By Bob Bird
Well, it’s what we lecturers call “Shroud Season” again. There are men and women, amateurs like myself, professional touring caravans, authors and Biblical scholars with PhDs, giving talks throughout the U.S. and the world, on the greatest and most important relic in human history. They are interviewed on Tucker Carlson, podcasts of various formats and professional documentaries. They are not all Catholics, which is a fact of utmost importance. They are increasingly evangelicals, mainline Protestant scholars and even Mormons. They possess their own life-sized replicas. Wherever we go, audiences are floored. Speechless. Amazed. Grateful. Renewed.
Even before a power point and accompanying talk, people want to take pictures and stare at it. Many cannot make out the features until they get a little help, and then, like one of those “Seeing-Eye” paintings, the brain unscrambles the visual noise, and a succession of gasps are heard in the venue.
Last week I brought along a trusted companion and for five days we went from Whittier, to Valdez, then Glennallen, Palmer and finally to Anchorage. In all, about 250 people of all denominations saw and heard about the Shroud and its increasingly famous companion cloth, the Sudarium of Oviedo. I’m not done, either. I will be at a Baptist venue in Kenai on Monday and St. Benedict’s parish in Anchorage on Thursday. You can call my radio show between 3-5 pm any weekday and ask questions and give comments, 907-283-5811.
This vastly important relic is taking the American culture by storm, and I would suggest that a YouTube search with the key words “Dr. Jeremiah Johnston Shroud” will conjure for you any number of his fine interviews. He is a Biblical researcher of highest reputation and impeccable credentials. Above all, he is a rollicking, humorous and joyous man, cracking playful jokes, especially when discussing his former days as a dedicated Shroud skeptic.
And speaking of skeptics, they have retreated into the intellectual attic, or like Johnston, are making a 180 degree confession of their ignorance and former blindness. The Carbon-14 dating of 1988, seemingly the “final word” of the Shroud being a medieval fraud, is now viewed as one of the greatest and most embarrassing mistakes in scientific history, matching the Piltdown Man hoax as something to be hopefully ignored or forgotten.
The discipline of history alone shoots down the C-14 error. There is art history, numismatic (coins) history and various extant letters that prove the Shroud is much older than the 1390-1260 result, widely published and easily found online.
New dating techniques, unheard of even a decade ago, also posit the Shroud as 2,000 years old. Check out WAXS: Wide Angle X-Ray Scattering. They used a controlled sample of an unmistakenly authentic Masada cloth, reliably dated to 70 AD. With a tiny thread from the Shroud, the WAXS placed it as 2,000 years old as well.
And it is science, not theologians or Church apologists, who tell us that the mysterious body image of the Shroud cannot be replicated. The best explanations from earlier efforts are long gone. It certainly is not a painting, and not a hypothetical “vapor graph”, of which there is no known example in science. Nor is it a scorch, manufactured by heating a life-sized brass statue.
The best explanation now is that it was some sort of nano-second flash of thermonuclear energy, largely outside of today’s known laws of physics. Among the sophisticated physicists from around the world, whose lectures I attended last summer in St. Louis, there is some disagreement, but only in minor details. Plasma? Lightning? Radioactivity? A nano-second or 1/40th of a nano-second? No matter.
Bob Rucker, a nuclear physicist, said it best: scientists necessarily work inside the boundaries of the known laws of nature. When they encounter the supernatural, they are necessarily speechless, and that is where hubris might come into play. Acknowledging the phenomenon called a “miracle” would require humility. Their great knowledge and pride in what they have accomplished inside of their discipline, often gets in the way.
But not always. I saw this in St. Louis. Many of these incredibly learned men have come to the position of a child once again, trusting a loving God of overwhelming and incomprehensible power.
And for those who don’t need the Shroud? Well, Dr. Johnston has quite a Zinger. OK, you don’t need the Shroud. But John did, when he wrote in chapter 20 of his Gospel, upon arriving at the tomb on Easter Morning, when “He saw and believed.”
Make your own Shroud pilgrimage through the miracle of science on the internet. Be humble, and then — think for yourself. For in the end, that is how we all come to Faith.
Bob Bird is former chair of the Alaskan Independence Party and the host of a talk show on KSRM radio, Kenai.
