The Man in the Shroud

Colorado physicist theorizes that Shroud of Turin may have been used at the Last Supper

By Charlene Scott

Special to the Southwest Kansas Register

Was the shroud that wrapped the body of Jesus in the tomb until Easter Sunday also the tablecloth at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday?

I learned more about the answer to that question after I met John and Rebecca Jackson. I was working as editor of the Denver Catholic Register newspaper in the early 1990s, and John was a physicist and professor at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. His wife was an Orthodox Jew from New York who had served in the Israeli army and converted to Catholicism.

The Jacksons operated the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado in Colorado Springs. They conducted all kinds of research and experiments on the shroud, which has been housed in Turin, Italy since the year 1578 in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

I was intrigued by the Jacksons and their research, and I wrote a series of six articles about them for the Denver Catholic Register. I later went to work for the Jacksons at the Shroud Center in 1994 as their Director of Communications. It was a great honor for me to work with the Jacksons.

The Shroud Center contains an 14-foot photographic image of the shroud that was taken in 1978 when John led an international team of 30 scientists, botanists, and photographers to Turin, Italy to study the shroud. Pope John Paul II had given his permission for the week-long study.

The linen shroud is 14-feet long and 3.5 feet wide and looks like a very long sheet. When folded, the image of the frontal body of a man is on one side of the shroud and the image of the man’s back is on the other side. The Man of the Shroud would have been placed upon the lower part of the cloth, with the rest of the sheet wrapped over his head and front of his body.

The image bears stains of the exact wounds recorded in the gospels regarding the torture and death of Jesus Christ. On the back, buttocks, and legs are more than 100 scourge marks that doctors have declared are from a whip bearing lead balls at the end of long straps, a weapon of torture that the Romans used.

On the feet and wrists (not the palms, as mistakenly portrayed on so many crucifixes) are puncture wounds from nails. John explained that the weight of a man’s body would have pulled a victim’s hands from nails driven into the palms, but nails driven between bones of the wrist would have held his weight. The Roman custom for their hundreds of crucifixions was to place nails in the wrists of the condemned person.

On the chest is a gash that would have been inflicted by a sword or long blade. On the head are wounds that could have come from a crown of thorns.

The scientists working with Dr. Jackson in Turin determined that stains on the shroud are, indeed, human blood. They found no paint on the shroud. But there is more to the shroud than meets the eye.

To his great surprise, Secondo Pia, an Italian photographer, discovered in his dark room in 1898 that the photo image of the negative of the shroud was a positive image. The negative looked like a developed photo, with light and shade reversed. Such a negative had never been seen before – or since.

Through his experiments, Dr. Jackson discovered that the shroud image also contains three-dimensional data of a human form. This phenomenon does not occur in normal photos or paintings. From that data, Dr. Jackson created a three-dimensional statue of the Man of the Shroud that stands in the chapel of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

I accompanied the Jacksons to Russia in February of 1995, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, to photograph and videotape their talks to Christians, scientists, and unbelievers.

They spoke one icy night at St. Cosmas and Damian Church in downtown Moscow, which had been closed as a church and used as a museum for 66 years by the Communists. The parish was founded in honor of Father Alexander Mien, a Jewish Russian Orthodox priest who was murdered by the KGB only four years before our visit.

We also visited St. Sergius Monastery in a 900-year-old city now known as Zargorsk. We saw only eight or 10 people lined up to visit Lenin’s tomb in Red Square in Moscow, but at the monastery, hundreds of people wound around a hill in the deep snow to visit the tomb of St. Sergius, Russia’s patron saint who founded the monastery in the year 1340.

The Bolsheviks turned the monastery into a museum during their revolution, but now more than 1,000 seminarians attend a theological college at the monastery.

The Lord always has the last laugh.

Everywhere the Jacksons spoke in Russia, people were astonished to learn that botanists discovered on the linen shroud tiny plants that grew only in the area of Jerusalem at the time of Christ. They listened with surprise as Rebecca told why she believes the shroud was the tablecloth at the Last Supper.

The cloth’s dimensions are consistent with Jewish cubit measurements used in the first century, Rebecca said, and the cloth meets Orthodox Jewish requirements for purity of linen and cotton for both burial and table cloths.

Wax and perhaps food stains occur on the shroud at distances that suggest a table setting, and Rebecca pointed out that the Jews would not have had time to order a linen cloth made for the quick burial of Jesus before sundown after the crucifixion. Thus the tablecloth from the Last Supper probably was used as a burial cloth.

The un-cleansed body of the Man of the Shroud is evident in the blood stains and dirt that have been found on the cloth. Rebecca reported that four conditions prevent a Jew from being cleansed before burial: if the person dies a violent death; if he is sentenced to capital punishment for a crime of a religious nature; if he is killed by a gentile; and if he is considered an outcast from the Jewish community.

Jesus fulfilled all of those requirements.

When the people stepped outside into the Russian landscape the next morning, they would have seen evidence on their churches of the Jacksons’ belief that early Christian art was copied from the face of the Man of the Shroud – the “face made without the hands of man.”

The face of Jesus appears above the doorway of nearly every Russian church, and those long faces with orthodox curls below the ears appear identical to the face of the Man of the Shroud.

Dr. Jackson believes that carbon dating of the shroud conducted in 1988 was faulty. The three laboratories that did the testing claimed that the shroud dated to the 14th century. Dr. Jackson believes, however, that the pieces obtained for the testing came from an area of the shroud damaged by two different fires in the past, and that the damage rendered the tests invalid.

The Catholic Church does not claim that the Shroud of Turin is a true relic, but Pope John Paul II visited the cathedral in Turin to see the shroud with his own eyes twice during his papacy, and millions of Christians from all denominations and faiths have come from distant lands to view it.

As for myself, I do believe the shroud covered the body of Jesus Christ during his burial prior to his Resurrection, and that it probably was the tablecloth at the Last Supper.