Turin Shroud’s Sistine Mystery Times Infinity

Letter to Romans: The Shroud of Turin’s authenticity has again been portrayed as a medieval fake, while the faithful diss science for its ongoing inability to explain how the burial cloth’s image could have been produced. What if both sides miss the only point that matters?

As theologians have argued & many scholars will concede, God Almighty surely has the power to give the world the perfect image of the resurrected Christ in 1400 AD if He so chose. Exactly who decided the Turin Shroud HAD to date to Pilate’s time? As Jesus Himself often reminded His disciples, “God’s ways are not always ours.” Just as surely, it can be argued God often acts or communicates through the humans He created. My favorite example of God working through the gifts he gave us is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. When I saw it for the first time my breath was literally taken away; I instantly KNEW, it had to have been crafted by God’s hand. So, does it matter if the Shroud dates to the First Century or 14^th, any more than it matters whether this Commentary was written by Darryl Van Duch or his pen mate, Davd Soul? If not, then, even if the Shroud were a medieval creation, its existence can surely have a profound spiritual significance as well as be an historical artifact & scientific marvel.

Yet, fueling the possibly misplaced faith-science divide over the Shroud was a study published in Heritage Science’s April journal. It supposedly reaffirmed the conclusion in 1981 of STURP, a muti-national project consisting of three teams of university researchers in Europe & the US. You may recall they had used carbon-14 techniques to date the Shroud as circa to 1400 AD. Purportedly also debunked in April was a popular theory that the cloth samples used in that original research was an edge of the Shroud that had been rewoven to repair damage to it. Yet are there any wonder other researchers have identified statistical irregularities in those earlier measurements that have yet to be explained? And not to be forgotten is that STURP was unable to identify the mechanism that transferred or produced the image of a crucified man. Nor has anyone since. Then, again, I’d challenge anyone to stand under Michelangelo’s life-giving Father in the Sistine as He reaches out to Adam & explain how the artist pulled off the masterpiece 13.8 billion years after God is BELIEVED to have created His universe …

Davd Soul