In a YouTube presentation on the Shroud of Turin delivered on 10 April 2020, the charismatic Fr Johnathan Meyer of All Saints, Guildford, Indiana enthusiastically declares:
“The Shroud of Turin is 14.3 foot by 3.5 foot burial cloth. So if we look at the Shroud, its exact dimensions are 14.3 by 3.5 foot length of fabric. Now, what’s interesting is this: […] this burial cloth, if we follow what a cubit is, is exactly two cubits by eight cubits. It’s not like 2.1 cubits and 8.4 cubits, no. It is exactly the measurement of a cubit, two by eight, because that’s exactly the length that cloth was measured out during antiquity.”
He then has the chuzpah to invite his listeners to look this up and confirm it for themselves.
It is, of course, nonsense.
For a start, four times 3.5 is 14.0, not 14.3, which is 2% longer, and for a second, nobody has measured the Shroud at those dimensions anyway.
For years, popular books had given dimennsions of 14’ 3” x 3’ 7”, which was unavoidably an estimate as a blue silk ‘backing to the backing’ partially overlapped the ends of the cloth itself. Then in 1998, in order to fit the Shroud more neatly into its display container for the ostentation that year, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg removed this backing and took the oppportunity of measuring the Shroud in its entirelty for the first time. Then in 2000 and again in 2002 Bruno Barberis and Gian Maria Zaccone measured it again. By this time the cloth was, and still is, visibly extended at the corners and bowed inwards along the sides.
‘Traditional’ (14’ 3” x 3 7”)…………………………………….434 x 109 cm
Flury-Lemberg (1998)…………………………………………437 x 111 cm
Barberis & Zaccone (2000)…………(upper*)……………….435 x 113 cm
……………………………………….(lower)…………………438 x 113 cm
Barberis & Zaccone (2002)…………(upper*)……………….443 x 114 cm
……………………………………….(lower)…………………442 x 113 cm
* The ‘upper’ length of the Shroud has to be an estimation as the corners are missing; similarly any measurements of the short sides, unless they be taken at the middle of the Shroud. The precise measurements in 2000 and 2002 were in fact taken of the new backing cloth.
Although some of these measurements were precise to the millimetre, the Shroud, like any linen cloth, has been subject to expansion and contraction due to humidity, tension and gravity, which renders such precision meaningless. Its present storage conditions will minimise future changes.
It can easily be seen that Fr Meyer’s dimensions (436 x 107) do not correspond to any of the measurements above.
What’s more, none of the widths take into account the fact that the side-strip, which was undoubtedly part of the original sheet, has been re-attached. Flury-Lemberg thought that an intermediate strip had been cut out, and the edge sewn back in order to retain the selvege, but this seems to me far-fetched, and is certainly unsubstantiated. It would however, completely destroy the hypothesis that the Shroud was woven to an 8 x 2 cubit scheme. Even if the side-strip had been attached without any removal of material, the width of the cloth would have to be extended by a centimetre or so to account for the overlap at the seam. Similarly, the ends of the cloth are hemmed, and I don’t know if the measurements include the material folded over or not.
In spite of all the foregoing, it is true to say that the Shroud is about four times as long as it is wide, and it may be hypothesised that it was intended to be, and that it was constructed to some kind of measurement. If it is 8 x 2 cubits, then some estimaion of the ‘cubit’ used can by achieved by dividing the length by eight and the width by two. This gives us a range of about 54 to 57 cm.
But does this correspond to any cubit used in first century Judea? Ludicrous statements like that of Mark Antonacci in ‘The Resurrection of the Shroud’ (“Research indicated that the international standard unit of measurement at the time of Jesus was the Assyrian cubit (21.4 inches)”) are simply untrue.
The first person to claim a Shroud/cubit correspondence was Ian Dickinson, an unhinged and rather unpleasant scholar of the early Middle East, who claimed an ‘Assyrian-Jewish cubit value of 21.6 inches (54.86cm).’ He called this: “the widely used, indeed, international standard of that time for merchants of the Near East” which “had been so for centuries.” Attempts to justify this include a “Graeco-Roman era Assyrian cubit rod, found in Egypt, now preserved at the Petrie Museum (UC36149), London; its physical length being just short of 21.5 inches (54.61cm), with its ends well worn, plus around 2000 years of wood drying.” This is a travesty of an interpretation, designed only to manufacture an appropriate provenance for his idea. Flinders Petrie himself noted that the rods he had collected (he describes fifteen in his ‘Ancient Weights and Measures’, 1926) had ‘butts’ on each end, (rather like modern school rulers, in fact) and that the cubit length was divided into six or seven palms, clearly incised within it. Rod UC36149 (not an accession number he would recognise, but fortuitously identifiable by the word ANOYTI inscribed on it) has a cubit of 21.33 inches (54.2 cm). It is also a pity that Dickinson doesn’t mention the other Graeco-Roman or Roman cubit rods in the museum, whose entire lengths are
UC80577……….53.0 cm
UC80578……….53.2 cm
UC36148……….53.5 cm
Petrie himself lists two ‘Roman’ cubit rods of 20.4” (51.8 cm) and 20.6” (52.3 cm), and four ‘Assyrian/Jewish’ rods of 21.11”, 21.33”, 21.33” and 21.16” (from 53.6 to 54.2 cm)
Next, Dickinson suggests that the extensions to the temple of Solomon made by Herod the Great can be shown to fit a 21.6” cubit, his evidence for this being a single length of wall found during the exacavations of Charles Warren, at the end of the 19th century. (‘The Recovery of Jerusalem: a narrative of exploration and discovery in the city and the Holy Land,’ Charles Warren, 1871). However, by far the general consensus about the Herodian cubit is that it was about 46 cm (18”). The following are mentioned in ‘The Plan of Herod’s Temple’ (David M. Jacobson, 1990-1):
46 cm…………….Theodore Busink, Der Tempel von Jerusalem von Solomo bis Herodes, Vol 2, 1980
44.5 – 45.7 cm…..Frederick Hollis, The Archaeology of Herod’s Temple, 1934
42.8 cm………….Asher Kaufman, Determining the Length of the Medium Cubit, 1984
44.5 – 52.0 cm…..Louis-Hugues Vincent and Ernest Mackay, Hébron, le Haram el-Khalil, Sepulture des Patriarches, 1923
52.5 cm………….Leen Ritmeyer, Locating the Original Temple Mount, 1992
Clearly in some desperation, recourse has even been made to a cubit from Eleanor Guralnick’s 1996 paper ‘Sargonid Sculpture and the Late Assyrian Cubit.’ She established three cubits, a standard one of 51.5 cm, a ‘big’ cubit, two finger-widths longer, at 55.2 cm, and a ‘royal’ cubit, three finger-widths longer than standard, at 56.6 cm. They still don’t match the precision usually claimed, and there is no reason to suppose that a measurement from over seven hundred years previously should be preferred to more contemporaneous ones.
So, no. Of course the Shroud does not match first century measurements: it was woven in the thirteenth century. It is four ells long.
Probably.
The length of the ell varied across Europe, and not consistently from south to north or east to west. Some were based on the entire length of the arm, and some on the forearm alone. The Flemish ell, at 27” (69 cm) was too short for the Shroud to be one ell wide, and too long for it to be two. Italian breccia varied from 55 cm to 70 cm, of which the shorter lengths could match the Shroud, and German ells were even more variable. The northern Scottish ell marked in metal studs in the graveyard of Dornoch cathedral is 39″ (99 cm) which is too short, and other Scottish ells seem to have been shorter still. The best fit is the standard English ell, 45″ or 114 cm, which, allowing for the extra width incorporated into the side seam, matches the Shroud almost exactly.