The Gospel of John also mentions a “Gabbatha,” or pavement, where Pilate is said to have sat in judgment over Jesus prior to his crucifixion (John 19:13). L. H. Vincent, an archaeologist and priest, discovered this pavement,
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which is preserved today in the crypt of the Covenant of the Sisters of our Lady of Zion in Jerusalem.
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Literary evidence of crucifixion in the first century as described in the Gospels is abundant. The Dead Sea Scrolls appear to refer to it as a punishment for treason, and the Romans used it as a means of execution for revolutionaries and thieves. From the beginning of the first century through
ad
70 and the destruction of Jerusalem, thousands of people were crucified in Palestine. Two early crude graffiti of crucifixion have been found. One is from Pozzuoli, outside Naples, and the other is from the Palatine Hill, near Rome.
In 1986, archaeological corroboration of the methods used for crucifixion was found by Israeli archaeologists. A skeleton of a first-century adult male who was crucified was found in an ossuary at an ancient Jewish cemetery in northern Jerusalem. An inscription on the ossuary identified the man by the name “Jehohanan.” An iron spike was driven through the ankle bone, and a small piece of olive wood was still stuck to the spike.
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The legs of the skeleton of Jehohanan were broken by a single, strong blow shortly before death precisely in the manner recorded in the Gospels for the thieves crucified beside Jesus (John 19:31–33).
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Breaking the legs prevented the crucified person from raising himself in order to breathe and thus hastened his death, according to the custom of the times. This is believed to have been customary treatment for Jewish crucifixion victims in deference to the Mosaic prohibition against leaving the body on a cross after sundown at the beginning of the Sabbath.
Notwithstanding that custom, the Gospels report that the bones of Jesus were never broken—he was stabbed with a lance to assure his death. Critics, particularly German scholars, speculated decades ago that the story of the breaking of the legs was an invention of the Gospel writers, fabricated merely in order to fulfill an early prophecy in Psalm 34 that not one bone would be broken when the Messiah was crucified. Jehohanan’s skeletal remains, however, undermine that theory of fabrication in the Gospels.
Medical opinions verify not only the Gospel report of the sweat of blood that Jesus suffered in Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion but also the testimony in the Gospel of John that blood and water ran from the body of Jesus after he was pierced with a lance during the crucifixion (19:34–35). Most medical experts agree that this is an accurate description of what would have been observed since the water would have come from the pericardium surrounding the heart and the blood from the right side of the heart. Some medical experts have observed that the water could also have been fluid accumulated in the lungs as a result of the beatings Jesus suffered. All agree that this is strong proof of death.
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In any event it is unlikely that the apostle John could have known in the first century to fictionalize that effect.
The Shroud of Turin is a fourteen-foot length of sepia-colored linen that appears to bear imprints of a naked, crucified male; vague outlines, marked with blood and sweat. Up close the image is almost invisible. Step back and the faint image with traces of facial features gradually emerges. The farther back you stand, the clearer the image becomes. The image evidences that the body was carefully placed atop the cloth, with the remainder of the cloth pulled up over the head, and then draped over to his feet. This cloth is believed by many to be the linen cloth described in the Gospels as purchased by Joseph of Arimathea to wrap the body of Jesus for burial.
The Shroud, which is physical evidence, meets the test of relevancy in our case because if it is authentic, it corroborates many details of the Gospel testimonies and possibly the resurrection. All four of our witnesses—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—have testified that Joseph of Arimathea bought the linen cloth and used it to wrap the body of Jesus after he was removed from the cross and placed in the tomb. When three days later the tomb was found unaccountably empty, both Luke and John mention that Peter and John saw the linen cloth still lying there.
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Among all ancient religious relics, the Shroud of Turin is unique. So let’s look at the evidence and determine whether it’s more likely than not true that the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus.
Although circumstantial evidence traces the existence of the Shroud back to the first century, the first clearly documented record of the Shroud bearing an image believed to be that of Jesus was a public exhibition in Lirey, France, in
ad
1350. Large crowds attended the exhibition, and a souvenir medallion was struck. One of these medallions can be seen today at the Cluny Museum in Paris. At the time of the exhibition, the Shroud was owned by the Charny family, a French aristocratic family, but it was donated to the Duke of Savoy in 1453. The Shroud was exhibited in various places throughout Europe until 1578 when it was moved to Turin, still owned by the Savoia. In 1983 Umberto II of Savoy donated the Shroud to the Pope, on condition that it remains in Turin. Today the Shroud resides in the Guarini Chapel of the Duomo in Piazza San Giovanni, Turin, under the care of the Vatican and, locally, the Archbishop of Turin.
After photography was invented, in 1898, the first photograph of the Shroud was taken by an amateur photographer named Secondo Pia. This work produced an astounding result. In his notes Pia wrote that as the negative emerged from the solution in the dark room, he saw the clear, sharp image of a man’s face and wounded body slowly revealed, an almost photographic likeness of a man who’d been crucified. He realized then that light values, shadow and light, were reversed with the Shroud. The Shroud itself was a photographic negative! As if it came from a time capsule, the invention of photography had released for the first time the clear photographic image of a man with clear and detailed features.
This inexplicable and spectacular discovery was verified thirty-three years later in 1936 when access to the Shroud was allowed by the Vatican once again for another photograph, this time taken by a professional photographer, Giuseppe Enrie. The second photograph confirmed the mysterious results of the first, providing such detail that experts who have held the original glass negative in their hands have said that no one could have faked the precise, photographic quality of the image.
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The reverse (positive) image on the Shroud clearly shows a man’s features with swelling, wounds, and blood, particularly on the eyes and nose and encircling the forehead, as well as nail wounds at the location of the wrists, just above the hands, and in the feet. A wound on the right side of the chest is also clear, all exactly as described in the Gospel of John (John 19).
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More than one hundred scourge marks on the body appear on the image, on both the front and back of the cloth. These were made with a double-pronged whip, with dumbbell-shaped balls of lead. The marks of the whip match the unique design of a Roman “flagrum” used in the first century.
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Science has found no explanation for the image on the Shroud. Evidence shows that the image was neither painted nor drawn, and no known transfer, contact process, scorching, or burnishing or other process has been found to account for it. Numerous well-respected artists have attempted to reproduce the image without success; for one thing they are unable to convert a model of the clear human face to a negative image. The image appears to have been created all at once, not over time, as no prior decomposition had set in when it was formed. High magnification photographs of the image fibers show that the fibers may have been degraded by some sort of chemical change, something similar to a blast of radiation.
From tests using a VP-8 Image Analyzer created by NASA, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories tested the Enrie photograph and were startled to find that the image has true three-dimensional properties. The VP-Image results took the density of the image and converted it to vertical relief, as in bas relief. This was possible because there is an exact mathematical relationship between the distance of the different parts of the body from the cloth and the light energy from the Shroud image. This mathematical component of the photograph has been confirmed by computer scientists in the last few years.
The Shroud’s bloodstains, however, were created by contact, and after extensive analysis they have been determined to be human blood. The particles are hemoglobin, type AB.
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Blood does not flow from a dead person, however. These bloodstains appear to have been created by contact of moist blood clots with clear borders of serum lines, not from a fresh flow of blood. When photographed, the serum lines, which can only form around blood clots, produce fluorescent halos around the blood marks, indicating that these were from the last blood that flowed near death and at the time of death.
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In 1995 samples taken from the bloodstains on the Shroud also tested positive for DNA (believed to be of human source). Some gene segments have been clearly isolated.
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These results were separately verified by Victor and Nancy Tryon at the Center for Advanced DNA Technologies. Additionally, in the second analysis the presence of X and Y male chromosomes were confirmed.
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In 1988, for the first time, the Vatican allowed radiocarbon dating testing (carbon-14) on the Shroud. All living things, such as the original flax used to weave the shroud, contain carbon isotopes that decay after death. Radiocarbon dating measures the amount of carbon-14 a former living thing contains, and that tells us the age. In the 1988 radiocarbon dating, small samples of cloth, all cut from a single site on the Shroud, were given by the Vatican to laboratories at Oxford University in England; in Zurich, Switzerland; and at the University of Arizona (Tucson, Arizona), in the United States. After testing, the average findings from the three labs, to a 95 percent degree of probability, indicated that the Shroud’s flax was dated to approximately the year 1325.
Based on the radiocarbon dating, newspapers around the world announced that the Shroud was a medieval forgery. This was a tremendous blow to many international scientists, physicians, artists, and photographers, and those who’d venerated the Shroud for years. Still, there was a puzzle because the medieval finding was contradicted by strong historical and circumstantial evidence indicating that the Shroud had existed back to the first century.
In 2005, however, Raymond N. Rogers, a chemist and laboratory fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, proved that the radiocarbon dating was wrong. Rogers proved that the samples provided to the three radiocarbon-dating laboratories had been cut from a newer rewoven strip added to the Shroud in the medieval period. Rogers tested fibers from all areas of the Shroud against threads taken from the area of the official radiocarbon samples distributed to the laboratories and found that the samples used in the tests, unlike the rest of the Shroud, were of a different chemical composition. For example the samples contained cotton and dye not found in the original cloth fibers.
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The specific dye found in the new cloth strip was first introduced in Europe around the end of the Crusades in 1291, not long before the radiocarbon date announced in the 1988 testing. The newer cloth was found to have been added to the Shroud by the use of an artistic technique often referred to as “invisible weaving,” a technique used by medieval artisans to repair fine tapestries. Roger’s discovery was announced in a peer-reviewed publication and has since been independently confirmed, leaving open again the possibility of a first-century dating and giving more weight to the circumstantial evidence tracing the dating of the Shroud back to that time.
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Since the first recorded public exhibition of the Shroud in
ad
1350, it is known to have been located only in Europe. But intriguing evidence indicates that its origins are elsewhere. Faint images of flowers on the Shroud establish that it was in the geographic area around Jerusalem at a time earlier than 1350. In addition there are pollen grains scattered over the cloth, and faint images of a thorn plant,
gundelia
, on the head. In 1973, Max Frei, a forensic scientist from Switzerland, identified fifty-eight species of plants among hundreds of pollen grains taken from the linen.
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The pollen has now been matched to the flower images on the cloth. In 1997, botanists announced that twenty-eight different specimens of plants had been identified through images that appear on the Shroud, using a special process of photography using negatives and ultraviolet light scanning to increase contrast. Botanists from Hebrew University have authoritatively matched these images to plants, some of which grow in the area between Jerusalem and Jericho. The plants include rock roses, crown chrysanthemums, a bouquet of bean capers, and the gundelia. The fact that pollen has also been matched to these identified flower and plant imprints provides a second independent botanical method of confirmation.
But the image of the bean caper,
Zygophyllum Dumonson,
provides the strongest evidence because this plant grows
exclusively
in Israel, Jordan, and the Sinai desert. In addition, the faint images on the Shroud of the winter leaves and the stalks of the bean caper indicate that the plant was picked in the springtime, the time of the crucifixion—and Easter and Passover—as reported in the Gospels.
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Perhaps flowers lead the way?
In July 2002 the Shroud underwent a major restoration in Turin. The restoration was controversial among scientists around the world, scientists who had studied the cloth extensively for many years and yet were not consulted. Unfortunately the cloth was vacuumed, and the pollen and other debris were removed in the process. Turin officials say the pollen and debris were preserved separately; however, as of the date of this edition, that has not been publically confirmed.