Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

In the Wake of a Miracle

In recent years, some scientists have tried to link the enigma of the Shroud's images to a resurrection event. In the wake of a miraculous occurrence, they reason, some energetic stimulus brought forth a visible chemical change at the surface of the cloth?

To many people this is utter read-no-further nuttiness. Indeed that may be the case. But it must be considered because such thinking articulates certain qualities of the images. Both the frontal and dorsal images, for instance, seem to be a vertically collimated representation of a body. And they do seem to be terrain graphs that can be plotted as 3D isometric objects. Miraculous causation must also be considered because it is so widely discussed in numerous texts, on websites, and in the media.

The quasi-scientific conjecture that allows some to surmise a supernatural image drawing process depends on some energetic radiation emitting from the body as the body dematerializes or becomes mechanically transparent. It presumes much about how a resurrection event might have occurred.  Perhaps it presumes too much. Could we not, with just as much validity, envision that Jesus simply awakened, stood up, and walked out of the tomb?

John A. T. Robinson, famous for creatively challenging conventional wisdom about New Testament interpretations and provenance, very much doubted that the Shroud was the work of a forger. In contemplating the notion that the author of the fourth gospel may have meant for us to interpret that Jesus passed through his burial cloths, he addressed dematerialization:

Dematerialization is I suspect a modern way of envisaging the relationship between flesh and spirit, matter and energy, of being 'changed' or 'clothed upon' with a body of 'glory'. How a first-century Jew would naturally have envisaged resurrection (though this does not of course mean that this is how it actually happened) would surely have been as a corpse waking up from sleep, like Tabitha in Acts (9:40), as indeed Jesus predicts of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then like Lazarus walking out of the tomb. The difference in the case of Jesus was that the grave-clothes did not need to be taken off him nor the stones removed: he did it himself. For, unlike Lazarus, he was not simply being restored to the weakness of a flesh-body. In the power of the Spirit he broke the bonds of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Far from being viewed as helpless and naked, he would probably have been envisaged in robes of light like the angels at the tomb, as in the vision of the risen Christ in the Apocalypse (cf. especially Matt. 28:3 with Rev. 1:14).

Jesus simply arising, like getting out of bed, is not satisfying for those who suppose the image was drawn on the cloth by the Resurrection. Nor will a non-corporeal, spiritual-only resurrection do. No, these researchers imagine, as no medieval forger would have imagined, elementary particles or radiation emitted from a dissolving body. It might be something like a "Beam me up, Scotty" scene from Star Trek with sparkling energy.