, you're called a popularizer.

01:29:18.060 I mean, this is a very high-view, hyper-skeptical community that catalogs biblical manuscripts.

01:29:25.180 All you have to do is go to Society of Biblical Literature with 5,000 Bible scholars to see

01:29:29.240 how crazy some of these people are.

01:29:30.880 I'm sure-

01:29:31.500 There is a hatred towards truth.

01:29:34.340 I mean, the man who I defend in my thesis, I write about this in my book, Body of Proof.

01:29:39.120 I've spent three years studying the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus.

01:29:42.400 I've written a 93,000-word, history of resurrection belief in the Judeo-Christian motif.

01:29:49.040 And I come to my viva where in England, it's pass-fail.

01:29:51.740 So, if you fail your PhD viva in England, you can never do a redo again.

01:29:56.000 You get what's called an M-fill and there's no do-overs.

01:29:58.660 So, I come to my defense, Tucker, and I have a Bible scholar who did not believe in the miraculous,

01:30:04.780 did not believe in the historicity of the resurrection.

01:30:06.680 And he looks at me and he says, Jeremiah, do you actually believe the resurrection happened

01:30:11.760 or is that just imaginative storytelling?

01:30:14.460 Yeah.

01:30:14.640 Well, that doesn't surprise me at all, you know, that people who-

01:30:20.580 I mean, how many Episcopal priests believe in God?

01:30:23.000 Yeah, none.

01:30:23.640 None.

01:30:24.240 No, I know some who do, but like the minority.

01:30:28.480 Yeah, that doesn't shock me that they would-

01:30:30.820 You know, that corruption exists.

01:30:32.360 It's the suppression of information.

01:30:34.540 It's Wikipedia that drives me crazy.

01:30:37.940 It's gatekeeping information that prevents the public and interested parties, researchers,

01:30:44.840 from even knowing that that information exists.

01:30:49.100 Like, that is so sinister.

01:30:50.680 I'm a victim of it.

01:30:51.760 I mean, I was taught that the shroud was a Catholic relic and there was no science behind it at all.

01:30:57.580 I mean, I was taught that at the intellectual Jerusalem that is Oxford.

01:31:00.600 I mean, so, I'm a victim of this.

01:31:02.280 I understand it completely.

01:31:03.500 And I guess I'm numb to it, Tucker, that it's my world.

01:31:06.420 I've been in it professionally in the academy since 2009.

01:31:10.500 It's just a miracle if truth actually gets out.

01:31:12.780 And that's why I'm so grateful for your program.

01:31:17.160 Do you have hope that there will be further study of the shroud or do we not need any?

01:31:23.420 I'm doing all I can to make that happen.

01:31:25.120 This is changing people's lives, this truth.

01:31:27.520 Because when we look at this mystery, it actually reveals the message of Christianity, God's love for us,

01:31:34.240 and that he sent Christ to die in our place and raise from the dead.

01:31:37.000 That's the gospel.

01:31:37.940 That's the good news.

01:31:38.860 And that this event actually happened in history.

01:31:41.660 Jesus physically, bodily rose from the grave.

01:31:44.240 And there are great reasons to believe that.

01:31:45.820 I have another artifact I want to hand you, though, Tucker.

01:31:48.620 Yep.

01:31:48.820 I want you to hold the replica of the spear.

01:31:54.360 So, this is amazing.

01:31:56.280 This is a replica.

01:31:57.540 There's a weight to it.

01:31:59.140 Now, you mentioned that they did not break Jesus' legs, but let's make sure he's really dead.

01:32:04.860 So, they take this spear, this lance, and they stab Jesus according to John's gospel.

01:32:11.220 And remember, John's gospel, this is not a scientific or medical journal.

01:32:14.100 It says that blood and water came out of the body of Jesus.

01:32:18.540 Jesus is stabbed between rib five and six.

01:32:21.720 And we see that reflected on the shroud with the post-mortem type AB blood that pools just above that triangle,

01:32:29.460 right parallel with rib five and six.

01:32:32.760 And you're holding in your hand the spear that would have inflicted that punishment on Jesus' dead corpse by the Roman executioners.

01:32:42.000 Damn.

01:32:44.100 And so, the spear likely had an iron tip on it.

01:32:46.880 Exactly.

01:32:47.480 And it punctures about three centimeters wide.

01:32:50.900 And again, the scripture said Isaiah foretold it, by his stripes were healed, by his stripes were vindicated.

01:32:57.000 And we see that reflected in the spear, the lance wound, that Jesus body.

01:33:01.900 And we see that reflected on the shroud, which is just fascinating to think about.

01:33:06.000 Last question.

01:33:08.560 Are there other physical artifacts extant that you're satisfied are genuine, whose providence is knowable, that point to the historical reality of Jesus?

01:33:24.520 Oh, absolutely.

01:33:26.120 We have an embarrassment of riches of artifacts, archaeology.

01:33:30.260 This is the beauty of Christianity.

01:33:31.860 This is the beauty of our faith, Tucker, that our faith intersects with archaeology, where I often say that, and I say this in body of proof, archaeology is Christianity's closest cousin.

01:33:41.600 What's amazing is…

01:33:42.400 To what extent can Christians…

01:33:43.820 I mean, because all of this is taking place in a non-Christian country.

01:33:46.460 Absolutely.

01:33:46.840 And, well, I mean, I know atheist Jews who are archaeologists, and they use six sources to make sure their archaeological sites exhibit verisimilitude, that they're digging in the right place.

01:34:00.400 And you've probably heard of these sources, Tucker.

01:34:02.120 Are you ready for this?

01:34:03.460 These are atheist or agnostic Jewish archaeologists in the land of Israel.

01:34:07.760 There's around 100 archaeological sites at any one time.

01:34:11.120 Most of them are secular, completely secularists.

01:34:13.580 But they still use six sources to make sure they're digging in the right spot.

01:34:17.920 Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the Book of Acts, and Josephus.

01:34:22.400 So, if the critical archaeologists are going to use our sources because they're so good, I'm going to use them too.

01:34:29.240 But, I mean, why should we try…

01:34:31.360 I mean, if you have people who are, you know, opposed to Christianity, you know, is there oversight?

01:34:38.720 Like, are there…

01:34:40.500 Do we know that historical information isn't being suppressed?

01:34:45.080 No.

01:34:45.440 I mean, there needs to be more integrity to it, for sure.

01:34:49.000 Are there people who aren't attached to that government who are on the archaeological sites watching this stuff?

01:34:55.360 There are…

01:34:55.800 I have great friends who are there who have incredible credibility.

01:34:58.540 Like my archaeologist friend, Scott Stripling.

01:35:00.540 He's the lead digger at Shiloh, or what the rest of the world calls Shiloh.

01:35:04.480 He's in season five.

01:35:05.760 So, there's great archaeologists out there doing great work, but they're fewer and far between.

01:35:11.020 That's why we need more people to do what we do.

01:35:14.420 Jeremiah, thank you for all of this.

01:35:15.360 Thank you, Tucker, for having me.

01:35:16.580 Love your program.

01:35:17.320 Love you.

01:35:17.840 And this is a horrifying device.

01:35:22.200 Thanks.

01:35:22.800 Thank you.

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01:35:31.500 We know the people who run it, good people.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - August 08, 2025

Jeremiah Johnston： Shroud of Turin, Dead Sea Scrolls, & Attempts to Hide Historical Proof of Jesus

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