Rather to some people’s surprise, Matthew Cserhati and Rob Carter of Creation Ministries International have recently published a thoughtful and reasonably well researched article deciding, on balance, that the Shroud is not the actual burial cloth of Jesus. (‘Is the Shroud of Turin Authentic?’, creation.com/turin-shroud)
This was rapidly followed by a denunciation from Duane Caldwell, an ordained minister of the Evangelical Church Alliance, in his blog, Rational Faith. He is convinced that the Shroud is authentic. (‘Is the Shroud of Turin Authentic? The Unconsidered Evidence’, rationalfaith.com/2019/09/is-the-shroud-of-turin-authentic)
As I understand it, all these people are six-day ‘young earth’ creationists, who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, sola scriptura, and certainly not in the Big Bang, Evolution, or the authority of Christian Tradition as considered by the Catholic Church. Although they both swap alleged ‘scientific evidence’ for or against the authenticity of the Shroud, based on some fairly scanty reading of a handful of popular books, surely their authority, if they have any, must derive from their biblical competence, so that’s what I’d like to look at here.
This is Matthew Cserhati and Rob Carter:
Bible: Our conclusions are primarily based on the biblical evidence, namely that according to John 11:44 and John 20:7 the Jewish custom was to bury their dead using several cloths, not just one. The Jews buried Jesus with a face cloth, which disqualifies the Shroud as being the burial cloth of Christ. Furthermore, Jesus was buried with seventy-five pounds of extremely sticky spices, according to John 19:40, whereas the Shroud shows no signs of them.
Although they go on to expatiate in greater detail, adding the references in the gospel of Luke to their evidence, this sums up their position. Firstly, Jesus was wrapped in many small strips of cloth, with a large face-cloth over his head, and secondly, that he was enveloped in large quantities of “sticky spices”. They compare Jesus’s wrappings with the description of Lazarus emerging from his tomb, “his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth.” This, they seem to claim, is what Luke first meant by “a linen shroud”.
Duane Caldwell won’t have any of it, but his rebuttal is confused. He begins with “othonia”, the word John uses, and usually translated “strips of cloth”.
… though the word is used in the plural, the word “strips” is not used – that is supplied by translations like the NIV. An equally valid translation would be “they bound him in linen”.
Well, no. The word “ὀθόνιά” is unequivocal, and does mean “strips of linen”. Hippocrates, in De Officina Medici, and Aristophanes, in Acharnians, used the word to mean bandages. Caldwell’s appeal to Hosea and Judges is also unconvincing. Both these Old Testament references are clearly to gifts of material, not to finished garments or furnishings. However, what neither Caldwell nor Cserhati and Carter seem to understand is that ‘strips’ are not necessarily always really thin. Even in English strips of wallpaper are half a metre wide or more, and we see that ὀθόνιά is also, in other contexts, used to mean ‘sail-cloth’, in other words the strips of linen which were stitched together to make sails. There is certainly a sense in which the Shroud be described as an ὀθόνιον, if not ὀθόνιά.
Caldwell goes on to look at “soudarion”.
This is the piece John indicates was lying separately (John 20.7) from the οθονιον – notice the word “strips” is not used here either – even in the NIV- it’s simply “linen”.
There’s a misunderstanding of the Greek here. The word in John 20.7 is not the singular ὀθόνιον, but the plural ὀθονίων. It still means “strips”.
The [Creation Ministries] writers have rejected the Sudarium of Oviedo as being the head piece around Jesus’ head, but that doesn’t mean the Bible indicates there was only one cloth. I agree with them the Bible mentions multiple linen clothes – including the head covering called a soudarion. That doesn’t mean the shroud cannot be one of the “linens” mentioned.
The first sentence is both misleading and illogical. Cserhati and Carter do reject the Sudarium of Oviedo, but certainly admit a head piece, and they do not claim there was only one cloth. They reject the Shroud as being the rest of the wrappings. If the burial wrappings covered the head piece, they would not carry an image of the face, whatever shape they were, and if the head was totally covered by the wrappings, then there would be no point in a head piece, especially a blood-soaked one like the Sudarium. Caldwell’s counter to this is that:
First the head covering (σουδαριον) was placed over the head before the body was taken off the cross to capture the precious blood, because “the life is in the blood” (Lev 17.11) and the Jews wanted to keep the blood with the body.
The Sudarium was then, according to Caldwell, removed and placed to one side before the body was wrapped in the Shroud.
Both Caldwell and Cserhati and Carter also discuss the wrappings around Lazarus. The Creation Ministries pair say that the description of Lazarus’s burial cloths is very similar to that of Jesus’s, quoting John 11:44:
“The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.‘”
Even if it only specifically mentions his hands and feet, here Lazarus is bound with multiple clothes, just like Jesus was in John 20:7, with a separate napkin around his head.
Caldwell responds that the word used for Lazarus’s linen strips (“keiria”) is different from the word for Jesus’s. This is perfectly true, and κειρίαις also means strips, although in this case it seems restricted to thin ones, such as the straps of a bed frame, as well as swathing bands (though not in the bible) and bandages. Caldwell’s point seems to be that the use of two different words implies two different meanings, however slight. However, he does make the mistake of relying on a biblical lexicon definition: “for tying up a corpse after it has been swathed in linen.” This is very circular reasoning, as the only basis for the definition is precisely the verse in question.
Caldwell’s last word on the wrappings is a cursory look at the verbs rather than the nouns. For Jesus, John uses ἔδησαν (‘bound’), which is invariably used to mean ‘tie up’, like a prisoner’s hands, or corn in a sheaf, or a donkey to a post. The last meaning in Strong’s Concordance, “to swathe in linen cloths”, refers exclusively to John’s account of Jesus’s burial, and is more circular reasoning. It cannot suggest other than the use of cords or very thin strips of cloth to tie the shroud around the body. Mark uses ἐνείλησεν, which means wrapped, like a parcel. Matthew and Luke use ἐνετύλιξεν, which also means wrapped, but seems to carry the connotation of being rolled up as well. John uses the same word to describe the head-cloth, ‘rolled up in a place by itself.’ For Lazarus, John (the only evangelist to mention him) uses δεδεμένος (‘bound’ hand and feet), περιεδέδετο (‘bound around’, describing the head cloth) and λύσατε (‘untie’, or ‘loosen’ his bonds to set him free, although λύω was also used metaphorically)
None of these words can possibly suggest the loose draping of the Shroud over the body in the fashion it must have taken if it was to receive the image as we see it, so in this, Cserhati and Carter are fully justified.
The other biblical consideration of Cserhati and Carter is the “sticky myrrh and aloes”, of which there were “ὡς λίτρας ἑκατόν“. This is a hundred ‘litres’ – usually translated ‘pounds’, but since a biblical pound was about twelve ounces rather than our sixteen, the total weight was about 34 or 35 kilograms, the mass of a large child. There is, however, no sign of it on the Shroud. Caldwell’s response to this is feeble indeed, suggesting that apart from the ‘botanicals’ which have been detected on the Shroud (vague traces of several different flowering plants, certainly not myrrh or aloes): “the rest of the spices may never have been applied.”
On balance, I think Cserhati and Carter win the biblical argument. At face value, it reads as if Jesus had his head covered with a face-cloth, packed around with myrrh and aloes, and then fully enwrapped in at least one sheet, large enough to be a ‘sindon’ but long enough compared to its width to be called an ‘othonion’. This was tied in place with very thin strips, giving us the plural ‘othonia’ to be discovered later. There is no sensible way in which any of this could describe the Shroud of Turin.
But we are not quite finished. Although Duane Caldwell subtitles his article “the unconsidered evidence”, and thinks that their disbelief is one of Cserhati and Carter’s “biggest blunders”, he is both polite and respectful. But his case was taken up by Stephen E. Jones, another “Evangelical Christian”, who also write a blog. He quickly weighs in with words like “misleading” and “fallacious”, and essentially condemns Cserhati and Carter to Hell:
Jesus warned in Mt 18:6; Mk 9:42; Lk 17:1-2 that if anyone causes a Christian to sin (in this case to reject the Shroud, which is the is the very burial sheet of Jesus, according to the overwhelmingweight of the evidence), “it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” So these writers might ask themselves, “why are we undermining the Christian faith of millions?” Even if they were right that the Shroud is a forgery (which they are not – see my “Problems of the Turin Shroud forgery theory“), Jesus’ warning against undermining the faith of even one their fellow Christians still applies.
Jones reconciles the plurality of cloths dilemma by pointing out that: “One large shroud does not preclude the use of other cloths.” I think that’s fair enough, as far as it goes. Then he goes on to suggest that the “sticky spices” claim is a straw man, as the myrrh was probably in “dry blocks or in powdered or granulated form“. This too, is possible, although it presumes that the ‘aloes’ that went with the myrrh were the Old Testament version – a kind of scented sawdust from a tree (Aquilaria sp.) – and not our usual understanding of the word, Aloe vera, which is an unguent. Jones also points out that Pierluigi Baima Bollone claimed that he had identified myrrh and aloes on the samples he extracted from the Shroud. Indeed, they were a crucial element in his hypothesis of image formation.
From an entirely dispassionate point of view I suppose I ought to point out that neither myrrh nor aloes have any biblical or archaeological justification as Jewish burial spices, and that vanishingly little is known about whether “the custom of the Jews” involved draping, enfolding, wrapping or rolling the corpse in whatever kind of sheet. All that can be said for certain is that after a year or so, when decomposition had reduced it to bones, they were usually transferred to an ossuary.
Being a Catholic, I am not constrained by sola scriptura, and as a scientist have no problem with the Big Bang, Evolution, or a metaphorical interpretation of biblical truth. In my opinion, Jesus is most unlikely to have been buried either in an expensive bolt of cloth, or surrounded by kilograms of spices. Both these are pious exaggerations derived from the conviction of his resurrection, and are not responses to the appalling disappointment of his death. Although the Gospel of John shows some familiarity with Jerusalem, his chronology is so different from that of the synoptic evangelists that I do not believe he was an eye-witness to the events, and may simply not have known what the burial customs before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD.