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Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence
This book scientifically challenges earlier radiocarbon testing and presents new evidence in determining the Shroud of Turin's true age.
320 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1998
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May 8, 2018
Be advised, Mark Antonacci is passionate about the Shroud of Turin. Although his book, The Resurrection of the Shroud is almost 20 years old, it focuses on the critical years of the seventies and eighties when the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), a team of esteemed scientists who chose that name for themselves, were given unprecedented access to this unique relic and performed all the latest (for 1978 that is) tests on it. Fortunately, this group has a website and they are still active. In fact, they are currently celebrating their 40th anniversary of that original examination and testing, although they have had to say good-bye to so many of the original members who have passed in the ensuing years.
Each chapter of RotS is an in-depth exploration of something associated with the Shroud, such as: ‘images on the shroud’, ‘trying to reproduce the shroud’, ‘archaeological artifacts’, ‘painting theories explored’, ‘the history’, ‘scientific challenges to the carbon dating’, ‘the scandal exposed’, and ‘the cause of images on the shroud’ etc.
My favorite chapters were: ‘the man in the shroud’, and ‘unlimited, worldwide opportunity’.
Just the tip of what I learned about the Shroud:
• It is a 3D image, a negative, and NOT a painting of any sort. It is certainly a shroud, a burial cloth, made of fine linen, not normally associated with the sort of person who would have been crucified.
• The image forming mechanism acted through empty space. There are distinct differences between the blood and body images.
• The Historically Consistent Method states that if a body instantaneously dematerialized or disappeared, particle radiation would be given off naturally and all the unique features found on the Shroud’s body images and blood marks would occur. This method was arrived at by combining all the research from scientists from around the world on all aspects of the body and blood of the Shroud. It is the only method (at the time of this book anyway) which accounts for all of the Shroud’s known features.
• No one has been able to reproduce the Shroud, though there have been an endless number of attempts to do so.
• The man wrapped in the cloth was scourged, crowned with thorns and crucified according to known Roman procedures. No broken bones were noted, but there was a wound to the right side of his chest and two excoriated areas across his shoulder blades.
• The physiognomy of the man appears to be Middle Eastern. His hair is parted in the middle and it is long, falling to his shoulders. He seems to have a chin band and coins over his eyes, another Jewish burial custom. Even the coins have been identified!
• There was a well-known, early church relic called the Image of Edessa, later the Mandylion when it was moved to Constantinople. Some scholars believe the Image of Edessa/Mandylion and the Shroud are one and the same and give the following reasons: eyewitness descriptions and reactions; persistent claims it was ‘not made by human hands’; copies which have come down through history; and words used in reference to it which indicate all that was exposed was the face, i.e., something much larger was folded up and encased behind the facial image. The Mandylion disappeared from Constantinople; it was never mentioned after the 7th century.
• There was a table in the last chapter comparing ancient authors, when their works were composed, how many manuscripts/papyri we have, the earliest, and the time lapse from when it was reputed to have been written. There were authors of over 200 manuscripts: Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Euclid, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Plutarch, Josephus, and Livy to name a few. Of these, most of the works are copies made at least 700 or 800 years after the death of the author. Whereas with the New Testament, we have extant copies of writings from within 20 years of the events described. And not just one or two, but 85! 268 manuscripts which are over 100 years old and 2792 800-year-old manuscripts, as compared to the handful from their secular counterparts. I found this table endlessly fascinating. Before I saw this, I had no idea how rich we are in proof for what we read in Sacred Scripture, not that I want or need proof, but it is nice to know as so many are critical of these writings, yet give complete and unquestioning acceptance to secular texts with much less historical documentary proof.
• Well over a quarter of a million of man hours have been spent studying the Shroud of Turin making it the most intensely studied relic in the history of the world. This does not include numerous hours spent by pathologists, physicians, and various people from the fields of archeology and history.
• Finally, there was a huge debacle over the carbon dating which involved rivalries, personalities, failure to follow scientific protocols, and timing. ‘The mishandling of the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud was tragic. Because of those results, millions of people believe there is scientific proof the Shroud is a fraud. We’ve seen this simply isn’t true. But how could such a thing have happened?’ It was a terrible tragedy and even today, if you mention the Shroud to most people that is what they think, that carbon dating “proved” it as a medieval forgery. It didn’t, but people like easy answers. And there is nothing easy about this piece of cloth.
The author believes the man in the Shroud is Jesus Christ. When he started his research, he was a non-believer. I don’t see how anyone can read this book and not have something awaken in them. If not certainty, at least hope.
A very challenging read, but worth it.
March 29, 2018: Chapter 5, Attempts to Reproduce the Shroud Image sounds like it would be very interesting. It was at first, but it soon deteriorated into attempt after attempt which, having already read why the previous ones failed (as well as the Shroud's complexity and detail from the initial chapters) you knew the result of subsequent efforts before you started to read. The interesting point being, there have been almost no end to people who have tried to make their own Shroud of Turin, without success. I was glad to move on to Chapter 6, Archaeological Artifacts and other Evidence. Still think Chapter 2 is my favorite, Examination of the Man in the Shroud.
March 22, 2018: My Dad told me to read this book awhile back. I promptly went out and got a copy, because how often does Dad tell me to read something? Well, this was the first time I can remember, him ever doing it. Then I got distracted by other books. Since then I have given him some books which have really challenged him, reading-wise. Thought it was about time ... not that the subject doesn't fascinate me. It always has! Good time of year to be reading about it too, coming into the Easter Season.
Each chapter of RotS is an in-depth exploration of something associated with the Shroud, such as: ‘images on the shroud’, ‘trying to reproduce the shroud’, ‘archaeological artifacts’, ‘painting theories explored’, ‘the history’, ‘scientific challenges to the carbon dating’, ‘the scandal exposed’, and ‘the cause of images on the shroud’ etc.
My favorite chapters were: ‘the man in the shroud’, and ‘unlimited, worldwide opportunity’.
Just the tip of what I learned about the Shroud:
• It is a 3D image, a negative, and NOT a painting of any sort. It is certainly a shroud, a burial cloth, made of fine linen, not normally associated with the sort of person who would have been crucified.
• The image forming mechanism acted through empty space. There are distinct differences between the blood and body images.
• The Historically Consistent Method states that if a body instantaneously dematerialized or disappeared, particle radiation would be given off naturally and all the unique features found on the Shroud’s body images and blood marks would occur. This method was arrived at by combining all the research from scientists from around the world on all aspects of the body and blood of the Shroud. It is the only method (at the time of this book anyway) which accounts for all of the Shroud’s known features.
• No one has been able to reproduce the Shroud, though there have been an endless number of attempts to do so.
• The man wrapped in the cloth was scourged, crowned with thorns and crucified according to known Roman procedures. No broken bones were noted, but there was a wound to the right side of his chest and two excoriated areas across his shoulder blades.
• The physiognomy of the man appears to be Middle Eastern. His hair is parted in the middle and it is long, falling to his shoulders. He seems to have a chin band and coins over his eyes, another Jewish burial custom. Even the coins have been identified!
• There was a well-known, early church relic called the Image of Edessa, later the Mandylion when it was moved to Constantinople. Some scholars believe the Image of Edessa/Mandylion and the Shroud are one and the same and give the following reasons: eyewitness descriptions and reactions; persistent claims it was ‘not made by human hands’; copies which have come down through history; and words used in reference to it which indicate all that was exposed was the face, i.e., something much larger was folded up and encased behind the facial image. The Mandylion disappeared from Constantinople; it was never mentioned after the 7th century.
• There was a table in the last chapter comparing ancient authors, when their works were composed, how many manuscripts/papyri we have, the earliest, and the time lapse from when it was reputed to have been written. There were authors of over 200 manuscripts: Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Euclid, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Plutarch, Josephus, and Livy to name a few. Of these, most of the works are copies made at least 700 or 800 years after the death of the author. Whereas with the New Testament, we have extant copies of writings from within 20 years of the events described. And not just one or two, but 85! 268 manuscripts which are over 100 years old and 2792 800-year-old manuscripts, as compared to the handful from their secular counterparts. I found this table endlessly fascinating. Before I saw this, I had no idea how rich we are in proof for what we read in Sacred Scripture, not that I want or need proof, but it is nice to know as so many are critical of these writings, yet give complete and unquestioning acceptance to secular texts with much less historical documentary proof.
• Well over a quarter of a million of man hours have been spent studying the Shroud of Turin making it the most intensely studied relic in the history of the world. This does not include numerous hours spent by pathologists, physicians, and various people from the fields of archeology and history.
• Finally, there was a huge debacle over the carbon dating which involved rivalries, personalities, failure to follow scientific protocols, and timing. ‘The mishandling of the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud was tragic. Because of those results, millions of people believe there is scientific proof the Shroud is a fraud. We’ve seen this simply isn’t true. But how could such a thing have happened?’ It was a terrible tragedy and even today, if you mention the Shroud to most people that is what they think, that carbon dating “proved” it as a medieval forgery. It didn’t, but people like easy answers. And there is nothing easy about this piece of cloth.
The author believes the man in the Shroud is Jesus Christ. When he started his research, he was a non-believer. I don’t see how anyone can read this book and not have something awaken in them. If not certainty, at least hope.
A very challenging read, but worth it.
March 29, 2018: Chapter 5, Attempts to Reproduce the Shroud Image sounds like it would be very interesting. It was at first, but it soon deteriorated into attempt after attempt which, having already read why the previous ones failed (as well as the Shroud's complexity and detail from the initial chapters) you knew the result of subsequent efforts before you started to read. The interesting point being, there have been almost no end to people who have tried to make their own Shroud of Turin, without success. I was glad to move on to Chapter 6, Archaeological Artifacts and other Evidence. Still think Chapter 2 is my favorite, Examination of the Man in the Shroud.
March 22, 2018: My Dad told me to read this book awhile back. I promptly went out and got a copy, because how often does Dad tell me to read something? Well, this was the first time I can remember, him ever doing it. Then I got distracted by other books. Since then I have given him some books which have really challenged him, reading-wise. Thought it was about time ... not that the subject doesn't fascinate me. It always has! Good time of year to be reading about it too, coming into the Easter Season.
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June 7, 2013Enjoying this , very well written.
March 22, 2021
The Shroud of Turin is a famous and controversial object, purported to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. Its history can only be traced back to the 1300s in Europe and the 1988 carbon dating gave it an age not more than a thousand years old. And yet there are so many strange details and unanswered questions.
This book looks at the history and science of the Shroud. First, a large amount of scientific information became available during the twentieth century, after the late nineteenth century discovery that the image on the Shroud is a photographic negative (photography only becoming prevalent in the 1800s). A few minor investigations happened in the early 1900s. An extensive scientific examination happened in 1978 when a team of scientists studied the image and the cloth in every imaginable way for several weeks. The group of scientists included medical examiners, radiologists, biologists, chemists, and pathologists. They photographed the Shroud in a wide array of lights as well as taking samples of the cloth and various items that were on the cloth (blood, pollen, etc.). The analysis yielded fascinating results.
One main focus of the scientific investigation was to prove or disprove various theories on how the image came to be on the cloth. They concluded that the great detail on the Shroud (over a hundred wounds can be identified from the nail piercings, the side wound, head punctures, bruises, and scourge marks) could not have been created by an artist. No traces of paint residue were found and the image is embedded in the topmost fibers of the cloth with no signs of brush strokes. The uniformity and precision of the image is not even possible today. Oddly, the image markings are not on parts of the cloth covered by the blood stains (they could tell it was type AB blood but there's no hope of getting DNA, so there's no chance to clone). Various attempts to recreate the Shroud image have failed, even wrapping a mannikin covered in paint. The detail does not come through; the image is smudged or blurred when the body is moved. The author theorizes the only way for the image to encode on the Shroud is if the body passed through the cloth at a high energy state (which would also account for higher levels of carbon-14, which would throw off the radiocarbon dating).
The book also looks at the history of the Shroud. The cloth's history can only be definitively be traced back to the 1350s in France. Antonacci traces the history forward from the stories of the Image of Edessa (which is in modern-day Turkey). The Image goes back to a story of King Abgar of Edessa asking for a cure from Jesus, though his message to Jerusalem arrived after the crucifixion. The apostles sent the burial shroud which became revered for a few centuries. With the rise of iconoclasm, it was hidden in the city wall until it was recovered in the sixth century. Then it was taken to Constantinople, the capital of what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire, where it was kept as a treasure. When the Knights Templar participated in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, it's assumed they took the Shroud which went to their various castles in turn, winding up in Paris in the early 1300s. The theory is supported by the variety of pollen discovered on the Shroud and on the sudden shift in iconography from a beardless Jesus to a bearded Jesus in the sixth century (as if artists were copying some newly discovered and highly honored image).
The writing is very thorough and very technical at times. I found the reading tough in certain sections. He uses very similar arguments disproving various painting and imaging theories. Antonacci gives a very detailed description of the wounds on the Shroud and how they were inflicted. The detail isn't boring but it is excruciating. The history and the archaeology were more interesting to me. He also gives a detailed analysis of the radiocarbon dating and various flaws in how it was conducting (limited sampling and fewer labs analyzing, among other issues).
Recommended for those interested in knowing more about the science and the history of the Shroud of Turin.
This book looks at the history and science of the Shroud. First, a large amount of scientific information became available during the twentieth century, after the late nineteenth century discovery that the image on the Shroud is a photographic negative (photography only becoming prevalent in the 1800s). A few minor investigations happened in the early 1900s. An extensive scientific examination happened in 1978 when a team of scientists studied the image and the cloth in every imaginable way for several weeks. The group of scientists included medical examiners, radiologists, biologists, chemists, and pathologists. They photographed the Shroud in a wide array of lights as well as taking samples of the cloth and various items that were on the cloth (blood, pollen, etc.). The analysis yielded fascinating results.
One main focus of the scientific investigation was to prove or disprove various theories on how the image came to be on the cloth. They concluded that the great detail on the Shroud (over a hundred wounds can be identified from the nail piercings, the side wound, head punctures, bruises, and scourge marks) could not have been created by an artist. No traces of paint residue were found and the image is embedded in the topmost fibers of the cloth with no signs of brush strokes. The uniformity and precision of the image is not even possible today. Oddly, the image markings are not on parts of the cloth covered by the blood stains (they could tell it was type AB blood but there's no hope of getting DNA, so there's no chance to clone). Various attempts to recreate the Shroud image have failed, even wrapping a mannikin covered in paint. The detail does not come through; the image is smudged or blurred when the body is moved. The author theorizes the only way for the image to encode on the Shroud is if the body passed through the cloth at a high energy state (which would also account for higher levels of carbon-14, which would throw off the radiocarbon dating).
The book also looks at the history of the Shroud. The cloth's history can only be definitively be traced back to the 1350s in France. Antonacci traces the history forward from the stories of the Image of Edessa (which is in modern-day Turkey). The Image goes back to a story of King Abgar of Edessa asking for a cure from Jesus, though his message to Jerusalem arrived after the crucifixion. The apostles sent the burial shroud which became revered for a few centuries. With the rise of iconoclasm, it was hidden in the city wall until it was recovered in the sixth century. Then it was taken to Constantinople, the capital of what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire, where it was kept as a treasure. When the Knights Templar participated in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, it's assumed they took the Shroud which went to their various castles in turn, winding up in Paris in the early 1300s. The theory is supported by the variety of pollen discovered on the Shroud and on the sudden shift in iconography from a beardless Jesus to a bearded Jesus in the sixth century (as if artists were copying some newly discovered and highly honored image).
The writing is very thorough and very technical at times. I found the reading tough in certain sections. He uses very similar arguments disproving various painting and imaging theories. Antonacci gives a very detailed description of the wounds on the Shroud and how they were inflicted. The detail isn't boring but it is excruciating. The history and the archaeology were more interesting to me. He also gives a detailed analysis of the radiocarbon dating and various flaws in how it was conducting (limited sampling and fewer labs analyzing, among other issues).
Recommended for those interested in knowing more about the science and the history of the Shroud of Turin.
September 26, 2011
The topic of this book was very fascinating to me, but it was so technical and so far over my head that I really struggled to get through most of it. I finally ended up giving up on finishing it. That is rare for me. I can only recall one other book I did not finish and it was an audio book that had such severe scratches that it was impossible to complete.
October 24, 2008
Awesome book. Technical at times but very good.
December 27, 2010
Another in my reads about the Turin Shroud. Written by a lawyer, some of it was over my head dealing with various tests done on the shroud, but a good discussion. (I'm not a scientist.)
June 13, 2015
I really enjoyed this book, he gives a strong case for the shroud.
September 6, 2017
Objective empirical evidence
An important review of a key stone existential question relevant to any attempt or approach to realize how and why we exist.
An important review of a key stone existential question relevant to any attempt or approach to realize how and why we exist.
October 24, 2019
An excellent technical analysis of the methodologies used to examine the shroud of Turin
This book is an excellent scientific review of all the studies performed on the shroud of turn. Be forewarned it is an extensive almost exhausting read of several different types of methodologies used to scientifically analyze the shroud. However it is very insightful and illuminating and for the believer it can offer affirmation while for the non-believer I think it provides substantial evidence that the conclusion that the shroud of Turin is a forgery from the middle ages should be seriously re-examined and certainly not taken for granted.
This book is an excellent scientific review of all the studies performed on the shroud of turn. Be forewarned it is an extensive almost exhausting read of several different types of methodologies used to scientifically analyze the shroud. However it is very insightful and illuminating and for the believer it can offer affirmation while for the non-believer I think it provides substantial evidence that the conclusion that the shroud of Turin is a forgery from the middle ages should be seriously re-examined and certainly not taken for granted.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews