The Shroud of Turin: More Science by Press Release?
A recent discovery of a piece of cloth in Jerusalem has led to yet one more inane attempt to debunk the Shroud of Turin. Barrie Schwortz has nothing about this on his website yet, so I thought I would try to tackle it in detail.
The discovery in question is of part of the shroud wrapping the body of a leprosy victim in a tomb not far from the Field of Bood in Jerusalem, where Judas is said to have hanged himself. The tomb evidently belonged to a wealthy family and had remained undisturbed for 2,000 years.
Ordinarily, you wouldn’t think that the most important thing about this tomb discovery would be an ordinary piece of linen cloth, but it sure is in this case.
The most complete article I have found is the one by Mati Milstein in the National Geographic News. The headline trumpets “Shroud of Turin not Jesus’, Tomb Discovery suggests.” The story says:
“In all of the approximately 1,000 tombs from the first century A.D. which have been excavated around Jerusalem, not one fragment of a shroud had been found” until now, said archaeologist Shimon Gibson, who excavated the site for the Israel Antiquities Authority. . . .
The newfound shroud was something of a patchwork of simply woven linen and wool textiles, the study found. The Shroud of Turin, by contrast, is made of a single textile woven in a complex twill pattern, a type of cloth not known to have been available in the region until medieval times, Gibson said.
For the author of the article, this casts doubt on the authenticity of the Shroud — the linen is the wrong type, so the shroud can’t be real.
For all the excitement over this news, even the author of the article had some doubts about this point:
Assuming the new shroud typifies those used in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, the researchers maintain that the Shroud of Turin could not have originated in the city.
That’s perhaps a big assumption, given that there are no other known shrouds from the same place and time for comparison —though in one case clothing had been found in a Jerusalem tomb.
That’s right – only two first-century textile samples have ever been found in the Jerusalem area. In a place where thousands of people lived at the time, and where cloths of all makes and weaves must have common. No other shrouds have ever been found. That is a very small basis for declaring either that the weave in the shroud just found is “typical” or that twill weave could never have been used in a burial cloth in the area. (At the very most Gibson (who is quoted only indirectly on this point) can only say that the only twill weaves found in the area so far have come from medieval times. Other vague “researchers” cited remain completely anonymous.
How could anyone interested in the scientific viewpoint accept such blanket statements? (Answer: they are only acceptable when the purpose is to debunk Christianity).
In another story, archaeologist Gibson says (once again not a direct quote) that ancient writings and contemporary shrouds from other areas had suggested that there were always several cloths in a Jewish burial, including a wrapping around the head, and the Jerusalem shroud finally provided the physical evidence.
The article’s author takes this to mean that the Shroud, which is only a single cloth, is therefore a fake.
This is a very simplistic view, obviously made by someone who knows nothing about the vast amount of research that has been one on the Turin Shroud.
While carbon-dating in 1989 suggested a medieval age for the cloth, most sindonologists have always believed the wrong spot on the linen was chosen for the analysis. Just recently this was proved when fibers from the spot were analyzed and found to have come from a medieval re-weave. This seems to call for new Carbon-14 tests, which hopefully the Church will grant.
So the jury is still out on the age of the cloth. Nevertheless, the general consensus of scholars who have actually studied the Shroud is that the linen is ancient. Many details can be deduced about the cloth’s manufacture, and all of them, including the type of loom on which it was woven, the fact that the individual threads are hand-spun, that it was woven in narrow strips rather than a larger piece (in the exact way described by Pliny the Elder), the type of seam used on the side strip, which is the same used on cloths found at Masada – are identical with those of cloth woven in ancient time. Also the Shroud can be measured in exact cubits – an ancient unit of measure.
Herringbone twill weave like that on the Shroud has been found in ancient times (though unusual for linen). It was rare and expensive, but there is certainly no reason it could not have been found in Jerusalem, where goods were bought and traded from all over the known world at the time. In fact the Gospel of Mark says that Joseph of Arimathea “bought fine linen” for Jesus’ shroud (Mk 15:46). This suggests that it was bought locally, but that it was also expensive and not the ordinary material for a shroud.
In regard to the various cloths found in a Jewish burial, this new discovery doesn’t tell Shroud researchers they don’t already know. They have long been aware of what ancient writers say about Jewish burial customs. None of them has ever claimed that the Shroud was the whole of Jesus’ burial linen. It does represent the largest piece, the linen shroud that all Jewish people, rich and poor alike, were buried in. It is no surprise that over 2,000 years not everything that was present in the tomb was saved.
The Shroud itself has given researchers clues that other pieces of cloth were indeed present. There are bands where the image is absent between the side of the face and the hair, which suggests that there was was a cloth tied over the head to keep the jaw shut in death. A similar gap on the lower arms has been suggested as evidence that the wrists were tied together.
In fact, other parts of the burial linen may have been found. Some researchers have come to believe that the cloth of Oviedo, Spain was the cloth that covered Jesus’ face in the tomb.
Go here for more info about the Shroud as a textile, especially Sue Benford’s paper on the reweaving and Ray Rogers’ paper about the cloth of Oviedo.
