THE REAL FACE OF JESUS? By Bobbie Ann Cole

 

During our Christmas just spent in Israel, my husband Butch and I stumbled upon a permanent exhibition of the Turin Shroud at the Notre Dame Hotel in Jerusalem. 

It certainly wasn’t something uppermost in our minds. Had we not taken a look when it was mentioned by the man at the front desk — and spent two hours in what ended up as contemplation and prayer— I would not be writing this piece.

The Turin Shroud is a length of fine linen, 4.35m long by 1.1m wide. It bears the full-length front and back images of a crucified man as well as many other images, including a large number of flowers and plants.

We have good evidence that Jesus was hurriedly taken down from the cross after he died and wrapped in a shroud. The hurry was due to the fact that a special shabbat was just coming in, not only the weekly Sabbath but the beginning of the Passover: 

“Joseph (of Arimathea) took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth,  and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock,” Matt.27:59-60.

A Fake?

Years ago, I read an intriguing book about the Shroud. The wonder of it was: how could the likeness of a crucified man be ‘burnt’ onto a length of linen? This crucified man wore a crown of thorns, had pierced wrists, ankles and side and legs unbroken. (To hasten his departure, this was often the Roman way.) It seemed unlikely to be genuine.

Carbon dating in 1988 of some threads came up with an origin in the Middle Ages that seemed to confirm my doubts.

Yet no one could explain by what event the imprint had been made on the shroud.

My own idea was that perhaps a flash of lightning had ‘photographed’ the image of a wrapped statue at some stage…

Even though it was now known to be a fake, determined advocates of the Shroud carried on probing, declaring that the threads sent for carbon dating happened to be those of a medieval repair to its fine linen— one that used cotton threads.

Yeah, right… I thought.

Deep inside, however, I was disappointed.

From 1st Century AD

Since 1988, technology has moved on. Threads have been deemed comparable with a piece of fabric known to be from the Siege of Masada in Israel, 55-74 AD. It is claimed that the Shroud can be dated to the first century AD.

Imprints of flowers and plants that feature on the Shroud have tightened its existence to a place and a season. The late Avinoam Danin, a Jewish botanical expert from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has spent years examining these. Although not a Christian, he has said, “Observing the images of plants in the same locations on photographs produced by different photographic techniques and on the linen of the Shroud itself proves that they are real and not artifacts,” *.

He locates them all to the Jerusalem area. Some species are found nowhere else. And he dates their flowering season to March-April, which coincides with the Jewish Passover, the season of Christ’s crucifixion.  

Anthemis Bornmuelleri

When Joseph of Arimathea laid Jesus in his tomb, he “was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds,” (John 19:39). This is a vastly extravagant amount of unction and plants. To set this in perspective, the first century Jewish historian Josephus boasts that a famous teacher was buried with as much as forty pounds of ‘spices’.

A Cap of Thorns

Danin also confirmed the presence of what he terms the ‘ferocious thorns of two trees’ around the man’s head.

Although the Shroud’s official known origin is in   Turin in1578, there is good evidence to support its being much earlier.

The Sudarium

It can be paired with a sudarium (head cloth) mentioned in Luke and John’s Gospels that is in Oviedo, Spain, a destination of Christian pilgrims for more than a thousand years. Measuring 34 x 21 inches, this dirty, wrinkled linen cloth is stained with blood. Although devoid of facial image, according to Simply Catholic it bears marks that clearly conform to the head of a “brutally crucified man.”

“The stains are the product of pulmonary edema that flowed from the nose and mouth after death, as is characteristic of crucifixion victims,” (see John19:34). “The cloth is also covered with aloe… In the case of severe trauma and when blood flowed at the time of death, Jewish law mandated use of a sudarium to retrieve the victim’s blood. Since blood was viewed as the ‘seat of life,’ it was unthinkable to move a disfigured corpse without covering it, and it was imperative not to lose the blood because it was just as much a part of the body as the flesh. Burial of the blood was required, even to the extent of digging up blood-soaked earth and interring bloodstained clothes and linens.”

The tradition is that Joseph of Arimathea gave the sudarium to Simon Peter. It was then at a monastery on the eastern side of the Jordan River. From there, it travelled in the 7^th century to Alexandria, Egypt, and then on to Seville in Spain. Surviving the Moorish invasion of 711, King Alfonso II the Chaste built a holy chamber in his palace in Oviedo, now part of the city’s gothic cathedral, to house it. 

A Match

The Spanish Centre for Sindonology (meaning Study of the Shroud), based in Valencia, Spain, has investigated both the Shroud and the sudarium and has confirmed the “overwhelming probability” that the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo covered the same victim. Blood flows, puncture and other wounds on the face and neck coincide, as do the presence of aloe and myrrh.

Jesus is also the only crucifixion victim known to have been crowned with thorns, or perhaps, as Danin suggests, a ‘cap’ of thorns. Simply Catholic reports: “The Shroud of Turin has in fact a distinctive trickle of blood on the forehead in the shape of the Greek letter epsilon, which appears above a drop of the same blood, from a puncture wound. This pattern appears on the sudarium in exactly the same place.

“Both linens, then, covered a man who was scourged, crowned with thorns, struck in the face, brutally crucified and buried, just as Scripture describes Christ’s unique passion, death and burial.”

If they are both from the same burial, the known origin of the Turin Shroud can be dated back to the 8^th century.

The Pantocrator

There is possibly an earlier still connection that may be established for the Shroud. The face of an icon known as ‘The Pantocrator’ at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, dated to 550 AD, bears a remarkable resemblance to the face on the Shroud. Was it therefore inspired by the Shroud?

Today, we have reached the Shroud’s ‘holographic era’: we can see 3D images of the man, as if he has come to life. I find them moving and impressive. Convicting.

Butch and I are looking forward very much to seeing the Shroud for ourselves at Mystery and Faith, a high tech, interactive exhibition that is coming to Washington DC’s Museum of the Bible from Feb 26 to July 31^st.

To me, if this really is the image of Jesus, it is priceless.

* Botany of the Shroud, Avinoam Danin

 

Bobbie Ann Cole is a Christian writer, speaker and writing teacher.

Her latest post on her Scrollchest Blog is The Women in Matthew’s Genealogy. Why those women? 

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