The earliest surviving source that mentions the Image of Edessa as having ever existed is the Doctrine of Addai, a Syriac Christian text written in around the late fourth century AD or early fifth century AD, which says that the Image of Edessa was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus while he was alive by King Abgar of Edessa. For instance, some supporters of the shroud have tried to give the Shroud of Turin a history by identifying it with the Mandylion, or Image of Edessa, a small, rectangular piece of cloth that was held in the city of Edessa in the Byzantine Empire that was said to bear the miraculous image of Jesus’s face. Supporters of the shroud have tried very hard to invent a provenance for it. Instead, we have absolutely no mention of any object identifiable as being the Shroud of Turin in any surviving early Christian text and the earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin comes from fourteenth-century France. If the actual burial shroud of Jesus had survived and it really had a spectacular image of Jesus himself miraculously imprinted on it, we would expect to find mentions of it all over the place in early Christian writings. Finally, the fabric of the shroud was made using a complex weave that was common in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles but was not used for burial shrouds in the time of Jesus.Įvidence #1: The Shroud of Turin has no reliable provenance prior to the fourteenth century. The bloodstains on the shroud are not consistent with how blood flows naturally, which suggests the stains have been painted on. The fabric of the shroud has also been conclusively radiocarbon dated to the Late Middle Ages.Īdditionally, the proportions of the figure on the shroud are anatomically incorrect, but they closely match the proportions of figures in Gothic art of the fourteenth-century. For instance, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in the Judaea in the first-century AD or the specific description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John. We know this primarily because there is no definitive record of the shroud prior to the fourteenth century and the earliest definitive record of the shroud is a letter recording that the forger who made it had confessed, but also because of a wide array of other factors. Unfortunately, we can be virtually certain that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax that was originally created in France in around the 1350s AD by an artist trained in the Gothic figurative style as part of a faith-healing scam. If the shroud were authentic, it would be a remarkable source of information about Jesus the human being. It is easy to see why this idea is so appealing. Supporters of the shroud claim that it is the actual burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth and that the image on the shroud is the true image of Jesus, created at the moment of his resurrection. It is a 4.4-meter-long linen shroud bearing the image of a crucified man. The Shroud of Turin is probably the most famous supposed relic in existence.
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