Quest for the Historical Jesus

Quest for the Historical Jesus

My first thought provoking encounter with the shroud happened while on a flight from New York to Miami. On the plane I was reading Thomas Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills, a history of the apostolic era of early Christianity. I thought it might be interesting and a good way to pass the time in the air and indeed it was. There was nothing funny in the book, nothing ridiculous, nothing to laugh at. It was simply well told historical narrative. Well, seemingly so.

Suddenly, with little logical reason that I could see, Cahill started to discuss the burial shroud of Jesus. It might have been a treasure of the early church in the East, he surmised. That same shroud, he clearly thought, is now in Turin.

That’s funny I remember thinking. Funny? Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer and sometimes professor of biochemistry at Boston University said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …” That is not the way I found Cahill’s assertion funny, then.  It would become the way I would come to think about it.