EWTN Live - Barrie Schwortz - Shroud of Turin - 2013-11-6 - Catholic History

on August 15 1981 at 6 p.m. in the evening Mother Angelica put EWTN on the air for the very first time and the first program aired what was that program and what was it about stay tuned and find out as we will discuss this topic further [Music] [Applause] hello and welcome I'm father Joseph Mary chaplain here at EWTN filling in on EWTN live for father Mitch Pacwa who was away and I'm happy to do so tonight because of the topic which has always been of great interest to me and to so many it is the Shroud of Turin the reputed burial cloth of Jesus Christ you know Mother Angelica decided to begin EWTN s programming on that first evening EWTN went on the air by broadcasting a documentary on the Shroud of Turin back in the late 1970s I was an engineering student in Chicago and I was reading a magazine about new technologies which had an article about a group of American scientists who had been permitted by the Vatican to examine the Shroud of Turin using the latest technology I was fascinated with the article and really have been ever since tonight we are happy to welcome to EWTN one of the men among that original group of scientists and researchers mr. Barry Schwartz welcome Barry now Barry where did the idea come from to form a team that would go and research the Shroud of Turin image well several scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories and their sister laboratory Sandia Labs had a device called a vp8 image analyzer and it basically you allowed you to put a photograph into it using a just a black-and-white video camera and that then allowed you to extract the information and raise and lower it and normally when you put a photograph or an artwork into the vp8 you get a rather distorted jumbled kind of result when they put a photograph of the Shroud of Turin into the vp8 they got the natural relief of a human form which shouldn't be possible right and it indicated immediately to them that there was something unique about the image on the shroud something that was not typical of any other images that any of us were familiar with and there were a bunch of imaging scientists involved in the group so that became effectively the catalyst that led these scientists to say look let's put together a team of experts in various appropriate disciplines and let's see if we can get permission and go to Turin and examine the Shroud to determine and answer a single question how was the image form ironically after five days and nights of examination two years of planning before we went and three years of reducing the data and publishing it afterwards the result was that we could not answer that question we could tell you what it's not it's not a photograph it's not a painting it's not a rubbing and it's not a scorch but we know of no mechanism today that can create an image with those same chemical and physical properties so this was technology that was being used by like the Voyager exploration so they were taking images out in space and they were translating those into 3d images and they discovered that this had a 3d property - exactly exactly there's depth information or like topographical information is encoded into the image and we had members on the team not just from Los Alamos and Sandia but the Air Force weapons laboratory the Air Force Academy and of course NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and interestingly enough my hero on the team Don Lin was the imaging project manager in charge of all imaging on Voyager and Viking and Mariner and Galileo projects among others so I was thrilled to be on the team with someone of the that you know I'm a photographer a professional photographer and a NASA imaging scientist is about as good as it gets some very prestigious people very much their own fields were going to examine this shroud yeah and I was I was very honored to have been asked to be a participant and how did that happen how did that come about you were invited I had done a project as a consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratories worked with another man named Don Devan and we finished the project it was seven months long and obviously it had something to do with atomic bombs we finished that project and I went back to my normal routine and a few weeks later Don Devan called me again and he said gee Barry what do you know about the Shroud of Turin and I kind of laughed and I said but Don I'm Jewish and Don laughs he said so am I remember and I'm oh yeah so Don asked me to be on the team and immediately I said no because I felt uncomfortable with the thought of being involved with something I perceived to be a Christian object or relic and I just wasn't very comfortable I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home very much like Fiddler on the Roof right like both my parents born in Poland the grandparents lived with us it was really like that so I was very uncomfortable but the image properties caught my attention and if I can just add at that moment the man I mentioned from NASA Don Lynn I remember saying to Don one day after he had joined the team gee Don what's a nice Jewish boy like me doing involved with the shroud and he looked at me and he was Catholic and he said Barry perhaps you've forgotten that the man in questions is you and I said no Don that's about the only thing I know about Jesus but I knew he was Jewish and he said oh so you don't believe that God would want one of his chosen people on our team and then I laughed and I said no no I didn't think that Don gave me the best advice perhaps I've been giving him all of my life he said Barry go to chiran do the best job you can do God doesn't tell us in advance what the plan is but one day you'll know those words were the words that kept me on the team and of course I've never regretted it and I'm grateful that I was able to before dawn past to thank him for saying those words to me and truthfully in retrospect I really believe that was God speaking to me through his voice and you really did not expect that it was something authentic but she would very quickly discover that had been painted that it was a forgery I was I unfortunately said publicly give us five minutes we'll find the paint and the brushstrokes and we'll go home it's 35 years later I'm still here still here and of course I would say within the first 10 or 15 minutes of the shroud being placed before us you know we photographers always carry high-powered magnifying glasses in our pockets I immediately started looking for paint and brush strokes and guess what there is absolutely none on that cloth other than a few microscopic particles of paint that came from copies of the Shroud that were painted by artists through the centuries and then permitted to be laid on to the cloth to sanctify oh I see and so if you paint particles would come off but in the images in the area of the image there's absolutely no more of those microscopic particles than there isn't an on image area that is not what forms the image on the shroud what was what was some of the equipment that you brought with you to examine the Shroud I know you said you what they were very you were very careful not to damage the Shroud in any way every test that we designed and we spent 17 months before we left planning and designing our exam every test was designed first to be non-destructive we didn't want to cause any harm to the cloth so rather than to find a way to fasten it so that we could raise it up and look at it they designed and fabricated a steel table so we could fasten the shroud to the table with magnets thus causing no harm ironically it had been on public display and when they took it off public display and brought it to us it had been thumbtacked onto a piece of wood and here they are taking out the thumbtacks and I'm looking at it and thinking all the trouble we went through to preserve it and they had already crucified the crowd oh boy so when you arrived there was a church involved in the research were they overseeing it and telling you what to do or eliminating that sort of thing at the beginning you have to remember first of all the owner of the shroud until 1985 was King Umberto the last Duke of Savoy of the royal monarchy of Italy he was in exile in Portugal but his family the Savoy family owned the shroud for about 600 years so our primary permission came from King Umberto he and his family had always had the church be the custodians the caretakers of it and so we needed of course their permission as well so we developed and created a 70 page test plan detailing every aspect of every experiment which they saw and ultimately approved hmm but as far as carrying out the research was the church involved in telling you right you can do this or you can't actually I was shocked at how they distance themselves away from us the King had an emissary there there were two priests there at Monsignor Cuttino who was the keeper of the shroud had several the keys of the three keys to the reliquary Monson you're Claire Mello who was the pastor of the Cathedral and they sat and observed they absolutely had no bearing on anything we did and they intentionally stayed back so that it would not appear that they were trying to influence the science and I promise you they had absolutely no impact on what we did other than to observe they were just observing so it's really faith and science working together to come to them the truth and of course you and I discussed this earlier but you know my definition I always hear this that there's this war between science and faith and I've thought about it long and hard and I came to realize that science is simply man's attempt to understand God's creation so why should they be opposed to each other but they're both leading us toward the truth right so we're not afraid of science that's right we want to know the truth scientifically and also the faith is leading us to God I agree and I think that for me the most important part of all this that has led me to do what we're going to talk about here in lecturing around the world and educating people to the shroud was that I was very frustrated when we came back and I saw the media reports I realized that my Christian brothers and sisters were not getting the truth about the Shroud of Turin that was very frustrating and irritating to me because I was there I was a witness to the event I was a participant and it was very frustrating to see how things were spun in the press that turned the the kind of the interest in the shroud away from the cloth and in sort of speculating that oh we were a bunch of religious fanatics and the science was not valid in all this and and frankly I don't think that any group of scientists in the world could have done something better than what we did in 1978 but of course by today's standards were very limited by the technology of the time what we had was the best that was available to us in 1978 what would you say were some of the findings that surprised you well I'm not certain that I was too surprised by much but there were a few things about the Shroud that were hard for me to grasp and the first one was something we noted almost immediately I was with Vernon Miller who was our chief scientific photographer a dear friend of mine passed away and Vern and I looked at the Shroud we stood next to each other and we saw that the blood was still reddish or crimson in color Vern had a lot of experience in forensic work and he and I both knew that old blood is supposed to turn brown or red or black rather not red and not stay red and that was kind of a deal breaker both Vern and I just kind of looked at it and when that's when I thought maybe that's paint but it turns out that the blood chemists on our team dr. alan adler and other jewish member of our team and a world-renowned blood chemist did the analysis and proved and you'll find me using that word only occasionally but we proved that the blood is not paint or pigment but actual human blood it had hemoglobin and porphyrins and other components of blood and and also dr. Adler found a very high content of bilirubin and that's commonly the case when someone is tortured over a period of time not given water body goes into shock the liver starts producing bilirubin and pumping it into the bloodstream and Adler had found a very high content of bilirubin in the blood hmm it's blood and if that's present in the blood then the blood remains react yes bilirubin is it's a hemolytic age and it breaks down the red blood cell walls and once that happens the blood stays red forever but I didn't find that out until 17 years later now you obviously believe in the authenticity of the shroud what are some of the things that you concluded in examining the shroud that have led you to believe as well as what you just mentioned but other things that led well as soon as I had the opportunity to look at it closely I realized my stupid statement about seeing the blood seeing the brush marks and going home was that was over with there are no brush strokes there are there is no paint or pigment and it didn't take me very long to put that idea aside but that didn't explain some of these unique properties the encoding of depth or spatial information or topographical information that's if you really look at it from a scientific point of view the only way that can happen is if there's some interaction between the cloth and the body it covers so that really forces you to accept that there had to be a body with the cloth covering it and so that was one of the important things but I'll tell you people often ask me what you know what was it that brought me over the edge well 17 years later it was finding out that the bilirubin caused the blood to remain red but I didn't know that for a long time I was pretty much convinced that the Shroud hat was most likely authentic but I wasn't completely convinced and of course until I found out about the bilirubin but there were so many things that when people asked me what was it that convinced me I only can answer all of the above what people don't understand is there's such a vast amount of information about this cloth now it's been gathered and it's almost overwhelming and ironically you know you think you're gonna go and you're gonna examine this cloth and you're gonna answer the questions and instead we came back with a thousand new questions and very few answers but we did eliminate painting and scorching and these or photographic means so all of those were eliminated but that didn't really bring us any closer to an answer as I said earlier the the evidence basically shows us that we don't know a mechanism that can make an image with these chemical and physical properties and we know where this shroud was from like the 13 50s or so we can definitively say where it was correct the the chain of custody the chain of its history is starts in the mid 1300s with an unbroken chain of custody until today the problem and of course this is what gives the skeptics all the ammunition is there are breaks in the history of the shroud and and what people often forget is this is a Jewish burial cloth with blood on it Jewish law says it must remain in the tomb so how did this burial cloth of a Jewish man how did it escape the tomb why was it not buried with the body and that's a good question because Jewish law says it can't leave the tomb so I have to share with you what my 90 year old mother said Jewish mother born in Poland not well educated you know high school emigrated to America as a child she heard one of my lectures about eight years ago and afterward she was very quiet when a Jewish mother is quiet be afraid and so I turned to her mother I said mother what do you think and she turned to me in that typical kind of condescending Jewish mother attitude and sister Barry they wouldn't have kept it for 2,000 years if it didn't belong to Jesus would belong to anyone else nobody would care right and I laughed I thought what a clever response the more I realized and thought about it I realized this was this was a very profound observation thus a burial shroud yeah and why did they keep it why was it kept now people often ask me why the Gospels don't mention it well Jewish law says it has to be in the tomb and it also bears an image which is also forbidden by Jewish law so the disciples could not come running out of the tomb saying look what we found it would have been destroyed and they might have been the next ones to be punished so I think that it makes sense this was hidden away and kept secret for a very long time so these breaks in its history provides all the ammunition in the world for the skeptics to deny it but there are many signs of it of claws bearing the image of Jesus mentioned throughout history starting at about the fourth or fifth century again in the ninth century in the 10th century so it throughout history there are references to a cloth like the Shroud but of course it wasn't called the Shroud of Turin until it arrived in Turin in 1578 and everything is anatomically correct right even before they knew some of the medical properties of blood whether it's coming from veins or from arteries it's correct that it's anatomically correct on this beyond anatomically correct since we are living in a kind of a CSI environment everybody knows all the buzzwords it is absolutely forensic ly accurate and the real experts who have studied it that are forensic scientists say that it is absolutely perfect that it is like studying a real crime scene and dr. zeig abhi whose book you're familiar with may rest in peace just passed away recently he studied it he was the medical examiner of Rockland County New York he studied it and studied crucifixion for over 50 years and the effects of crucifixion on the body and he said the only way this cloth got the bloodstains and things that it shows was by coming in contact with the body there's no other way hmm no artist could have done that and interestingly enough the bloodstains apparently were on the cloth before the image formed so if a forger was gonna make this he would first put forensic ly accurate bloodstains onto a blank sheet and then paint a body around it without paint right I don't think that's very very pus that we can say it's very impossible for anyone to have produced this right from you know hand thing to it this father we now live in probably the most image oriented age in our history yes everyone has a camera in their hand a computer on their lap we do imaging two-year-old kids are playing with images on computers now and yet with all that technology and capability no one has been able to even come close to duplicating the chemical and physical properties on the Shroud let's talk about the carbon-14 dating that was done in 1988 which many people said discounted it as a fraud well in 1988 a tiny sample was taken from the cloth it was divided in half and 1/2 put away and the other half divided in thirds and given to three different radiocarbon dating labs they applied their radiocarbon dating techniques to it they came up with three different dates within a range of a few hundred years of each other and based on that one test set declared the Shroud was a fake now in the real world of science if you have a theft if you do a hundred tests and 99 tests point in one direction mm-hmm and one test points in the opposite direction ask any real scientist in the world and they'll tell you they throw that one away sadly in the case of the Shroud all of the evidence that our team had gathered and it is accumulated from historians up until that moment in history was discarded in favor of one test that was not properly performed in the first place mm-hmm on a very poorly chosen sample but the world chose to accept that it was a fake based on that one test one everything else pointed in the opposite direction and that carbon-14 dating is not infallible it's not the gold standard although it's it is accepted as a as a valid scientific test for dating however there are certain objects organic objects that cannot be dated certain mollusks if you dated certain mullets you would get a date 20,000 years in the future so obviously there are some things about Carbondale that are problematic and critically important and I don't want to be critical of the carbon-dating process which i think is a valid process because in 2005 new data came out and new evidence came out that was published in a very highly regarded peer-reviewed journal that proved and again that's the only the second time I've used that word tonight proved that the sample taken for carbon dating on the shroud was anomalous different than the rest of the cloth and did not represent that cloth so it was not a valid sample for age dating the cloth they dated a repaired corner and when I say repaired it's not a patch that would be obvious was rewoven and dyed to match the rest of the cloth so it took experts looking at macro photographs of that area to detect the fact that this had been manipulated but three independent experts testified to the fact that this was absolutely manipulated have been repaired they dated the repair I saw the TED talk that you gave in Rome on the Shroud and you quoted the words of Sherlock Holmes maybe you could sure Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of my heroes when I was young I read everything he wrote and once I got the word about the Billy Reuben from dr. Adler and understood why the blood was read that was the last thing left so I applied the rule that Conan Doyle spoke through the lips of Sherlock Holmes who said if you eliminate all the possibilities whatever remains no matter how improbable is most likely the truth and with that axiom applied I realized I accepted the shroud had to be authentic at that moment in time that if you look at the totality of the data not just one rest but the totality of the data that's the conclusion at Legion and and see that's the point that that's what happened to me I had a long period of time almost 20 years to contemplate and remember I had access to everything I was a participant I had held it in my hand and so I think that it was the accumulation of data and not any one item but all of the above that was the answer to to what ultimately convinced me and trust me Father I was looking for any excuse to deny it I have to be honest I'm talking to a priest for our viewers you know at the shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament Mother Angelica has an exhibit of the Shroud of Turin and this is one more reason for you to come here and to visit EWTN and the shrine to see this life-size representation of the Shroud of Turin and I learned I didn't know this before the show that Barry was involved in that as well those are my photographs those are my our life-size backlit transparency photographs that I guess it was about 10 or 15 years ago I was approached by a mutual friend a gentleman who runs the Shroud Center in Richmond Virginia he had already obtained them for his shroud Center and he said that he wanted to donate a set of them to Mother Angelica because she was building a shrine in hanceville and so downstairs I've never seen it other than in a few photographs four of my life-size photographs of the shroud or on display and I'm thrilled to hear they're still on display there so they have photographs of the actual shroud and then also the photographic negative side by side correct so we have the natural color image so that people can see the way it looks to the eye and then we have the very famous light dark reversed photograph of the shroud as it would appear on a photographic negative because interestingly enough the image that's on the cloth itself is light dark reverse from what we're used to seeing meaning it's the negative when you photograph it onto film that becomes a positive and that is a much more natural image so the Shroud is the negative and the negative we make of it becomes the positive a little confusing I know but people are very familiar with it and I think they're showing a photograph right now the face compared to natural color face to the negative view so it invites any pilgrims I want to come and see that as well as attend one of the shows like our pilgrims here from North Carolina I also have here on the table this is a portrait that was done by our Polish Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration and you know Mother Angelica belongs to an order that was founded in 1854 and they have monasteries monasteries in India in Poland and Austria and the Polish sisters sent this image which is based on the Shroud of Turin that you can see the face of Jesus and so you would get a little bit of a glimpse into what Jesus look like from the Shroud and a portrait based on that you know ironically this is a man who died 2,000 years ago yet almost everybody in the world will identify that so that's Jesus and I think that that is very telling I mean we don't know how many people 2,000 years ago look yet everyone Christians Jews even Muslims can look at that and go oh that's Jesus why because all the iconography that started pretty much back in about the fourth century all the way through into modern times much of that iconography was based on the image of the shroud and we found similarities there's a crease under the chin of the man of the shroud just a crease in the cloth but it shows up as a line and it's some of the icons that line is there so it's an obvious they had scenes the shrouds you know now tell us about your website it's the most visited website for shroud information it's the oldest and the largest website in 95 I got a phone call from a friend who said you know that trout thing you're involved with turns out it's just a photo by Leonardo da Vinci and I thought he was joking I thought it was a joke and I said she said where'd you get that because da Vinci but the Shroud was being shown a hundred years before da Vinci was born he was a good artist but it wasn't that good so I asked him where did you get that information he said well my wife and I were checking out of the grocery store and there it was on one of the tabloids and it was at that moment I had an epiphany and realized I was privileged I was on the inside track I had access to the information I was participant I touched the cloth myself and studied it up close but the public didn't read scientific journals and they had no access while I was on the phone I wrote four words on the manila folder on my desk consider building a website in January of 1996 shroud dot-com went online mm-hmm it is now the oldest largest and most visited and most extensive website on the subject and I often hear from people you know you're number one on Google so I have to remind them we're five years older than Google so you have great resources like scientific studies that we're done in the shroud you have large images number of images that are variable there lots of photographs many papers it got so big I had to put a search engine on so I could find what I put somewhere got so large it has virtually everything there's a list of speakers there's a list of the list of Shroud centers around the world I can't even think of it all it's huge there's a huge book list the definitive book list of something like 1400 books that have been written on the subject are listed so it's really an extensive resource and continues to be a primary resource for those who wish to study the Shroud the idea being to preserve all this data so that future researchers don't have to start from the beginning again it's and so I'm very proud to have been able to do that and of course I never expected it was gonna grow the way the internet did when I started in 96 if you kind of geeks and you know computer computer nerds but those are the ones on the Internet then of course few years later it exploded that's wonderful well we're enjoying our conversation here with Barry Schwartz who was on the original investigating team for the Shroud of Turin and we're going to be taking a break now and then we'll take your questions and also those of the studio audience so please stay with us [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] hello again I'm father Joseph Mary filling in for father Mitch for EWTN live and we're having a wonderful conversation with mr. Barry Schwartz who was involved in looking into the Shroud of Turin a scientific investigation back in 1978 we have a caller Sharon in New York hello Sharon what is your question hi father hello welcome hi and what's your question - Schwartz thank you for taking my call as we all do so many depictions of Jesus when he was nailed in their shroud were the nails through his hand or where they through his wrist and my second part of my question is how tall was he good questions well first of all the greek word for hand does not exclude the middle of the palm or specify the middle of the palm or about one inch below so if you take your thumb and your little finger put them together it forms a groove called the thinner furrow if you're a Roman soldier and you've got to crucify a hundred guys today you grab the hand you do that you've got a groove you put the nail in it goes in practically just below the center of the palm in the fleshy part comes out exactly where it's shown on the Shroud what we see on the Shroud is the exit wound so we don't see the entry wound so there's a lot of speculation but if you're nailed through the middle and you're reasonably strong you could rip your hand loose if you're nailed just an inch below that and the thinner furrow between those fleshy parts you're not going to be able to pull your hand out because of the bones that are there but no bones were broken that's important now the height of the man is a good question because remember that the Shroud is a substrate that can change its size and shape based on the relative humidity that it's in and so it's difficult to measure and do measurements depending on you know the the humidity and temperature them in which the shroud is stored but the other thing is this unlike artworks that have a defined edge the shroud image fades out as the distance between the the body increased so where do you start your measurement where do you end your measurement so we cannot do precision measurements but generally except it is 5 foot 10 5 foot 11 okay very good we have a question here in the studio hello what's your name and where are you from Celine I live in the area in Birmingham I heard on a documentary that because of the negative nature of the shroud that the hair would have been white is that true I've heard that a matter of fact I know the doctor who suggested that the problem is this the Shroud of Turin does not contain any color information so from the data that's on the Shroud you know you can look at it and on a negative dark hair will look white why hair will look dark but that doesn't indicate the actual color of the hair we don't know the color of his hair we don't know the color of his skin the color of his eyes of course they're closed but those are the kind of things that that kind of information cannot be gathered from the Shroud one can speculate but we can't say that with any kind of scientific veracity great we have another question here in the studio hello what's your name and where are you from I'm Anthony and I'm from South Dakota and what is your question my question is since there's evidence of blood on the shroud can the blood be tested for DNA actually the blood was tested in 1995 in Texas the University of Texas Health Science Center by dr. Victor Tryon Victor he was a DNA expert he determined that the blood is male and human with normal chromosomes but he also said that the segments are so degraded and so old that it's impossible to get a full DNA profile and I always remind people that DNA analysis is a comparative analysis so even if we had a full profile of the man of the shroud who would you compare it to does anyone happen to have the provenance DNA of Jesus in their you know in their laboratory somewhere of course not so it's questionable because of the degradation in the age of it that any real value of any detailed information can come out of it and again then like I said who would we compare it with so although DNA is important the good news is this because there been so many stories and movies and TV shows about cloning Jesus or cloning the Antichrist from the blood of the Shroud can't be done you need a full DNA profile so DNA is not going to be a very important test to apply to the shroud any further because it's too degraded however that technology continues to advance and perhaps at some point in the future that might become viable we have another lady here with a question what's your name and where you're from my name is Mary Judas and I'm from Raleigh North Carolina welcome my question is how do you know he's a Jewish man well that's a great question actually well it just so happens that Jewish burial custom was very specific in the first century and this is a perfect match of Jewish burial custom so if you look at it that way and also you can look in the New Testament in the Gospels which tells us that they found the cloth they found the linen strips that had bound him into the shroud and they found the second cloth kept separate from the other because it also contained bloodstains and fluids from his nose and mouth those had to stay in the tomb and that was only typical of Jewish burial custom so that would be a pretty strong indication this is a Jewish baroque man a Jewish Burroughs route now your own father you talked about I did my father died in 2003 he had an Orthodox Jewish burial playing wooden coffin his body was not embalmed he was wrapped in a shroud but the only difference was instead of wrapping it with linen strips to bind the body and the side was sewn on either side and consequently it was like a mummy bag that you know that you would slip the body into but otherwise it was pure linen very much the same as the Shroud except that it was sewn on the sides we have a caller ray downing who has been involved in I know ray routes hello ray welcome to the program hi how are you did you have a question or a comment for our show tonight well the only thing that I have to say regarding it as I work with Barry on a television special for the History Channel and then Barry is the the best spokesman I think for the the shroud and believed in its authenticity and in spite of the fact that he's not Christian he's Jewish and so it's an interesting mix to have a Jewish advocate with the you authenticity of the shroud which is more than I personally could do my notion of from what I know of the shroud is it that it's the jury's out on it there's not enough information to declare it a fake not enough information say it's authentic and so what I did is the three-dimensional information contained in the Shroud dad I'm convinced of and I use the three-dimensional information as a blueprint as a map for making a portrait a new portrait of Jesus in 3d and that was featured on a to History Channel specials the real face of Jesus and Jesus the lost 40 days so a lot of our viewers have probably seen those programs right Thank You ray and say hi to Maria for me all right so Barry you've been involved in a lot of different programs on the shroud and news programs pretty much all the networks all the networks every what you want as a matter of fact this is my first time on EWTN and one of my friends said why did it take so long I said well I only go where I'm asked and finally I was at it so here I am for glads are here well we have another question here in the studio hello what's your name and where are you from hi my name is Mike stark and I'm from Lake Forest Illinois and my question is regarding the blood on the shroud we've all seen the passion or I assume most of us have and was quite gruesome and I was just wondering how much blood actually appeared I see the mark as you said the exit wound on the wrist but I'm wondering how much more blood there was detected when you guys did your examination of it it's a great question first thing I want to mention is that if you look at art depictions of the crucifixion from the earliest to the most recent you'll see that Jesus always is covered with a modesty cloth but not on the Shroud because artists have artistic license so did Mel Gibson when he made his movie and when you're making a movie and you're trying to get somebody to feel the horror of what was done you get up close and you show graphic rending of flesh Mel choose to use something called squatter peony which the town of the Romans did have but they used that that was capital punishment if they used that on you but Mel chose to use that knowing that it wasn't historically accurate but it served his purpose again artistic license to indicate and get the audience sitting in front of that screen to feel the horror of the moment as far as the blood goes you know there are theories there's a debate going in the world of the Shroud amongst forensic experts whether or not the body was washed now we know in the Gospels it says there wasn't time for a full anointing of the body there it was the approaching Sabbath starting at sundown so they had to stop and they were coming back Sunday to finish personally having a Jewish mother of my own I can't believe that Mary would allow them to put him in that tomb without at least a quick washing of the body and that's why we see the blood stains the way we do they rewetting and what we're seeing here is blood exudate not the flowing of blood because he was dead when he was wrapped in the cloth the other thing and I want to make quickly clear is that some people say dead bodies don't bleed but doctors agha be in his book showed a time-lapse series of photographs of body had come in for hours dead stabbed and he wiped them with just a wet cloth put up the camera and kept taking photos and there's a successive series of photos showing blood continuing to lose out of the body at least four to six hours after death hmm there's no sign of decomposition in the body absolutely or not yeah people often forget that they say that Jesus was in the tomb for three days that's three Jewish calendar days started on Friday but late in the day the Sabbath began at sundown he was there all day Saturday and Sunday morning the tomb was and it's about 36 hours okay and in that period of time under those conditions in a tomb there is no evidence of any liquefaction or liquid liquefaction decay because there probably wasn't adequate time for it so we don't see that on the Shroud that's actually very consistent with the Gospels that said that he was not corrupt or corrupted meaning no no decay well we have another studio question hello what is your name and where you're from father I'm Tim from North Carolina well and my question for doctor is have you done any investigation on the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe well first let me thank you for calling me doctor my Jewish mother will be thrilled but I'm not a doctor recently I was at a conference a special invitation conference in Jerusalem and attending the conference aside from a number of us who had studied the shroud including dr. John Jackson and his wife Rebecca who John was the founder of our team they wanted us there to meet with the folks from Mexico who had studied the tilma to kind of compare notes and we had a couple of days of roundtable discussion and they asked us to make some recommendations now I understand the story of the Tilghman I recognize how significant and important it is to the evangelization of the country of Mexico it was and as a matter of fact don't Wandy aigo was sainted yes so my suggestion was this let's study and determine the best way to preserve the tilma let's learn what material it's on they're not even sure they think it could be hemp because it's outlasted the agape material that they thought it was initially but I think that you know giving it too much scrutiny might disappoint some people and having seen what we've seen and studied what we've studied I would say this that you know some things perhaps are best left alone and my advice to them was and and that was why I was there was to give my put my two cents in my advice was let's study how to preserve it and leave it at that mm-hmm or you have another a caller hey Zeus welcome has Zeus and where you're from and what is your question I'm calling from New York and what I like to know is mr. Schwartz how has the findings of the Shroud and your experience with it has changed your life Wow okay well that's an interesting question in 1996 I built the website once I built the website and began to take a more public role in speaking out about my belief the Shroud was authentic the questions changed and people started asking me what I called the ultimate question what do you believe well I had walked away from Judaism when I was 13 I was it never made me feel connected to God but of course I was raised in that I was born that so I'm Jewish and raised in that tradition but at that age I was 50 years old when that happened I realized that to give an honest answer which I'm compelled to do if I'm gonna do this work I was gonna have to look in my own heart for the first time as an adult and consider what I believed I didn't even know how to answer the question well because I was raised in the Fiddler on the Roof Orthodox tradition of Judaism God was part of everything every day and amazingly when I opened my heart and looked in and was honest with myself about that for the first time I found that I always had a deep faith in God God was in there just waiting for me to acknowledge him so how many Jews can say the Shroud of Turin LED them back to their faith in God that's wonderful we have another studio question thank you for what's your name and where are you from my name is Joe Montone I'm from Yardley Pennsylvania and mr. Schwartz my question is right in line with the last caller what effect has your own investigation and conclusion to the Shroud of Turin had upon your own faith and the faith of your family well as I just said my faith basically I I didn't can think that I even had faith until I really looked openly and honestly inside my own heart I don't know that it's had much of an effect on my family typically people want to know what Jewish people think of this around and you know they're not very threatened by it many Jewish people and many of my Jewish friends have said to me you've studied it for 35 years you held it in your hand you've been part of the research you've accessed all the science and I've always said yeah you know I've had this privilege so they say well what do you think and I always say well i'm i accept that it's authentic they should good enough for us so my Jewish friends don't have a problem with it I've discovered in my travels that the biggest skeptics almost inevitably are Christians and that just baffles me but that's perhaps why I'm here to talk about this is to give them perhaps a bit more confidence that why would I do this what do I gain I'm not paid very well it's not about money father I do make a little more than you do but not much and so my point simply is the only reason I'm doing this look I I was greatly privileged to be in that room there probably a billion people on this planet who had more right to be there than I did but then for some reason God dragged me kicking and screaming and put me on the team and kept me there and so as I often say at the end of my lectures isn't it funny how God always pictured you to be the messenger I'm a mess so you really believe that God is calling you to continue to talk about this you know fathers you're trying to necessarily persuade anybody but him you just want to present the facts yeah I look I'm not that clever to a thought to do this I didn't want to do this I tried to quit a couple of times so so I actually believe that this is exactly why I was on the team it wasn't about making photographs sure that was the entree but ultimately it served I was there to collect everything put it all together and ultimately preserve it archive it and make it available to the public free no charge and I'm not sure if I got the last part of that question that you asked about I'm sorry give me the last part of your question one more time yeah that it's that's not something that you are trying to persuade and well necessary thank you yes yeah I I was approached by a gentleman in Canada after one of my lectures and he said mr. Schwartz he said that was a great lecture but you'll never convince me and I looked him right in the eye and I said sir what makes you think I even care what you believe that's between you and God take it up with him mm-hmm he smiled and I answered his question so you're just presenting the facts as they were collected giving a resource where people connect it would be totally inappropriate for me to get involved in in discussions or in presenting people with my opinion of how they should believe I didn't even believe myself for so many years I'm not the one qualified to do that my job like I said is to bring the information to bring it in an honest non kind of dramatic way to tell them the truth to let them know that the science backs up everything we found and at that point in time I always say look the Shroud didn't come with a book of instructions and the answer isn't going to be on it the answer to faith can't be on a piece of cloth but perhaps in the eyes and the hearts of those who look upon it yes I think we have time for one more call we have Joanne hello Joanne where are you from and what is your question I mean I was wondering if mr. Schwartz would comment on the mandelian in oviedo spain and its correlation to the shroud okay the cloth that's in Spain is the sudarium that's the sudarium of Oviedo it's been in Spain since believe the fifth or sixth century it is the second cloth mentioned in the Gospels in my opinion it is a head cloth the cloth that would have been wrapped around the face when Jesus was removed from the tomb and there's a an image of an on screen now and I was given the privilege of seeing that when I was in Spain two years ago they actually opened the reliquary and showed it to me and that is a cloth that I bet you'll find a lot about it on Shroud calm because I believe this is the one cloth that is related to the Shroud some of the bloodstains on the Siderius line up and match with some of the bloodstains on the shroud and if you look at where the fluids have stained the sudarium and lay an image of the shroud over it you'll see they match exactly with the nose and the mouth or so I believe that's the second cloth mentioned in the Gospels which somebody said well but there's two claws and ones in Italy and ones in Spain how can they be authentic I said you know to Claus over two thousand years it is possible they might have gotten separated but somebody was trying to use that as an excuse to deny both and I have seen it and I believe that there is a relationship I don't know that that's been proven scientifically but I do believe that we can at least look at that as a viable possibility for the second cloth well we thank you for joining us for this very interesting discussion on the Shroud of Turin has been a pleasure to have you bury and to get some of your insight on the investigation in the shroud and the current studies that are going on in your own website so we appreciate you coming here and telling us all about this and to remember dear family that this network is brought to you by you and we're able to bring wonderful guests like Barry Schwartz here because of your your contribution and your assistance in our work so please do continue to remember us and we would love to have you come and visit us here at the shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament where we have the Shroud exhibit and also the Lourdes grotto that you can see the beautiful Church there attend one of the EWTN programs here a Barry did you have any final words that you'd like to well I'd like to remind everybody if you want to really get into real depth study of the Shroud remind people to please come to Shroud calm understand that I may have founded the the website but I gave up the ownership of that and all of the photography and all of the materials and several of the guys who passed away their families left me their materials all of that has been transferred legally over to our nonprofit organization Shroud of Turin education and research Association or starin in and we are a 501 C not C 3 nonprofit so I don't want people to think that I'm doing this in getting paid big bucks to be on EWTN a father so I would ask people if they're interested check out the website and we are a non-profit so we can use all the help we can get great and you're busy traveling all over to present the truths about the shroud that you discovered correct wonderful that's my mission very good so once again we thank you for being with us tonight and let us remember today when I was praying with the EWTN employees we read of st. Paul's letter to the Philippians chapter 2 and there is a very ancient him where it says though he was in the form of God he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped that but rather he emptied himself born in a like list of men and he gave himself to death even to death on a cross and so that tells us the great love that Jesus has for you and for me and may Almighty God bless you the father and the Son and the Holy Spirit [Applause] [Music] you [Applause]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 137,307

Rating: 4.8761778 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television, Shroud of Turin

Id: wIUDaMatODM

Length: 56min 33sec (3393 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2013