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

Mark Guscin

There are many points of coincidence between all these points and the Shroud of Turin - the blood group, the way the corpse was tortured and died, and the ma-croscopic overlay of the stains on each cloth. This is especially notable in that the blood on the Sudarium, shed in life as opposed to postmortem, corresponds ex-actly in blood group, blood type and surface area to those stains on the shroud on the nape of the neck. If it is clear that the two cloths must have covered the same corpse, and this conclusion is inevitable from all the studies carried out up to date, and if the history of the Sudarium can be trustworthily extended back beyond the fourteenth century, which is often referred to as the shroud’s first documented historical appearance, then this would take the shroud back to at least the earliest dates of the Sudarium’s known history. The ark of rel-ics and the Sudarium have without any doubt at all been in Spain since the beginning of the seventh cen-tury, and the history recorded in various manuscripts from various times and geographical areas take it all the way back to Jerusalem in the first century. The im-portance of this for shroud history cannot be over-stressed.