The Shroud of Turin is back in the news. Many of the content creators I follow have been claiming the Shroud is real, in light of recent studies using x-rays to analyze the plant fibers of the Shroud.
I think the most egregious is the "face of Jesus" made by asking a generative AI to create a face based on the Shroud of Turin. If you ask a generative AI to generate an image of a face, it literally must create an image of a face. And that's what they got. They got an image of a face. It'd be curious to see, if they kept asking it the same thing, how different the faces would be. I'm guessing broadly similar, but notably different. Especially if you asked Google's Gemini.
I have always been dismissive of the Shroud. My point has been, the eyewitness evidence of Jesus' burial and resurrection is inconsistent with the Shroud of Turin, so that even if the Shroud is miraculous and from the 1st century, it just means it's a miraculous 1st century burial shroud of some other guy. I want to stress, this is a rhetorical position. The Shroud is not miraculous, and is not 1st century; I'm simply emphasizing that I do not need to know its date or means of creation to know it is not the burial cloth of Jesus.
I made a kind of flippant post recently. However, the Shroud of Turin is actually a highly studied religious artifact, and maybe warrants more than such a brief dismissal. So I thought I'd take some time to go into more depth on it.
I am going to again state the case against inauthenticity. That is, that the Shroud is not the burial cloth of Jesus.
The argument I am going to make does not in any way rely on the carbon dating data, on modern replication attempts, on historical records from medieval France calling it a forgery, nor on any modernist, naturalist, or anti-supernaturalist viewpoint.
My argument will only be based on, firstly, the eyewitness accounts of the burial and Resurrection of Jesus that we have in the New Testament. Secondly, on the historical descriptions of the Image of Edessa, the most likely historical candidate for the Shroud's pre-Turin existence, taken out of the patristic sources. These are the sources Christians should look to. Based on careful analysis of these, and these only, I will show that Jesus was not covered in a shroud at the moment of his Resurrection, and that the Image of Edessa is a later accretion to the original legend of King Abgar V.
