The Shroud of Turin is a long piece of cloth that bears a ghostly image of a man, with what appear to be blood stains around his wrists, side, and forehead. The cloth contains both the front and back image of the man, and many believe it to be the shroud that Jesus Christ was buried in, and that the image was somehow left in the shroud as he resurrected from the dead. Although the Catholic Church has never officially endorsed the shroud as authentic, many popes have hinted at it. Pius XII called it a “holy thing perhaps like nothing else” and John Paul II said it’s a “distinguished relic linked to the mystery of our redemption.” Last year, Pope Francis steered clear of calling it a relic, and concentrated on its power to inspire, saying that it is an “icon of a man scourged and crucified” that “speaks to our heart.” Every year, around Easter, replicas of the Shroud are brought out and displayed in Catholic churches across the world.

Not unrelated is the fact that the church (and religion in general) has a public relations problem when it comes to its relationship with science. Viewers were reminded of this last Sunday when, in its first episode, the Fox documentary Cosmos (hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson) told the story of when the church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for simply believing the earth revolves around the sun. The Church later imprisoned Galileo and banned his works for the same thing. Galileo died in 1642, but the church didn’t lift the ban until 1822 and didn’t until 1992.

To improve its relationship to science, the Church needs to react harshly to pseudoscience—it needs to identify it when it sees it, criticize it, and distance itself from it as far as it can. And, more importantly, it needs to admit when it’s wrong in no uncertain terms. A significant step in this direction would be disavow the Shroud, to admit that it is a forgery, and stop parading it around. Why? Because the Shroud is a obviously a fake, the evidence for it is clearly faulty, and those who defend it are steeped in illogical pseudoscience.

So let’s examine the Shroud from a logical point of view. As usual, it takes longer to debunk bad arguments than it does to make them, so I’m going to make the case in three separate blog entries.

The Shroud is Obviously a Fake

Any biblically-minded Christian should know that it’s a fake. John 20:6-7 clearly states that Jesus was “wound in clothes” with merely a “napkin” placed over his face—not folded in a shroud. Besides, being folded in a shroud has never been part of Jewish burial rights. Likely with such knowledge in mind, Bishop Pierre d'Arcis and his predecessor Bishop Henri told Pope Clement VII that the shroud was a fake in the 14th Century; they even had a confession by the forger. This is also about when the Shroud first appears in recorded history: 1357 C.E. So its own history places its in question.

Just looking at the Shroud also establishes that it is not legitimate. First, the image in the shroud looks nothing like what Jesus would have actually looked like; first century Palestinians were not that tall, did not have that kind of hair or beard, or even that kind of nose. Instead, the image is more typical of how Jesus came to be depicted in art in the 14th century.

And speaking of the hair, the long hair seen in the shroud defies gravity. It is parallel with the man’s body, as if he is standing, instead of falling to the back of the head as it would if was the body were flat. Along the same lines, there is also an anatomically impossible flat footprint on the back of the shroud. (Source)

Shroud enthusiasts—“shroudies,” as they like to be called—insist that the image on the shroud was produced by some kind of energy (like radiation) emitted by Jesus’s body as he rose. But the image on the shroud could not be produced by such an event. (A) Radiation can’t leave an image in cloth. (B) Even if it could, since radiation emits in all directions, at best it would just leave a blurry silhouette, not a clear cut face with features. (C) Even if it could produce a clear cut face with features, that face would be distorted. A cloth wrapped around someone’s head lays flat against their nose, eye sockets and ears. If someone’s face somehow ‘radiated’ and recorded an image on such a cloth, when flattened out the cloth would depict whole representations of each part—nose, eye socket, and ears—all pointing in the same direction. Needless to say, this is not what the shroud depicts.

So, even without knowing how the shroud was faked, it’s obvious that someone did fake it. Honestly, this should be enough to convince any fair open-minded person. Of course, nothing I say will convince the “true believer,” so I might as well just stop here. But there is a lot more to the story. So next time we’ll look at the evidence, and even discover how the shroud was likely faked.