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

Jesus at 2000 Symposium

In May of 1996, in an Episcopal Teleconferencing Network broadcast follow-up to Trinity Institute’s “Jesus at 2000 Symposium” Crossan, Marcus Borg, Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright, and Deirdre Good were exploring the topic of the Resurrection. As can be expected when Crossan was present, the matter of Jesus’ burial surfaced in the discussion. Tom Wright had just finished arguing that Jesus’ was in fact buried. The conversation went as follows:

Borg: But surely the reason that didn’t happen amongst other reasons is that Jesus was a peasant and secondary burial in an ossuary simply didn’t happen for peasants.

Crossan: That’s expensive, Tom, that burial you’re talking about.

Wright: It is expensive and the Gospels explain perfectly well how it happened. This is the trouble.  It’s very easy to reconstruct something if you take all the bits of evidence off the table and say, we don’t believe any them, then of course you are free to tell any other story that you like.

That may be a fair criticism of the argument that Jesus was not buried. It seems so, but I don’t know.  It is illustrative, however, of the problem with the shroud. We cannot be selective with evidence and simply fall back on best understandings, then wonder about newly crucified models used to address but one of the contradictions. Of course, if the shroud is authentic, then there is little argument left about whether or not Jesus was buried.