Letter #117: A Face in the Shroud
A Meeting of Minds
Mine son.
You’ve probably heard the news about the Shroud of Turin.
The shroud, first documented about seven centuries ago, holds the image of a man often supposed to be Jesus Christ. The idea is that Jesus was wrapped in the shroud after his crucifixion and the fabric, like Veronica’s veil, miraculously retained his likeness.
In 1978, a microscopic study of the shroud found that the image was a painted forgery. Ten years later, three laboratories carbon dated the fabric of the shroud and declared it was made in the 13th or 14th century.
But now, a new form of X-Ray dating has found the shroud’s fabric consistent with cloth from the time of the siege of Masada around 73AD, and therefore plausibly from the time of Christ. What’s more, an artificial intelligence image generator called Midjourney has been used to derive a lifelike picture of the image on the shroud, a photographic portrait of a wounded man eerily similar to the Jesus of popular imagination.
So many phony relics have littered the churches of Europe, one would be a fool to buy into the shroud’s legitimacy without serious investigation. Still, when I first looked into the portrait’s penetrating gaze, I felt a chill of connection. After all, you don’t have to believe in the shroud to believe in the reality of Jesus himself. The first Christians preached in many of the very places Jesus walked, and no one ever seems to have questioned Jesus’s existence or denied the fact of his empty tomb.
Given the new dating, the powerful effect of the Jesus image may simply be this: it’s a striking reminder that the incarnate creator of mankind was not a spirit or a supernatural force, but a particular person from a particular time and place and culture, who walked and suffered, ate and bled, grew and lived and died like one of us.
In my final letter last week, I spoke about religion as a story, a joy-inducing narrative of morality and meaning that overlays the seemingly random events of material life. It’s important to remember that, in this case, the narrative is also history. As C. S. Lewis tells it, J. R. R. Tolkien shared this wisdom with him on that trail in Oxford which you and I once walked together: “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference, that it really happened.”
This changes everything. It suggests that material and spiritual reality are one: not a creation of the human mind but a meeting of that mind with the mind of another, greater than our own. The truth of scripture is not derived from scripture but from life — a life that is itself a story, shot through with meaning, morality and consciousness.
Our joy, in other words, is natural to us — and as real as the face gazing back at ours.
Love, Dad
Hey wait just a dang minute, I thought that early tests of the Shroud’s image established that whatever it was, it _wasn’t_ paint, but something more akin to scorch marks. And that the test that dated some of its fibers as being from the Middle Ages did so because the sample used was from a repair that had been done on the Shroud in that period (come on early investigators, can’t we distinguish between the original fabric and fabric woven in centuries later?). Then there are observable details the significance of which the average Middle Ages antiquities forger would unlikely have been aware, such as that the configuration of the scourge marks indicates the use of a specific type of scourge used by Roman authorities in the time and place of Jesus’ ministry…well the more they have continued to find out about this piece of cloth and its image, the less and less credibility the “obvious or ok maybe not obvious but still a fake!” theories have. 😤. Does the stability of anyone’s Christian faith rest on the authenticity, or inauthenticity, of the Shroud? Of course not, but this is one of the most enthralling scientific investigations in history, and yeah I _love_ that the people who are emotionally invested in the Shroud being a fake get repeatedly smacked across the chops with an ice cold mackerel (or whatever kind of fish it was in the home waters of those fishers of men).
I studied theoretical physics in college, and I’m willing to say “maybe” to the miracles in the gospels.
But what I know certainly is that when I decided to follow God, Christ showed me the path beneath my feet and revealed himself on the same path, walking in front of all of us towards the light.