Transcript for:
Shroud of Turin Overview

What's the shroud of Turin? The Shroud of Turin is believed to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. 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. What is a burial cloth? Right? A shroud, which is mentioned in all four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, is simply burial cloth. It's a linen garment that a corpse is wrapped in. And in the Jewish tradition, similar to a pa, how a pa if you get a pa bread. Yeah. Literally, it just wraps from over your feet, over the head, and then back around the front of the feet as well. And that is laid, that's when the body is laid to rest within the burial shroud. That's a shroud. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] So you believe that this piece of cloth which is represented right there is that life is that the actual size 1 to1 14 ft 4 in by 3t 7 in or 8.8x2 Assyrian cubits which was the standard unit of measurement in the Roman Empire. 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 correct in that period in the first century in antiquity. Um is it a continuously woven piece of cloth? That's one piece of cloth. It is pure linen. Pure linen. What is linen? the herring bone weave. It's made from the flax plant and this has a unique herring bone weave. The only reason I know what herring bone is is my wife has a herring bone backsplash in our home that was very costly. So, it has this amazing 3 to1 herring bone weave which is indicative that a wealthy man would have purchased this this actual burial garment in his own pre-death planning. And that's exactly what we see is consistent in the resurrection traditions embedded in the gospels. Joseph of Arythea gives Jesus not only his own family tomb, a new tomb heed in stone, but he actually gives him his own burial cloth as well. Okay. And it says that in the gospels, correct? Okay. All four. So you're saying that this cloth represented right here, one to one, covered Jesus's body, the historical Jesus. And it's not a death cloth. I actually believe it's a resurrection cloth. Resurrection cloth. 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 Kuman. We have them from all over antiquity really. 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. How do we have hundreds of barrel claws from that period? 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. And so we have Josephus is a Jewish historian. Jewish historian of the first century. Exactly. And so when these tombs have been excavated, not only are 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 Msada and other places around the land of Israel. the climate being dry enough to preserve. Absolutely. Absolutely. For thousands of years. Thousands of years. 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 anti-date the shroud by 3,000 years. We have the Taran 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. Amazing. So, it's not a shocker that we have burial claws from antiquity. It's not a shocker that we have pure linen burial claws. The shocker is the image that's embedded in the cloth. Okay, I have many questions. Um, and I'll I'll ask my first question last, which is wait, I thought the shroud of turn had been thoroughly discredited by modern science, right? And we'll get to that, but let me just stay tuned. provide a partial spoiler by saying what is factually true which is no it has not been 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 this is an image of a bearded man a strong man a muscular man height of 510 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. Um, he weighs around 170 to 180 lbs. And since this is a contiguous cloth, it's not strips. We're not talking about mummification, right? The Jews didn't imbalm. They had to bury the dead on the day of their death. Um, and that's what we see consistent with all the first century or late second temple. They did not embalm. They did not embalm late. 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 that what became that first Easter morning which we know is April 5th AD30 um or April 9 AD33 depending on which year you go with. Women are coming to complete the the spicing of the body. Why? Because the body would stink. The body's in rigamortis. 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. What does it mean to spice a body? They would perfume it with myrr with alows because of Jewish burial traditions. Remember when when uh Lazarus dies, he's been dead for 4 days. And Mary and Martha are like Jesus don't open the tomb. The body stinkketh according to the King James version. Um well that that's why they would spice the body because for 7 days you mourn the dead at the family tomb. So you have to sit next to the corpse and the corpse is rotting. 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. Um it's always cut out of limestone and the tomb has different niches. So my the fingers represent the niches. that you would pray, you would worship, you would mourn the dead inside essentially a gathering point within the tomb of Jewish burial traditions. And there'll be slots cut these niches, right? And in those niches are these bone boxes called oushuaries because one year after your family member, your loved one died, you would collect the bones and those bones would then be placed in a bone box. This is a thing called oelagium. 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. 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. So okay, but of the thousand hundreds of thousands of shrouds like this that exist, why do we think this one can has an image of Jesus on it? because all of it matches the way in which Jesus was crucified and that's what's powerful about the shroud. Okay, for example, for example, on the shroud we have blood all over it. And the blood is interesting. It's been tested. It's typeAB blood, which is Semitic blood. And few the fewest amount of people in the world, only 6% of the world's population has type AB blood. 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 post-mortem blood all over the shroud. So that's interesting. So this tells us that someone died a torturous death, a death where um he was flogged. We see scourges. There are hashes all over the front and back images. 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 five and six, a gash in the side. Well, Jesus, we know from John's gospel, he is penetrated through rib five and six by a spear. And that spear, John says, blood and water comes out. Well, that's post-mortem blood. We know that that blood 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. And we see that all of this bears correspondence with what we read in the gospels about how Jesus died. How do we know that the man pictured on the shroud was crucified? That's a great question because there are crucifixion nail wounds. You can actually see in the four arms of the crucified man. We see by the way wrist, hands, the entire hand, it's all the same Greek word. And so Jesus, he we know that the nail penetrates through the wrist and the palm. And that's how the Romans would crucify their victims. In fact, we have 21 different um 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. You should be experiencing comfort every single day of the year and it should not be something that happens every so often when you get home from work. No, all the time, no questions asked. And that's why we recommend Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth makes bamboo sheets. Sound weird? Weird enough to try? That's what we thought we did and we're grateful we did. Bamboo sheets are actually incredibly soft, breathable, natural, and regulate your temperature without artificial means. 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Built for real life, made to keep up with your life. Cozy Earth. So, we know that crucifixion was a was a was an historical practice. Absolutely. And it's the best established fact of the ancient world. Jesus death by Roman crucifixion. What what what does that mean? Meaning that if we can't know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion based on the historical record, we shouldn't believe anything from history at all. We have as much evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus that we have from Roman empires of the same the Roman emperors of the same period which is remarkable. Where does that It is remarkable. Where does that evidence come from? It comes out of um all of the sources. Tacitus, Suatonius, Lucian. We have 11 different sources within and I always use what the most critical scholars use within a hundred years of the time of Jesus which his ministry begins in 26 to 27 AD. He's crucified as we said on that first Easter weekend April 5 he's resurrected. He's crucified April 3rd AD30. We know the exact date which is fascinating to know that. Um and then we have 11 sources AD30, right? And so we have 11 sources that talk about this Jesus, this crestice. He's spelled in variant ways, but they're all talking about the same person. This Jesus Christ who's crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate at the hands of the Jews. And that's written in Tacitus, Suatonius, Josephus. There's some remarkable work coming out with Josephus recently that Josephus, who we've already mentioned, the first century Roman historian, he would have had a firhand knowledge. He would have had friends who were at the trial of Jesus and he writes about that. He was not a Christian. No. So of those 11 obviously you got the authors of the four gospels who testify to this. You have Saul, Paul, you have Paul. Yep. Those are all followers of Jesus. But you have non Christian. Absolutely. You have hostile witnesses who give voice to the historicity of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Interesting. Interesting. So what does the face tell us? The face is remarkable. When you look at this, this is truly remarkable. So, let me back up for a minute. In 1898, the first photograph is taken of the shroud. Okay, remember photography has only been invented in the 1840s. And so, in 1898, when the shroud has been on display, the shroud has only been on public display a few times in its entire history. And right now, you have to see it through a private viewing. Very few people, this is the closest, this is what's so cool about our broadcast today. I This is the closest the audience will ever get to the Shroud of Terran. we're bringing today on your network. What's amazing when you look at the face is we see an actual image in Sakand Peio when he takes the photograph in 1898 of the shroud. There was no electricity in the church Tucker. So he had to bring in generators. He had to take flash photography. The exposures took 14 minutes and 20 minutes. When I was in Tur in Italy recently, I saw the actual camera he used. It looks like a dorm refrigerator. He used glass plates to take the picture and in the dark room. Now, Sakonda P is a lawyer and he's just a hobbyist photographer because who who was a professional photographer? No one in 19th century. And he's in the dark room and I want to show you what he sees using my cell phone. And when I speak on our tour events, I have our entire audiences do this. If you take your phone and if you put it in classic invert and you just bring up the camera and if you focus in, I want you to do something. I'm going to hand you my phone. I want you to focus in on the image and you're going to see exactly what Sakonda wild Sakia saw this image and he's a follower of Jesus and he believes he's looking at the face of Jesus Christ. Keep in mind he would be the first one to see the face of Jesus since the apostles. And what does he say in the dark room in 1898? Never more appropriately, oh my God. And so in 1898 he sees this is really it's so much clearer in this is photographic negative right the negative is actually the positive and so if you trace and go to the back I want you to look at the back of the image the head the blood the back all of those hash marks the abrasions I estimate there are 700 wounds on the crucified man of the shroud. No one was crucified the way Jesus was crucified in antiquity. The crown of thorns you ask. So you ask about the face. Aonda believes that he's looking at the face of God in that image. Of course, he was immediately accused of being a fraudster, a hostster. Uh because photography is so new, the dark room. This can't be an image, right? He had to have faked this. I don't understand just as a kind of physics question like how how would a photographic negative be clearer, right? Isn't that fascinating? I mean, that's the thing about the shroud. The the physics contradict the chemistry, the chemistry contradict the physics. That welcome to Shroud of Terran. You're being redpilled on the shroud right now. I'm being baffled right now. Um, so the image, what's remarkable about this image is that you have to stand at least 8 ft away to see it with the naked eye. As we are right now, the image vanishes if you get closer. It's hard to trace because the image is superficial. Tucker, I mentioned the blood earlier and there are pints of typeAB blood, premortem, postmortem, pints of blood all over it. I This was a very, very badly wounded man. So again, indicative of what we know of crucifixion, pints of blood, type AB blood. And then in addition to that, when you look at the shroud and you see this and you see all of the the image itself that's left, the im the blood absorbs all the way through the linen, but the image is superficial. Now, this is where you have to say with me. The image is only two microns thick. It is it does not absorb all the way through. So, if this was a hoax, if this was a work of art, if there was pigment, if there was dye, if there was paint, it would absorb fully. But if we took a razor to the actual shroud, we could shave off the image because it's that thin. And this is what the best scientists in the world cannot replicate. That's what's fascinating about the shroud, the image. There's no paint. There's no dye. There's no ink. The image is actually something chemically has happened. And we believe it happened at the moment of resurrection. 34,000 billion watts of energy in 140th of a billionth of a second. A physicist, my friend Paulo Dazo at Ania Laboratories right outside of Rome, spent five years, he's a laser expert. He's a physicist who works with lasers. And they were able to duplicate the chemical change of what happens with the linen fibers. 34,000 billion watts of energy at pick power. But the thing is it was a cold energy. It happened in 1/4th of a billionth of a second. And that is what changed the chemical structure to leave this image on the shroud. So that answers your question. How is there a photograph? Well, scientists doesn't know the mechanism. We we have no way to quantify how this happens. the best scientific laboratories when you look at it. Sandia Labs, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Lab, Ania Laboratories in Rome, the world's best scientist cannot reproduce this image that's in the shroud. It does any other of the many burial shrouds from the region and the period, do any of them contain images? None. We have blood on them. We have Hansen's disease, the tomb of the shroud. We actually had a leprosy. Yeah, exactly. that was discovered. The the Bible deniers said there was no such thing as leprosy, so Jesus couldn't have healed lepers. Well, we have a shroud that actually has leprosy on it. None of the shrouds that we have have this image, which you've just seen, which is it's mysterious because the shroud is the most liabout artifact in the world, Tucker, and that's why I so appreciate you having me on your program today. It is the most hated artifact in the world. It's the most liabout artifact. It's the most misunderstood artifact in the world. I have an allergic reaction to Catholic relics. There are over 20,000 relics in the Catholic Church. And a relic is interesting because it has this apocryphal history to it. And yet it can't be studied by the physical sciences. The Catholic Church has only two artifacts now that we can call both an artifact and a relic. We have the shroud of turret because it can be tested through history, through sciences. We're going to get to the pollen spores. I mean, this is like a CIA CSI experiment. When you look at the shroud, it's amazing. And then we have the Sudarium of Oeddo in Spain, which is the facecloth that John's Gospel talks about that covered his face that was in the corner of the tomb when the disciples came to see that the tomb was empty that first Easter morning in John chapter 20. So, and that cloth also has human blood. Guess what the blood type is? Type A. You can't make this stuff up. It's mindboggling. So that wasn't that image was not really clear right to people until 1898. 1898 the first photograph and then in 1931 Andre the first professional photographer takes these highresolution images for his day and that sent shock waves throughout the scientific community. So much so that you have thinkers like CS Lewis. So I would I used to live in Oxford when I did my residency and I would often go to the kils to Lewis's home and you can go in the bedroom of Lewis's home where he the man lived the great thinker of the 20th century who was an atheist who became a Christian and I look up and above the mantle in his bedroom I can see it right now in my mind's eye he has onre's image of the face of the crucified man because every morning that CS Lewis woke up he wanted to be reminded our God has a face Jesus nar narrates God to us. If you want to know what God's like, look at the face of Jesus. And Lewis needed that reminder. And so if CS Lewis takes the Shroud of Turan seriously enough to have a picture of it above his mantle in his bedroom where he the first thing he saw every morning when he put his feet on the ground, I wanted to take it more seriously. Amazing. And he was of course Anglican, not not Catholic. Um, what kind of testing has been done? Scientific testing. This is that is such a great question. This is where I went from being a shroud skeptic because I was conditioned in Oxford in my residency that we, you know, we deny miracles. We deny anything supernatural. Um, Oxford is really a factory for creating apostate Bible scholars by and large. I can say that having been there and been in faculty of theology in Kell College. I know that's not popular, but it's true. I would often go home to my flat in Summertown after reading the Greek New Testament with my cohort and I would ask my wife Audrey, "Am I the only one who actually believes in Jesus in this group?" And that's okay. And I was conditioned that this this is a Catholic relic. There's no historicity behind this. It's a joke. And I was conditioned by that. And then I was scary where and this is why your voice is so important, Tucker. So many people they're d they know enough to be dangerous. They're Tik Tok smarter. They're YouTube smart. They have a sound bite, but they have no substance to their faith. And I want to have a substance to my faith. I'm a truth addict. I follow truth wherever it leads. And my pastor, Jack Graham, began encouraging me to just look into the primary sources for the shroud. Not to pay attention to the to the blogosphere, but to pay attention to what what do the scientists actually tell us? And once I began to look at the scientific studies that undergur all of the facts I'm sharing with you, I remember being it took my breath away. the evidence was so compelling. So to answer your excellent question, given that framework, 102 scientific disciplines have studied the shroud and produced peer-reviewed journals, studies, and cases for all the different aspects. And when I So when I tell you it's the most studied artifact in the world, I mean it. 102 academic disciplines have spent 600,000 scientific hours like my friend Paul Dazo studying um studying the lasers like my friend Bruno Barbaris the mathematician from University of Turan not a theologian not a preacher great guy good friend of mine Bruno is a mathematician and he took all of the excellent questions you're asking me the correspondence of how do we know he was crucified how was he crucified what blood type crown of thorns nail print hands nail scarred side nail prints in the calccaneous the heel which is interesting we'll talk about that the scourge marks from and then the petibulum abrasions the cross beam when he factored all of those probabilities together Bruno Barbaris the mathematician said there is a one in 200 billion chance it's anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth one in 200 billion because I like my eyes because the physical the representations in this image track so precisely to the accounts Exactly. Not only with scripture, but with what we know of crucifixion from Josephus, from uh Pho, from all of the other first century historians as well. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's a cliche for a reason cuz it's pretty good advice, but sometimes it's not true. Cell phones are a glaring exception. You've got your cell phone, you've had it for years, you don't change. Sometimes your cell phone battery life fades or maybe your processor can't keep up. But your phone is bound to run into trouble eventually, no matter what the problem is. And replacing it early is much better and often far cheaper than replacing it too late. Enter Pure Talk. This month, if you switch to a qualifying $35 plan, 35 bucks. Pure Talk will give you a Samsung Galaxy A36 completely free. Literally free. Just 35 bucks a month for talk, text, and data. and you get to restart your phone life cycle without paying for a brand new device. So, it's a scamfree deal all on America's most dependable 5G network. It's like a cell phone that works as well as any other. It's just way cheaper and they're not scamming you. So, switching is a win for everybody. You save money on your cell phone bill. Pure Talk grows to hire more Americans and support more veterans, which it does. So, go to puretalk.com/tucker to get your free phone today. That's puretalk.com/talker to switch to our wireless company. It's America's wireless company. It's Pure Talk. What do you mean? There are holes in his heels. Yeah. This is amazing. Can you describe crucifixion? What was it? What was the purpose? How did they die? Crucifixion was the most heinous way to die. It turns out humans are really good at figuring out terrible, tragic ways how to destroy ourselves. And crucifixion brings that to a fever pitch. The Persians likely invented it. Alexander the Great, who gives us the language of the Bible, coin a Greek, he also made crucifixion fashionable throughout his helenization of the world. The Romans come along and they take crucifixion that they learned from Greek helenization and they perfect it for 700 years. Remember, Josephus tells us that during the Jewish revolt, AD66 to 70, Titus and Vespasian are crucifying 500 Jews a day. And so, they were experts. Now, it wasn't wasn't like they had a crucifixion manual. There were 30 provinces in the empire during the time of Jesus. Remember, um we we have uh Pontius Pilate who's governor. We have first Augustus who is emperor and then we have uh the other emperors who followed during the time of Jesus. There's 30 provinces and the provinces would practice crucifixion in different ways but it was in the it was in the Syrian province where Judea was where it was partic particularly heinous. I already mentioned we have 21 different records of crucifixion with nail piercing. Nails were uh iron. I actually have a nail artifact that I'm going to show you. In fact, this is a great time to do that. I want you to hold the replica of the crucifixion nail. This is a crucifixion nail. It was circular on top and then it was actually a spike. It was an iron spike. And the Romans would drive this crucifixion nail through the wrists, through the palm area and then through the heel, the calccaneous. Our heels are very brittle. And so they had to be very accurate when they would pin someone to the cross. And they would likely straddle the heels on either side of what was called there. You have the pibulum and then you have the the cross beam. Then you have the the center vertical beam and the the heels would be fastened straddling the beam and the victim would be crucified completely naked. There was no loin cloth. I know we see that represented in in traditional Christian art, but Jesus would have been crucified naked because the Romans were saying something with this. The Romans were saying, "Don't ever defy us." You know, we are the truth. And remember, Augustus was called the son of God. And so when when Mark comes along and says, "No, Jesus is the son of God." I mean, those were sedicious words for the time because Augustus was called the son of God. When when Augustus gave good news, it was called the gospel. Christianity takes that term unelectus. It's it's uh not the gospel of the Roman Empire. It's not Pax Romana. No, this is the gospel of the true son of God, Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead. And so he's crucified and the Rome and so crucifixion was I mean the at least one gospel account describes the other men on either side as as criminals or rebels but malifactors who got crucified. Well, this is interesting. Um it turns out we really hate to crucify slaves and we want to do it in the worst way possible. That was the Roman view and so non-Roman citizens. However, we do have citizens like Antigonus, the last of the Hasminian rulers, who's a Roman citizen, but he defies Rome. Uh, this guy named Mark Anthony who becomes Augustus, crucifies Antigonus in a really dis despicable way. He actually beheads him first and then crucifies him. We have all of his remains. Um, it it's interesting because these crucifixion nails were thought to be something like amulets, felactories. They were thought to bring you good luck. And what's interesting is crucifixion nails were reused again and again. So the very nails that pinned Jesus to the cross had probably been used many times before that to kill other Roman victims because you know iron work is expensive, right? And again the Romans, you know, they were a slave machine. They knew how to kill people. They knew how to enslave. You know, 40% of the empire were slaves and so they had to know how to crucify them. And so you have this this slave crucifying machine that is the Roman Empire. And then if you were a citizen but you defied the empire, you would be crucified too. How does crucifixion kill a man? It's really interesting. Were women crucified by the way? Yes. In fact, they were crucified naked often facing in facing towards the cross just for pornographic reasons. How does it kill you? It kills you in a variety of ways. It doesn't kill you quickly. It it maximizes torment um while minimizing um the it actually maximizes the length of death and it and it prolongs death. And so when we study the blood work, so there are some amazing hematological reports that I've enjoyed reading thoroughly. When we study the blood that's on the crucified man, it bears correspondence with that Jesus there's high levels of creatinin which means he was suffering from kidney failure, high levels of feritin. His body had inflammation all over it. He was dehydrated. You read John's gospel. Remember in John's gospel, Jesus, one of the seven sayings, I thirst. He's dehydrated. We know that Jesus likely lost lost onethird of his blood volume during flagagillation. So he was dying of a variety of things. 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 ovdo the face cloth. It's six parts pulmonary edema, one part blood. Again, a hoaxer is not going to make this stuff up. I mean that it becomes so crazy pulmonary. So your lungs fill with fluid. Fluid, blood, and a mixture. In fact, there is a translucent um mixture of fluid around the side wound. We we looked at the side wound there uh between rib five and six just above that triangle which is really a patch from a burn hole. There's actually a translucent serum around that that again is consistent with what John's gospel said. Blood and water flowed out of Jesus because he was already dead. And so the crucifixion would prolong that. High levels of feritin, high levels of creatinin. Jesus is suffering liver failure, kidney failure. His body has inflammation all over it. I believe though that Jesus died of cardiac arrest, massive heart failure, congen congenital heart failure because he's has labored breathing. We know all of this from the blood samples. The New Testament um one account says that the his tormentors wanted him off the cross by the Sabbath by Passover. That's Deuteronomy 21 actually before nightfall. Before nightfall, right? So they broke his legs or they were planning on breaking his legs. They didn't because he died. And that's consistent with messianic prophecy in David Psalm 22. Yes. But why would breaking the legs of a crucified man hasten his death? A wonderful question. Thank you for asking it. 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. And you would just edge up ever so often while you're trying to breathe. And that would prolong your life. So if you broke your legs, obviously you can't stand up. So the point is when you're hanging by your wrist, you can't breathe. Exactly. And you suffocate. You die in your own blood essentially. And so you can't you can't do that. And so that's why but they come to Jesus even though they break 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 flagagillation. We'll get to that here in a moment. Um but they didn't need to break his legs because he was already dead. In fact, they're surprised. Remember, Pilate is shocked that he was so soon dead. Jesus begins the crucifixion around noon. He's dead by 300 p.m. The Jewish day would begin at 6:00 p.m. And so, they only have about 3 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 ft away from where Jesus was crucified. So, this is the coolest Christmas present I'll get this year. This is a leather Alp pouch logo right there. Gets on your belt. Made in the United States out of actual leather. If you carry, you can put the firearm on one side and a loaded tin of alp on the other. It will never be far from you. And it is legit cool. What does it mean that they carried the crossbar? What's the crossbar? That is such a great question. So, and this is what's so amazing when again I I don't privilege this. I just look at this through historical eyes. When you look at the back, the dorsal image on the shroud, you can see that there there are scourge marks all over it. But in the in the right shoulder coming down a at a diagonal, there are abrasions all over the back. We mentioned that Jesus, the man of the the crucified man of the shroud, weighed around 175 to 180 lbs. The pitibulum, which is just the cross beam, so they didn't carry the whole cross. They would only carry the cross beam. And again, that wood was scarce as well, by the way, in the Roman Empire. So that cross beam would have been used again and again for other crucifixion victims. And so Jesus experiences the scourging. And then he's asked to carry the cross. And that cross uh the cross beam, the pitibulum weighs around 125 lbs. And he can't carry it. He falls. And this is one of the most moving experiences for me when I was studying the the signatures of the pollen. We actually have not just pollen, but we have limestone and clay soil that is native only to Jerusalem and it's on three parts of the crucified man in the shroud. Are you ready for this? It's on the feet obviously because he walked barefoot. It's on the knees and then the tip of the nose. So when Jesus is carrying the pibulum, he falls. And he not only falls, he falls hard. He collapses and his face gashes the ground because we have in the tip of his nose actual soil from the land of Israel from Jerusalem. So the cross beam is the piece of wood to which his ar his right fastened his wrists are nailed and that's tied to the vertical post. Yeah. To match the Greek letter tow. So it would look like a capital T. We see that. And he's tied to that post but he's nailed to it. Make no mistake. He was nailed to it. Right. But the but the cross is tied. Exactly. Why why the letter toao? Was there a significance? There wasn't. Um the Christian movement makes it significant. We call the styoggram where you you write the letter toao and then the letter row. So the two letters and we actually see that used in early Christian scriptures. Um it's it's like an it's it's essentially just a quick way of saying Jesus was crucified. It's becomes an early Christian icon. 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. It's like it's like the rack or the exactly spiked coffin or but much but yeah but even worse because it prolonged the agony as long some would be crucified outside of Jerusalem. They'd be on the cross three four five days. So this was for the most reviled enemies of the state. Like there's no respect at all. This is not like executing a man by beheading or no firing squad in later periods. This is like for the this is for slaves, right? Insurrectionists, like the worst of the worst. And thinking about the heel, you know, you think about the first gospel message. It's actually called the pro evangelium in Genesis 3:15. Remember that first prophecy that that his heel um he would crush his head, but the enemy would strike his heel. And we know that the enemy did his best to crucify Jesus and did strike his heel. And then you look at that blood that was prophesied even as far back as Genesis 3:15 that Jesus would smash the enemy's feet head with his feet even though his foot was crucified and pierced. And we see that it did take blood and a lot of blood. And I think sometimes we can look at this so academically we forget no this was a real historical person who suffered this torment. It's just kind of wild if you think about it that the early church took a torture device, like the scariest and most humiliating of all torture devices, right? And made it the symbol of their religion. Totally. And I mean, again, if you Well, if we were making up a religious movement, we would never start there. I mean, make no mistake. I mean, if you and I No, because you'd want your god to be triumphant. You wouldn't want your god to be humiliated by certainly not crucified. not by some colonial governor and a bunch of absolutely local dumb religious leaders. Right. And I think the message in this and there are so many points of application. Many people wonder if God really loves them and they say, "Well, how do I know God loves me or if I send away God's love for me?" Paul wrote in Romans 5'8, "But God demonstrated his love for us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." And the shroud is a beautiful demonstration. And it's a great reminder that God gave his best for us, Tucker, when he sent his son. He didn't give us second best. He gave us his very best. 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? 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. He wouldn't like Why would he submit to some like ludicrous local authority and die with criminals on either side? It's like the opposite of what you would imagine. It's smacks of authenticity to me. Well, I agree with that cuz it's so not what you would expect. No, you wouldn't. And 2 Corinthians 5:22 5:21 says, "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might be the righteousness of God." 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. So in Christ and this is the beautiful message of grace. He could treat us as if we live the life of Jesus. And that's the message of grace. It doesn't make sense. There's not an equation that's going to help us make sense of grace. But it's like the early church decided to brag about its weaknesses, right? And that's the foolishness of preaching that Paul talks about. It's the foolishness of preaching. It's the wisdom of God to those who believe and foolishness to those who deny it. Walk through in clinical detail the torture that this man endured before the cross. Tucker, it's something I'm still learning about because it takes my breath away even though I've I mean I've I've published 250,000 words in academic works on the resurrection and on the physical torment of Jesus. I've published several popular books on it. I've talked about it and I can't get over it. Um because there is a there's a realism to it that reminds me of how shameful my own sin is. Remember but but pretend you're a police reporter here, right? So Jesus is with his disciples at night. Judas shows up in the bunch of olive trees are kind of standing around. Romans show up. Local religious stories show up. Grab Jesus. He goes on trial. Walk us through what happened. Absolutely. Well, it started before that. would have started before that night because Jesus cleanses the temple and he literally reserves his fiercest words for the rel the corrupt religious establishment. Notice that Jesus hates hypocrites. He hates corrupt religion. In this case, it was the corrupt Jewish priesthood. It was the corruption of what was happening and taking place at the temple that the money changers. You had to put all of your currency in the Syrian or excuse yeah in the Syrian or excuse me the Tyrion temple tax and they were ripping everyone off and they made God's house a den of thieves. Jesus clears the tables. That's a messianic sign. He's no who can do that but God himself. Cleanse his house. My house shall be called a house of prayer. And so that that's when they begin to decide to kill him. Who's they? The Sanhedrin. the 70 members of the Jewish ruling council ask Pilate to crucify Jesus under the reign of Caiaphas's uh who is that when after Jesus rolls into the temple and overturns the tables of the money changers and says get out that they're like we're going to crucify him we're going to kill him we want him dead and again they Pilate had to sanction that and so Pilate being the politician he was he says okay we'll do it and so Jesus is arrested he's taken to the home of Caiaphas you can go to this home today. It's uh the the first century steps that Jesus would have been led to Caiaphas's home. He spends his final night there, which would have been Thursday night. He is beaten. He's tortured. Um they they put a blind they put a blindfold on him. They began to hit him. They club him. There are marks on the crucified man where that are different from the scourging. He's clubbed. He someone took something that's the equivalent of a bat and struck him with like a rod. And that's when they're saying, "Prophesy to us, preacher. Who who struck you?" You know, because they blindfolded him. And then he is led um from there to Herod Antipass who's I you know, I find no fault in him. Send him back to Pilate. You know, everyone's trying Herod Antipass was one of he was the tetrarch of Galile Galilee. He was one of the Jewish leaders who was put in place by the Roman Empire who um beheaded John the Baptist. He was the one who killed Jesus's friend. He was like a local guy who was a stoogge of the Roman government totally but from Galilee. But they all came to Jerusalem for Passover. So this is not this is not unusual. And then ultimately Jesus ends up in Ptorium at the hands of Pilate. What's Ptorium? It would have been right off the temple mount this structure uh where the Roman where the Romans were headquartered to keep peace in the city. So, you have the Jewish uh priests and they have their armed forces that arrest Jesus like they're Jewish police and then Jesus is handed over to the Roman authorities to be crucified. And in John 19:1, I think it's one of the most overlooked, understated passages in all the Bible and Pilate had Jesus flogged. And if we read that too quickly, we just don't understand the impact of it. And that's why I've brought these artifacts for you. I want you to This is a fleum that we had commissioned. I want you to hold this, Tucker, and I want you to get it in your hand. It's a fleum. This is a flagrum. Okay. So, this is uh a wooden dowel with three rawhide lines coming off it and lead balls on the end. Right. And I have two of them because we know from the crucified man that there were two torturers. So Jesus is being whipped simultaneously by two different executioners. So the purpose of the lead balls on the end of the rawhide is is to inflict as much torment as possible. And so sometimes you would have flaggrooms with bone ends but um there are all these barbell shapes on the hash marks of the crucified man which leads me to believe that it was used in something just like this. So this is again a onetoone flum that the Romans would use. So if you If you hit someone with a length of rawhide and a piece of lead balls at the end, I mean, you kill someone with that, right? And this is where Jesus loses onethird of his blood volume. And I want you to understand something for the benefit of our audience. Notice how short this is. I mean, this is not like an Indiana Jones whip, right? I mean, there was a demonic intimacy to this torment. And the blood of Jesus would have been splattered all over the executioners. And so, they flogged Jesus. There are 200 wounds on the dorsal on the back image. So if we took time right now to count them up, there's over 200 on the back. There's 172 on the front. There is not an area of Jesus's body that has not been tortured, including the pelvic region. We have We do not We need him in the crotch with us again and again with lead tips. Lead tips. And not only that, take the skin right off a man's body with that. And actually um according to the hematological reports Jesus is we think his right eye was blinded. So there's not only we'll get to the crown of thorns here shortly. So hold your breath for that one. But the there's his right eye. There are wounds consistent with flagagillation. So we don't know if the guys were drunk or if they were just going to town on him. But they whip him 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 uh in the image of the crucified man. And also his left cheek probably from the rod beating at Kaiaphas's home is also hugely I mean it's like he's been in a heavyweight boxing match. I mean he can't see out of his right eye. His left cheek is raised and so this is the flagrum. So this was before his this was before he was sentenced to crucifixion before he was sentenced to death. Pilate again he brings Jesus after and again so 372 wounds that we count but again we don't have the lateral side. So again I want to reiterate he's probably there's probably 700 wounds on his body if you count them up and if you just you couldn't survive that long term, right? And this is where Pilate then fashions a crown of thorns and he places it on Jesus, his head. And let me set these so we can make some real. So that's the halo of thorns. No, actually not. Let me show you. I thought it was a halo because you and I, we've both been so influenced by early Christian art and specifically medieval art. But this is what took my breath away. And I want you to be careful with this because these are Bethlehem thorns. This is the crown of thorns. This is the helmet of thorns. This was not a wreath, Tucker. This was not a like a sweatband you wore around your forehead. They fashioned this diabolical crown of thorns, these Bethlehem thorns that when they dry, they're as sharp as nails. You can feel that. I mean, it pricks your finger right to the touch. And they ram this on Jesus's head. 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. 50 puncture marks. And so you can imagine and that's all that's all detectable on the shroud. Right on the shroud. You can see the back of the head that all of the blood pooling in the back of the head from this crown of thorns being rammed on his head. So Jesus has 700 scourge marks and then they slam this on his head and this is where Pilate brings Jesus before the Jewish mob and this is where we hear in the the Latin eomo behold the man pilot says and he's bloodied. How does he even stand? We don't know. His love compelled him to stay standing in our behalf. And this is the point you imagine seeing a man in this state. he will very quickly be dead and that it's not enough for the crowd. They begin to yell, "Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him!" Demons and this is where Pilate says, I should also note as a historical fact, he never did anything wrong. Like he was never even accus He was never accused of hurting anybody. Remember all of the false witnesses came forward when Jesus is in this this dummy trial at Caiaphas's home and they say, "Well, he's a bastard." Remember Jesus is accused of being an illegitimate child. um he's accused of blaspheming, of casting out demons by Beelzebub, by the worker, by the prince of demons. All of these false accusations are brought against him. And Jesus doesn't open his mouth. 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, right? He he could no sin. No sin was He's not even accused of it. Right. So, um Right. So just to put it in context, so it's they didn't even claim like he he killed a man in Reno, you know, shot a man in just watch him die, you know, there's nothing like that at all. He cheated people out of money or he, you know, kicked out the money changers and stole the money. Exactly. Nothing like that at all. Right. This was diabolical in every sense of the word as you rightly point out. And this crown of thorns, the first time I saw it was in Jerusalem and Tucker, it took my breath away. It still takes my breath away. So the reason that you've revised uh or you're going with the modern revision to the common halo of thorns is based on the blood record right there. Absolutely. The punctures, the wounds, the basically the pathology of his head and his face and the back of his head. And this is what be you asked, how do we know this is Jesus? Well, the cru the helmet of thorns leaves it beyond all doubt in my mind. I believe this is a slam dunk case that the crucified man is the historical Jesus without a doubt based on the evidence. If you were to recre if if you were to take the gospel accounts and Josephus and the the 21 total accounts of Jesus's crucifixion, which I think is accepted by everyone, atheist and Christian alike, as a historical fact, right? If you were to take all those facts from the record and try and create an image of them, could you create this? No. No. That's the fascinating thing. The best scientists in the world cannot explain how there's an image there and they cannot replicate it and it couldn't be replicated now. No, even with our best technologies today, it can't be rep replicated in any way. So, this brings us to I think one of the central questions which is the provenence of this. Where did it come from? What do we know? That's the fascinating thing about where this has been for the last 2,000 years. Well, it turns out there's a scientist, a criminologist by the name of Max Fry who uh was involved in the Nermberg trials, a very respected criminologist. He spent five years of his life, again, this is where I say 102 academic disciplines. 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. Max Fry, who's now dead, spends five years of his life studying the pollen spores on the shroud. What's a pollen spore? Pollen? Well, I have it on me from this beautiful state we're in right now. Yeah. From traveling here and all of the allergies here right now. Um, but there are 56 different specimens of pollen that Max Fry detects from plants. From plants, from plant life, botney. 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, right? 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. So you have pollen flowers that only bloom in April in the land of Israel and that pollen signature according to Max Fry those that pollen species we have 56 of them is embedded in the shroud chemically. What's fascinating is we don't just have pollen from the land of Israel. We have pollen that traces the provenence of the shroud from Jerusalem AD30 to Adessa which is far eastern Turkey where it's there for 900 years and then we have pollen from Constantinople the the Eastern Roman Empire right Constantinople and again the shroud is constantly um escaping the caliphates of the time. So it goes from Constantinople in around 1200 through Athens finally up to Liry France with a knight Jeffrey Desar who we don't he never says how he got it but he has it uh and then ultimately he sells it for two castles to the Seavoi family of France and then it's moved uh to Shawnbury France and it's under the house of Seavoi uh and then it becomes very political because the Seavois then uh relocate their kingdom uh 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 where it's so where as a matter of written record yeah great question leaving aside the you know the modern chemical analysis of of the of the shroud how far can we trace it back so we know it was where we can trace it first of course as I already mentioned the shroud is mentioned in all four gospels and then we We have Ucius who's the most respected church historian. He's at the council of Nika in 3:25 talking about the face cloth, the image cloth of Jesus. 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 Adessa where it stays for 900 years and we know it was there, right? Okay. So, and it's known by different names though. This is the thing that I want to say. I'm a huge Kansas City Chiefs fan. Kansas City Chiefs were not always the Chiefs. They were the Dallas Texans before they moved to Kansas City. It's very similar with the shroud. It's known by different names, but it's the same object. Yeah. The Mandelian, the image of Adessa, the facecloth. And as we continue to red pill ourselves with this Tucker, you have the pollen that matches it. You have the textual records that match it. Ucius, we have these other wonderful early Christian historians who are talking about this face cloth. When's the first written reference to it? Udycius, the great church historian. three four early 4th century early 300s right 325 AD is council of Nika so it would antidate that so early early 300s okay so and he's bishop ofius and keep in mind what is but hold on but just so as a okay so we know this has existed for at least 1800 years exactly so um the written record kind of the written record shows it so that's kind of not in dispute Right. So if this were a forgery, it would have to have been a forgery at least as early as the 4th century, the 300. Exactly. And so that right there kind of tells you like if modern science can't replicate this. Good point. Probably not possible in 20 AD, right? Ex not in incredibly not. Okay. So I didn't know that. No, nobody does. And because I was told by readers digest in the 70s. No, I'm serious. I first Yeah. Strange stories and amazing facts. It was a reader digest book that I read in 1980 in summer camp and I read about this and they're like this amazing thing and photographic negative but we know it's a product of the Renaissance or the late middle ages. False. But there was already a written record of it going back to the greatest historian of the early church who I was I was going to mention. He's in Cesaria. He has a library. We don't know the sources he had, but he had an incredible library. Yeah. So, he's standing on the shoulders of historians before him. And so, this is a long-standing historical tradition in the church. 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. 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. I'm not interested in the Catholic Church, therefore I'm not interested in the Shroud. The Catholic Church did not take control of the Shroud of Turan until 1983. Two years of probate court, the last king of Seavoi bequeaths the Shroud to the current pope who was Pope John Paul II at the time. And after two years of probate court, finally the Catholic Church becomes the custodian of the Shroud in the 1980s. So it was in private hands. So you said it was in eastern Turkey for 900 years where uh in Adessa which is which is um eastern Turkey 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've mentioned it keeps moving west. Exactly. As the Ottoman Empire rises totally and Islam sweeps over Yes. the the land of of the Bible. killed the bishops, the Bibles, and the buildings. And so, it's escaping that. So, it's amazing the embarrassment of riches we have from an artifactual standpoint. Um, and then when you actually look too, there's something else we haven't touched on. The iconography, the early Christian art, Tucker, I mean, is remarkable. On my social media, we created a AI image. My friend Doug Powell and me, um, Doug gets all the credit. He's an amazing artist. He imported the information of the face of the crucified man and compares it with the icon panto crotter lord overall which is at the currently at St. Catherine's monastery where it's been since the sixth century. This is an icon of Jesus. It's famous. When he put those two images, the face of Jesus in the shroud and the icon pantoer and cyani, he put that into midjourney and created an AI rendering of what Jesus would have looked like. It is so moving. It's powerful to look at. It's interesting the face of Jesus on the shroud before us. Even at this distance, it it's recognizable as the Jesus from antiquity, from right the artistic representations of Jesus all the way up until George Floyd became Jesus in 2020. Yeah. Not the gayl looking Jesus of the medieval era. I mean, and I really mean that. If you look at Jesus depictions in the medieval era, it's a very effeminite Jesus. No facial hair, weak, small, a white Jesus. That's not what we have reflected. So again, if if we were a hoaxer in the medieval era, we would have created the Jesus of our time, which is this effeminite Jesus. No, what do we have in here? We have a a man's man, a long-haired man, a man, you know, we know Jesus walked 20,000 miles in his ministry. 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. This there was no Ubers or rid share apps. He was pound-for-pound a strong man, a physically fit man. And that's why he could probably take the brutality that he endured as well. That's such a that's just so interesting though. But the face is distinctive and the face is reflected through Christian art going back a long way. Like if you just showed me that that face, I was like, "Oh, that's Jesus's face." Exactly. The So the question always was like, "Well, how do we know what Jesus looks like?" And this is the Yeah. And so all the icons, what we call them is all the iconography, all the icons of Jesus, there's over 200 of them. They seem to have the same source material. And when you compare it to the shroud, it's like they all trace the face of Jesus off the man of the shroud. That's wild. And not only that, you have the numismatics. This is the study of coinage from the ancient times. And you have all these Byzantine coins that look just like the image of the face of the man of the shroud. Yes. So like what are all these people looking at if the shroud was invented you know like the liberal scientists want us to believe and the liberal Bible scholars who are apostate you know in the 14th century. So that's the claim this 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 so let's get into that in some detail if you don't mind. I would love to. So everybody remember so I mis I guess I misremembered I was told it was probably fake in 1980 but it was you're saying it was not until 1988 October 88 October 88 there was a carbon date radiocarbon dating of the shroud itself right before you debunk it if you wouldn't mind just explaining who did that right so the agreement was again the Catholic church did not take control of the of the shroud until the mid80s first If you don't mind, could I just back up to 1978, Tucker, to the original scientific research? So, I mean, this is amazing, which I'm glad we have this time. In 1976, and I'll get to it. I want to set the context. 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. It's a brightness map and they would use that to scan the impact of the nuclear bomb. So that's what the machine is. These are not pastors. These are not theologians. These are professors at the Air Force Academy. They get an image of the Shroud of Turin, likely the Enray 1930s image that CS Lewis had in his bedroom, and they put it through the VP8 image analyzer, and they realize there is a 3D there are 3D information encoded in the Shroud of Turin. No other picture does that. I want to make sure this sets in. There's 3D information. There's like a holographic topography brightness map of the man of the shroud that looks like you're looking at the surface, you know, geography topography of of there's like depth. There is depth. There's 3D. The way they said it analytically, there's 3D information encoded in the image of the crucified man. And when they put pictures of their grandchildren through it, it was just smeared 2D images. So no other image does this. 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 stur team, which consists of 33 scientists, 26 who went to Turin, Italy. They had 5 days. They had 120 hours to study the shroud. Keep in mind the Seavoi family allowed this, not the Catholic Church. This is controversial, but I don't believe the Catholic Church would have ever allowed the Shroud of Turn to be researched. And that's not my saying. That's Barry Schwarz, who was the documenting photographer who photographed the shroud in 1978. It was the private family, the Seavo, the House of Seavoi, who allowed this research team, 33 scientists to study the shroud for 5 days. Okay? So, they they took four years. They didn't go on Twitter, didn't exist. They didn't go on social media. Didn't exist. They took four years to publish all of their findings. And I use I haven't used this word yet until this point in our interview. The Sturrup 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." He wasn't saying that after 15 minutes of studying the Shroud. They all thought they had a free trip to Italy. They were in the lobby, Barry Schwarz, uh, one of the original STR teams, and I met many of them. Sadly, many of them are now dead, but they're meeting over drinks in the lobby of the Italy Hotel in Turin, which is a beautiful city to visit, and they're all joking that they have a free trip to Italy to debunk this hoax. No one was saying that a few days later. So, these 33 scientists publish, and they prove, this is the word I'm going to use. It's proven. The shroud is not a work of art. It is not a man-made image. They can't tell you how it's made, but they proved there's no pigment. There's no dye. There's no paint. They cannot explain how the image is there, but it is not man-made. So for the Christians out there or or religiously minded people who think that like we're we're we're uh violating the second commandment right now looking at this, we're not violating the second commandment, Tucker, so we can be at ease. What's the second commandment? Is you shall not worship a graven image. A graven image is uh by definition a man-made object, a handmade object. The shroud is not man-made. It's otherworldly. So we're not violating the second commandment. So that allows people and what's otherworldly about it? The 3D that the image we're here's the cool part about the shroud. I believe we're looking at the moment of Jesus's resurrection. Ultimately, all of this conversation leads that something powerful happens on that first Easter morning. It's electromagnetic radiation that's so powerful. We don't have this amount of watt power on Earth. 40 billion literally 40 billion watts of energy. But it happens. It's pick power. It's not like the power when you flip on. It took me a while to learn this. It's almost like a cold energy because it happens so quickly in a twinkling of an eye. It doesn't evaporate. That's what the labs the labs could heat up and and and essentially tattoo the shroud, but it would it would burn up instantly. It would scorch. This didn't scorch. It was 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 the pulse rate power 40,000 billion watts traveling at 140th of a billionth of a sec second we believe is that moment that Jesus body is resurrected and that's what leaves this image but whatever it was it was a process that chemically change the fibbrals the at a 0 2 depth which is surface level to leave this image And that cannot just for the fifth time that cannot be applied with a brush. No, it can't be duplicated. And it hasn't been. 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. 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 we know it existed? because contemporaneous sources described it. Then how how are they allowed to say it was a Renaissance, right, creation? Well, how are they allowed to say anything that's unfactual? They're liars and they hate truth and they hate God. Well, yeah, I'm aware of that, but like just on logic grounds, it's how could I know did anybody say, "Well, wait a second. We've been, you know, someone in the 320s wrote about this, right?" Well, they don't know that, honestly. The 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 Yeah. But if they're studying the shot of turn, you'd think they would have some grounding in the shot of turn, right? Exactly. So, um, so they do radiocarbon dating. This was the headline from 88 I guess, right? That it's a so that that So, thank you. So, that was the scientific launch to the So, then in the mid in the late ' 80s, um, they thank you for bringing me back. Um, it's agreed upon that seven laboratories would do blind research carbon dating of the shroud. And the scientists who studied it said, "Whatever you do, don't take the sample from the fringes because the shroud has been repaired." There's two things we're looking at, Tucker, that it took me again a minute to It took me a minute to learn all this. The There's these parallel those lines. Those are burn marks. Those are scorch marks. These 16 triangular shapes, those are patches. The shroud survives a fire in 1532. The nuns stitched it up with a with a backing cloth and um they also many where was the fire? Uh this was in Shawnbury, France 1532 before it moves to turn in 1578. So it survives this fire. It's dowsted. The the shroud has survived at least three fires. And so there are also water stains. You can see those water marks as well on the shroud. This is what's amazing. Like if this was a work of art, it would have diluted it. the image would have smeared or vanished. None of that happens. The the image is still, as you just saw with the classic invert on my phone, very apparent. And so, it survives all of that. But the but it it did come in contact. I mean, millions of people have likely touched this shroud. I mean, it would it would be brought out for baby baptisms. That upper right corner would be cut off. 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 cath my my castles. I mean, so it's known that aspects of the shroud were given out even for indulgences. So in the top left, you can see with the naked eye, anyone who pulls up the shroud can see it's it is a contaminated area of the shroud. It's dark. Um it's been touched a lot. It's the fringes of the shroud. And so it's there's an invisible weave there that many great scholars believe that was patched. And so the scholars said, "Whatever you do, don't carbonate the corners of the shroud because it's been so contaminated. It's a contaminated sample. Get in the middle of the shroud and carbonate those samples." So what did this community do? These seven labs that were supposed to carbonate it, actually only three labs did. No one ever answered why seven labs didn't do it. It wasn't done blindly. Three laps. Tucson, Arizona, Zurich, Switzerland, and Oxford, England, carbonate the shroud. What part did they take? The upper leftand corner that any non-scientist can see is a contaminated sample and they carbonated that patch. Exactly. Thank you for noticing that. Exactly. Are you're talking about the very top left. That's a different color, right? It's dark. It's That is what they carbonated. And then ironically, the British Museum suppresses the data, the raw data of the carbon dating for 29 years. Only in 2017 through a French attorney who I'm going to be with very soon, very soon at the International Shroud Conference in St. Louis. I encourage people to check it out. Um the French attorney through the equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act finally got the raw data released for the carbon dating. And what did they find? The sample that was used to carbon date it has cotton within the sample, not fine linen. The rest of the shroud is fine linen. That's indicative it was patched. So this whole bias towards the shroud is based on bad science and suppressed science. By the way, 29 years suppressed. I don't know that there was there cotton in Europe or the or the Middle East. I I for there was uh in Europe because they would use it for patchwork, these invisible weaves, these seamstresses. No. Right. But 2,000 years ago, yeah, this was fine linen. We don't have any other shrouds with cotton. This is the patchwork that was done in in in medieval Europe to protect the shroud, to preserve it. And so that is what the carbon. So if 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's burial cloth. And we have one bit of evidence to deny the shroud. This erroneous carbon 14 dating. Has anyone ever carbon dated the linen? No. No, it's not been allowed to be dated since. What? I don't understand how you could carbon date what's obviously a patch, right, that I can see. Well, we weren't even made aware of what was dated until the data came out. So, they knew that there was cotton in the sample, which just immediately disqualifies it. Exactly. It's a contaminated sample. And they knew that and they hid it for almost 30 years, right? We're sure. Welcome to Shroud of Turn Research. 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. And his debunk of the carbon dating got no traction. So, I'm happy to bring it up on your program and give him all the So, why has why not just take I mean, it's kind of a significant question, right? If it's um 2,000 years old, it Well, because the Catholic Church is afraid of it. And the Catholic Church has still never come out in support of the shroud. Are you aware of that? like they they they're ambivalent about it. They're indifferent about it. They they're only and I was just in Turin. So I'm thankful for everyone there who welcomed me. I met all of the scientists, my friend Enrico, the chemist who the shroud is now currently kept in what's called a reoquary. Uh a little about it's the exact size of the shroud. Uh the company, this is fascinating information. The company that creates all of the u materials for the International Space Station is based in Turin. That same company created the box that preserves the shroud. So where is it? In a church. It's it's it's in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in this reoquaryy, this box. You you can walk in and see it today, but it's a covered box and it's 99% argon gas because the two enemies of the shroud right now are light and oxygen. And so they're preserving it. So the Catholic Church has no interest in educating people about the shroud. Again, I'm thankful that you're having me on. Uh their only their only interest is in conservation. So they're conserving the shroud right now. Um, the shroud hasn't been on display in a since 2015 publicly. We don't know when it will be on display again. And yet, it's this key to the whole message of Christianity. I mean, it is the death, burial, and resurrection and an artifact. Nothing else does that outside of the Bible except I'm confused. Why would a Christian church want to hide what appears to be physical proof of the resurrection of the core story of its religion? Right. What what's the answer? I wish I knew who makes that decision. The Pope. So the technically the Pope is the custodian of the shroud. So and that's because it was left to the Pope, not the Catholic Church. And I was there during conclave, which was an interesting experience, but I just don't it doesn't seem to make any sense. Do you think they're worried that it would turn out to be fake? Right. I think so. I can't speak. I don't know what's in their mind, but but just to be clear, the the so far as you know, the shroud itself, the actual linen cloth has never been radiocarbonated. Just the patch, just the upper left corner, which is a contaminated sample. So, it was the patched sample, not a fine linen sample. Yeah. So, not the real thing. Correct. And that's not just me. That's Paulo Dezro. That's Bruno Barbaris. I mean, there's Ray Rogers. I would encourage people to study these scientists. any way I doesn't radioarbon dating destroy the sample? Absolutely. Right. So I mean I mean 25% of CR14 dating is thrown out anyways like so my area of specialty is paleography and codecology. How we how we date Bible manuscripts and we date Bible manuscripts through paleography not through carbon dating. We date it through handwriting styles to get a date range roughly a hundred years to date Bible manuscripts. We don't do that because to your point excellently, it destroys the the actual artifact. Is there any other way to date it? Yes, in fact, it's been d that's the thing again. Thank you so much for asking these questions, Tucker. It has been dated in four other scientific ways that conclusively all show that it's a first century artifact. We have breaking news on your show. Wide angle X-ray scattering out of the Institute of Crystalallography in Rome has shown that the shroud has been getting old. It's been decomposing. It's been degenerating for 2,000 years. They took a sample of a shroud from Msada that's conclusively dated to AD70. And they compared the shroud of Turin using wide angle waxis wide angle X-ray scattering. This is the Institute of Crystalallography. And what they found is that the samples have both been getting old at the same time for 2,000 years. So it's not been getting old for 700 years. It's been getting old for 2,000 years. There was another study done. Um, linen is made from flax and it has a substance called vanilla in it. Vanilla. And it takes hundreds if not thousands of years for there to be no trace elements of vanilla in the fine linen. Guess how much vanilla there is in the Shroud of Turan? Zero. So if it was 700 years old, there would still be traces of vanilla chemically. There's no vanilla in the Shroud. So, I don't want to bore you with these details, but they're very important. There have been other scientific studies that have been suppressed um that con all of the other studies to answer your question, have proven that the shroud is 2,000 years old from a scientific standpoint. I think it's pretty wild that the authorities, the British Museum, is that what you said? Right. Would hide relevant data, suppress it for 29 years. I mean the the professor how can you do how is that science? How I don't understand one of the lab officials Tucker I mean this is all I mean if if people just read for themselves and think for themselves. Um I mean one of the professors who wrote on the chalkboard 1260 to 1390 was given a $5 million endowed chair right after this announcement in 1988. By whom? By his cabal that was backing him. Huh. So again, people need to follow the where the evidence leads. And again, I'm following forensic science. I'm following the iconography. I'm following I mean, the blood samples alone, the hematology. If we wanted to fake the shroud, do you realize we'd have to kill someone? We would have to get blood, premortem blood, and then we would have to stab them in the heart and get post-mortem blood and trans translucent pulmonary edema and smear that. I mean, and then we'd have to know that there are certain plants that only bloom in Jerusalem in April. We would then have to get we'd have to know the provenence of the shroud. I mean, when there's over 30 things a hoaxer would have to know to fake the shroud and then you'd have to apply it in some unknown fashion that cannot be replicated even now. And then we would have to know how do we change two microns deep so surface level and you know every so we have a traveling exhibit right now that we're doing where I have 50 artifacts that show these things through infographics and we have panel 13 in our traveling who is the man of the shroud exhibit shows um each fiber each thread of has around two 150 to 200 fibers. So you think about 02 microns of each fiber of each thread. I mean that's how superficial the image is. We couldn't fake that. No one can. We don't have the technology to do that. I just I I'm fixated on the idea that the custodians of the science around this at the British Museum, which is the most famous museum in the world, whose whose job is to search for the truth, that's what science is, the pursuit of truth, that they would hide facts, right, and mislead the public on purpose. So that but I guess I shouldn't be surprised because this is a religious artifact, right, that speaks to the veracity of the world's greatest religion which has many opponents. Exactly. So um it does raise questions about other archaeological finds that are relevant to Christianity. And the big one of course are the are the Kuman scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls found right after the Second World War by a shepherd. Um 1948 a bedin Yeah. A bedawin shepherd boy throws a stone into a cave. Here's this something pottery breaking goes up there and all these jars with these scrolls in them. Um that of course was the same year that Israel became a nation 1948 and they become the custody or some of them become the custody of the Israeli government. Um, and they're written right around the time of Jesus, maybe a little before, correct me if I'm wrong on the facts, 250 BC. 250 BC, this monastic community called the Kuman community in Kuman, right? And um, and they're, you know, many portions of what we refer to as the Old Testament. At least that's what we've been told. But then I've always wondered like these are in the custody largely of a government and they slow rolled. I mean they could just like take pictures of every single fragment and put them on the internet, right? And anyway, there are a lot of questions, but my main question to you, I think you know something about this is do we have all the Kuman scrolls like that are in custody? Are they available to the public and scholars? Because they keep coming to light. I mean, there's the Kyroeneza fragments. So, there's also Dead Sea scrolls outside of the Dead Sea, if that makes sense. So, like there's the Kyro Chairoganiza uh fragments. There's this this brings up a great question. I mean, the antiquity of all artifacts is sketchy to be clear and you know when you look at the great artifacts from history, how people come into control of these artifacts, there's a lot of money involved. There's a lot of corruption involved candidly. But could it be is it plausible or is there any evidence that scripture from the Kuman cache the Dead Sea Scrolls has been suppressed? Oh, certainly, absolutely. There's there's there's absolutely um ways in which all I mean there is a demonic hatred towards anything biblical. I mean I've not just in the Dead Sea Scrolls community. I mean I've seen this with all biblical fragments. There's there is a hypers skepticism towards biblical fragments that a framework a worldview that we don't foist on anything else except biblical fragments. You know, as long as they're available to the public, I'm okay with that. Right. As long as people can, you know, have the information, decide for themselves. But I my concern is that they're not available to the public. Well, I worked in the Griffith Paperology Lab in Oxford, which is in formerly known as the Sackler Library. They took the Sackler name off it. So, but when I was there, it was the Sackler. Killing a lot of people. Um, so now it's just the Ashimoleon. So, in the Griffith Paperology Lab, I mean, we have a half million fragments that have not been categorized. They have not been cataloged. So, I mean, I say this as one who does this. I mean, yeah, there are biblical fragments that have not been brought to light. Why? Well, I mean, it's a great How hard is it to take a picture of them and put it on the internet? Exactly. And there are great people doing it. I mean, my friend Dan Wallace at the Center of Study of New Testament Manuscripts, their entire aim is to photograph as many biblical texts as they can and to make them available. So, there are great groups out there that are doing it, but the hoops they have to jump through with these libraries and where these manuscripts are living. Why would it be controversial to take um you know, a 2,000-y old fragment of scripture, take a picture of it and upload it onto the internet? Why would that be why would someone want to prevent that? My I can only speak to my experience. And so many of the paparologists who I've worked with, so many of the those are people that work with the papyrie. So biblical fragments are papyrie first and then um that was the original uh work of the scripture and then of course scrolls honestly so many of them so papyr made from plant papyrus plants that grow in wetland the early church was innovative it used something called a codeex it did not take scrolls from Jews it it it wanted to have this book form um with writing on the recto and verso the front and back of each page and it it was cheap it was inexpensive it could be hidden unlike these scrolls that were I mean I have Jewish scroll rolls. They're they're beautiful, but they're heavy. They're they're hard to transport. Uh they're only written on one side. You had to unroll the whole thing. And they're made of animal skins, right? Parchment. Parchment would be uh boine. They're all boine. They're animal. They're calf. Yeah. Okay. Um so the but any of this stuff is not I mean like what would be the justification for keeping it from the public? Yeah. Well, I mean, so much of it comes out of the Enlightenment Movement of of Europe. I mean, coming out with what we called higher criticism, the German scholars, um, the height of German scholarship in the 1800s that Jesus didn't exist. If he did, he was probably gay with a mortgage. Um, no, I get it. I get it. And then you have this Pontious Pilot didn't exist. And so, so much of that influenced modernity in a way that I mean, has wre havoc on all of our div colleges. Sure. But I'm just saying now 2025 if you have a bunch of scrolls that are found in a cave in 1948 that speak directly to you know the world's great religions is how can a government be allowed to hide those from but you're immediately accused of being a sensationalist. I've been ridiculed and attacked for bringing the shroud to light. I mean you're you're called a popularizer. I mean there there this is a very high view hyperskeepical community that catalogs biblical manuscripts. All you have to do is go to Society of Biblical Literature with 5,000 Bible scholars to see how crazy some of these people are. I'm sure there is a there is a hatred towards truth. I mean the the man who I defend in my thesis I write about this in my book body of proof. I've spent three years studying the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. I've written a 93,000word uber leafang gashishta history of resurrection belief in the Judeo-Christian motif and I come to my viva where in England it's pass fail. So if you fail your PhD viva in England you can never do a redo again. You get what's called an mfill and there's no doovers. So, I come to my defense, Tucker, and I have a Bible scholar um who did not believe in the miraculous, did not believe in the historicity of the resurrection, and he looks at me and he says, "Jeremiah, um do you actually believe the resurrection happened or is that just imaginative storytelling?" Yeah. Well, that doesn't that doesn't surprise me at all. Um you know, that people who I mean, how many Episcopal priests believe in God? Yeah. None. None. No, I'm I know some who do, but like the minority. Um, yeah, that doesn't shock me that they would, you know, that that corruption exists. It's the suppression of information. It's Wikipedia that drives me crazy. It's gatekeeping information that prevents the public and interested parties researchers from even knowing that that information exists. Like, that is so sinister. I'm a victim of it. I mean that I was taught that the shroud was a Catholic relic and there was no science behind it at all. I mean I was taught that at the intellectual Jerusalem that is Oxford. I mean so I mean I'm a victim of this. I understand it completely and I guess I'm numb to it Tucker that it's my world. I've been in it professionally in the academy since 2009. It's just a miracle of truth actually gets out and that's why I'm so grateful for your program. Um, do you have hope that there will be further study of the shroud or do we not need any? I'm doing all I can to make that happen. This is changing people's lives, this truth. Because when we look at this mystery, it actually reveals the message of Christianity, God's love for us, and that he sent Christ to die in our place and raised from the dead. That's the gospel. That's the good news. And that this event actually happened in history. Jesus physically, bodily rose from the grave. And there are great reasons to believe that. I have another artifact I want to hand you, though, Tucker. Yep. I want you to hold the replica of the spear. So, this is amazing. This is a replica. It's There's a weight to it. Now, you mentioned that they did not break Jesus's legs, but let's make sure he's really dead. So, they take this spear, this lance, and they stab Jesus according to John's gospel. And remember John's gospel, this is not a scientific or medical journal. It says that blood and water came out of the body of Jesus. Jesus is stabbed between ri five and six. And we see that reflected on the shroud with the postmortem type AB blood that pools just above that triangle, right parallel with rib five and six. And you're holding in your hand the spear that would have inflicted that punishment on Jesus's dead corpse by the Roman executioners. Damn. Um, and so the spear likely had an iron tip on it. Exactly. And it punctures about 3 cm wide. And again, the scripture said, Isaiah foretold it, by his stripes were healed. By his stripes were vindicated. And we see that reflected in the spear, the lance wound that Jesus body. And we see that reflected on the shroud. Um, which is just fascinating to think about. Last question. Are there other physical artifacts um extent that you're satisfied are genuine whose providence is knowable that point to the historical reality of Jesus? Oh, absolutely. We have an embarrassment of riches of artifacts, archaeology. This is the beauty of Christianity. 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 proof archaeology is Christianity's closest cousin. What's amazing is I what extent can Christians I mean because all this is taking place in a non-Christian country. Absolutely. And well I mean I know atheist Jews who are archaeologists and they use six sources to make sure their archaeological sites exhibit vera similitude that they're they're digging in the right place. And you've probably heard of these sources, Tucker. Are you ready for this? The this these are atheist or agnostic Jewish archaeologists in the land of Israel. There's around a hundred archaeological sites at any one time. Most of them are secular, completely secularists, but they still use six sources to make sure they're digging in the right spot. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the Book of Acts, and Josephus. So, if the critical archaeologists are going to use our sources because they're so good, I'm going to use them, too. But I mean why should we tr I mean if you have people who are um you know opposed to Christianity you know is there oversight like are there do we know that historical information isn't being suppressed? No. I mean there's there needs to be more integrity to it for sure. Are there people who aren't attached to that government who are on the archaeological sites watching the stuff? There are I have great friends who are there who have incredible credibility like my archaeologist friend Scott Strippling. He's the lead digger at Shiloh or what the rest of the world calls Shilo. He's in season five. So there's great archaeologists out there doing great work, but they're they're fewer and far between. That's why we need more more people to be to do what we do. Jeremiah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Love your program. Love you. And this is a horrifying device. Thanks. Thank you. [Music] So, it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show. On one level, that's not surprising. That's what they do. But on another level, it's shocking. With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars we're on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more. And that is totally wrong. It's immoral. What can you do about it? Well, we could whine about it. That's a waste of time. We're not in charge of Google. Or we could find a way around it. A way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive. The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel. Subscribe. Hit the little bell icon to be notified when we upload and share this video. 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