Shroud of Turin: Is this Jesus?

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and it has been a while. I did put out a video a couple of days ago entitled Apologetics 101. I was feeling kind of 101-ish, you know, putting out some introductory stuff.

Sometimes I hear folks who listen to my channel, they really enjoy the content, but sometimes it's a little advanced. We do cover some things like transcendental arguments and preconditions of intelligibility and the philosophical problem of the one and the many.

I get it. So I figured, you know what, let me make something introductory and put it out there and hopefully some folks could benefit from it. So I hope that was useful to folks. Oh, I'm happy to be back again.

I think we're going to have more of a consistent schedule coming up. I have Doug Powell on with me here today to talk about the Shroud of Turin. I have on Friday the... what's the date on Friday? It's the 29th.

I'll be having two gentlemen who are deacons at the Apologia Church in Phoenix, Arizona. I think it's Phoenix, Arizona. It's in Arizona. It's a church where James White attends, right? There are two deacons who...

Apologia Church hosted a debate between them and two Mormons. So we're going to talk a little bit about how to apply presuppositional apologetics to Mormonism. So I'm really excited to have those gentlemen on Friday.

And then the next week I'll be having my good friend Braxton Hunter on to talk about worship music, modern worship music. Does it matter, you know, with respect to the types of songs that we sing? So that's going to be a super interesting, you know, topic.

Perhaps we'll be talking a little bit about the theology behind music. I'll also be on Matt Slick's show. Matt Slick is the president of CARM, Christian Apologetics Research Ministry. And I will be talking with Matt about the problem of the one and the many.

So he invited me on his show to talk about that. And I'm not sure if it's going to be live or not, but whenever it's up, I'll let folks know if you want to follow me around as I am invited to speak on other platforms.

And I don't remember the date, but someone... I was on a show. It was last week or a week before that to talk about presuppositional apologetics. But we ended up talking about Calvinism. And so I forgot the name of the show.

If those guys who had me on are listening, I apologize. But they've invited me back on to talk about Calvinism. And so I'm excited to be able to do that on their show. I don't know the date, but when I find out, I will let folks know.

Post it on Facebook and social media. I also am planning to do my epic Calvinism live stream where I'm going to attempt to drink lots of coffee, energize myself, and go through all five points of Calvinism.

So it's going to be pretty long. We're going to go through total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. And I'm just going to blab about it.

And I don't know how long it's going to be. Hopefully, it'll be a big, chunky episode, but will be useful for folks. I know whether you love Calvinism or you hate Calvinism, it is always an interesting and fun topic to talk about.

So looking forward to that. Well, without further ado, I would like to introduce my guest today, Doug Powell. Doug Powell is a Christian apologist. I've had him on before. I don't know how many episodes ago.

It was a little while ago, but I had him on before. Doug is a Christian apologist. He's an author, a graphic designer, programmer, and recording artist. He's appeared on Late Night with Conan O 'Brien, CNN, NPR, World Café, Primetime America, The White Horse Inn, Stand to Reason, and Sound Reason.

His books include the best-selling Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics, Resurrection Eyewitness, an interactive book on the minimal facts argument for the historical evidence for the resurrection, and Jesus Eyewitness, an interactive book on the life of Christ.

He's also a contributor to the Apologetic Study Bible and the Apologetic Study Bible for Students. In addition, Doug is the designer of the Resurrection Eyewitness iPad app. It's been out for a while.

I'm not sure if it's still available, but when it was available, I'm not sure if it still is. It was pretty awesome. I had it. It was really helpful. As a recording artist, Powell has released nine albums, including The Apprentice's Sorcerer, which gives the transcendental argument for God as told as a magic show and set to music.

Doug holds a Master's in Apologetics from Biola University. Now, if you're interested, I know folks who follow my channel, we place a great emphasis upon presuppositional apologetics, and so Doug is also a presuppositionalist.

So I thought it would be fun to have a presuppositionalist talk about a topic that is typically used by evidentialists, and even that, they do it cautiously because we know the Shroud of Turin is a very controversial topic.

So without further ado, I'm looking forward to getting into the weeds on this topic with Doug, and so I would like to invite Doug on the screen with me. How's it going? Great. Thanks for having me. You're on now.

I gave you no warning. I just thrusted you on the screen there. All right. Well, did I miss anything? I remember giving the introductions on you a while back, and sometimes information goes out of date a little bit.

No, I guess none of that has expired. But I've got a couple songs on the new Alan Parsons record that'll be out later this summer. Okay. And my son was on Jimmy Fallon last night. He plays in a band called Soccer Mommy.

Oh, what was the topic? Well, he was in a band called Soccer Mommy, and they played their new single, Shotgun. Nice. Awesome. Very cool. The topic was rock and roll.

Okay. So you play instruments. Do you dance at all? Are you a dancer?

No, no. Rock musicians don't dance.

Okay. Well, that's fair. Well, I'm Puerto Rican, and I'm supposed to know how to dance, but I can't. Because I'm Puerto Rican, when I dance, even if it's bad, people think it's actually dancing because it's like, well, he's Hispanic.

That's got to be a move.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the Sharks were great dancers in West Side Story. There you go. That's right.

All right. Well, we're going to be talking about the Shroud of Turin today, and maybe we'll come to some conclusion. You know, Doug can share his thoughts as to what he thinks about the Shroud's authenticity.

But for folks who have been living under a rock or maybe have never heard of it, let's kind of go through some basic beginner questions and then kind of go into more detail. So why don't you describe for folks who may not know, what is the Shroud of Turin and why is it a big deal for a lot of people?

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth. It's about 14 1⁄2 feet long and 3 3⁄4 feet wide. And it is in Turin, Italy, in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. And it has been in Europe since at least the year 1355.

And it has been believed, beginning at least then, to have been the cloth that was wrapped around Jesus' body when he was buried. And what makes it so fascinating is there's a lot of stains and stuff on it, but among the stains there is kind of this vague shadowy form of a man.

And you see both the front and the back of the man because of the way the Shroud was wrapped around him. And it's just this indistinct thing. And nobody can really figure out how this image got on there.

So it gets displayed kind of rarely. There's no set schedule for its display. It's not permanently on display. So there will be exhibitions every 10 or so years. And you get a very short time in front of it after you stand in line for hours.

And then you can't really see a whole lot. So it's actually best examined in photos.

Do you have a photo of it? That you'd like to share on the screen? I can make it big if folks want to see it. As a matter of fact, I do.

And it looks like this. So what you're looking at here is the top image is how it appears to the naked eye. So if you were to go see it, I guess the next time it's on display is 2025, I think. But the top image is what you would see with the naked eye.

And on the left side, the left half of it, you can see the front side of a body of a man laid out. With the feet against the short side of the edge of the cloth and the head right in the middle. And then the right side is the starting with the head, it goes back down to the feet again.

So it's been draped over the top of the head of the man in the shroud. So it's as if the shroud were laid on a burial bench and then a body was laid on top of it. And then the other half of the cloth was folded on top of it.

What you see below is a negative image. And this is what makes the shroud really fascinating. There are okay, I'm a Presbyterian. Presbyterians are not supposed to like relics, right? And Calvin has a whole treatise against relics.

And he even goes directly after the shroud at one point. And I've been to the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. And I went into this wing called the Sacred Chamber and the Chamber of Sacred Relics. And I saw things like a stick that's supposed to be Moses' staff.

And a cooking pot that belonged to Abraham. And the sword of King David. And the turban of Joseph. And things like that. And they're clearly not authentic things. It's like a carnival sideshow in there.

And these are mainly what relics are like, purported relics. They're either so outlandish that they're not plausible to be polite. And even if you do come across something that might be authentic, that is possibly authentic, there's no way you could prove it.

You couldn't really investigate for it. How would you ever know that that staff was Moses'? I mean, what could you possibly test for? And what makes the Shroud of Turin unique is that it is investigatable.

You can do scientific tests on it that can't be done on any other relic. Except one. There's an exception. And I'll talk about that. But the Shroud is unique among relics because it is an object of scientific investigation.

And in fact, it's the most studied artifact in the world. That's its reputation anyway. But the age of scientific investigation started when it was photographed for the first time. And for those who are too young to remember this, back in the days before digital photography, when you took a picture of something, it created a negative on the film in the camera.

It was the opposite image. Everything that was dark that you took a picture of turned light. Everything that was light turned dark. And then you had to take it into a darkroom and process it with chemicals and then reverse the image again to get a print.

So when this was photographed for the first time in 1898, the guy took his glass plate negative into the darkroom and processed it. And that bottom image is what he saw. The bottom image is the negative of the Shroud.

And this is really startling because not only is it counterintuitive, because the reverse, it's a positive image. You shouldn't be looking at a positive image in a photographic negative. Because what it means is that the image of the body on the Shroud to the naked eye is a negative image, which doesn't make any sense.

So first off, it's just unexpected. And that startled the guy. But even more startling is the fact that there's so much more detail and clarity when you look at this in negative. And it turns out that the man in the Shroud has suffered all of the wounds that you read about Jesus suffering in the Gospels.

And so now this kicks off the age of scientific investigation of the Shroud that makes it so fascinating because now it's not just tradition or legend, but now you can really look into it regardless of your religious presuppositions.

So when you talk about the person in the Shroud. I'm sorry.

This might be a little clearer for those who are looking at it for the first time. So you can see the close-up of the body as if it were standing up right in front of you. And then that's that famous image of the face.

So what you're looking at on the right is the negative image. So there you go.

Sorry to interrupt you. No worries. What's fascinating, I think, is if it is legitimate, we have then a photograph of Jesus. If it's legitimate, that's incredible. So now you did say that on the cloth there's evidence that the person who was wrapped in that cloth suffered some of the same injuries that are consistent with Jesus.

How do you see that? When you look, is this through testing or can you see it straight from the cloth that there is evidence of maybe piercing in the wrists or bruising on the head or anything like that?

How did they determine that? Well, here it is. I kind of created a wound map here. So here's what can be seen just by examining the photograph. Starting at the top, you have this strange wound pattern at the top of the back of the head that wraps around to the front of the head.

And this would correspond to what you would think you'd see in terms of wounds from a crown of thorns if the crown of thorns was not shaped like a wreath but more like a dome or a helmet set on top of his head.

There is evidence that the shoulders have abrasions on it, which would correspond to carrying a crossbeam and also scraping against the crossbeam if this person had been crucified. All these little kind of tiny hash marks correspond to scourge marks.

Now, Roman scourge was done with a phlegm that could take two different kinds of shapes. One would be like you see in the Passion of the Christ where at the end of the leather tongs you have sharp objects like glass or metal or rocks or something like that.

Or it could be done with these dull, almost like sinkers on a fishing line where it's lead balls that are paired up. So they leave this almost kind of barbell or dumbbell shape. And this is what the man on the shroud has.

So he would have been scourged with these dull weights that left at least 200 visible marks on the back and 150 plus on the front. And they would have created a number of contusions before eventually penetrating the skin.

And that's what you're seeing there. The rear end on the left side, when you're looking at the left image here, that's the back side, the man's rear end isn't flattened out which indicates he's in rigor mortis.

So he's been dead for 12 to 36 hours. And then if you look around on the front side, you can see that there is a large wound in his right side that corresponds with the spear wound that you read about in the Gospels.

You can see on the wrist, the one visible wrist, there is a large wound that would correspond with where a nail goes on a crucifixion victim right at the base of the palm, top of the wrist. And you can see that from the wrist to the elbow on both arms, you see this trail of blood that goes from the wrist back toward the elbow at about a 20-degree angle which corresponds to the arms in the position of a crucifixion.

You also see that the one visible hand there where you should see a thumb, there's no thumb. That's because in a crucifixion, the nail through the wrist causes nerve damage that makes the thumb turn inward.

So it wouldn't be visible in this position. And look how long the arms are. They're unnaturally long arms. And the reason is because the shoulders are probably dislocated which is what happens to a crucifixion victim.

The body can't sustain the weight. So the shoulders dislocate. And that means in order to exhale and in order to get the pressure of the chest off the lungs so that the victim could exhale and get another breath of air, they have to push up on the nails going through the feet or the heels.

And that's what you see in the bottom there. On both the front and the back, you can see that there's this wound to the foot. So you can see it corresponds very closely to everything you read about in the Gospels.

Okay, wow. Okay, so now I'm thinking in terms of the wounds of Christ, the piercing of the side, the scourging, the crown of thorns. Was it normal practice to beat a person who was going to be crucified?

I mean, did they normally just crucify people and that was horrible just by itself? Or was it unique that someone was kind of severely beaten beforehand prior to that? Because I guess someone could say, well, let's suppose it's legitimate cloth and the person has similar wounds.

Who's to say that that's not someone else who was just beaten and killed in a similar way that Jesus was?

Probably more times than not, the victim was scourged beforehand in order to weaken them so that they didn't last as long on the cross. If you were well hydrated and in good shape and well fed and got crucified, then putting a nail through your wrist is not going to kill you.

You die from all sorts of other things. It would be through hypovolemic shock or dehydration. There's a number of things that kind of conspire. Like I said, if you're in good shape, you could last upwards of a week on the cross.

So to scourge someone would significantly hasten their death when they got on the cross. So that is what happened more times than not. But it's not just the scourging beforehand that would…. Okay, the question is, how many people suffered these wounds?

I mean, there were tens of thousands of people who were crucified by the Romans. So how common would it be to have these kind of wounds? And this question was answered by Gary Habermas, who's one of the leading experts in the world on the historical evidence for the resurrection.

And he wrote a book, two books actually, with a guy named Ken Stevenson, who was the PR guy for a group of scientists called the Shroud of Turin Research Project. They were called STIRP for short. And the STIRP team is who did the most extensive scientific investigation of the shroud ever allowed, which was done in 1978.

And so Habermas and Stevenson together in two different books in the 80s calculated the odds of just seven of the wounds. And then they did that in order to calculate the probability that it could be anybody other than Jesus.

So they don't even try to account for all the things that we just talked about or everything that you could see on the shroud, but just seven things. They looked at the crown of thorns and they assigned that a probability of 1 in 400 because you got to figure the crown of thorns was there to mock Jesus for being king of the Jews, and how many people were executed for claiming to be the king of something.

Probably not many, and given that there were tens of thousands of people executed by the Romans, that's probably pretty conservative. There is no indication of decomposition, meaning there's no fluid coming out of the nose or the mouth or any other orifices.

There's no sign of putrefaction. So they gave that a 1 in 10. The spear wound, they gave 1 in 27. I mean, if you think about it, I don't want to be too graphic, but there's a lot of places they could have speared the body to see if the man on the cross was dead or not, not just that place, but you didn't even have to use a spear to do that.

There's all sorts of implements you could have used to do that. So 1 in 27, probably pretty conservative. Crucified without ropes, because the arms were dislocate, it was sometimes the arms would sometimes be tied with ropes onto the crossbeam as well to secure the body because the wrists would sometimes pop off the nail heads.

There's no indication that that happened to the man in the shroud or any indication that happened to Jesus in the gospel accounts. Scourge marks, they gave 1 in 2. You got to probably more than half of the people who were crucified around that time were scourged beforehand.

So that's probably pretty conservative. No broken legs, they gave that 1 in 3. Jesus was crucified between two other people who both had their legs broken, but his were not, so that's 1 in 3. And then the most conservative one is buried in a linen shroud, which they gave 1 in 8.

That's super conservative because remember, if there are tens of thousands of people being crucified by the Romans in history, think about how the only archaeological evidence we have of any crucifixion victim is we have four skeletons of crucified people.

Two of them still had nails going through the heel bones, and only one of them is from the first century in Judea. One of them was found a few months ago from the second century in Roman Britain. So it was very rare, very rare to give the body back.

They were either left on the cross to rot during times of insurrection or they were put in a common grave. And so to give the body back was highly unusual. It happened far less than 1 out of 8 times. But they gave it 1 in 8.

When you multiply just these seven things together, the odds that it's anybody other than Jesus is 1 in almost 83 million.

Wow, that's interesting. Okay, so if you could pop yourself back on the screen there, you've got the image there. I don't want to ask the question while looking possibly at Jesus. I'm just kidding. Okay, so I know that there's first of all, let me say this.

If anyone has any questions for Doug, he will be taking questions if there are any. So just make sure you preface your question with the word question so that I can differentiate them. Also, if you think this is a load of bunk, ask a question.

This is interesting. I'm sure we know we cannot be 100 sure about these sorts of things, but, I mean, it's an interesting topic, and there are some people who think it's legitimate and want to hear the arguments of both sides.

So if you have a question or a critique or an objection or anything like that, feel free to ask them in the comments and just preface your question, comment, or whatever with the word question or comment or argument or objection or whatever the case may be.

All right, so the natural skeptical response is this is a forgery. This can be easily forged. Now, if you can put yourself we know as presuppositionalists, when we engage with unbelievers and we're arguing worldviews, we argue that the only legitimate way to critique someone is to hypothetically jump into their worldview and do an internal critique.

So perhaps you can do that here. If you could step into the shoes of the skeptic, the knowledgeable skeptic who's aware of the studies and these sorts of things, can you spend a few moments going through how you would debunk this based upon some of the best arguments out there against its legitimacy?

And then after that, perhaps we can go into some of the specific studies and strongest pieces of evidence that people actually think this is legitimate.

Well, it's probably better to do the remainder of the evidence first and then talk about potential theories. And the reason is because there are all sorts of kind of like common sense theories that you could put forward just based on what you've seen right now.

But it doesn't come close to accounting for the evidence that was particularly developed by the STIRP team. And the reason why that's important is because the STIRP team, this group of scientists from 1978, and they were a group of 33 American scientists.

And they get sometimes mischaracterized as a group of Christians who just went over there to verify what they already decided they were going to believe, that this was authentic. And that's not true. The majority of these 33 scientists were self-identified as Christians, but they didn't all agree on what that meant.

There were Roman Catholics. There were Protestants. There were conservatives. There were liberals. There were Christians who thought this was fake. There were Christians who thought it was legitimate.

There were a couple of agnostics. There were a couple of Jewish men on this. And so it wasn't a monolithic thing. And these scientists were all Ph .D. or equivalent, like terminal degree level experts in their field.

And they worked at highly respected places like Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Labs, Caltech, JPL, Air Force Academy, and the Air Force Weapons Lab. These were serious guys who went over there to do serious scientific work.

And at the end of the exhibition in October 1978, they were given 120 continuous hours to conduct a number of tests, as many as they could. 120 continuous hours, five straight days nonstop. So they had to work in shifts.

It was highly planned out. And so they collected all this data. They did all this photographic evidence. They hauled a ton of gear over there. And then over the next four years, they published their findings.

And they published their findings in over 20 different peer-reviewed scientific journals. So they wrote as scientists for scientists in a way that other scientists could interact with. And like I said, they're peer-reviewed.

So they're not writing for Christians. This isn't like they didn't have a blog, and they didn't publish it in Christianity Today, and they didn't publish it in Newsweek Magazine or the Discovery Channel or something.

And there's nothing wrong with any of those outlets, but they're not academic peer-reviewed environments. And that's what they were doing. So they were writing as scientists for scientists, not as Christians for other Christians.

And they determined that the main question is, what made the image on the shroud? And the answer is, they don't know. They couldn't determine it. They could determine what the physical properties of the image, but not the cause that the physical properties are the effect of.

But they were able to determine that the image was not made by paint, stain, dye, scorching, oils, pigment of any kind, spices, nothing. There was no natural or known artistic process that could have produced this image.

And they arrived at that in a couple different ways. Number one, the blood on the well, first of all, you'll still to this day read from skeptics that what appears to be blood on the shroud is actually paint, that there is paint on the shroud.

So first thing to know is it is blood. It is human blood, and it's type AB. Type AB is common in the Middle East and not common in Europe. Second thing is that there is

Which is relevant because the earliest knowledge that we have of the shroud is in the 1300s. So someone could say, oh, it's in France or whatever, but the fact that the blood matches someone that is in the Mediterranean area is relevant there.

Correct, yeah. So, I mean, that's not knowledge that any medieval forger could have known, let alone forged. If they forged I mean, how do you forge that? You'd have to like it'd be gross to forge it.

But there is paint on the shroud. The problem with the argument that it created the image well, I'll tell you the rest of that argument in a second. But the paint on the shroud isn't just on the image area.

It's on the off-image area, and it's only in minute trace amounts. And that's important because what we know is that in the Middle Ages there were a number of copies made of the shroud, and they were laid on top of the shroud in order to kind of certify them or bless them or make them official.

And it makes more sense that they would have contaminated or left trace elements from the copies on the linen than the other way around because the image was not painted on the shroud. And here's how the scientists know that.

This is a linen cloth, and the linen threads aren't a linen thread isn't just one thing. A linen thread is made up of 200 or 300 kind of fibrils twisted together, microfibers as it were, called fibrils.

And the image area is created by a change in the chemical composition of the outermost fibrils of the thread. What that means is that only the most superficial fibrils had this chemical change that darkened them.

And paint, stain, dye, pigment, oils, all of that stuff, scorching, would have penetrated deeper into the thread. It would not have just stopped on the outermost fibrils. And the other thing is that the darker the chemical change was, the composition change was indicates the distance from the material to the body beneath it.

So the darker it is, the closer it was to the body. And the less distinct it is, the farther away from the body. So if it's laying over the face and it's touching the nose, it's going to be dark there.

But as it bends around the side and it doesn't quite touch, but it's really close, it's less distinct. And that means there's three-dimensional information encoded into this the change in the density of the chemical composition.

So you could actually create a three-dimensional model of the body based on that information alone. And, in fact, the scientists did do that before they ever got to Turin. They did it in 1976, and it's one of the most famous images of the shroud.

So the other thing to notice about the image, even when you're looking at it with the naked eye, is that the image isn't distorted. Now, if the image was created by contact with the body and there was, like, stains, like blood or paint or dye or something like that on the body, and that's what transferred to the cloth in order to make the image, that would only look correct when the cloth was formed in the shape and contours of the body underneath it.

But as soon as you flatten out, it would be distorted, right? It would look right if it's bent around the face, but as soon as you flatten it out, it would be distorted. And when you look at the shroud like you normally view it, like that, it's not distorted, okay?

So it's not from—the image isn't made by contact. So the properties of the image are very mysterious. They don't know how it's done. They only know how it's not done, and it's not done by any known artistic means or any natural means.

Now, there are people who have been able to replicate a pretty good facsimile of the shroud using stuff that would have been around in the Middle Ages. Whether that kind of process would actually have been known to anybody at the time is up for debate.

But at the same time, it also does not capture all of the characteristics in the shroud, only some of them, enough to ballpark it, which is impressive, but it still doesn't account for all the attributes that you see on the shroud.

Okay. So, okay, so how might—obviously not everyone believes it's genuine and not everyone agrees with the legitimacy of the points you just made in terms of the conclusions one can draw. So what are some of the more stronger arguments against the authenticity of the shroud?

Well, the strongest one, of course, the famous one, is that in the mid-'80s, the STIRP team proposed another round of tests because there was so much progress made in 1978. So there was another couple dozen tests that were going to be done, one of which was the radiocarbon or the carbon -14 dating test.

And that became—and that was going to determine the age of the cloth itself. And that became such an important thing to figure out, it got treated as its own thing. And there was the Archbishop of Turin, who's the custodian of the shroud, and a representative of the Vatican, and several STIRP team members came up with a list of protocols in order to conduct a test, the radiocarbon test.

And the protocols were they were going to take seven different samples from the shroud from at least three different areas. They would be shared with seven different labs, and the labs would do one of two different methods for radiocarbon dating.

And that's what was agreed on. And then when the time came in 1988 to take a sample to do the test from, the Archbishop of Turin, who is the custodian, unilaterally changed his mind and did not follow the protocols.

He never explained why. He doesn't have to answer to anybody on this. But he allowed instead of seven samples, he allowed one sample to be taken. And that one sample was divided into three and shared with three labs, not seven.

And they all used the same method, not a second one as well. And six months later, in October 1988, when the date came back, it was dated to about 1260 to 1390. So it was announced that it was a medieval fraud.

And that is where things stand on the testing directly on the shroud because that's when the church pivoted from examination to conservation. And they've just preserved it and not allowed any more testing to be done on it since that time.

Interestingly enough, there was enough material that the STIRP team had to work with that there was one of the PhD chemists from Los Alamos, a guy named Raymond Rogers, continued to work on this issue.

And in 2004, I believe, he published a peer-reviewed paper in an academic journal for chemists that conclusively proved that the material that was tested in 1988 was not original to the main material of the shroud.

And so what he did is part of what the STIRP team protocol was, part of what it said was, don't use a sample from the top left corner because that has a high likelihood of contamination. Now, in the bottom half of the slide you're looking at, the main body of the shroud is kind of in the bottom right-hand corner here.

And so Raymond Rogers, this chemist, had a thread from 1978 from this main body of the shroud. And then he had access to a thread taken in that top left corner in 1973. And he compared the two. Now, the 1973 thread turned out to be cotton coated in plant gum and dyed.

And the sample from 1978 was linen, not cotton. Okay, linen comes from flax, not the cotton plant. It doesn't have any plant gum on it, and there's no dye on it. So this area, this kind of this whitish corner, triangular shape from the 1973 sample thread area, that area right there, that cloth has at least either a mixture of cotton and linen in it.

And that was important because then he contacted somebody who had a remnant from the 1988 sample material. And that 1988 radiocarbon sample material you can see is adjacent to that 1973 area. And that thread was examined.

And it turns out that what was tested in 1988 is cotton, and it's coated in plant gum. It is not the same as the main body of the shroud. So it doesn't mean that the shroud is authentic. It doesn't mean the shroud is from the first century.

All it means is that whatever was tested in 1988 is not from the main body of the shroud and therefore cannot be used to date the shroud with any sort of authority. Now, he proved that another way in 2002.