New Evidence for the Shroud of Turin w/ Fr. Andrew Dalton

your computer welcome to pints with Aquinas I'm here today with Father Andrew Dalton who is an expert on the Shroud of Turin and um I'm really pumped to learn about this because it was awesome to meet you several weeks ago in Rome and to have you give me and the batucinator uh Cameron batuzi um a tour I was really blown away so I'm so pumped about this episode yeah there's everything in that exhibit I could almost I wish we could like transport ourselves there um but I think it's gonna be cool also just to chat it out and have a conversation there's lots of stuff on the Shroud already online but I think a conversation allows to kind of tease out some things that maybe people watching will also want to ask about so hope that works um for those who aren't aware of you who are you um oh yeah I'd love to know about you know your expertise in this and how long you've been studying it okay yeah so my name is Father Andrew Dalton and I'm an American priest that's living in Rome I teach at a pontifical university and one of the things that I teach is shroud studies specifically the biblical Theology of The Passion of Christ according to the Shroud of Turin so it's kind of like the Pastoral and spiritual tool of but also the theology the theology that accompanies the sufferings of Christ as we know them uh by the shroud of turns so we can unpack that more but um I was there in Rome studying philosophy and Theology and bumped into the Shroud I really didn't think that I would specialize in this um my background was in engineering though like my strong subjects in school when I was a kid were maths and Sciences and then I just kind of derailed all that to join the priesthood when I was 20 years old and um yeah collided with this shroud expert who had written dozens of books on the Shroud spent over 30 years studying it and she her name is emanuela Marinelli and um she came to her University and this priest friend of mine said you have to hear her speak I said look I got places to go things to do I'm I'll sit in for a little bit but I'll probably have to sneak out after a few minutes and I was glued to my chair she was absolutely riveting I I quite literally lost sleep that night I was so excited to hear about the Shroud I was like how in the world am I 10 years of seminarian and I've never heard this stuff like the world needs to know it and um so I stayed long I think like three hours with emanuela um we've since become friends and have appeared on television together Etc we're quite close this is now like 11 years later probably because um that was the first generation of the postgraduate certificate in Shroud state do you know you could study this route for a year um in a pontifical university people don't know how much there is out there but this is the most studied archaeological object in the history of the world say that again for people the most studied archaeological object in the history of the world and so when it comes to historical events like the what you're looking for is monumentum at documentum right that you have a monument and a document and of course we're all familiar that there are documents telling about Jesus's passion but many people don't know um about the Shroud at least to the degree that one can know and so here's what happened with emanuela I stayed I stayed talking but she said wait till you come back next week because there's a physicist who's he'll be speaking Yeah if you lost sleep last night yeah exactly and he was just that way his name is uh is Paulo Apollo di Lazaro he spent five years this guy just trying to reproduce by ultraviolet light that's amazing on a linen just playing with the variables of like you know amplitude frequency duration of exposure so that he could recreate um an image like that of the man of the Shroud on another linen and this guy what made himself famous when he published an article saying that the amount of energy you would need to recreate a similar image would be 34 000 billion watts and of course you you've probably bumped into this on the internet no but what does that look like well it's not a matter of what it looks like so much as I mean what it looks like well here's the trouble you see this is why it took five years right because he took different these different variables of light trying to reproduce something caramel color alert on a linen yeah but it was frustrating because he got either nothing or just charred the linen altogether yeah which obviously we don't have I really want to get into that yeah but I know we want to go into that in depth so let's can we just start right basically so when did you actually first see the Shroud uh was it after you heard this lecture yeah so and then tell people what the Shroud is give them the basic definition for those who are like I think I know what it is but sure yeah there's a lot there's a lot there we'll go slow sure so I first bumped into this exhibit I say the Shroud talk by Marinelli I want to say that was 2 000 and oh gosh is it 11 the first year that we started I'm gonna I'm gonna have to think back to that but I I lost sleep I told you and met these these different experts they were wanting to explain what the what the Shroud is who the man of the Shroud is and what significance it had all part of a pontifical University's program to like give you a panoramic view of shroud's study so interdisciplinary but the basic premise is that we'd been reverencing this cloth down Through the Ages as the burial shroud that wrapped the body of Jesus so again Jesus of course is on the cross on on Good Friday but he's taken down and then laid in the Tomb well when he's laid in the Tomb he's wrapped in these clothes we should spend some time in that passage of John where it's written about yeah but but before just to kind of lay it all out the the the church proposes to have exactly that at least that's what's on display in torn that is four and a half hours north of Rome by by the fast train you can go and see this Relic which is on display in the cathedral there and that's to say it's inside of a case and only on special occasions it's out of a double case like in inert gas and constant temperature and pressure never exposed to more than 50 Lux of light we want to preserve this thing for future Generations now so I started to meet those guys the the authorities the ecclesial authorities in in Turin a few years later so now I'm on othonia as part of this non-for-profit that's International Group for shroud study and so I go there um regularly we just had a meeting a few weeks ago but they have a shroud Museum they have an international study of shroud studies and they provide many of the experts that teach at our pontifical University so at the one hand you had this like hub of of study like the minds that were involved in in probing this document to understand its Mysteries and the other side you had these these museums that would kind of showcase or create a space of experience with the Shroud those are two different kind of questions right some people just know the image and they that they dive into prayer and contemplation through that and that's one way uh to experience the Shroud for sure but another is to like roll up your sleeves get get the experts on scene to study the physics the chemistry the biology the forensic medicine and then the history the art history they're like I say so many different so that's good and we're going to get into all the objections to why the Shroud may not be authentic but when do we first have evidence in literature of the existence of the Shroud yeah if you want to follow the paper trail back um or even icon Trail there might be images of it right so you're gonna get different answers depending on what database you're looking at but so many people point to the year 1354 because that was when it was on display in the hands of a certain jifua de charni in France and he and this we have his stamp we have his Seal family crest nobody doubts that in 1354 what he was looking at and what was on display is the Shroud as we call it today the Shroud of Turin prior to that there's evidence but it is controverted evidence like you say it'll be things like icons so a typical one is the Mount Sinai pentocrator in St Catharines and there can we throw up the image of the Shroud just so people can kind of see what we're talking about yeah in fact I should I should describe what you're looking at there because it's not immediately obvious which one is that yeah so let's look at um first do slide six okay and I think at the the top of the the picture you'll see a kind of tan or beige picture would you be out of it oh yeah and we'll zoom in on some of the best particulars here thank you that's more than perfect you don't have to give it that much yeah that's okay um so at the top you see this is a really long cloth it's hard to see perhaps in our computer screen how wide this is but this is 14 feet so 13 foot 7 inches to be exact and then three foot seven is is its height so that's like 4.4 meters by 1.1 meters and what you see on the left side of the of the linen is the frontal image of the body right and then on the right side is the dorsal image of the body so it actually wrapped all the way around in fact there's another picture that I've got in here let me pull it up so it just this will explain very easily here we go go to um slide 13 this um this is just a painting but it shows this angel holding up in the clouds the the linen and just below the the Shroud is at the foot of the cross you have Jesus um wrapped in in this cloth it's simply to it's kind of a didactic photo so you can understand how he was lying both on top of the body and then it there it's so long that it wraps around the back of his head over his face and over his stomach so now when you unfold it you get um what is in the the hands of the Angel there when was that painting produced this is much later I want to say it's the 16th or maybe 17th century okay but it's simply a good way of um visually understanding that it's only the inside of the cloth many people don't know this that the Shroud is colorized it's imaged on only one side of the cloth so it's the side that touches his body and in fact it's so superficial that if you were to just gently graze with a razor blade you would you would erase the image of the man forever I this is what Paulo de Lazaro discovered how can just dive a little detail because this is so interesting um if you ask the question like what's the depth of penetration of coloration on the surface of the Shroud the answer is mind-boggling it's 200 to 500 nanometers which is uh that's not even a number that I can fathom so I I give this example of a human hair like take a single human hair imagine you could very carefully with your scissors um cut it in half along it's long end and discard that half and now with what remains try to cut it in half again do that four or five times until you're left with 1 16 or 1 20th of the width of of a human hair that's the that's the depth of penetration so as you say that is on one side of the Shroud but not on the other other so if you were using some instrument to paint or imprint this image you would likely see it on the other side that's right there's nothing soaked into the fibers in fact that was one of the main questions that was one of the main theories on the table when this gets tested on sure we'll get into those testings in a moment but one of the theories was that this was a painting and so this was pigment either organic or inorganic maybe it's a Dye maybe it's a an ink of some sort and so they had made a list of the chemical properties of all of the pigments known to man throughout history and they do a certain test called paralysis Mass spectroscopy that would I not only find it but identify its chemical composition while sweeping the whole shroud you don't find any of that not a single dose of Little Dot or drop of of pigment organic or inorganic no varnish no dye no directionality whatsoever with which some liquid is applied to the cloth and again it doesn't soak into the fibers it's like the blood stains do you can see them on the other side a great experiment is to just take transmitted lightly to a regular light bulb walk to the other side of the Shroud and you'll see the blood stains because now they'll be backlit yes and you'll see them all the more but guess what you won't see the image of the man body's image of the man it just disappears it's so superficial and so frail wow that it's overpowered by just simple light on the other side and so this is what we're unable to produce today even artificially even after all this study even though the 2023 now we don't have a micro laser capable of delivering a micro burn this precise and so the obvious question is how in the world did this come into to being like what's the Genesis of this enigmatic image and before we get get further I know that people are going to come in with these thoughts of wasn't this disproved so it might be helpful to show why that isn't the case before we go on to kind of um assuage people's right let's do that okay so slide three here shows some pictures this is probably what you saw on front page news um in 1988 [Music] and can you see the uh the 1260-1390 exclamation part there's the exclamation part that really this is it just screams academic excellence and uh propriety doesn't it um these same guys with this uh very um composed stance with their arms folded before these like yeah pillars um yeah it just says these these same guys got what's the number I'm gonna forget like how many million in Sterling they got for their new Museum like the next day it's a matter of the public record the moment this was published they were able to build their new laboratory some stuff was very fishy from the start but it's just it's just the case that across the world Front Page News everywhere I was the Turin shroud was it's been proven to be a medieval fake it tells us nothing there for about Jesus's sufferings it can't be considered a relic etc etc and so if you still believed that the Shroud was real after this point you might as well believe that the Earth is flat it was you're about the same category and my heart just goes out for those people who are serious students are the ones who had dedicated hundreds of thousands of hours um especially the team from sterp in 1978 these guys had published already over 20 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles they knew from the start to be suspicious of this really but what I like and this I would lead with this now is that as of 2017 um we've we have a published article that shows that the conclusions from 1988 are no longer sustainable so I should say that again the very publication archaeometry out of Oxford they that first published this that published that 1260 to 13 it said that conclusion can no longer be sustained and so I'm sure that hit the front pages right not no exactly so although it is a matter of mainstream science so if you want to find in the literature you're gonna bump into this the the French researcher who published this article is Tristan casabianca another friend of ours who teaches at our University and he he goes into all the details is a fascinating story but I want to say it was in 2017 that according to the Freedom of Information Act these Laboratories were compelled by law to release the raw data that shows how heterogeneous were their individual results because there was Oxford Zurich and um Zurich Oxford and Arizona those were the three Laboratories and the idea was that they were going to publish independently and that their particular results but that didn't happen they lumped them together and gave us this Big Arc 1260 to 1390 95 sure that this is the time period from which the the Shroud hails and so it's fake um but the bottom line is that they use a sample from the top left corner of the Shroud which we know to be anomalous it's it's just not representative of the rest of the Shroud and we knew that and we had proof of that 10 years prior you would think somebody would have this I think they knew that well they ought to have known that much we know we knew though this that in the moment that they're cutting the sample eight centimeters of the most prized Relic in all of Christendom and of course you know that with carbon dating you you carbonize it as you destroy you put into a fire basically this cloth never to be seen again and so you'd think you'd be very careful like compare that to the sterp team the shroud of turn research project of 1978 for a whole year they prepare just so all of their tests will be non-invasive non-destructive and yet here we're about to destroy forever eight centimeters and they don't know where they're going to take the sample two hours prior to the experiment and it's all on videotape in in Italy there is a documentary that came out just telling this whole Fiasco and it's called La Notte de la it's the night of the Shroud and you know who does the narrating if I'm not mistaken is the uh the same actress I'm gonna forget her name now who plays the devil in The Passion of the girls yeah so it's got some it's got some fun imagery there it's a little Needle on the nose yeah exactly it's a little edgy but the fact is I can understand why some people were upset but here's the thing even if you think that those uh Laboratories did good science and I'm willing to you know be benevolent and and say as much even if they did perfect science um they did so on a sample that tells us literally nothing about the rest of the Shroud like you could look at the chemical composition like you can see a map what's called a brightness map of from the UV fluorescence like turn off the the lights shine UV capture what fluoresces and it tells you about the chemical composition of the cloth It's All Uniform it's all like orange Hues maybe a little yellow little red but it's not forest green but that's exactly what color it is in that top left corner like a little kid in kindergarten can point to that and say look mom that part is different and yet this is where these you know world renowned scientists are using to date the Shroud it's just so why not take another piece of the Shroud and carbon date that wouldn't that be enough to prove what you want to prove Yes except that you can imagine that after this very embarrassing episode many people are hesitant to go that way I think the church would remember it's the church that's paying for this Cardinal ratzinger at the time was saying yeah these are your protocols absolutely let's do seven samples seven Laboratories about how much does that cost yeah I have no idea that I didn't see but um and sadly that got reduced to first three samples and then one and then they published together against their own protocols were these fellas alive when it got retracted that I don't know because yeah here we are 30 years later so 2017 yeah it's like oh that's right that's the same publishing outfit retracted it yeah it might even be 2019 by the time like it's 2017 I think is when the first research is done and then um um but it's worth looking up on even on the internet you can find or in shroud.com that's like the mecca of all scientific data what's it called the Shroud shroud no just shroud.com yeah so that's led by Barry Schwartz who is um the teacher so right after I was telling you I met emanuela then Paolo and then Barry Barry Schwarz he's got a a light um a white ponytail have you seen this guy a big white beard he's super fun he's Jewish and so he was my buddy like when he we came he came to Rome and he gave an extended um course on shroud studies because he was up close and personal with the cloth in 1970 as technical photographer you have to realize that the this is all the people that came together from the highest powered Laboratories Across America when they discovered that the Shroud encodes 3D information so in a different in addition to the fact that the the man's body is anatomically perfect that it acts as a photo negative we'll put a little bookmark on that and then when it encodes 3D information this is what's going to mobilize these uh these Laboratories across the states to then petition the royal family in the Savoy's in Turin to study Hands-On the Shroud for five days 120 consecutive hours what did that look like and well here's a picture so if you want to see when they bring um 80 crates of the most state-of-the-art material overseas to to study they would just want to answer one question which is what number is that oh sorry yeah so this is what does that say 11 11 11. so this is the team um this is uh John Jackson here looking at the Shroud which is mounted on this like stainless steel like they brought overseas so that everything it was by magnets so as not to like prick or um like destroy in any way everything was to be non-invasive they almost create a international Scandal when they can't get through customs with all this state-of-the-art material but they the question isn't religious at this point it's really important to highlight that it's simply you've got Catholics and Protestants and atheists and Jews and agnostics and everything else Under the Sun and their only question is to answer by what mechanism by what means was this image produced because we've never seen anything like it and to this day we've never been able to reproduce anything like it especially at the microscopic level um so that really does invite the question right if it's not a painting if it's not a Scorch if it's not a rubbing if it's not a camera a scooter right some sort of medieval photography well then what in the heck is it wow and and so this is something sorry sorry just yeah to tell you what they came home with is more questions than answers wow because they don't tell you what it is they tell you what it's not they say it's not human artwork it's not it's not made by via negativa exactly it's uh they do they they leave open in this question of How It's Made and so that really does leave room for the theory that many of course Christians have proposed is a what if it's the natural effect of a supernatural event what if it's after the resurrection or in the moment of the Resurrection whatever that looks like that produced this image um so some things even from a scientific or empirical point of view point in that direction so for example um the the blood stains compared to the body image so here's here's a question that I like to ask is like if you are a con artist if you're a forger if you're if you're trying to present to the world an image that you made but make it look real what would you do would you would you paint the body first and then paint the blood stains or would you first start with the blood stains and then after the fact probably the first way exactly right so what happens if you do the blood stain for like the head and your your neck needs to be like two foot long right that just doesn't work right so it's clear that any artist would start with with the body and then add um the the blood on top but that's not the case so the Shroud is actually not imaged wherever there's blood so the blood was there first and it's protecting those fibers because underneath those blood stains there's no Imaging of the Shroud and this of course we found about out in the modern era because shroud science is born in the 20th century like that's when we really started to study this thing after the first photograph maybe that's something we should talk about because it's worth it's worth saying I think uh if I can go back to let's go back to this slide here well I'll tell you what right here this is uh slide four it's a picture of secundupia this is the amateur photographer that snapped the first photo of the Shroud in 1898. it's about 60 years after the invention of these first deck telegraphs this is a monstrous machine you can you can see it on if you go to tour and you they have it on display in the uh in the museum there and this guy I love this like what if you're the the family that owns the burial shroud of Jesus and you like to add a little pageantry to your family wedding or baptism you just I'll whip out that burial strategy did you get that photo up oh you got it yeah yeah so this is the guy that after 15 minutes of developing the the film goes into the dark room and in this next slide slide three that is just this is this is great so this is the one everyone's seen yeah so this is an image of the face now we're zoomed in on the face and on the right side of uh number five it's the juxtaposition of the the two facial images on the right it's the the positive image the linen itself in in beige and if we're honest like okay I can kind of make out a face like there's two eyes there's a nose something like a mustache and a beard if I'm kind of creative and I squint a little bit but if if we're honest like it's it's hard to make out the details but secundupiah was the first one to ever lay eyes on the photo negative wow and so he goes to the dark room and after time this very slowly this image comes um comes to fruition yeah and so he sees like the for example I like to mention the the eyes because if if I were to ask you just pointing at the positive image the one of the linen like where are the boundaries of the eyeballs you might be very inclined to like do like a Bart Simpson kind of thing where you have these big bulging eyebrows because it seems like these are these are the outlines to the to the eyes and that explains by the way many icons that show again and again Jesus with all of these same characteristics one of them being these these bulging eyes but when you get to the negative of that all of a sudden you see a very clear intelligible human face that this is marking the the subtle Contours around the eye sockets the details of the the separation of the lips you've got um this swelling in the cheeks you've got a separated septum if you come two thirds down the nose you can see that the the cartilage has been separated according to the American scientists the beard has been plucked um you have huge you can see things like the the arterial blood that flows near the the temple that's from the the frontal vein that's here at the uh at the center of the forehead we could go on and on about some of these details keep doing it well well we will but what I want to say now is that the first thing to be noticed in 1898 was that this was too good to be true I see instead of applauding second they accused pointed fingers at him to say come on where did you really get this and it's not until 1931 one nice some three decades later that Giuseppe Enrique now a professional photographer working on orthochromatic film which produces some of the most beautiful photos to this day because of the um the kind of colors that are that we find it's these kind of warm Hues that you find on the on the Shroud in any case he does um this experiment of photographing the whole length of the Shroud and sees that indeed the Shroud is a photo document it's it's when you take the negative of the Shroud that you don't arrive at a negative the negative is the positive image which suggests and this is the mind-boggling part right is that what is the Shroud then a photo negative tell me how that works 19 centuries before the invention of Photography we have a photographic effect in the linen itself and so it's gonna be Eve de Lage who in Paris picks up on this just noticing the anatomical Perfection of this body and that the pathology that this man suffered are just right on a thousand different details and they correspond to what we know about of Jesus's sufferings and so he read this is an agnostic he's not a Believer right but he writes a paper saying that the man of the Shroud is Jesus of Nazareth and they laugh him out of the scientific Community they won't publish his paper in the minutes and so he has to lament to his friends that you know if I were writing to uh if I were writing about Xerxes or some Pharaoh or something no one would have any trouble um but they're scandalized for some reason that I found a trace of of Jesus of Nazareth his existence but he's like why is that a problem I don't get it um and yet to this day we see that anything related to to Christ is yeah it's a sign of contradiction because you brought up a point a moment ago that needs to be I think reemphasized that at this point we're not you don't have to believe this is a supernatural artifact that's right and and so it's just someone could someone agree that this is the Shroud that yes covered the body of Jesus Christ and still not believe that Christ rose from the dead that Christianity is true exactly I'm so glad you brought that up it's kind of like well even if it is authentic so what like what what does that show us some and I know some people online get very enthusiastic and they go so far as to say that they think the Shroud is like a proof of resurrection and or I I actually am more cautious than that I I do think it's a sign of Resurrection I think that it's certainly compatible and even kind of knocks at the door of your heart saying come on explain me but at the very least you know so much is like having the right questions sometimes we start with a certain biasis art of like predisposition to answer just one question and a lot of the talk and a lot of ink is spilled on radiocarbon dating and is it authentic I think the better question to ask is who is this man like just here's the data explain it right it's there it demands an explanation that's a better starting point just gather all the data and see where it leads you have to start with um the conclusion of Christianity or not or the opposite right you can actually just just be open to where it's like a philosophical argument for God's existence like the world exists something exists now explain that it's exactly that it's exactly that and I I think that we have gone both wrong in both directions either from a bias of scientism that a priori excludes the possibility of Miracles and the resurrection or on the other hand kind of begins with yeah that's we already know that now what do we even need science for in the first place and I think both of those are wrong like I much prefer what pope Saint John Paul II would say in his first line of the encyclical where he says faith and reason are two Wings by which the human Spirit ascends to the contemplation of the truth of like here's the perfect case study for that like just try it out like faith and reason come with your instruments come with your you know x-ray your infrared your ultraviolet your spectroscopy your paralysis Mass spectroscopy your sticky tape samples your blood samples bring it on just like that's what the church was inviting us to do wow but there's a letter very powerful one from Pope Saint John Paul II actually and he was inviting researchers even non-believers to press to probe just leave your bias at the door just like everybody else and just let's see where it goes and what what we find out of course is that it's a mirror of the Gospel is that it actually at so many levels coincides with the gospel story we've always heard recounted it's just now we have a fifth witness it's not Matthew Mark Luke or John it's it's the Shroud testifying to these uh to the passion yeah I want to get to that I want to get to how the Shroud mirrors the gospels um but I guess a few questions first is there any credible scientists today making claims about this shroud being inauthentic or dating back to maybe the Middle Ages and and what is their best argument the best argument is carbon dating there's no doubt that when you're talking about um a linen which is organic material the gold standard is carbon dating like there are other means of of dating like with a vanillin or with um if of course if they're evidence of coins that's one way you could also look to um the icons to see you could if there if there's the pseudonym in others third parties the other other types of artifacts that would in some set kind of Meet the uh the itinerary the provenance of the Shroud so for example just to make this practical um the pseudium is the head cloth that covered the body of Christ according to John chapter 20. well we have that it's in it's in Spain and the blood stains are extremely amorphous and yet they when juxtaposed onto the Shroud a line oh my goodness the and the qualities of the blood is very very specific right so you've got um proportion of blood to water that indicates lung edema and that's someone who's been scourged someone who's been severely beaten suffers exactly that but this is the one that really gets me if you look to the um the blood stain the rivulet of blood and we looked at the face a moment ago perhaps we can pull up that same slide that shows that kind of reverse three shape review letter and Epsilon and then at the base of it there's a little droplet there's a there's a little circle I love this because the the rim is outlined on the Shroud if you look to the sudarium you get this same blood stain but what's empty on the Shroud is filled up on the other have you got it up there and so um that that's just one example you could read up on the the work of I think his name is Alejandro Hermosillo from Valencia there's a there's a shroud studies over there and there's a center for shroud studies and he's done some work on the comparative analysis of the Shroud on the one hand and the pseudonym on the other but we know the provenance of the Sudan audium it was on display at in 611 I want to say certainly the beginning of the 7th century and um and so the Shroud if it covered the same body is at least as old as that right and so we talked already about the Mount Sinai pantocrator from the 6th Century as well there's many other icons from the later medieval period um so these are other ways of dating the Shroud but I I want to say and this just I think is um this is just the facts like when it comes to organic material there's no better way to date it than radiocarbon dating so why isn't an objection well then combinate it again if you're so intent on showing that this is authentic then the church shouldn't be afraid to well that's right and especially if you if you have more of an understanding of what may be a newer part of the Shroud is that was that the problem yeah so we could get into that too so that top left corner yeah is exactly where you'd grab the Shroud like if you wanted to put on display and we have like lithograph images of this where the bishop is with his bare hands just holding up the crowd for hours and you that's what you'd literally do you imagine like uh making your pilgrimage across Italy to just so you could have a few brief moments yeah and this is what always happened Whenever there was a public display you know just pick it up and yeah they would go and and people would March from across Europe nightmares of this don't you just wake up at night in the cold sweat and and but imagine the soil the wear and tear on the top left corner okay so it's not that it was a newer part of cough well here let me finish that story so because of the wear and tear it's very likely that it needed to be repaired in the 16th century so there was a fire in 1532 and um these these nuns basically tended to the Shroud after the fact um did they add a strip of new material this is one of the theories there's a fun little story behind this there's this woman who's watching TV her name is Sue Benford she's not a scientist she's a librarian if I'm not mistaken she since passed away but um she's watching this on TV and she says that face convinces me that's Jesus I gotta study this thing so get this she gets a picture like a blown up image of the textile and then shows it to textile experts and again and again without knowing what they're looking at they simply describe what they see a misaligned weave they tell her about French invisible weave the idea is that you would put one thread or one cloth next to another and without putting like a seam in between the two cloths you would what you create what's called a splice you would unravel the threads on the one end do the same on the new cloth and then just splice the threads together so that it looks like one piece it's very expensive it's very difficult but it was known and we have books about it in the 16th century the problem is that the new material is going to be white with respect to the linen that is yellowed over time and so they added a plant gum that's new organic material now in order to make it all uniform color and so this was studied long after the fact even after Sue Benford third present presents a paper in orvieto at one of these shroud congresses and it gets published on the most um scientific website online which is shroud.com and this is when the head chemist of um the sterp the shroud of turn research project his name is Ray Rogers he gives Barry schwarzen call and says what are you doing publishing this paper from The Lunatic Fringe on our scientific scientific website and he was like well Ray I mean she follows the scientific method I think the people ought to know what what a good hypothesis is and hey if it needs to be scrutinized and uh you know destroyed we'll let it be so you know and he's like I'm going to prove it wrong in five minutes he's like well Ray go ahead you know they hang up the phone imagine this Rey was at sterp again in 1978. um I'm not sure what year this is but I want to say around 2000 somewhere there because uh Ray Rogers is dying of cancer this guy's like racing against the clock to prove his his theory but what happens when he hangs up the phone is he goes is back to I guess his little manila folder or whatever he's got a little strip of of the shred he went home with a sample of the Shroud that he could put under a microscope and examine and he finds cotton of course the Shroud has no cotton it's all linen but he says I can't believe I'm saying this Barry calling him back now but I think she's right and so Barry Schwartz will like race against the clock all that the time he's got left on this Earth to present one last paper and show an arguing in favor of this theory of French invisible weave basically that although the Shroud be from the first century there was a strip that's from the 16th century so that what those different Laboratories were actually analyzing was a a blend of first century and 16th century material thus giving us this medieval date which is of course an average because I don't know if you know I should explain for our listeners how radiocarbon works please but for me yeah so anybody any any of us that are alive and breathing are taking in oxygen and replenishing our carbon all the time so if you look at a table of elements you're going to see the periodic table you're going to see that it's carbon 12 because of the number of protons that it has but there are other Isotopes to other flavors of carbon if you like c14 is radioactive so it sheds those extra protons over time at a known rate and so we know the half-life how long it takes for this c14 to shed these these this extra material and so 5370 years I want to say is the half-life of c14 which simply means I take a sample I shove it in a machine I calculate the molecules that are there and I get an exact date of when that plant died or when that person died in the case of uh you know human biological material but the it simply means that the uh the flax from which linen comes was chopped down at in in the first century it stopped replenishing its uh yeah it's carbon and that now we can we can get an exact date but what they didn't tell you in 1988 was that each of these Laboratories again Arizona Zurich and Oxford they got different dates and even Arizona because it got two strips it got an initial strip and like oops sorry guys we we shortchanged you let me snip off another little sliver so it's only two centimeters away perhaps on the cloth and yet there's some 200 year difference between Arizona one and Arizona two the two samples and this they didn't tell you that as you move left to right across the Shroud you go from an older date to a younger date and so if it's 12 40 and then 14 40 within a couple of centimeters like what's the date when I move 4.4 meters to the right like is it a date in the future when I get over there they didn't tell you any of this they just said oh we're sure it's from the Middle Ages it was just really disappointing now now that we all the data is out um and so I think you're absolutely right everybody's on the same page we want to do it again but I think the international accurate is compensating how within uh okay some have said maybe they were wrong but even even that so they're not wrong by that much like if you didn't have um this theory of the French invisible weave you would have to theorize some sort of contamination whether by fire or by some fungus of sorts or they're uh they'd have to be introduced a significant amount of organic material from another period in order to skew it that much because it's it's precise to within a few years okay it's it's actually not it's not a matter of like 200 years or something it is precise but so do you think if this carbon dating was allowed to take place that would settle the argument I mean I think it would be helpful when it was yeah if it's done right yes I think you know we should have followed the protocol that we initially established seven different samples from different areas of the obviously you're going to destroy and therefore you want to be careful about where you choose to draw the threads from and as you know time advances so does the technology so maybe we can destroy less material yeah and in such a way that you want to preserve us above all the the body image and this is a relic so you don't want to be haphazard about just what's interesting is even if you take that theory that this is a medieval invention which as we've said has been debunked but even if you took that theory you're still left to explain how the hell you produce an image like this well that's right even now let alone in the Middle Ages and this is the question I like to ask my friend Barry Schwartz because he he's not a Believer and yet he travels the world talking about the authenticity of the show what does he think it is well well this is what I ask and I say well well because he likes to give this great analogy which I follow like he says I think it's a Sherlock Holmes episode or a little short story or something where Watson says Hey Sherlock or no Sherlock 2 Watson says watson if you've got four theories or or five theories in all the hounds of Baskerville I think oh look at that [Music] you just like satisfied Decades of my searching for that because I I forgot that but I love the the reference so something like this like if there are five theories on the table and four can be discarded or disproved you can know Watson that the one that remains is surely true and so it helps whatever whatever when when what is impossible is removed whatever is left however improbable must be true gives this guy a raise all right okay is there how much money you're making but if that's your producer like that's fantastic so no way Neil could have done that by the way at the end of it but um so the the naturalistic um theories have been discarded we know that it's not a painting we know that it's not a Scorch because of the ultraviolet fluorescence we know that it's not a Commodore score there are no highlights there are no Shadows there there's like I say there's nothing impressed upon the cloth there's no directionality no brush Strokes so if we're unable to reproduce it with any of these means and by the way I would be much more convinced if all of these debunkers were on the same page because look if it's a painting it's not a Scorch if it's a Scorch it's not a rubbing if it's a rubbing it's not a photograph it's like guys choose figure out which one it is but it's not gonna have an argument yeah exactly but um the other thing is um if all of those fail and we can say this with I use the word prove sparingly but I use it here we can prove that it's not any of those things and so if all those naturalistic yeah um theories fail this is where the Christian can raise it well how about another idea what's Barry's answer oh well he'll just shrug his shoulders and I think that's fair like like if you want to be very Jewish come on no that is to say I don't know no well he holds out he says we can't explain it today it's not that it's in unexplainable this is about the world I've just been informed I got the wrong Sherlock Holmes story okay so give her a raise sign of four um I gotta do some reading well that's good I learned something here today so I'm happy um but I guess where was it going with that the uh he shrugs his shoulders there will be an answer there isn't one now and that's a fair that is I respect that I respect that the one who says like okay you brought me to the brink the the limits of my knowledge it's not paint I agree it's not exactly and I can't explain it today but maybe tomorrow we will so why why okay fair enough but I I want to say this is that we're all at the end of the day more than empiricists yes as a scientist qua scientist I'm gonna say I can't explain this yeah but I'm a man I have all the other all my faculties that and I have to at the end of the day say yay or nay what do I think and there I have to take in all that I know and I think this is really does bring to the fore this the question of the interplay between faith and reason it's like reason brings you to the shore and you've been walking and now it's time to swim but it's like how much evidence do you need like if I could just take one element just to highlight this um if we were to make a list of all of those candidates all those people who were crowned and crucified there's exactly one person on that list and that's Jesus of Nazareth if there are other people that were crowned and crucified and that may have been the case but nobody ever wrote about it and so what's the probability that it's not Jesus when you have this unique combination of sufferings that you have nail wounds in the feet and in the hands a pierced side evidence that he carried the cross that he was nailed to the cross that he was crowned with thorns that he was punched in the face all of this is here and then and then you pile on other things like pollen that can that is consonant with the the Flora that blossoms between April and May within a radius of I think five kilometers to Jerusalem and and then you have soil so this is a very elaborate kind of hoax yes yes who is this guy like this guy to get the guy on the Shroud absolutely yeah if it's a fake we need to like develop a following of whoever faked it to some degree because he's a genius yeah he's Beyond genius so just to give an example of this like there's soil there's soil on the feet and and knees and nose it's terrible to think about what that implies for for the viacruccis like when he fell he fell flat to his face and some 75 to 125 pounds Came Crashing Down on a head uh crowned with thorns so the forensic doctors don't agree on much but they agree that those Thorns penetrate through the skin to the Bony plate below and so that I don't know exactly Amen to that but um from a scientific point of view we can study this soil that's on the feet knee and nose and determine its chemical composition we know that it's calcium carbonate with a touch of strontium and we know further it's um with crystalline structure to be travertine aragonite which is an extremely rare crystalline structure and yet according to one geologist it matches the soil of the grottos of Jerusalem like a fingerprint she says and so again if it is fabricated in France in the Middle Ages what in the world is it doing with soil from Palestine there right on on precisely in those areas where you'd have contact with the ground and so it's really it's the cumulative force of all of these different elements I don't think it's any one thing that kind of like hammers it home sure some some are more important than others some elements are more important than others um but it really is um the bringing together the conversion the convergent evidence that is again and again consonant with what we know from from scripture and what what has been passed down and received by our tradition who's the leading academic that would cool this into question and what does he say in response to this uh publisher retracting the original debunking of it well some have said it's so Nicolette is a book that just came out by I want to say baker or Baker academic um I'm going to forget the title of the book sorry but um there have been all kinds of debunkers along the way in Italy a big one is Carlos Kelly um but there are you know YouTube videos that you can easily find that that will go into this but they're basically holding on to that the idea that that this is a medieval fake and that the carbon dating though it wasn't definitive if we were to do it again I bet you get with it we get the same uh kind of uh 13th century outcome and so um because remember in 2017 what was shown was simply that you can't reach this conclusion it might be by other ways we can reach that conclusion it's simply that with the data that was used um in 1988 it doesn't bring you to this conclusion in other words it's a non-sequitur right you would need to do it again but it does leave open the question so it may be the case that we re like maybe tomorrow and this wouldn't this wouldn't be a problem some people have pretended that Christians are out there saying that or the oh the case for Christianity rests upon the authenticity of the Shroud like we would sleep easy tonight if we got a new test saying hey you know what the Shroud is Medieval and it's it doesn't tell us anything about the the sufferings I think that would be kind of unfortunate like I'm glad that there's there's no way you would sleep easy if that was discovered especially given what you've just shared about the pollen and the soil okay fair enough I would I would be disappointed but that is to say but it wouldn't it wouldn't shake my faith our faith rests upon eyewitness testimony yeah and what I think is really cool I mean obviously we have Mary magdal we had those the first apostles they tell their story some 500 saw him at one time risen from the dead and so um these people when they had nothing to gain and everything to lose they went to their death professing faith in the resurrection when it was known to be false that people rise from the dead like nobody in the ancient world believed such a thing that people come back from the dead to live new glorified resurrected lives like that's the the premise and thesis of NT writes big book on the resurrection right like Christianity came into a world where its Central premise was already known to be false and and yet a whole swath of the society went on board and changed their day of worship from Saturday into Sunday because evidently they thought something happened on Easter Sunday and so whether it's true or whether or not what you can't deny is that they believed it to be true and so now you have to account as a historian like why in the world would they believe this and so what I think is cool is that those were eyewitnesses to the living Jesus but if you were to ask okay who saw the moment that cadaver became a glorified divinized human body nobody was there right Mary Magdalene gets up early but not early enough right she's she's late she slept in he's gone the the tomb is empty and so the Shroud becomes the Silent Witness to that event which I think is amazing because of course when she goes to the tomb I know we call it an empty tomb but what you read about is that it's not empty in fact it's what they find there that when they find it the way that they find it they begin to believe and so I think it's so powerful that in John 20 verse 8 it says John saw and believed and this is where I want to take him by the lapels and be like slap him across the cheeks a little bit what did you see so that you believed this is this is the first distinctive Christian faith attested anywhere in the scriptures and it's why not why can't that just mean he saw an empty tomb well what you described can we pull that up because that's worth talking about this is such a good how do you look up the scripture yeah let's let's read that because the um I think this has not been given nearly enough attention in the scholarly literature and also with regard to shroud studies and so I'm glad for the question I'm just gonna pull up my Bible here and uh check it out in Greek and just for those who are watching right now if you're a local supporter go to mattford.locals.com we've got a private chat going on so you can join that and ask questions and uh I will be sure to ask father your questions at some point in the episode do you want me to ask some of this or have you already looked it up I don't yeah no no I'm I'm ready so this is John chapter 20. all right and this we know well because it's what we Proclaim on Easter Sunday it's the first day of the week Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb early while it's still dark and sees that the Stone's been taken away and so she goes and tells Simon Peter and the Beloved disciple that's John um and says they've taken away the Lord he's not in the Tomb I don't know where they laid him so Peter and John go running and in verse 4 it says they're running together but John goes faster I guess Peter is a little a little older a little slow maybe a little extra pounds on the gut I don't know but he he didn't get there first John does I love this detail in verse five John bends down says he Stoops he Stoops and the reason this is significant is because it coincides with what we know from archeology in first century tombs interesting there's a stairwell down that leads to an anti-chamber and then against the wall like on a shelf much like in the catacombs if you've been there you'll see that's where the body would be lay would would like and so Simon Peter goes in first but first it's uh John who sees from a distance the linen cloth that's the word that I'm reading from the ESV if you get into different translations you're going to get different vocabulary here but the linen cloths notice the S at the end it's because in the so read it from the Scriptures it says what in verse 5 in stooping to look in he saw the linen cloths so it's so he sees fra he sees the othonia that's a neuter plural and that's why we add s to the to the it's burial cloths or linen cloths and the question is what in the world was that especially since in the synoptics Matthew Mark and Luke we get a different word we get the word sindon which is shroud like a long sheet that cover so it's a syndone in Mark I think 15. remember that young man that mysteriously is like runs away naked when they tear away his tunic or whatever that's a syndon that's a shroud so it's evidently something big enough to to cover a body but the point is here that's that John from a distance he doesn't go in but he gets low because now it gets a good angle to see deep inside and what he sees from a distance is the this linen cloth okay that's interesting but what happens next Simon goes in like I can just imagine Johnson after you Holy Father like he waited for it for Peter and now Peter steps down that the threshold of the where the the stone would have been rolled away into the empty chamber and he tells us what he sees coming into the tomb he saw the linen cloths that the second mention of this word othonia and look at this he saw the linen claws lying there in other translations it adds funny words like lying on the ground but I'm here in the Greek and I can tell you that it does nothing of the sort it just says he saw the linen cloths lying and um it's also interesting to note that he changed the verb to see in English we're going to get three times he saw he saw and he saw but in John's language he changes vocabulary and I think that's intentional it seems that there's a crescendo in light he's seeing but we're seeing more and more so in a first moment what is Peter C extra that John didn't see well he sees the linen Clause lying and the face cloth that's the sudarium which had been on Jesus's head it tells us not lying with the linen cloths that's a third mention in three verses of the same exact word othonia but folded up in a separate place and you're like come on John there are thousand details I wish I could know about The Passion of Christ like how big were the Thorns uh where did they pierce him in the side how many Scourge marks um but it's like relegated to a subordinate clause and then he keeps on going but boy when it's time to tell you about the dirty laundry in the Tomb like he's going on and on about it okay and that got to catch your attention like what is the purpose what is the purpose here where is he going with this discourse and finally in verse 8 he comes to the climactic conclusion to say then the other disciple who had reached the tomb first that's John right he also went in and he saw and believed and it's not blepo that was the first verb it's not theore oh that's the second verb that Peter sees but now it's that he saw and believed and so especially being used in conjunction with the verb to believe there's the sense that there's sight that is natural and then there's sight that is Supernatural they're seeing and then they're seeing right and these are the first baby steps towards that fundamental belief that yeah it founds the rest of our faith if we take Paul seriously anyway when he says if Christ isn't raised your faith is in vain like it all rests upon this and here's the testimony bearing its witness he saw what did he see there's a there's a detail here I wish I could jump in one of those time machines with uh Michael J fox or whatever like reconstruct the scene of like what exactly they saw there's lots of fun theories out there we can get into that if you want but um what I do know is this that it's because he saw what he saw and others the condition of the empty tomb and it's what's quoted in the catechism if I'm not mistaken it's what is it 460 or no I think it's 640 I sometimes get dyslexia on these things but um it says that it's the condition of the NT tomb that led them to belief and so whatever they saw it it was it was it was started with something visible something sensible and so this is where I want to go to the text and say like okay what Clues do you got for me here anything and there is something and it's fundamental it's not much but it may just be all we need I come back to that that funky sentence that is so true that is translated with such difficulty he saw the linen Clause lying there and I told you in in Spanish for example they say lying on the ground we read this in our liturgy in Spanish I think that's unfortunate because it doesn't say on the ground as if the point were to say it's not on the staircase it's not on the on the sill where his body lay no it's on the ground no that's there's that they pulled that out of thin air it doesn't say that nor does it say lying there as if they say not here but there the word there is not in the group it's just it's just not there but it does say that they're lying and the word Kamina means can mean lying flat as it like so if the body has dematerialized I don't like that term but you get the it communicates what I'm trying to get at if the body is no longer there such that the cloth that's surrounded can now collapse the result might be described as a cloth lying like a balloon that's lost its air it's got nothing inside and so that it can collapse I see add one more detail the fact that it's a plural and not a singular it's not a shroud but it's here it's the linen cloths okay so what else do we know here according to the American scientists according to the if you look to the beard there's a depression in the beard evidencing a strap a clot that would have kept the mouth closed so that after rigor mortis relaxes you wouldn't have a a mouth just gaping wide open it would be it would be tied tied closed likewise there's a strap evidently over the ankles but below the knees that's keeping the the legs together um and and so it seems that the man is taller on the front of the cloth than he is if you were to measure from the back because there's a fold in the cloth because of this strap and so some have theorized that in addition to the syndone which is that long sheet that kind of folds above and below the body you have these other strips that bring together at certain points and contain uh the body this is really interesting if you if you know John 11 because that's when Jesus calls Lazarus out of the Tomb and he gives him a command you remember what he says I am there it is so evidently there's something to untie and so interesting could it be that something similar is here in Jesus's case that John who was there at the foot of the cross on Friday and now he's back on Sunday morning and he sees what he saw before except nobody wow and so he might have described it in this way the bottom line is this what what we have in the text says that it's not that he crucified his intellect when he came to believe no he departed from something that was intelligible and then carried it forward when he came into an encounter with Jesus and that's where this itinerary ends it moves from seeing certain details that are fuzzy at an at a distance then we come up close and personal and then we get even then we get the vision of Faith but then it climaxes an encounter when when Mary Magdalene encounters the Lord and that's where that's where our faith Journey ends too you know it's like come press and probe like study the Shroud but don't like don't be unbelieving but believe is see with faith holy mackerel okay so I know you want to draw out a lot of things from scripture um but can I can we get to some questions you bet but before we do that can I tell people to go check out hallow.com Matt it is the number one question Matt Fred I think I think Matt works as well h-a-l-l-o-w.com Matt frad you're right Thursday um Matt Fred uh check them out because it's the number one Catholic app on the interwebs I think it might be the number one Christian app don't quote me it's a bloody fantastic app and it'll help you to pray and I know a lot of people for your New Year's resolution said you'd like to do that more what's cool about Hallows it'll help you do that and um it's really well produced and if you go to hallow.com the link is in the description below and sign up there you'll get a three month free trial which is just ridiculous so after the end of those three months if you don't agree with me that it's as good as I'm saying you can um unsubscribe and you won't pay a cent but it'll help you it'll lead you through the rosary it has night time stories bedtime stories you can listen to it has stories for your children that you can play for them at night it really is absolutely excellent and um a hundred percent Catholic so if you want to pray the rosary if you want to know how to meditate in a Catholic fashion please check it out hello.com click the link in the description below sign up there that way they know that I sent you and you'll get those three months for free all right can I sign up on the website so that you um if you I know a lot of people in the communities don't want to give more money to Apple or Google than they need to so if you sign up on the website then Apple and Google don't get a cut through the payment processing on your phone thank you all right so uh Heidi thanks for being a local supporter it says who is dragging their feet on the proper dating of it who has to approve it so I think that goes back to the question of okay we did carbon dating but it was on uh uh but what so if if a new carbon dating thing would actually prove it whose commission do we got to get right so as of 1983 the Shroud was bequeathed from the royal family to the person of John Paul II because he is the successor of Peter so it is as of 1983 that's like recent history that's like yesterday in the grand scheme yeah yeah so now it is the property of Francis so of course he has a delegate in Turin it's the Archbishop there in in Turin and he also has you know people under him that tend to the nitty-gritty but I think what would need to happen is that the scientific Community would have to reach a kind of consensus as in order to suggest like hey this is not just what needs to be done but the exact way in which it needs to be orchestrated so that the community doesn't happen large can be confident that the results are credible and so after the Fiasco of 1988 nobody's like just itching to do this and I just want to say that we're in a great place right now to talk about the Shroud and we need more people I I love what I do I love that I get to go around the world talking about the Shroud I have in in China and Hong Kong and Singapore and the Philippines and throughout Europe and here in the states um but I wish I didn't have to in a way like I wish there were other people that would get on board and and do this so thank you by the way for the platform to share this but people need to know that they can get educated on this and do a postgraduate certificate in Shroud studies from othonia it's in Spanish it's in it's in Italian and it's in English and learn about it share about it bring it to your Parish bring it to your Catechism classes people need to hear this you never need you never know who who can benefit from this kind of discourse I think it's really sad that we've kind of dumbed down our catechesis our strategizing for evangelization has often been like more carpets in our uh in our chapels and more you know electrical guitars and that kind of thing what if we were to like turn up the volume on the intellectual side of Christianity I think some people need to hear some of these these details and you never know who can be helped I've certainly seen it again and again so we'll put a link to this authonia yeah so if people want to do a post-grad certificate in this they can great while I'm on the topic I know you have a new podcast that's about to drop and I want people to know about it before we get to more questions because I know you I know Father Michael you two are the most brilliant and Charming priests I've ever met so I cannot wait until your podcast starts we're going to put a link in the description below to your podcast those two priests I know there's two priests yeah I know you don't have any videos yet but I want to tell everybody click that link we have a link we'll have a link up there soon and subscribe to their podcast so once you guys stop start dropping videos yeah no and thank you for the idea it's authonia international.org right okay it's yeah we can I'll give you the exact link to the postgraduate certificate because what we have is the science and Faith Institute which is under the big umbrella of this pontifical University and it's complicated so I'll just get you the direct link and put it in in the description um for those who want to follow along but yeah thanks for that um word about the podcast I'm excited about that it's not going to be only shroud related the idea is that we're just gonna have conversation as two priests that want to shoot the breeze with people um who from different as much like much like you do here quite quite honestly but um I think so I'm excited for it too I think it's gonna be good so we're just building the studio now and hopefully right right with you guys that's great okay uh Vespas says do we have any other extant burial shrouds or similar textiles from that time period for example when the tomb of Saint Peter was discovered there were bits of purple cloth and we know that his bones were wrapped in a purple cloth when the original Basilica was built are there other grave shrouds like this nothing like this is the answer to the question the Shroud is an absolute unicum for these three reasons and it's worth repeating that the Shroud Bears an image of a man an image that is anatomically perfect that's one two that it acts as a photo negative where the grayscale is inverted and then three that it encodes three-dimensional information there's not a single other cloth that is any of those characteristics are there other burial claws yeah even predating the Shroud but also from the period I think right there in Jerusalem like a stone's throw from this Holy Sepulcher um just to the South like towards henna there is a cave that is called something like the field of the Shroud because of some cloths that were found and I'm sure there there are many others that we could we could point to I don't have off the top of my head um but um this is extremely rare obviously if you have a decomposing body next to a linen cloth it's going to decompose much more rapidly um one of the things that is surprising about the Shroud is that there are no signs of decomposition or putrefaction anywhere on this body which to my mind Harkens back to Psalm 16 right where do you remember Acts of the Apostles uh chapter 2 and Peter quotes the psalm and says you will not allow your beloved to see corruption um of course he's using the scriptures to talk about the resurrection of Christ now he's applying this verse to to Jesus but it also applies neatly to what we know about from the Shroud that there's no signs that rigor mortis has been relaxed there's no signs that out of the nose and mouth that pneumonia gas exited out of the uh these passages and you would expect that and would be a very different and gruesome image that you would find if a dead body had stayed in contact with that longer than 40 hours that's when that's when rigor mortis relaxes but somewhere between 30 and 36 hours and of course if you if you zoom in on the on the blood stains especially at the wrists which are very crisp and neat in there um in their limits in their Contours it shows that this is dried blood that has re-softened by a process called fiber analysis ever so slowly but it's a ticking clock it tells us how long that blood stain is in contact with the cloth so as to create this stain and the answer that the scientists give us is that somewhere between 30 to 36 hours after initiation fiber analysis was interrupted and so what that means is that not only did the body not extend beyond rigor mortis but it which never relaxed but the body is no longer in contact with the cloth beyond the 30 or maximally the 36 hour mark so we're talking if you do the math with me a little bit if Jesus is tucked away in the Tomb before the third star and the sky appears when the Sabbath rest descends upon them um it's probably let's say it's 6 p.m 30 hours later is midnight on Easter Sunday 6 a.m is you know six hours later they're in the movie small hours of Easter Sunday they're telling us somewhere between midnight and 6 a.m the body is no longer in contact with a cloth wow and so these again this is what I say is certainly leaves room to say the least for the Christian hypothesis and so what do we make of it what sense do we make of it so to answer the question of the per of the person is do we have anything any other cloth um yeah you can look to things like is it a z or is it an S twist things like that do they know what to do a three to one herringbone weave yes this these kinds of things we know but to my mind that's lower down on the Chain right I mean the more important aspects that that count let's say they all have to do with the image and there we just find nothing nothing remotely close um even when we engineer them knowing all the characteristics today at a microscopical level they're not they're not close I would love to see the closest representation of the Shroud that we've been willing to put off um I'll show you something oh you've got some yeah oh my goodness I'm pumped okay so it was it was while you looked it up there was some comedian I forget if it was Brian Regan who said that we don't get a sense of just how good these athletes are at the Olympic Games because they're all running next to each other and they're all really good so what we need to do is get some fat guy like me and have them run alongside yeah so I'm excited to see the comparison between what we've been able to accomplish no it's great I always love these guys when they try yeah I'll pull it for you now I'm scrolling so let's go do what which one does that say 60. 60 of 63. so this is one there's some more as we scroll down but let's do 60. um so there's some that have said that the Shroud it's really bad they call it instead of the Shroud of Turin I'm sorry Lord to say it but the shroud of a urine have you heard this before because what you can do is get this Emulsion on a cloth you you it's very clever um it's a bit clever it might be because I'm a dad it's a dad joke anyway so the theory here is that if you have a dark room yeah something like with a kind of photographic effect they said what if you had a body out in the sunlight and then you know passing through this prism see this little hole in the wall in the top right and then what would happen is it would be projected the image would project now upside down and it would create a photo negative and it works like the amazing thing is it actually does produce the image of the body you put a statue out in the sun and it'll do that there's a I think it's National Geographic that has this guy in a white lab coat I'm gonna forget his name I know this is Nichols I think nickel Joe Nichol I want to say Joe Nichol um but he's a magician by trade but he dresses up with a fancy white coat to to present his theory to you um which I'm at the end of the day super happy about because what he produces though it's impressive is nothing like the Shroud because it has clear highlights look at the top of the feet look at the top of the hands and the uh and then the shadow under the chin and under under the under the hands there are no highlights and shadows anywhere on the Shroud and they don't tell you this in the National Geographic version but that image can only last a matter of days you expose it to sunlight and it just disappears and you have to think about imagine a human body anatomically perfect in the Sun for four days that's how long you need in order to project the image what does that body look like after four days like um the flesh is still hanging on the on the body I don't know and they have to turn it around and do it again for another four days to get to get the back of the body again this is not going to show up in the in the literature but that's uh or the because when you're making it you have to realize that when you're watching a uh documentary you gotta who's paying for that documentary and what what is their interest it's not the same as peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that have to sustain the scrutiny of their peers in order to then okay so that's one that's a that's if the Shroud were a a photograph a kind of camaroscura made by Leonardo da Vinci they say right in the uh 13th century or the or or thereabouts no never mind that he he's born like a hundred years later but that's uh Minor Detail okay um the other one here is Kelly here in the the center the middle a kind of drawing but again we don't have anything soaked into the fibers there are no brush Strokes there's no directionality um there's no way I mean it impressive as it might be uh it's still in 60 but at the bottom uh Center black and white the black and white I believe that's Kelly's image this is uh that looks that looks almost I thought that was oh no no no so the the one on the right I'll we'll bring up the other the original so you can compare and contrast but again it's the chemical um aspects the chemical composition and the the microscopic level that's where these utterly fail these aren't surface phenomenon they're remember we have we can only penetrate the two to 500 nanometers they're not even remotely close at that level even if you think like artistically they're they're convincing this one is Emily oh gosh I forgot our last name uh it's like coming or something like that but um who thinks that it's a rubbing you're gonna do like in like um kindergarten where you put a leaf under a yeah with a crayon you know so it is impressive that it is also a way too accurate and um it looks like a medical drawing or something like that it's uh it's impressive but again it just doesn't it doesn't have the the characteristics that what's really enigmatic about the Shroud is that even though it's been exposed to water indeed like soaked in water such that there are water stains no it's it their water stains on top of the body image and they don't obscure or dilute or mess up in the least the body image neither did the the fire right so they're they're or what you can see and we should pull this up for the crowd here let's go to those first slides I can't remember what was it like number four so that shows these um here this is a good one um number six that shows the um the triangles that you see yeah here here and here they're kind of these symmetrical patterns it's because the Shroud was folded up there's four dividing lines so it folded in half right there in the center then fold what remains in half and then half again so that the face is what remains that would have been most interesting to those who wanted to show it off or venerate the the Shroud and then of course you fold it along the long axis and and then you get the four folded garment in fact that's one of the names in history that we know of a linen cloth that bears the image of the Savior the Tetra diplon it just means the four folded linen corresponds to the four folds we find on the Shroud but that's what creates these symmetrical patterns because inside the the shroud once folded is inside of a silver casing and that in the fire melts down and singes the outer edges of the folded cloth and so the result is this the the fire however did not destroy the body image the high temperatures didn't mess up that that's absolutely the case with every painting that we know um the same could be said about uh scorching like the one of the theories was that you take a statue heat it up yeah put a cloth on top and then sing it right that would be a Scorch but again it's the scientific data that's important here if you look at the ultraviolet fluorescence that would tell you where there's a Scorch and it's impossible that this is a Scorch not not not improbable but utterly impossible so again we can discard all of the all of those attempts at reading the Shroud are are so unlike what we actually have that we should be able to say thanks but no thanks like this this is not a feasible way of thinking about the way the Shroud image came it came to be Chad asked what you mean codes 3D information that's a good question yeah so if you were to take a picture of me with your camera it's obvious that the picture would show my white collar as white and my black jacket as black so color doesn't correspond to distance information because indeed the camera is equally distant to the white as it is to the black this is not the case with a shroud the Shroud is monochromatic it's all one Hue but think of like pointillism so think of like imagine you had one magic marker and it's orange let's say and you want to give the impression of certain dark areas and certain light areas what you do is you draw more dots in less space to give the impression of um a deeper a darker Hue and then you just spread out those dots in order to give the impression of a lighter shade and that's what you have on the Shroud so where there's contact with the cloth um like where the nose sticks out or the chin sticks out it's touching the cloth in such a way that the Shroud is more densely colorized here at the nose but imagine now the Adam's apple it's going to be slightly distant to the cloth because it's draped over the chin and now that Gap means that there's less colorization less densely colorized um Hue and this means for the scientists that there is an inverse proportion between the density of image and the distance to the camera which in this case is the cloth so the bottom line is that they can look at the brightness map of the Shroud put it through the vp8 which Maps eight Shades of Gray and now it's translating two-dimensional information which is the cloth is 2D obviously it's flat but now if I can put it through the vp8 image analyzer which I didn't describe so let's do that this is uh slide number nine this is showing Eric jumper and John Jackson and the instrumentation on the right is the vp8 image analyzer this was used by NASA by the way to map the Topography of distant planets that we didn't travel to but we could know the hills and The Valleys just by a special form of Photography and if I scroll down to the next slide I guess this would be uh 10 you can see on the right what the vp8 image analyzer renders obviously there's interference because of the the cloth and the weave and the thread but there's the Contours of a human face are clear like the nose sticks out in such a way that corresponds to a human face this is not the case with any other photograph you take a picture of me my face slip it under the vp8 my my nose might go inside instead of out like it makes no sense on the Shroud however it corresponds to the Contours of a human body and so this is what was noticed um by these two American scientists of the United States course Academy and when they notice it it's so mind-blowing to them that this is what sparks the shroud of turn research project this is why they go over the seas with all that state-of-the-art equipment when they see that this we can build a statue based on the mathematical information that is contained in that cloth even though there is some artistic license like for the the eyebrows and things like that but the rest like for example the the chin is close to the sternum why because the head was hanging on the cross right and so if it looks like his head is raised as if like a pillow is underneath it's not the body is in rigor mortis and he's maintained the same position as he held on on the cross likewise with the knees like you might think oh there's some triangular support under the knees no it's just that his knees were bent on the cross so that's how they were and then that's how they remain exactly so they're going to force the hands down obviously in order to carry him from the execution site about 140 feet if I'm not mistaken down Calvary and into this cave which is the garden I love this a little aspect little often missed um but Jesus is buried in a garden and there he's laid to rest and it's from that place that the new Eden is constructed right that Jesus is it's risen from the dead and re in this way gives us access into Eden so there's a little spiritual reading for you that is a remarkable an explanation for the newest objection to the authenticity about the angle the blood marks would have had to have been made from hmm I'm not sure what the questioner is referring to that's that's your question okay well then I can a touch of the touch of research to the newest objections okay so there are in some reconstructions that will even show the way the blood flows um there's sometimes I feel like this is exaggerated however because baima bologna is a forensic doctor in Italy there were two in America Heller and Adler who studied the blood stains in I want to say the 1980s to determine certain characteristics of the blood but bimobilone suggests that um The Scourge marks and we have some 360 of them so some 240 Scourge marks on the back 120 on the front and it's every area I just assumed that he was scourged just on the back that's what I am but but it's it's not it's the from the clavicle to the ankles front and there's no Gibson inspired by the Shroud oh yeah oh yeah and now in some ways however he tells that he what's the saint that uh Gemma oh no no and so he tells that in an interview someone will tell you in the live chat in three seconds so you just shout it out when it's there Catherine yeah and so in an interview he says how he took inspiration from some of that and he also also from Caravaggio paintings in some points now he tells you his point is to drive you over the edge emotionally like he wants to bring you to the brink of like can you even look at this so he wants that he wants it to be in a motive response um and so he does drum up certain details like for example um Jesus carries the T cross which would weigh something like 300 plus pounds I'm so glad you brought this up okay based on the Shroud and base what we know historically he carried the petibulum the cross that is only the horizontal beam that weighs some 57 or 75 kill I know in pounds is like 75 to 125 pounds is what we postulate that but he carried it in just the same way as men who work on the railroad who carry a similar type of beans [Music] favoring the right shoulder okay one third of the weight would have been about in front of him two-thirds behind and they would rest it something like this so that you have excoriation on the right shoulder and then again on the left shoulder blade precise nicely the the scapular that sticks out that's what's braided against as he as he jostles his position as he falls to the ground a 10 centimeter Square excoriation on the left shoulder blade a little further down and closer to the spine and so um I've heard that Padre Pio said that was the most painful portion of his Stigmata the the shoulder wound exactly I've heard that too yes I've heard that too now and that was again his private Revelation but I do want to just um sift out two kinds of things so I think one thing is a Saints private Revelation another thing is a historical archaeological object and they don't necessarily coincide um so I've got a lot of in my mind right now and I want to answer his question too but I've just got to go to the Stigmata because this is a case in point right many stigmatists have the nail wounds in the center of the palms and yet on the Shroud it's in desktop space I'll pull that up just so we can have a Graphic that but if you look like under the muscle in the thumb you'll have if you were to bend so put your uh thumb and Pinky together right bend down like 90 degrees um and now under the muscle in your thumb you'll get a little divot at least some of us have this okay do you have this I I've got a I'm not sure there's the camera I've got this like 10 to here and it's right in the center that's where it goes that's where the nail went in and it penetrated out 1.5 centimeters higher on the opposite side and so according to a French surgeon by the name Pierre Barbe who writes a book called a doctor at Calvary he does this experiment on Fresh cadaver sorry for the Macabre detail here a little bit let's do it it's it's really worth just to understand like so much of that's the kind of science I want to give my body to give give your body yeah to kind of like for science yeah to understand more about the crucifixion okay I'm glad to see you not me no because this is bad news seriously when if when well the bad news about putting the nail here is is that there are two nerves that pass just through the spot it's the ulnar nerve and the median nerve and they don't control it's not just that they control the movement of your fingertips but their their sense nerves that are going to send shock waves of pain through your central nervous system expand once I'm dead once you're dead I want someone to crucify me no no no okay I was gonna think of you as a hero that would have been an idiot so we've got really good reason I think it wasn't through the Palms right and so this has been asked like Jesus if the Shroud were authentic surely we would see that the nail wounds would be in the hands are you going to tell me that all those stigmatists included were wrong and and thanks be to God it's the stigmatist it's that themselves who answer this question so I don't have to ah good and they say look don't think that this is how he was fast the fastened historically he must have been fixed in a more permanent way but when you see the stigmatists you immediately understand those are the wounds of Jesus which is exactly the point like for our sake for understanding like if your wrists were bleeding well what Paul would say is like look I bear the marks of Christ right so there's this sense of there's a credibility because he is sharing he's filling up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ to use the words of Colossians 1 24 right there's something like okay Christ the head in heaven is glorified he's suffering no more but in his mystical body he continues to suffer how do you convey that idea if all of our artwork if all of our churches have down through the centuries depicted Christ crucified with the nail ones in the hands it's the way to communicate effectively even if not historically true that those are the wounds of that you participate in the wounds of Christ is to put the Netherlands in here in the Palms but we know and Pierre Bobby tested this in the 1930s and then publishes in the 50s if you put a nine inch nail with a square cross section through this portion of the Palm after just 10 minutes and with a little shove it comes right through what is just soft tissue there's no transversal support here there's no way it could sustain the weight of a human body not even half the weight of a human body and in fact we know from the first century literature that you could be crucified for some two weeks and not die do you know in some instances they would little variations of crucifixion could be employed so you could like give a little cedele a little seat so that some of the weight could be redistributed in such a way that even if the crows had come and pecked out your eyes you're you're still alive you're not bleeding that much on the Shroud it's when they take out the nail now the faucet is opened now the blood can flow you're not actually bleeding that much just reminded I never answer your question about the blood flows and I'm getting there so the this is important to say that even if the scourge marks aren't penetrating the skin so that blood is Flowing out that's what Mel Gibson exaggerates he uses the scorpione like this it's have you remember that scene where the shells tied into the leather strap shells and like like bone cloths or something I don't know like it was like metal shards that would kill you and in short time um but what we see on the Shroud is actually much more credible um we we have these Scourge marks I was telling you front and back we can even tell you the directionality with which they with which they fall imagine this for the con artist theory if you look at the mid body range all of these Scourge marks land perpendicular to the main axis of the body but if they fall towards the feet or towards the head that is towards the extremities it's always at an oblique angle and we can draw the arc so we can know that there are two leak Torres two two men scourging one on either side of the body pivoting from one fixed point so we can see their half circle we can see this Arc and they're um and and that's why the patterns land as they do but it means that one guy was evidently taller than the other because his Arc was longer than the other this was discovered in the 1980s like somebody's going to draw a circle around every single one of these scourges you actually have that idea yeah we definitely will and so it's a monsignor Richie who looks at this directionality but what I was going to say is it's not sure it's a debated Point whether these Scourge marks actually penetrate the skin so let's go to slide 22 that's the The Passion of the Christ Mel Gibson has this very dramatic scene I always have to pull away at this point like do you remember when it like latches onto the skin and you're like waiting for it I can't I can't watch that scene it's just too much um but what we see on the Shroud is more like this the very next slide 23 23. we have a picture of a Roman flag room and this is that the instrument of torture that has three leather straps at least that's the postulate just because um they're they're groups of three at the end of these elastic leather straps we have these lead balls that are going to leave these Scourge marks and you can see this pattern which I've created in Black again and again all over the Shroud I think it's Peter Jackson um from sterp that will count these and others have published on the same point to say that it's some 240 on the back and 120 on the front which means a total of 360 divided by three means 120 lashes that is three times as many as the Old Testament scriptures allow so don't confuse a Roman scourging with a Jewish flogging they're utterly distinct the the Jewish flogging is in the synagogue with leather straps and it never exceeds 39 lashes do you remember I think it's in second Corinthians 11 where Paul says five times I suffered the 40-1 that was the upper limit because you're not to treat your brother like a beast he says and I think he quotes Deuteronomy there um and but of course they have no concern we're not in the synagogue we're not using a Jewish flog this is the Roman flag room and each one of these marks is the equivalent of a third degree burn as far as the damage that it does to the human body um even if it doesn't perforate the skin so look you could fall off a motorbike and be six weeks laid up in a hospital maybe you didn't shed a drop of blood but it's no less painful and as far as your circulatory system is concerned that is blood loss even if it's a hemorrhage under the surface of the Skin So if you look at some hyper realistic versions of the man of the Shroud they'll show blood stains like each one of these oozing blood each one and and that may be a little much it may be the case it may not be the case but this argues that this is what's called echymosis that is like a um what do you call that a cardinal in Spanish a bruise A bruise like a where it gets um discolored on the surface of the skin even if it doesn't perforate the skin in any case I was going about the directionality there's definitely in the crown of thorns right yeah the crown is in the in the vertical position and so it's now accumulating this you have this cap of thorns do we have an image of oh yeah let's look at that that's important okay so that's going to be right before uh is that the same one that's in Notre Dame a Notre Dame in Paris it's a saint Chapel actually is the uh I if I'm not mistaken yeah here we go this is going to be okay tell you what go to um 26 the uh it this is just a picture that shows how we've often imagined the crown of thorns as a wreath yeah 20 oh sorry it is 27. yeah 27 um but again again we've seen pictures like these where there's like a circular a circlet that um that goes around the ears leaving the top of the head exposed um and if you were a con artist trying to convince people that this is Jesus you'd be inclined to do something like this on the Shroud but in this case the Shroud dares to deviate from the sacred Norm here it gives us instead a cap of thorns so just go to the very next slide and what we see is that it covers every area of the head um so we have some 30 to 50 puncture wounds that have little rivulets of blood if you scroll down to slide 29 some have reconstructed what they think the the cap of thorns would look like using the Sisyphus Spina Christie that's the species of plant that has these Thorns that are three quarters of an inch long the very Latin name how difficult would that have been to make well there are different versions of this that look like somebody spent three hours like weaving okay and I'm not convinced that at Roman Centurion is going to make this beautiful braid before he like puts it neatly on Jesus's head so I think it's much more likely that he's just kind of lopped off a mess of thorn okay took a pliant branch or wicker that you see here in the slide 29 and then bound together that mess of thorn and then with his spear and sword just pressed it on his head and so these Thorns are those um Supple when green when they dry they're like nails that just Pierce through the skin and so that's what the helmet looks like it's interesting that the Greek word for Crown is Stefanos so if you have any friends named Steven you know what that comes from it's Crown um but the crown in the first century and in the literature that we get in the also in the Old Testament of course is going to be translated into the Greek as well in the Septuagint the Stefanos was what was on the head of the priest and what did the priest's Crown look like well we can read about that I think it's in Exodus the towards the end you're gonna see how it's covering the entire head and so even though in the Middle Ages our crowns sure they were you know these circles around like a ring yeah on top of the head in the first century you could well imagine that something like that would be called a crown um and so what I go to in the next slide if you see it's slide 30. um these are just pictures now the intensity has the contrast has been turned up to see these blood stains at the nape of the neck so of course the the supplant branch is gonna get there's gonna be this pooling effect as the blood drips down from the head according to gravity it's gonna and now drip down the back of the neck and so this is what you see these kind of like see how um it's flowing down and towards the center so that is an area where you would have expected a great accumulation of blood and and so it is that you see that on the Shroud some have said and I I uh I wish I could see exactly that at the shoulder that there is evidence of a blood stain that goes in the opposite direction so some have said suggested that when he was scourged he was leaning over such that blood could flow what it looks like it's worn up but because of his position at the time it's actually flowing down um that is one thing I'm I'm not sure I just I know that the bit about blood flowing from the scourgeons is contested so I'd have to see further details about that but I think this is so um hard to reproduce especially at the wrist the blood the flow of blood yeah so let's look at that because this um I want to go to way down to the point of crucifixion where we see the wounds in the hands and I must have gone past it um because this is his death here we go yeah so there's a bifurcation in the blood stain here I'm looking at slide does I say 39 39 so of course Jesus is hanging from the cross so when he's on the ground he would be at a 90 degree angle um and I'll tell you what let's let me let me go through the whole process for you go to slide number 37 and so the stipes like that's the um the vertical beam it's already planted in the ground okay ready to because this is the execution site this is Mount Calvary and they were ready to receive the those who would be put to death and so what you were carrying had pre-established holes and it had a fixture to receive the the petibulum the horizontal beam and so all the Centurion had to do is lay the victim out flat stretch out his hands um 90 degrees to his body take a nine inch nail in in one hand a hammer in the other you know drive it into the wrist and it would go through the hole and now fix him his his hand to to the Cross he'd get to the other side and he'd have to make the wrist line up with a pre-established hole if it doesn't reach he makes it reach by by dislocating the shoulder and then driving in the nail and so um that is what some have suggested about the main of the Shroud a dislocated shoulder and then he's made to stand up in the um the vertical position and we seldom think about this transition don't we so two men yeah would grab either end what number is that this is uh okay sorry yep yeah and so he's he's now hoisted up and plopped down on the vertical piece and now he hangs from 90 degrees he sags 25 degrees and for at least a moment all of the weight of his body is hanging on those two Nails in his hands um and it's only when they put a nail in his feet that they can redistribute the weight but let me look to slide 39 because this is what shows how there's a blood how there's a blood flow from the wrist and there's a bifurcation pattern here of about five to seven degrees and this is very strange like why do we have two flows of blood and the answer is that in this position you can't breathe out what you need to do because what's happening is as you're as you're in this position your pleural cavity so you if this player is this double membrane that envelops your lungs and it fills with body fluid as you slowly asphyxiate that you would expect you quite quickly if your hands were together do you know that the Nazis knew this to to if you you want to hang someone from the rafters and kill them quickly just hang them with your hands together and that stretches out these intercostal muscles the the muscles that control your breathing between the ribs and you can't exhale this is why the victims start kicking the air so that they spontaneously they want to to breathe you can't help it um but of course when you're on the cross this is a debilitating Factor if not a cause of death because now the hands are spread out and so you last longer they were protracting on purpose your Agony um by giving you uh you know a nail in your feet that actually allows you to stain sustain the weight of your body now you can press down on the nail in your feet pull pull and twist on the nail in your hands kind of throw out your hip in such a way that now your muscles can relax and you can breathe out at last but you can't hold that position for any length of time and so when you're you know your muscles are on fire you collapse again until you can't stand it anymore and you have to push up and now you're so what I'm trying to suggest is that there are two positions of your hands even though there's an ulnar nerve and the median nerve that I told you are when exposed in World War II there were soldiers who had a median nerve exposed and if they didn't get morphine some prefer to commit suicide than to endure the excruciating pain and that is by the way the exact word for this do you know that the word excruciating comes from ex cruciatus out of the cross in other words that's the root the crooks so this was a pain that is so unique it gets its own word it was engineered to be the sumum that's what the Romans thought the cross today the highest of all punishments they were going to put you on display in a prominent area where they were passers by all the time so as to say don't do what this guy did or get ready to suffer the same and so he would be agonizing in front of your eyes and in this way if that were me I wouldn't want to budge a millimeter but you have to to breathe you can't help it so it's these self-inflicted pains as he's going up and down can you imagine if that's what it is to breathe what is it to speak like I always I thought like that this is what helps me about the Shroud actually it's like it's not because I have some morbid fixation with pain or like Blood and Guts and things I don't believe me um but this is the most radical love the world has ever known right to steal an expression from uh Pope ratzinger Joseph ratzinger said that before you spoke I think um but this is divine love on display in a language that is appropriate for like when you translate Divine love into human language words just won't do um this is Jesus stretching his out his hands wide on the cross as if to say this is how much I love you and he stretches out his arms and he dies um but if it to speak like there he is praying for his persecutors when um he's feeling this he's saying father forgive them they know not what they do there's a little detail that I've got to throw this in there this is the Bible nerd coming out of me but uh do you know that when we studied this part where Luke quotes the Psalms where Jesus from the cross quotes that Psalm that says into your hands I commend my spirit he says father forgive me um above all father forgive me it's introduced with not the verb he said in the simple past but instead elegant means he was saying it's an imperfect and it suggests that perhaps that he was repeating this like a refrain in a song Father forgive them Father forgive them they don't know what they do you know giving for giving to us an excuse for for what we're doing I wonder if we're worthy of that excuse by the way but there he was praying for us anyway um and um I think this is why I've come to love the Shroud is that I really think it draws me you know I've seen enough crucifixes to be inured to it to be desensitized to it it's jewelry it's decoration for my living room you know and I can sip tea as I look at the cross but this shakes me out of my complacence and says you know look at what I suffered for you this look at my disfigured face this is what I endured for your sins Andrew to say and not just mine and not just those sins from today but he's taking upon himself all sins from the dawn of time to the end of the age and this is the bitter cup that he's drinking to the dregs and look at what it looks like you know when he could have snapped his finger or like waved a wand and said you know Abracadabra I save you you suffer a paper cut or something right but why this and yet and he would say in John 10 verse 18 he says no one takes my life from me but I lay it down of my own accord I've got the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again so he's got the power to to endure anything and he's showing it in this way he's stepping into a very unique set of sufferings and he knows it and he says amen anyway like why why in the world would you do that I don't know no human no matter how heroic that would step into such a thing and yet there he is doing it for us do you know what really can I insert a something I I know you probably have comments too but this this took me like a year and a half of studying the Shroud to for have this Dawn upon me its significance but I needed the help of the Shroud it's the agony in the garden Jesus says three times let this cup pass for me um but then of course yeah it's not my will but yours be done do you remember that the the detail that only Luke gives us it's he's the doctor and the doctor is going to say do you remember I sweated blood yes here's how he puts it he was in such Agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground do you know you can read peer-reviewed scientific journal articles on a phenomenon called hematoderosis this is when your subcutaneous capillaries become distended and burst not because anybody's beating up on you but simply because the fear of death the the the idea that what he was about to face is is present to him such that his blood vessels explode this is the the Hemorrhage underneath the surface of the skin that now exits out of the adjacent sweat pores creating little drops of red blood on the surface of the skin leaving the biggest organ in your body sensitive to touch in a new way so that even if you blow air over the surface of the skin like just after having suffered hematodrosis that would register in your body as physical pain and so that is the preambles that's before we've even begun the physical sufferings and so I always ask this question what's the first physical violence that men did to Jesus that night of his passion and it occurs to me that after that prayer after that suffering of a sweating blood the it's it's when Jesus hears the sounds of those bearing torches and clubs and they're crying out his name and he says if it's Jesus you seek it is I you know I am ego Amy and Judas comes close and with a big smile and a nonchalance that is chilling would say hail Rabbi but literally the word is Rejoice how ironic is that because with a kiss now and with a big smile he says hail Rabbi but with that kiss says I hope you die because that's the first that's the first Domino to fall it's gonna begin a chain of events dominoes that culminate in crucifixion but it was that kiss that registered in his body as physical pain because of the hematologist and that's highly appropriate go check out Psalm 55 because we read this as priests often on Fridays um in the Liturgy of the Hours but it says something like this had my enemy betrayed me I could bear his taunts but it was you my intimate friend my close companion you know his words are like butter I think it says you know but it is like javelins yes exactly and that's what was happening to Jesus his intimate friend gave him a greater suffering than Pontius Pilate when he kissed him and when he kissed him because they you know we we pegged that on Pontius Pilate poor guy there's only five guys in our in our Creed you know father son Holy Spirit I think the Blessed Virgin Mary gets it in there the other one who gets mentioned is this Pontius Pilate this procurator why because it's a peg in history for the one on the one hand he's he's gonna say look I find no cause in him I don't want to put him to death so why does he well because there's a mob outside pumping their fists in there saying crucify and crucify him and they're the ones saying look because of his blasphemy that's why he's got to be put to the cross it wasn't because he was an insurrectionist it wasn't because he didn't pay the temple tax because he claimed to be the Messiah and the Son of God and that the Sanhedrin cannot abide you know Caiaphas runs his garments and says you've heard the blasphemy from his own lips go and cart him off to Pontius Pilate and Pontius Pilate says look I wash my hands I don't want anything to do with this it's on you not me of course he gives the green light but when he does he puts the sign you know Jesus King of the Jews what I've written I have written and so a goat went down in history that Jesus went to the cross with the cause of his of his death because that's the titulus was supposed to be what incriminated you you know this is why you're here well in history it was went down to history because I am the I Jesus Jesus will say I am the king of the Jews he would also say I am my kingdom is not of this world if it were of this world you know my angel God I could snap my finger I could just call out with a word and you know the father would send 12 Legions of angels Jesus could add a thought just make all the that wood of the Cross those Nails just dissolve in thin air but he doesn't he endures it on purpose and to show us to show us his love I think I want to say this that you know Shakespeare has a poem that we would memorize in high school and it's a love poem it's a sonnet I'm gonna forget the number but it ends like this it says Shakespeare says doubt that the stars are fires doubt that the sun doth move doubt truth to be a liar but never doubt I love and as beautiful as those words are I'm sure many uh many a young lady has swooned to hear something like that the fact is they are just words and so Jesus is interesting right in the scriptures it's not full of I love you I love you I love you but what he does is show it and he shows it in such a way that we can't possibly doubt because I mean think of those who love you most who has ever endured anything like this Jesus is gonna take the full brunt of our sin and shame and dies the most ignominious death imaginable and from that place shows us that he loved us in a way that is like no other and I think that's why we need to contemplate the cross I don't end the Shroud I don't think it's extra I think we need there's a contemplation here that says if you want to go deep into my heart if you want to grow in Holiness I'm going to steal a line from uh Pope Saint John Paul II is crossing the threshold of Hope where he says there is no Christian Holiness without Devotion to the passion just like there is no Christian Holiness um without without um the contemplation of the Cross or something to that effect but the bottom line is that this isn't this isn't just decoration for our living room like we need to meditate on this stuff and that's what I would invite people to do because no matter how much we talk we'll never do it we'll just scratch the surface but the heavy lifting has to happen in silence where we look to that face when we look to that body and then we ask who are you Jesus why did you take all this upon yourself why how much do you love me I feel moved by the Holy Spirit I think um to say that there are people watching right now who want to give their life to Jesus Christ they haven't up until this point they've kept God or Christianity up on the chalkboard and they've been looking at Arguments for and against would you please lead them in a prayer to accept the person of Jesus Christ as their savior I wouldn't yeah praise God lord Jesus uh we call upon your Holy Name there you told us wherever two or three are gathered in your Holy Name there you are in our midst and so Lord for sure we're gathered together um by the dozens perhaps hundreds perhaps thousands and we call upon your name in Praise In Worship and we call upon your blessing we just want to say Lord thank you for enduring the cross thank you for showing at just how much you loved us that you took on Immortal nature you took on our human nature in order to to die to save us out to bring us out of hell and into the Dominion of of Christ the King and so Christ the King we come before you before your throne and we ask that you be enthroned in our hearts now because you are king of Heaven and Earth you have you take up your throne in my heart so that you can rule in my words in my gestures in all all my Deeds um because I want you to reign as can I want your glory to shine through my broken humanity and perfect as it may be to make manifest Your Love On Earth as it is in heaven amen amen thank you um okay let's see I've got a ton of questions uh I saw one really good one please somebody asked father if there were similarities between the Shroud of Turin and the tilma of yeah Juan of Guadalupe or yeah Our Lady of Guadalupe yeah there have been studies on that in fact if you don't mind I'd like to read it just because this person even though they're a local supporter also gave me a 20 tip to read this so thank you Emilio it's very kind of you have there been any comparisons between shroud and Saint Juan Diego's tilma with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe I have heard that the image is also incredibly thin on the Tillman I was wondering if there was any similarities yeah some have noticed these similarities especially at the face and the hands because if you remember there you have the Virgin who's wearing clothes so there are aspects that have said to be parallel or similar analogous in some way so much so that there was a congress in Rome at one point um that brought some um some researchers together and was called the two Linens and and they were highlighting some of these aspects now I have to be fair there is not nearly the same level of research done on the tilma as on the Shroud of Turin and so it remains to be seen just to to what extent this is the case but um we can see certain certain things that seem to be similar certainly many have there's surprising aspects on the tilma I'm not an expert in that so I don't want to speak to that and I'll leave that to others I know this that the the tilma has been treated has been painted so for example a certain Rays around the angel around the the the body of the Blessed Virgin Mary that have clearly been add-ons um and so layers of protection um have called into question whether it's even possible to test the tilma in the same way or to the same degree as we've done on the Shroud and so while that is a wish it remains in the future we can't say definitively that these that these characteristics are the same but that some have suggested that we have a kind of photo negative quality or three-dimensional qualities I I don't want to speak uh dogmatically about that but I do think it's interesting that obviously I mean how many people have have converted through um that tilma through the miracle that we celebrate there in December and uh and that I mean upon the millions we're talking like more than we lost in the Protestant Reformation have come back to the faith through our lady there in Mexico so go marry exactly um but um that oh I was gonna say I think I just lost my train of thought if it comes to me I'll let you know yeah no worries all right let's see what else we have here um Lucy 845 says does the back of the Shroud show that his backbones were exposed the bat or the dorsal image in other words on the right side does it show that it's backbone or so no it does not so some have suggested that there is what do they call this like a volumetric information I should say on the Shroud I'll explain um so there are two theories from the physicists about how the image was impressed upon the cloth for lack of a better word um but one is that light emanated out of the body in the moment of the resurrection and that light produced what we now see on the Shroud the other theory is that the cloth collapsed into the body as the body became mechanically transparent that's the word that they that is to say like um like a window pane is transplant and light passes through well so the cloth passed through the body both on the top and on the back that is I know very hard to imagine but that's that's what some have suggested that almost like a vacuum is created in the moment of Resurrection so that the the cloth both on the top and on the bottom is like sucked into the body and and that in that process as it penetrates some four centimeters in towards the body it actually captures three-dimensional information I'm not gonna weigh in on that I just want to let people know that these are two theories that are out there and that um if that's the case we may have even information that goes into the body but um no I don't think we can say that we like we have exposed like vertebra no that that I've never heard um defended in in a way that scientists have picked up on anyway Kyle Whittington says I've heard that the blood samples are all a b though I've conflicting claims on whether it's positive or negative has the blood type been tested and how accurate can that test be after two thousand years good question and that's exactly right some have weighed in to say yes it is a b and some have got in other words some tests have been done on the blood I think I mentioned Heller and Adler in the United States and by My Bologna in in Italy and um others have have written on this subject some assert more than others as is often the case in any area of science right and so a certain immunologist by the name of Dr Kelly curse he teaches for our program and I think he rightly cautions us uh to say um look if we want to be really really precise of what could be the case we could even include certain primates a certain tests like it would include humans and certain other primates fall in into that same place he's not suggesting that the blood is that of a monkey or something like that he's simply saying that further tests would need to be done in order to pinpoint precisely human blood and then go on to do its blood type um it is interesting that on the sudarium and in other Eucharistic Miracles we've seen the blood type to be a b so if it if these uh certain scientists are right who have gone out on a limb perhaps to to say that there are there's evidence enough to be a b blood I do find it fascinating that we have these you know we can compare and contrast with these other samples of course you know the best thing would be to just knock on a door in Jerusalem be like hey uh where's the file on on Jesus I want to go to the hospital and retrieve his his blood sample we obviously don't have that right so what's the next best thing it seems to me the sudarium and Eucharistic Miracles but I I understand if certain people are going to discard those other things and not not hold that let me ask you what what are some things that proponents of the Shroud are saying that you wish they would stop saying like I could imagine you know whatever like yeah very enthusiastic religious people get together they start drawing things out that aren't there at all and they might make things look yes no we get that a lot and in fact like it was Trump 2024. but Q's signature was in there I said trust the plan yeah no in fact there's some really funny pictures of have you ever heard of paridolia this is what when you look to a cloud or like a grilled cheese sandwich or like a root with a uh like gnarly roots on a tree um people see faces Mickey Mouse is in the clouds or words um yes well that was real but that was that was real but this so but do the test now on religious people tell people like crumple up a sheet of paper give it to religious people and then and then tell them this is an ancient uh Papyrus what do you see and it's exponential how much more they see in that instance and so people have seen sailing ships they have seen flowers they have seen um rope um they have seen words like lamb uh um and other names for Jesus and I'm very skeptical of these things knowing that paridolia is out there and so one of the one of the things to question it may or may not be the case huh um coins some have suggested that there are coins over the eyes and um there's a certain priest by the name of phylus f-i-l-a-s who who proposed this but if you zoom in you can actually see letters which look like if I remember u c a i this uh is supposed to correspond to what would be UK or Kappa a i because on the lepton there's a a coin that was minted in 29 A.D that has a like a scepter or Ladle on it and it has um the the inscription of a Pontius pilot or excuse me type Tiberius Caesar it's the name so it's the end of Tiberia um or something like that um that is is seen on this uh this small little coin and there was a problem with the theory is that it was misspelled so it was a c instead of a k or vice versa yeah C instead of a k and and yet there it was the misspelling but then after the fact they found the coin with the so-called misspelling further uh corroborating the theory that this coin was indeed over the eyes um I don't say this because I think it definitive I do think it's interesting and it's worth further study but if it's the case that we have a coin that is indeed minted in the year 29 that is a nice Peg to put it in the first century but because the weave is you're going to have interference on the image because you know the weave when you're going on the loom over and under these threads it's not a perfectly flat piece of paper that we're projecting upon and so is it possible to really see the edge of a letter like the letter U on a BL so or might we be seeing what we want to see knowing that paredolia is a phenomenon we have to be very careful what we don't want to do is do such sloppy science that the debunkers can easily say look if that's the kind of science you're doing let's throw the whole thing out and they throw the baby out with a bath water so what I want to do is and this is what I think the authonia exhibit does well and I think the postgraduate certificate was careful to do from the start is like we need to do a kind of curating of the data that's out there let the physicists speak about physics let the chemists speak about chemistry let the image experts you know talk about that area the historians etc etc so that we can bring together all of this data and make it available to a broad audience that gets scrutinized so that we can know like with what degree of certainty these things are you know what a good resource is that you can find also at Amazon um John Jackson has he's the physicist or yeah physicist from the shroud of turn research project and he uh for like 20 something bucks you can get a summary of like the main conclusions and the source material that that is referenced so that in like 100 Pages you can get a lot of the data on the Shroud that's going to ask you that what's the single best book you would recommend that's a good one that's a good one for um learning about sterp the thing is the Shroud is a universe like it is depends what what type of science you want to know about because it's if you want to know like coming at Mount Everest like how exactly do I approach this exactly which is why we wanted to create the diploma so that we could give you a panoramic view to the one who's being introduced but in such a way that is pedagogical and that it doesn't fixate on the minutia you know major on the miners without even getting because it's so to my mind a good example of this is the carbon dating how many of these documentaries spend long hours talking about something that in the end tells us nothing about the actual shroud and leaves out all this other stuff yeah so if you're talking about forensic forensic medicine I think you've got to know Pierre babay I mentioned a doctor at Calvary it's been translated into every language zagabi is a modern forensic doctor that kind of follows up but as some have called it like footnotes on Barbe but then there's the whole area of like what the popes have said how tradition has received it how historians right so you know it's a good podcast by my friend Dr Cheryl white and Father Peter Mangum from from Shreveport Louisiana they do a great job they have a beautiful exhibit one of the biggest in the United States by the way um and but they have a podcast with a little if you want to go deeper into some of this stuff it's a nice introduction anyway into the shroud uh thank you uh Kay Sila says I saw a television special about the true face of Jesus that reconstructed what Jesus may have looked like based on the Shroud and also went into a lot of the recent science father was discussing here is he familiar with the program and if so what's his opinion it was a big part of what brought me back from Faith deconstruction slash post-modernism and solidified my mums and my faith in the in the resurrection yeah well I think I've seen that what's the name of it again a truth it was the the face thing let me find out the true face of Jesus maybe we could look that up to see if it's uh I want to see if it's Robert Downing or something like that is that the name of the guy I might be wrong about the name but if if I if I remember he's not a Christian he's kind of like a gnostic but he's really good about the technology so at that point anyway he had made one of the most hyper realistic reconstructions of the face taking the Shroud as his starting point he's gonna try to um reduce the noise like all the interference that comes from the weave just to give you the face as face but he was really fixated on the physicality of it and so he uses uh you find it sorry I found all of the things in the History Channel oh okay well he yeah so he that's probably the one it it made a big splash when it when it came out and um we met at the uh Museum of the Bible so I got you Downing sorry was it was it Ray that's it Ray Downing nice guy I like him quite a lot I have to I have to say we went out for dinner after the fact but we met at the Museum of the Bible two years ago when there was a um exhibition there a temporary exhibit so say a little prayer we need a national museum here in the United States and uh maybe we maybe you can work on that in fact there's a a filmmaker by the name of Robert Orlando that is is making uh some material now I hope it gets it makes a big splash um and I hope it does a good job I've not seen it yet but he's bringing some major Scholars like Ben witherington III and Dale Allison major mathean exegete Mark goodacre um so gosh I hope I I hope it's okay that I'm saying oh I know it is okay actually because it it's online so I saw publicity of his of his film so I know it's safe to say that um but and he interviewed me just what two days ago in Houston so I I'm hopeful that it's going to be awesome and uh that'll get the word out even even further but there are people that come from different Vantage points and Ray Downing is certainly one of them he's not a Christian he's not pro but he has a certain devotion um there's I think Ray what did I say Ray Barry Schwartz is a good example Barry wears an image of the man of the Shroud on a necklace around around his neck every single day he says this this man is an image of of Charity is an example of what uh heroism looks like um okay he's not a Believer or not all the way not yet but we we can pray for that too by the way um and um yeah uh I love that so I think it's worth knowing that people like Ray give us good help into visualizing the image even if they're not um you know the best go-to for orthodox theology sure sure doc Forte says given that tests of the Shroud since the 2000s Raymond ftir flax have conclusively shown An Origin around the first Century A.D are you surprised that more modern apologists don't bring it up when debating atheists religious Skeptics who argue that Jesus did not exist I didn't get the part of it I don't fully understand anything uh given that tests on the Shroud since the 2000s and then he's given three examples have conclusively shown An Origin around the first century Indy but that's not the case we don't have definitive proof that the Shroud is from the first century it's an open question remember I think might have been people might have been confused to say in 1988 they they proved supposedly that it's from the 13th century and then since the 2000s um we proved that that conclusion was false but that only means that we don't know when the Shroud is dated to it doesn't prove that the Shroud is from the first century we would need to do a further test to determine that okay there's someone knocking on the door and it might be the mailman or it might be my kid but either way given enough time they will leave I know nobody on the live stream can hear this because I'm watching the audio levels to make sure but it is like okay they are starting purposely very soft and then crescendoing stopping ever and they're still going we're still going so like a distant hammer should I check I mean we're live they can do you want to check yeah thanks just shout at them for me yeah just say Matt said you should be ashamed of yourself no it's probably my kid nice job not hitting the camera a lot of people do that it's very frustrating um I Liam never mind Liam did text me and asked where you were and I was like dude did you even bother to check the one thing he would be doing um let's see this person says anyone else super emotional listening to this amen somebody asked a really interesting question that I don't know if father will have the answer to no one there oh yeah we have someone working on the roof I bet that's what it is oh there you go distance Hammer but I'm glad to hear I'm glad to know that they can't hear it um somebody asked thank you if you had done any Research into Orthodox icons that appear to not be painted by humans I have no idea what they're talking about yeah I know what they're talking about they're talking about what's called the Akira poeta so in Greek there's a word yeah so it's just from it's just from the word Heros which is hand and it means and the ah is the alpha primitive so it's like not made by human hands it's the verb to make the word English letters oh so uh English transliteration it would be something like a c h e i r o p o i e t a i think yep can't pronounce it so but there are these images that uh are called the not made with human hands um because they're following a prototype which is understood to be not made with human hands so the Theory actually goes that because there are some 250 points of coincidence between these images so if you go into the courtroom and let's say I want to commit I want to accuse you of a heinous crime like you stole my Relic in Rome and you go like off to the Bahamas or something and I need to make an image of you and hold you accountable in court my drawing better match up to your real face by 50 points of coincidence but we have some 250 points of coincidence between some of these icons and the Shroud itself and they're really counter-intuitive artistic traits like for example there's a u between the eyebrows in many icons there's a there's a a horizontal line that cuts across the throat or like bulging eyebrows I told you about or or the accentuated cheeks swollen cheeks um my favorite one though is together the mop of hair you know it's like why does Jesus always have to have this massive hairdo like why why not why doesn't somebody do something different and and or the best is the Wisp of hair like right here at the center and of course could we maybe pull off these icons you've been talking about this that might be helpful I've got some here oh you do yeah yeah we have some on a slide but while we're looking for that I just want to ask people if you think that this interview is helpful and would be helpful to the faith of others please consider sharing it on Facebook or Twitter or just tell your mother-in-law about it or your son about it or let's let's spread the word because I think this is really powerful yeah I'm trying to find the picture but um I'm sure there's well there's there's several different icons I mentioned earlier the pantocrator of Mount Sinai um St Catharines that is one of the most ancient um but oh gosh I can't believe I don't have this in here I definitely have the slides oh yeah it's right at the beginning I have three of them anyway um so what slide number is it eight eight yeah so there is Saint Catherine's on the far left um I want to say this is chefa Lu on the far right I think there's one in the middle is um from the 12th century and I can't remember where it's from but I have the notes on it elsewhere but it's just a good example of just how in different places and in different times again and again now these you have some of these are mosaics or paintings but we could multiply this by five and if you go to an authuni exhibit you'll see the Shroud in the center and you'll have like nine images all around the side and this is one of the things that was studied very early on I want to say it's paulvinio who um enumerates something like 13 to 15 characteristics here but um that are again and again the same like look for example see I think this is all inspired by the Shroud and the head oh yes oh that's exactly the theories that in others they're looking at the Shroud and because this is a Divine prototype they can't diverge they can't do something different they're gonna they'll Open the Eyes um so of course on the Shroud we have uh closed eyes and it's a river so correct me if I'm wrong these they are painted by humans but they're just like making it as faithful replicas of the Shroud as possible exactly so it's not that um they're Divine they're they're miraculous images exactly but they're called this because they're following the Akira poeta and so there's a similar I think mindset as you get with re like paintings of the Shroud people re but like they said that we have reconstructions of the Shroud in painting format and it's like signed like we have documentation saying and they would sanctify the uh the new shroud by placing it on the old shroud and so by placing it into context it's kind of like the idea with relics you know it's like okay this uh this glove it's not Padre appeal but it touched Padre yeah and so we hold on to it as a third class Relic yeah okay so something similar with a shroud the Shroud was seen as like the archetype and then by association these others these other images whether icons that were painted or mosaics or other claws that were then going to be draped in in other chapels elsewhere um they would they would be holy because of their coming into contact with the shroud very good all right my goodness so many questions coming in um what do you mean when you say anatomic Perfection you've said that several times yeah so this was one of the first things to be noticed like um one thing that artists will do when they want to draw the human body is study the proportions of the head for example how what what is the unit the head is like 1 8 of the total um height of the man or the distance between the eyes as related to the tip of the nose or to the extremes of the mouth or the distance to the ears um and so models let's go all the way back to the Greeks about like what are the proper proportions so that when we make statues and draw pictures we do so according to um the like real human body it's not a cartoonish drawing um you gotta ask like who in the 13th century was doing anything remotely close like not even in impressionism centuries later where we're doing something like Photo negativity but then photo negativity with Hyper realism like no that that's what I'm trying to say is that so the the um when they were looking at basically measurements of the body on on the one hand that is that they're the right proportion of the different individual elements to the whole at the micro level and at the macro level and then also with regard to pathologies above all so for example um the the side of the uh chest is is perforated so we have a four centimeter double-edged blade that leaves a kind of oval slit let me show you just so I can give an example I'm going to pull up a slide here from the piercing or the side let's say right this is important to show that he dies on the cross right because you can't have a resurrection if you didn't have a death before so it's really important like some of our Muslim friends will say Jesus was nurse back to health he was brought to the brink of of death perhaps but he didn't actually die look at slide 44 it shows a Roman Lancia that pierces the right side of the chest right between the fifth and sixth rib a distance of about 10 centimeters or 3.5 inches to the heart and so it's going to penetrate the the pleura and then all the way to the heart such that outflows blood and water remember that detail in John's gospel and an eyewitness has testified and he knows his testimony is True outflows Blood and water well this is a detail that shows up on the on the Shroud but but look at this next slide quick 45 is the dying Gall this is from the third Century BC and this Soldier has been struck in between the fifth and sixth rib on the right side of the chest in the exact same positions that you yeah yeah so this statue you can see it is on capitoline hill in Rome and he's contemplating his own death he knows that it's coming just moments away wow and he's so Romans are examining what's coming out of him or is that the point of him looking down like that or is it I'm not sure I think it might the dying Gall I think it's him preparing for death but what I find fascinating is that we know that the Weaponry existed and that the strategy was employed so that when you'd have the Roman lunchea you would jab with your left hand your sword might have been in your right hand but apparently with the long spear you want a distance and you're trained to strike the heart and so when you do so if you're using your left hand it's very likely that you strike the right side of the victim yeah and that's what we see in the dying all and it's what we see on the Shroud and there's not a great angle I know in some like zepharelli movies like Jesus is like 30 feet in the air or something it's not the case it's enough that you're six inches off the ground as long as you can't stand up right and so it's it's he's actually like right in front of us is that right and so that the angle is relatively flat or relatively it's not like he's reaching up high in the sky um and so uh a double-edged blade leaves this kind of blood stain look at number 46. um and you can see a that black dot is like the whole that where the spear goes in and then look how there's it's like pressurized blood that spurts out leaving these empty spaces um because of the pressure now you have to imagine so he's already been dead which means that the heart is not pumping anymore which means that the denser portions of the blood are settling to the base of the heart so the heart is like the size of a clenched fist so if you pierce that through what's going to flow out first is going to be corpulis blood which is red but then outflows serous blood that is plasma and so if there's separated blood it means that he's been dead for at least 30 to 60 minutes because that's how long it takes once the heart stops for now the blood to settle and separate so this isn't this isn't blood that was shed during life it's post-mortem blood which is exactly what the scriptures recount and of course they do so in terms that are super simple outflip blood and water but it corresponds to what we see of course we couldn't see it with a naked eye in 1978 though remember these guys that from the sterp project they're not looking with the naked eye it's all because you can't see water you can see the blood just fine but if you shine UV and capture what fluoresces there's like a halo around this blood stain so that's the very next slide 47 shows that of course I've only I can't show you UV because Violetta right it's ultraviolet but what what is here is that there's evidence of a around the outline evidence of of serum so this is the kind of level of detail that I'm saying that we're on have you ever looked at a picture for of the circular system as depicted in the 1200s it's laughable like we just didn't know the intricate musculature that surrounds an artery as opposed to a vein or how vein venous blood flows out of the frontal vein as opposed to the arterial blood at the side these are the kinds of things that I'm saying are not anatomically perfect I see uh we have a skeptical question here [Music] um why does the carbon dating accidentally correspond to the very narrow window of time in history where the Shroud first appeared in written history if it's supposed to be some accident well because even if well let's sorry I thought that was a follow-up question yeah because there's an integ intelligible plausible hypothesis that explains that namely that there is first century material blended with 16th century material such that you have a gradient go moving left to right such that you have the theory is that the one to the far left has more first century material and less 16th century material As you move to the right you get more 16th century material such that you go something like 1240 to then 1300 1340 and 1440. okay so there's a plausible explanation for that but look I want to say even if you don't accept the theory of French invisible weave which seems to be to my mind I think it's the best thing on the that's my personal opinion I'm happy to call it an opinion we've not proved French invisible weave we got plenty good evidence for it the the Los Alamos jet propulsion laboratory that inherited Ray Rogers um splice showed how it was indeed a splice showed how at the intersections of the threads if you remove them there's a white strand why because there's a plant gum that's soaked into the fibers left and right of the intersection but where there's uh where there's crossing over they're unable to see uh how the the plant gum didn't penetrate into that which is covered which makes perfect sense so in other words we're introducing new organic material that makes sense of the the data that's there so I think that it's there's there's simply and moreover it core it corresponds to exactly what we knew from 10 years prior that that upper left corner is heterogeneous uh with regard to its chemical composition so that that's that simply points to that that's an anomalous portion of the Shroud well that's exactly what we know about that portion of the Shroud so it's it's it's perfectly plausible if he wants to say is it some coincidence that it's from 1260 and then we have a paper trail that points back to 1354. look I want to ask him about 1192 I want to ask him about the Hungarian Pro prey codex everybody understands that this is the Shroud so check this out this is slide 57. this is a prey codex that dates precisely to the years 1192 to 1195 and we know that because 57 aside 57 yeah that's it um so this prey codex um as the name suggests contains prayers contains musical notation and so we're able to date it very precisely to that to those years but it's a cartoon it's like a comic strip from the 12th century which I think is amazing so can you see the top scene here with these men with beards are anointing uh the body of Christ and we know it's the body of Christ because see his Halo has the cross in it these two guys have beers I guess this guy doesn't have a beard that must be John I guess on the far right but the detail that counts for the Shroud is that you see how the body's on top of this long linen oh then there's further details specifically the hands so most of us have five fingers I'm pretty sure and yet this guy has four and on the Shroud guess what you can't see the thumbs no way and the reason is so clearly the thumbs are underneath the index fingers and some have suggested that it's because that the nails penetrate through these nerves at that the the knee drops of your hands exactly as a reef be that as it may you can't see the thumbs on the Shroud and neither on the Hungarian prey codex but that's not even the best part if you go down to scene two you're gonna see that these women who are carrying their flasks ready to anoint a body that isn't there are surprised by the angel who says you know pointing his finger why do you look for the living amongst the dead he's not here he's been raised and so you have instead that cloth one more time that same cloth that you saw in scene one it's now portrayed once again on the lower portion of that of the picture but this time we get further details that show oh the weave and the weave is the is exactly the pattern that we see on the Shroud the it was called a herringbone weave this is achieved on the loom by going over three and then under one thread over three and under one is called a three to one okay herringbone weave and so we get these um it kind of looks like a pyramid on the left I've zoomed in to show you see how there's like diagonal lines that go up and then they go down into the right so it looks kind of like if you're a little creative like the spinal cord of a fish and that's why it gets this name herringbone weave but that's not all it's it I just it's the again the convergence of all these elements there's more so just look up above and you see in the shape of like a seven four holes they've been called it's a misnomer but we call them the poker holes as if somebody took a hot poker it's more likely that something like charcoal fell on them maybe in a right of who knows but in any case it's fires to reduce it's the the the effect of of heat on the Shroud and it left these holes in the shape of an a 7 and then in the shape of an L depending on which way you're looking right here about three quarters down to the right and they're here on the Shroud and exactly I'll Point them out on this uh black and white um zoomed in version uh it looks like one two three four holes there and then again one two three four in the shape of a seven and so um nobody doubts nobody doubts that this Hungarian prey goddess is referencing the shroud of turn and keep in mind it's an 1192 wow that's 70 years prior the oldest date that the that was allowed by the 1988 carbon dating and so someone said ah it's off but it's 80 years first of all you told me you were 95 sure and you and you're wrong clearly but then there's no like hey let me explain this uh this shroud to you it's simply taking for granted that you know what this is it's like how how long must it have been in existence to just kind of nonchalantly like present this image without any need of explanation it's not coming out of nowhere in other words there's centuries of devotion that precede it also the very idea of Poker holes means that there was some instance of veneration most likely for the Shroud such that there was that that this um that's the harm to the Shroud came came to be so that's at least one good question that ought to be raised when someone comes from that angle but then I I want to say bring in the okay explain to me the sudarium explain to me that that this these anomalous very amorphous shapes Bloodstone that coincide explained to me that the blood has these these unique qualities that it shows that a man that has lung edema that we have these um icons down through the centuries what about the coins what about the veneration and this we should talk about the history huh because we didn't we didn't do this but this is like shroud ABC's a little bit where was the Shroud and when okay so we know it ended up in Turin but where did it start in Jerusalem in the year 33 A.D geez or thereabouts that Jesus has died and laid in the Tomb according to a legend of uh abgar there's a king in Odessa who hears about Jesus this uh Miracle Worker down south and because of his leprosy says I wish he could come to me I guess it's Thaddeus Jude who proposes the next thing next best thing because he goes north with the Shroud and when abgar venerates this face he's healed of his leprosy and converted to Christianity and so there's a pocket of Christians there in Odessa but that is reversed as soon as abgar's son takes the throne reverts to paganism and starts persecuting the Christians who go into hiding along with the Shroud which is buried in the city walls and so it's not until there's a flood in 525 that they now need to reconstruct those City walls and they find the Shroud they ReDiscover it in 544. now granted at this time it's not called the Shroud of Turin it's going to go by other names obviously the question is does it correspond to what today is called the Shroud of Turin and it seems that that's the case what was it called mandelion is one of the names we have other images image of Odessa and so what the his door needs to do is look at these different documents and say okay this is what we know about this cloth um does it correspond could it be the Shroud are there good reasons to say so and some will say yes and someone say no and there's there's room for the debate for sure the controverty history but it's good to know at least the pegs that people are pointing to so after 5 44 um it stays until 9 44 in Odessa but that's when Romanus the first who's the emperor in Constantinople wants to bring together all of the relics of Christ's passion into his house basically under under his roof and so there it goes and stays for almost three centuries but in 1204 there's The Fourth Crusade Aid and so you have Crusaders from Europe that basically sack in pillage in Constantinople and take home a little souvenir uh the the Shroud and so this is what's called the open years between 1204 The Fourth Crusade um and 1354 where was the Shroud we don't know but when when it does pop up lo and behold is in the hands of those who have ties to the Knights Templar again not everybody is on the same page about the the the Crusaders and their connection with the Shroud but this is one of those theories and so I think it's uh what's the guy's name that I like is a is it Jack Mark I'm going to get his name wrong maybe you could look this up but um Mark I want to say Marquardt or something like that um it has a book and you could I think enumerate something like 15 or 20 maybe more theories about what occurred during The Missing Years 1204 to 1354 but so it's for those at home just to kind of sum this up it's not as if we have the Shroud being spoken about in the Bible and then the next time we hear about it is in the 13th century exactly it's it's something that dates back what's post-biblical when do we first hear about well I think the abgar legend is um well well that would date what's I think pertinent to say is that it's one of the 12 that is moving the Shroud so I don't know when we can date The Legend because but I'm sure yeah that's something that people could look up the hidden history of the Shroud of Turin by Jack Mark Ward Marquardt yeah exactly so m-a-r-k-w-a-r-d-t right so I've I've not actually read his full book I heard him speak in an international Congress one time and I thought it was fascinating like this guy in a matter of short a matter of few minutes presented 15 theories of the Missing Years and apparently there are more and so and I'm open to that like this is what historians do this is what scientists do they propose theories they fish for data and let them best man win kind of thing right so let's let's put it on the table let's get it all out I know Ian Wilson is one who wrote a book that got a lot of play but I also know that he's not followed up to kind of um respond to criticisms and so some have called into question his theory and so that's fine you know let let that debate take place and I'll let the historians do that Dr shower white is someone in who teaches in Louisiana and uh has been to archives in Italy we've we've traveled together to chambery and to uh or not and to um to Turin and so I'm hopeful that they'll find more manuscripts more attestation but um what we have I think is enough to take seriously at the very release the Shroud it's like um especially things like the soil I I that one really gets me it's like what are we going to do with that that this travertine aragonite the calcium carbonate with just the the strontium that we know is matches the grottos of Jerusalem pollen that's another one that gets people big time I mean what we'd really need is like pollen ingrained in the blood stain pollen that because so we have some 113 if I'm not mistaken of the what's it called uh or something like that there's a plant I'm trying to remember it's a Latin name but it's a uh it's escaping me right now but uh gludia it's like or something like that um but 113 that were identified there so there was Max fry was a criminologist a Swiss criminologist who does like sticky type samples puts them under a microscope to identify like what species of plant and we're not talking like one or two but again over a hundred of the same that Blossom April and May right there in in and around Jerusalem so I think this stuff like that is it needs accounting for yeah uh you already did you want to keep going yeah um are there any confirmed Miracles associated with the Shroud yeah many people have asked me about that or or you mentioned one already with the leprosy but right yeah so that that was that was one that goes way back and some have called that a legend and even if it is even if there are legendary aspects to it it may have a historical base even if we're unsure to like how far does the historical basic extend I understand if people want to call that into question like um was there truly a miraculous healing of his leprosy like I don't know I but that's what that's what was passed down for sure um what I will say is this that it's not to be underestimated you know when Jesus talks about um throwing a mountain into the sea or let this mulberry tree be uprooted you know for those who have faith I know about you I've not thrown any mountains into the sea lately I've not and yet I know that God moves mountains and for me the biggest mountain more impressive than Mount Everest itself is when he moves the human heart from disbelief into belief and that's where I think the Shroud is most powerful that many people and I've seen it in my In the Flesh right I'll tell you a story one in particular so there's a group that came from Spain it was a girls school this girl was a senior I want to say she's 17 18 years old and she was known for being that gadfly in class that would ask the you know the consecrated women I was the dad playing you know all these annoying questions like you know what about this what about that and the skeptic for this and that so she comes to Rome and she we we do a shroud tour along with her class and the next day the consecrated women ask you know there's all these priests with all their degrees you know why don't you ask them your tough questions and she said you know what after yesterday's talk at the Shroud I don't think I need to and and so she was this was the kind of discourse she evidently needed to hear and that helped her and so you never know what you're removing I I'm always so impressed with the kinds of questions that I get with so sometimes I'll lead young people through our exhibition on the Shroud and then just take follow-up questions yeah and I've done this with uh medical doctors with Bishops with nuns with a First Communion or confirmation classes it is amazing the questions that come sometimes they have nothing to do with the Shroud it's like I thought it was just giving like uh scientific discourse or a historical one and they'll come back and be like well what about prayers to the Saints and what about purgatory and you realize that there that the gears are turning upstairs meeting like whoa this is real Jesus risen from the dead what are these other issues yeah so exactly we just removed a major Boulder that was an obstacle and now what does this mean mean what is it wait but there's this other obstacle and so that comes surging to the surface and so I think there's that's the that's a real tool of evangelization that we have here it awakens something in people it's a kind of discourse we've not heard the the the reason the number one reason our young people are saying they can't believe is science and so give them science right and what they're going to see is that it's not only compatible but faith in science are mutually Illuminating and so but they need to see one case study like probe all the science says here and what you're going to see is that it is intelligible and and yet it brings us to considerations of Christ's uh death and resurrection and now we're talking about the core of our Christian faith and this is why when I when I tour I on a tour I don't like that word but when I'm invited to speak and in a parish or I've even done this in in one time my favorite spot was Hong Kong on the 29th floor of like JP Morgan I think there was like one Catholic in the crowd but the rest were non somewhere some Protestants but it was like Chic and uh Buddhist and just non-believers but they were they were mesmerized by just the sheer science of it like explain this mystery to me I was like where else do I get the chance to talk about Jesus and the core mysteries of our faith the Incarnation and the resurrection which points to his divinity like the Divinity of Christ and his Incarnation this is this is like everything and we're able to talk at length it's like I can't talk a homily past seven minutes without getting Tomatoes thrown at me but we can go what two three hours easy on the on the Shroud and and the questions come who is this man why did he suffer what does it mean and I I think that's that needs to be played up a whole lot more if we take seriously the work of evangelization Jay latter says oftentimes Jesus is betrayed on the cross with a loincloth but is that historically accurate can we any evidence of a loincloth or otherwise in the Shroud no none whatsoever in fact it's just the opposite it that in the moment of scourging we know him to be naked because the wounds that are in the pelvic region are just as deep as everywhere else in the body so there was no loin cloth and that's on purpose right they're putting you on display they're they're going to the crossroads just Outside The City Gate where plenty of people would see you and you'd be humiliated and so that's the whole point now I want to be careful here I know that because this is the kind of thing that I hate to say and I hate to not say at the same time because I think that um you you don't want to if Jesus suffered it it's for a reason like Jesus is stepping into these sufferings it occurs to me to say that um Pope Saint John Paul II in his uh Theology of the Body um there's a whole chapter on the original nakedness right and I think there's something to be thought about pondered more deeply and pretend to have the best answer or the definitive answer but the fact that Jesus is naked is I think for obvious reasons we put a loincloth in our churches okay so I don't think that needs any explosion but if it's true that he was naked in the moment of scourging and I can't imagine that those who are doing these kinds of uh tortures are concerned to give it back to him once he's put to the Cross um so it is possible though by the way to answer Jay's question um it could it could be that after the fact they put on that loincloth but we have no evidence of that um and so but what is the I think the deeper question is what is the meaning that he was naked and I think what's happening here is that Jesus is shown to be a new Adam and he's suff he's stepping into the knot that Adam and Eve tied with their Disobedience and from that place with his loving obedience to the father is pouring out the love that unties the knot but is not from a distance saying like hey I'll suffer a little you know paper cut and then just say by Fiat or so by some decree or something some type of penal substitution or juridical Declaration that atones Us by some just a moral imputation or something that is not the case he's taking the full effects of our sin and on upon himself the way I like to say I'm glad can I expand on the answer here a little bit because this it goes into the crown of thorns but I think it's what uh I I just get a lot of light out of it I think it does speak to the question in a way okay so at the foot of the cross people are shouting the Pharisees are saying if you are the Christ and the Son of God show it come down and we'll believe in you which is like hey that's a good deal Jesus like you've got your chance why not but this is where I want to point to the crown of thorns and see like if you look with the eyes of the scientist you'll see something but it's a bit shallow you'll see something like okay those Thorns were three quarters of an inch long they penetrate every area every area of the surface of the skin they penetrate through the skin into the Bony plate etc etc but that's like I could sum that up by saying ouch like okay it hurt is a lot of pain it's ugly but what does it mean right and this is where you got to go to the scripture and you'll get much more insight the first time Thorns appear in the scripture are in Genesis 3 right after the fall so there are all kinds of fruit trees good for eating in Genesis 1 and 2. there are no Thor importance but after the eat of the forbidden fruit the Lord God Appears to Adam and says because you have listened to your wife and eaten of the fruit of which I said thou shall not eat of it cursed be the ground because of you so just pause there to note that this is a cosmic curse as an effect of man's sin and the curse takes a very particular shape because the Lord God goes on to say thorns and thistles shall shall it bear for you that the ground will come and by the sweater your brow shall you have bread to eat Etc right but I find that fascinating the The Fallout of the Fall the consequence of the original sin is a curse that takes a very particular shape Thorns or to be more more precise thorns and thistles which is the exact vocabulary by the way that reappears in the first sermon of Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7 where he says beware of um false prophets they are like ravenous wolves dressed in sheep's clothing and the apostles are like well great Jesus how am I going to pick them out in the crowd they look just like the rest and he says you'll know them by their fruit our Thorns are grapes gathered from Thorns or figs from thistles thorns and thistles it's the exact same vocabulary and in the exact same context in other words he's not talking about real agriculture with grapes and figs he's it's a metaphor for moral evil uh thorns and thistles the chaos and the the Disobedience the the sin is cast in these terms put two and two together and what do you get that Jesus knew that according to the biblical Motif Thorns stood for sin just that he would he knew that he would be crowned with thorns and so I think that without even opening his mouth but simply by wearing the crown what he's communicating to all standing by is I'm the sin Bearer I bear the sins of the world which is exactly the reading you would get if you understood from the Old Testament too that it's the high priest that would communicate the sins of the People by putting his hands on the head of the scapegoat not just anywhere but on the head and now this this goat would go out into the Wilderness to die so it was a liturgical representation of this transfer of our sins to him he's cast out Jesus is Outside The City Gate according to Hebrews and they're put to death so it's it's coming together isn't it the Thorns there's one expression from the psalm that says let one's evil return upon his head so when what goes around comes around round and when it comes around where does it land on your head so the of course Jesus according to Isaiah he is the suffering servant but we laid on him the sins of us all by his stripes we were healed so there is a kind of exchange here but Jesus is that vicarious victim who in our stead um takes the the the curse that is according to our punishment this is where Genesis 22 comes into play because there you have Isaac who is Led up a mountain on the third day Abraham is told which mountain it is Mount Moriah there he's he's given a test of God and he's to offer his only son uh his beloved Son Isaac as a holocaust as a whole burnt offering and they get there and there they are the only beloved Son is carrying the wood of the Cross up the mountain um which by the way begs the question how old was Isaac certainly he's not four years old if he's carrying the wood for the sacrifice according to the rabbinic tradition he's 30 years old or thereabouts is it fascinating because you know the rest of the story in the moment that the knife would fall and Abraham would offer as a holocaust his only beloved Son the angel stays his hand and says now that I know that you fear God Do no harm to the boy Abraham Wheels around to see a ram not a lamb even though that was the question that was asked up the mountain Abraham Abraham there's is like okay son here we go dad here's the wood for the sacrifice where's the lamb and Abraham says right there in the passage God will provide the lamb and yet he doesn't not on that day because the moment the angel appears Abraham spins around to find a ram but this is the detail that's so often missed with its horns caught in a Thicket its head the head of this vicarious victim is wrapped in Thorn and it will be sacrificed as the Beloved son is spared that's the exact language now that reappears in Romans by the way Paul thought of this too in other words that's not the so also real quick I want to ask if he was 30 Abraham had to have been like 120 yeah which means at a certain point Isaac was not being over like Isaac could Abraham couldn't have overpowered Isaac right like Isaac was laying his life well that's exactly what the rabbinic tradition says this passage Genesis 22 is called the akedah The Binding The Binding of Isaac but they say that uh and and you can read toggles about this that he was a willing victim that he must have been so he was he was strong as you say he would uh Abraham was feeble and and old how is it that he if he wasn't a willing victim how did he get Bound in the first place of course this is to move beyond the biblical text so I want to say that too but it is fascinating to think that Jews to this day understand that Isaac was a willing victim um but that's not the end of the passage um the end of the past if you read down to the down the page is when they rename this mountain and they rename it yahwehire which means the Lord will provide that's sometimes not caught in context or in Translation but the Lord will provide what read up just a few verses and it was clear God will provide a lamb but he didn't which is exactly why it left room for John the Baptist in page one of John's gospel to say Behold the Lamb of God he goes on to say who takes away the sins of the world John 1 29 okay so now fast forward to Good Friday where you have this Lamb of God on a tree and the and with the crown of thorns suggesting that he's rhyming typologically both with Genesis 3 in one way and in Genesis 22 in another as they're saying come down and we'll believe you that's exactly like saying you've got Divine muscle Flex right you got the power show it you know one of the words for power is horn we use this expression in often like like the Horn of our Salvation uh means a mighty savior in Translation so horn is a metaphor for um for power in the Old Testament so remember it's the horns that are wrapped in a Thicket they're in Genesis 22. so to Jesus his horns metaphorically speaking of course are wrapped in a Thicket that is to say you want to see Power guys if that's what you're asking for I'll show you power I'll die and on the third day rise but for the time being my horns are wrapped in a Thicket by the way that imagery is easily understood if you just consider like a ram when he attacks he charges with his horns if you want to defend yourself you charge right back and is that the way Jesus battles Satan it's like you take a blow I'll punch back harder no of course not g Jesus Is God Satan is his creature there is no way the darkness can battle the light I think that's the appropriate metaphor all of the all it's like Jesus is saying empty your fury on me spend all your strength on me Satan um concentrate on one point all of your Fury and I will take it upon myself I will drink that cup but when know this like when you bury me in that in the Land of the Dead and I can rot and light comes shining out of the darkness know this that the battle has been definitively won Jesus Is the Victor this is Christus Victor theology that Jesus concentrates upon himself all the consequences of sin he Bears it in his body and then Rises Victorious such that we are victorious to the extent that we are in Christ so that's our only wish is to be in him so that we can participate in his glory but what he's doing on the cross and this is what I think is so fascinating this is why we need the scriptures because if I had to look with the eyes of a scientist all I could see is a man being executed okay with with uh crowns that are yay long a crown of thorns that are so long but what I think he's saying more deeply is that I'm revealing myself to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world who opens up Paradise who gave who gains access it's like Jesus is facing those who have fiery um swords of those cherubim gaining access back into Eden and this is a new Exodus right and but we're not LED back into the land of milk and honey we're going to the Trinity that's where this ends as Jesus ascends to the father and it sits at the right hand in glory that's the new Exodus that's his end point that's what's been wrenched open right if you're remember the exit has ended the first Exodus when they crossed the Jordan and that was parted right the Jordan River yeah when Jesus is baptized what is rent Omen according to Mark Chapter 1 what is skitzod torn open the heavens such that the voice of the father comes spilling out and so does the holy spirit in the form of a dove as if to say the Trinity the life of the Trinity the life of God himself that's the paradise that we're going back into but now of course Jesus when he dies what does every evangelist highlight in the very next sentence he breathes his last period the curtain of the temple is torn this death the cosmic inclusio between Mark 1 and what is it Mark 15 or 16 15 I suppose but um as if to say I am gaining access into new holy of holies and if you're with me you share in it too and so gosh it's the theology that I want to get into I'm I lament a little bit that so much of shroud studies has been uh super saturated with scientific yeah and that's good I want the science too but it's a both end it's not an either or we need to really hang on to both end together to put them into dialogue yeah I almost feel bad having to ask questions less lofty than what your what you're answering I'm so grateful for that that was beautiful um Frankie Mercado just gave us a Super Chat he said hi Father Andrew I am a science undergraduate student at the University of Notre Notre Dame is there any way that I can intern under you for the summer and study the newest research on this because this stuff is so cool that's awesome yeah well listen please sign up for the postgraduate certificate we have I I wish we had hundreds of people subscribing every year but we don't we have like a couple dozen and I just think there's so much more to be done I I am not a scientist like I okay I did two years at Georgia Tech and then I began studying you know Humanities and Latin and literature and philosophy and theology so I you know I I dabble into the science um I'm sorry to disappoint there but I am not an expert I quote the experts when I can you know if I know that it's this physicist or that I'll try to cite my sources so that people can look into it for themselves but quite honestly we need scientists also with a faith perspective that can go into the different areas and you know give their expertise to what is an ongoing study so I think a good starting point would be uh for those who are more serious um you can say it's it's super cheap by the way like I'm embarrassed at how cheap it is for one year to get access to these videos from these leading experts from all over the all over the world but look I'm not we're not trying to make money off the thing with the idea is that you go out and spread the good news about this so get it get the postgraduate certificate videos learn from the scientists themselves and then um and then dive deep into shroud.com because what you're going to find is like if you want to specialize in things like the blood you really need to go into all the literature on that if you want to study think something like art history that's a complete different Corpus of literature and so but and so get your starting get your bearings get like I'll give you a holistic holistic point of view and then dive deep um we have another skeptical question you may have responded but feel free to take another swipe at it he says there were three Laboratories with three different samples that conducted tests on the Shroud and all converge within the the same range twelve hundred to thirteen hundred are we to believe all three Labs receive samples from the same top left patch that was known to newer known to newer compared to the rest known to be newer and oh okay no one compared perhaps that's what he meant was known uh okay here we go are we to believe that all three Labs receive samples from the same top left patch that was known to be newer compared to the rest of the Shroud yes we do know that no that's there's no doubt that we know that yes yes that's the answer and we have it on videotape we know where they cut the sample well they cut eight centimeters they kept four centimeters on reserve those four centimeters were diced up and given to Arizona one era then Oxford and Zurich and then Arizona two four centimeters were then sent those four different samples were sent to the individual Laboratories and they gave their individual results um but they did so when they published collectively and then so they have we have it on reserve the other four that other four centimeters so the patch that was sampled we know exactly where it was taken from we know it to be uh heterogeneous with respect to the rest of the shroud that's that's what I would want to say all right well look we've I think we've gone over three hours now so you have anything else you want to add gosh what would I want to end with all of this I suppose that um I think it needs to be highlighted that when we look to the face of Christ we contemplate him in his death but if it's the case that it's the resurrection that made this image we're also aware that the body that is so bruised and battered that face which is so disfigured is also about to rise and in this instant rising and so those eyes are going to open and that's our destiny too face to face vision of Our Lord that's what we long for as Christians now we're in this you know Valley of Tears In This Land of Exile and we await face-to-face Vision we need the help of this image I believe to contemplate his face and to long to see him alive because that's what we're made for like Augustine says you made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you no matter what the world can offer it can't offer anything like this where Christ has to uh in our inheritance is his because we're co-heirs with him so long as we believe and so that's the invitation I would give and look I'm happy for the Skeptics to come I want like uh Jesus with uh Saint Thomas the skeptic to say come press and pro put your put your hand Thomas in My Side press and probe hey you scientists come with your microscopes and all your X-ray and infrared and all the rest study the Shroud but don't be unbelieving but believe in other words that's the invitation to this encounter with Christ to see him with eyes of Faith because that's where we'll meet him final question three plus hours in what is your personal opinion of what created that image so I think that the Shroud is the natural effect of a supernatural event it's my personal opinion that the miracle isn't so much the Shroud although I know some people use that language I much prefer to say that I think the miracle is the resurrection when that corpse became a living glorified divinized body and there was something about it and that's whatever light effects might have accompanied such an event which I don't pretend to be able to uh describe or much less reproduce artificially but if somebody does want to volunteer to die and rise again let me know I'll hook you up with some physicists we can do some comparative analysis um but that's what I think I think that in the moment of the Resurrection um you know there's even some verses in Hebrews that use some luminous like in a flash of light obviously it's metaphorical language but it could could it be the case like look we get all kinds of luminous imagery in the Transfiguration don't we like you know when Jesus is up on the mountain and his face is reading like the sun right or and it's dazzling white in Luke's words exactly and and so what what I love about that is that the glory of his Divine person was shining through his Humanity it didn't Eclipse it it didn't destroy his Humanity but it did perfect it and that's what I think awaits us too is that God is by his grace he's going to make us what he is that's why he became what we are right to use the awards of the our first um theologians to describe how soteriology works there's a Divine exchange by which he was he who is Immortal takes on our mortal nature so that in our nature he can heal it and what he didn't assume he didn't heal so he assumed our full nature and he showed it to be the case most radically in his death but then when he rises he shows his Divine person and that's what we're contemplating every scene of the Gospel by the way is that there's a Divine person who is operating behind whatever human actions you might be seeing you know healing a leper or walking on water or calming the storm it's like a Divine person is doing those deeds is forgiving those sins and we contemplate his presence presence here because that's the Kingdom on Earth as it is in heaven there's a translation in human language that doesn't diminish in the least his divine presence it manifests it all right our Cosmos awaits uh the new day when we too are when all the cosmos is reborn is regenerated of course we await the parasia but it's it's already here in one sense he's inaugurated because in his person in Christ the head he has reached consummate glory on the in the church that glory is inaugurated but not consummated and so we wait that day amen and whoever that person was was unbelieving and prayed that prayer of acceptance to Christ let us know who you are so we can pin that comment to the top of the uh talk to the top of the comment section and invite prayers for that person right exactly yeah thank you kindly for being on this has been outstanding I'm so grateful that you've dedicated this much attention to this this topic so that you can help us so yeah thank you Father thank you Thursday do you want to mention one more time your uh upcoming podcast oh yeah one more more time can't hurt yeah so come check us out at the two priests those two priests in the description go check it out yeah I can't wait to be a subscriber it's gonna be terrific glory to Jesus Christ Glory forever

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 478,046

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: HAbuG-oVq1Q

Length: 187min 39sec (11259 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2023