Essay: The Shroud of Turin from the Eyes of My Teenager

The Shroud

There are skeptics for everything. It’s fascinating how some people are more inclined to believe that the world was created purely by the smallest chance possible than to believe there is a living God. Even when all the evidence lines up in front of them, people will still turn their head the other way in attempt to disprove ideas. This is especially the case surrounding the Shroud of Turin. With the Shroud, there is some controversy, history, as well as evidence.

The fourteen-foot cloth said to have been the burial linen of Jesus of Nazarene, (or Christ) has been attacked by skeptics for years. One strong argument was that carbon dating of the Shroud proved that it was, in fact, not around 2000 years ago but rather in the medieval times. Going by this, another dispute then comes to say that an artist simply painted a picture of Christ in the Shroud. Yet a dispute goes on to say that how does anyone know for certain that it is the actual Jesus’ face in the Shroud and not any other man? First, we have to look at the evidence before we can draw a conclusion.

The story of this relic, many discrepancies surround its origins mainly because of the fact that there are no records of the Shroud until around the 1300s. Going back before that, however, there was a cloth known as the Cloth of Edessa, which around 900 AD was transferred to the city of Constantinople. According to a description by an archdeacon, when the cloth arrived in Constantinople, he described it as a “full length image with bloodstains from a side wound.” With this information recently recovered by the Vatican, it is easy to therefore connect the Cloth of Edessa and the Shroud of Turin as one and the same. More evidence supports this idea as microscopic amounts of pollen, from ancient flowers found only in areas such as Constantinople and around the Middle East, were found in the cloth.

In around the year 1988, scientists claimed that the Shroud was dated close to 1300 due to carbon dating. This theory was then disproved as with scientific advancements, scientists were able to prove that the material was chemically different than the rest of the cloth. The samples taken for the carbon dating were actually a part of a medieval repair patch to the cloth. With this in mind, the cloth was then later tested to be at least twice > as old as the carbon estimates. Only one scientist claimed that the Shroud’s image might’ve been painted. It is agreed however, that through the chemical composition of the Shroud, by chemical and spectral analysis, the Shroud is not painted. If, however, one assumes that it was painted, first, how the image was created needs to be put to consideration. The image was a negative, which means that an artist of the medieval times has to do everything backwards with the image mind. It would be truly difficult to reprogram the way your brain processes things and to reverse everything. Imagine writing your signature upside-down and backwards. That alone is an extremely difficult task as the artist must make black into white and turn the light shades of grey into the dark and vice-versa. In addition to this strenuous process, why would an artist go so far as to make a hoax of this magnitude on a fourteen-foot cloth, instead of finding a piece of thorns and claim it as part of the crown of thorns that Jesus himself painfully wore.

All scientific evidence clearly proves that the cloth is very probable to have been around the 1^st century originating near the Middle East very likely to be in Palestine. It is also safe to conclude that the Shroud bears the wounds of a man crucified and the bloodstains are truly blood. The image of the Shroud has not been proved to have been man-made by any way, be it painting or intricate stitching and also cannot be reproduced by any natural process ever recorded or thought of. The theories concluding that the Shroud was constructed in the medieval times have been disproved and it is safe to assume that the Shroud is not a hoax, fake, or fraud of any sort. An unanswered question remains as with all the evidence presented, how do we know for sure that the image on the Shroud is the actual Christ himself? The answer to this is simple: God will not spoon feed us the fact that we have possession of the burial cloth of his son Jesus Christ, instead he calls each one of us to take that leap of faith necessary to believe in something more than mere facts and evidence, but rather, to explore the spirituality deep inside us and to be unconcerned with what physical wonder he blessed us with and instead fill ourselves with his loving grace to believe in something we cannot yet see.

Teacher's Comments: What an awesome conclusion!!! Your essay brought up some facts that may gleaned from factual sources. It is good writing to cite those sources and put it part of your essay. For example, Mr. Iggy Campbell, author of the book "The Shroud Phenomenon", argued that " blah, blah, blah". Yet, another scientist, Rudolf Reindeer reiterated that "yadi yadi da".