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'No more Shroud articles please!'
March 08, 2025
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One clever wit early last century claimed that the entire surviving corpus of ancient literature is a forgery, a hoax. Everything from Homer onwards had been faked by some energetic bright spark in Renaissance Italy.
He was pulling our leg, of course, but the suggestion, like all good lies, is not intrinsically implausible, for the startling truth is that all old literature – almost anything written down more than a few hundred years ago including the Bible itself – has come down to us only by a flimsy and tenuous manuscript tradition, through copies of copies of copies. By manuscript I mean of course written by hand, one copy at a time, by scribes. It is beyond dispute that not a single specimen exists of the handwriting of St Paul, or any of the Apostles, or of Plato or Aristotle, or of anyone further away from us by more than a dozen or so generations.
There are surviving specimens of writing from the ancient world but they are rare and usually not of a literary nature. For example, we have a brief autobiography of the Emperor Augustus (though not written by his own hand). There are also precious excerpts from the New Testament that have survived in the arid sands of Egypt often confirming the accuracy of the received text. Apart from written records we have plenty of non-written archaeological evidence of past events, the ruins of Pompeii, for example, or the bones of St Peter. The latter are a powerful witness but they tell us only that he lived and then he died, nothing more.
Generally speaking, we believe that the great events of history took place on the basis of a combination of such things as tradition, probability, plausibility and the internal consistency of records which support each other's narratives. We have no proof – in the absolute legal sense – of anything at all in the remote past.
A recent contributor to Sydney's Catholic Weekly, apparently irritated by an excess of miracle stories, pleaded with the editor to stop publishing articles about the Shroud of Turin. Why would a reader of a Christian newspaper feel that way?
I have lived my life with history and can think of no historical event other than the resurrection of Christ for which there is actual physical and measurable evidence that can stand the test of the microscope. The Shroud of Turin does that. Nothing else comes close.
Most people have heard that the Shroud was exposed as a fraud after carbon-testing about 30 years ago. That story got a lot of coverage at the time, probably because it was very welcome to sceptics. Relatively few know that the test was subsequently shown to be flawed (the sample was compromised by a later patch) and that the 'medieval forgery' theory has long since been overthrown.
We have all grown up in an 'enlightened' world. Philosophers like Hume and Kant have inured us to the notion that it is not possible to prove or demonstrate the existence of any non-material object. For most of us atheism has become a sort of default position, and this is true even among professing Christians many of whom are extremely sceptical about miracles and have grave doubts – yes, pun intended – about any continuance of life after death. At best they cling to a sort of sentimental hope that they will see their loved ones again. For most practising Christians, the resurrection of the dead is a bridge too far.
But further and ongoing research into the Shroud has demonstrated that what we actually have is a three-dimensional photograph of Christ at the moment of resurrection, captured inexplicably, miraculously. Don't trust my account of it. Google the work of Liberato de Caro and Robert Spitzer. You'll find plenty of gainsayers as well, of course, including the guy who claims to have proven that the Shroud was counterfeited by Leonardo da Vinci, but you'll also be stunned by the inability of scientists to explain how this extraordinary image was made.
It saddens me that so many Christians are sceptical about the Shroud and any other hint that God might still occasionally talk to his people in physical terms. I wonder why? Is it possible that we're afraid of the implications of belief? Or nurtured by two or three centuries of scepticism have we all become rusted-on materialists? If atheism is the default position for so-called thinking people nowadays, Christians have to work very hard to challenge that mindset, even in their own thinking. Mention miracles and most of us are instantly on our guard. The instinct to reject them is very powerful.
There is a story in the Gospel of St Luke about the rich man in hell who begs the Patriarch Abraham to send word to his brothers, who are still alive, to repent and avoid the same fate. No, says Abraham, they already have Moses and the Prophets - that should be all they need.
We too have Moses and the Prophets, as well as a whole lot more to guide us to Heaven. But if the Good Lord also chooses to send us miracles like the Shroud to reinforce our faith, let's be both gracious and grateful!
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David Daintree AM is director of the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies in Hobart, Tasmania. He served as president of Campion College from 2008 to 2012.
Image credit: Miniature of the book’s author, Vincent of Beauvais, within a border containing the arms of Edward IV, to whom this manuscript belonged / Wikimedia
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