TURIN SHROUD MAN IS NOT JESUS CHRIST

The Turin Shroud is the most famous relic in the world. Millions believe that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ bearing his crucified and bloodied image. The cloth is kept at Turin in Italy. The cloth is an enigma. Many say it is a miracle. If we do not know how to make something exactly like it, that is not to be wondered at. There are so many variables and possibilities and it aged, it was made so so long ago, and suffered so many chemical changes that we may never know for sure. Even if we make a perfect shroud it still does not prove that our method was deployed to make the Turin Shroud. Anybody declaring the cloth a miracle is a fraud pure and simple.
 
The greatest mystery is who the cloth depicts for the man whose face is on the Shroud is not Jesus Christ.
 
Even if the cloth is strange and inexplicable and even if there is real blood on it, it still does not give us any reason to think these effects came from a body.  Ultimately the shroud researchers want people to think that it must be real for it is like magic - and it works and that is how they make a living out of their nonsense. The crucifixion would have been very undignified and there is no sign of messy bottom with Jesus in the shroud nor did he wet himself.  The image does not carry the huge distortions that would be seen if a body had lain in it and imprinted the images. The image has nothing to do with proving the existence or resurrection of Jesus Christ.

THE GOOD CONDITION OF SHROUD MAN

He has a strong jawline and evidently shows no sign of having lost teeth to any significant degree. Jodi Magness in her wonderful book Stone, Dung, Oil and Spit shows her remarkable New Testament scholarship and grasp of archeology. She shows that Jesus' culture was not just one where you could be stabbed or bludgeoned to death any moment, but one where insanitary practices and harmful medicine and disease were rampant and affected everybody. Jesus in fact would have probably died in the same year he was nailed anyway. One big issue was teeth. Everybody lost them and everybody had infections and many died of tooth infections.

NEW TESTAMENT EVIDENCE CONTRADICTS THE SHROUD
 
In John 19:40 we read that Jesus was prepared for burial according to the Jewish custom.
 
The John gospel tells us how Lazarus was laid out in strips of cloth and with a bare face. This was a gospel meant for non-Jews. Jews would find it too hostile to their leaders and religion to even want to read it. The author then by telling us about how Lazarus was clothed in the tomb and how Jesus was anointed and so on was explaining what he meant by the Jewish burial custom. Jesus' face was bare in the tomb. Therefore the Turin Shroud is a fake.
 
Washing was part of the custom. The Shroud man was not washed so he was not Jesus. Plus the anointings and spices would have mingled with his dried blood and sweat stains making excessively messy and greasy marks which is exactly what we do not have on the Shroud. There should have been a lot of smearing as Jesus was eased into the cloth. If he were plastered in spices as John says then he would have been sticky.
 
The Bible says that the resurrection is the most important thing Jesus did. If God were giving us a miraculous image of Jesus it would be a miraculous picture of Jesus’ corpse transforming into the glorious and perfected Christ and something that was a complete mystery to science. The Turin Shroud is Genuine states that there is nothing miraculous about the Shroud though certain things can’t be worked out about it (page 130). Inexplicable is not miraculous. There are billions of odd things we cannot explain and that does not entitle us to hail them as miracles.
 
The New Testament says Jesus was anointed for burial meaning myrrh and aloes would have been used. There is no trace of them on the cloth at all!!

In 1981 Max Frei announced he had found aloes on the shroud. This is important for John 19 says they comprised some of the sweet-smelling spices used on Jesus’ corpse. Despite John 19 saying a lot was used not much was allegedly found by Frei. Worse it was found he was lying. There were no aloes on the cloth full stop. Even a vital Palestinian pollen was absent with the only specimen having proved to have been planted.
  
THE TURIN SHROUD CONTRADICTS THE STORY OF JESUS' EXECUTION

The man’s face is serene which indicates that it is not the face of one tortured to death. It is not true that you have to look peaceful when you die. It is argued that this is the face of a man awaking from the sleep of death. Christians believe that Jesus became something of a shape-shifter that could behave like a ghost so this waking idea has Jesus reviving the body before he transforms it. Not likely or necessary. Also there is no evidence that the man is meant to give the impression that he is waking from death.

The face of the man on the Shroud looks human while the earliest Christians applied Isaiah’s alleged predictions of God's top servant to Jesus and they said the servant’s face would be marred so much that it would look no longer like the face of a man. This indicates that the early Church would have rejected the Shroud as not being a true Christian relic.

The Shroud man has been whipped with savagery beyond belief. If Pilate liked Jesus according to the gospel Jesus’ scourging would not have been as bad as that. This shows that the Shroud of Turin is inconsistent with the gospels and is the image of a man posing as Jesus not Jesus. The Shroud also contradicts the gospels that Jesus was well-known and so popular that he had to be arrested in secret in case the people would rebel for if Pilate released Jesus as he planned to do and Jesus was presented as excessively scourged and scarred to his fans there would be huge trouble. Pilate, according to the gospels, never expected the crowd to reject Jesus.

And the Shroud man wore a cap of thorns. A cap is harder to make than a circlet. Roman soldiers had enough to do without the painful and time-consuming job of making a cap.
 
The Shroud man was made to look as if he bled afresh round the head just before being put in the cloth as if the crown of thorns had just been pulled off. Now the real Jesus if he was popular and if he had royal blood would have been crucified privately for crucifying him publicly with a crown of thorns on his head would have been provocative and asking for an uprising and Pilate was expected to keep the peace by the Emperor at least in the later stage of his being governor. It would represent Roman mockery of the sacred bloodline of David from which the messiah was to come and the Jews would not stand for that even if they hated Jesus because of the contempt and lack of morale among Jews this desecration would ignite. The real Jesus would not have been nailed with a crown of thorns on his head and a sign above it. The Shroud is lying.

If the Shroud-man was Jesus then why don’t we have impressive miracles of healing like those which Lourdes is famous for associated with it? If it is authentic it is more important than Lourdes.

The man is not Jesus. If we have a miraculous image of a man that is not Jesus then the Shroud is better than the New Testament for it gives scientific proof which is better than mere testimony and this makes it irrational and sinful to uphold Jesus as the Son of God when the evidence for Mr X being the real one is superior.
 
Yet the believers make excuses for all the problems. There are too many excuses.
 
There can be no doubt that the Shroud man was a different person from Jesus Christ.
 
NOT DEAD
 
Some would say there should be blurs about the mouth showing that the man breathed. But if he were in a coma his breath would have been imperceptible. And the occasional strong breath would not affect the image if it were slow forming.
 
The gospels say that Jesus was dead when taken off the cross but the Shroud man was not dead because he bled in the Shroud.
 
If there was a dead man in the cloth then somebody added the blood demonstrating that the cloth was some kind of trick for dead men don’t bleed.

WAS SHROUD MAN NAILED TO A CROSS?
 
Not all experts think the shroud man with his nail wounds supposedly in the wrists and blood flow and dislocated arms and legs was nailed to a cross. He was made to look as if he were nailed to something.
 
If you look at the print of the Shroud-man’s hands you will notice that there is a hand with a nail wound with unnaturally long and thin fingers that covers the other hand that is far more ridiculously elongated. The visibly wounded hand is bent a little over the other and that is the only reason it looks shorter but it still looks too long. If you act as if you are looking at a distorted image and mentally picture the hands as being normal you will see that the so-called wrist wound really came through the back of the hand through the palm without the nail penetrating at an angle. Jesus would have been nailed through the wrist and the wrist wound of the Shroud-man is simply an illusion caused by some kind of distortion. Plus even if the wound is at the wrist then that still does not prove the forger of the Shroud believed that the Romans crucified through the wrists because the nail might have been put through the palm at an angle so the point comes out near the wrist.
 
The notion that the Shroud man was nailed in the wrists as Jesus would have been is controversial and unprovable. All we see is an exit wound on the back of one hand which could mean a wound in the palm or the wrist. The wound should be serrated and the skin should have come off. A man nailed to a cross and who is on it for hours will wear his skin down where the backs of the hands touch the cross. Shroud man has no evidence of such marks. They are absent.
 
The Shroud man is alleged to have dislocated arms which makes them look abnormally long (page 43, The Holy Shroud and Four Visions). Some say the overstretched limbs are just errors in the production of the image. If dislocation has taken place then it shows that the Shroud was forged after visionaries like St Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373) claimed that Jesus arms were pulled apart for the nail holes on the cross were too far apart. First the Romans did not need nail holes – they just needed to hammer the nails in. Second, Jesus would have died rapidly if his arms were dislocated for he wouldn’t have been able to help himself upwards to ease the suffocating strain on his chest. Crucifixion killed by asphyxiation. The victim died when he couldn’t push upwards to relieve his chest muscles from the pressure of hanging and fill his lungs. Third, there is so much bleeding into the Shroud that Jesus had to have been entombed alive if the Shroud is real. But if he had dislocated limbs he would have died rapidly and long before the gospel says. Then there would have been a contradiction on the cloth between the dislocating and the bleeding. It would be a sure sign that the image was contrived.

The Second Messiah says there are signs that the man in the Shroud was nailed to a doorframe for one arm was nailed straight up and the other was nailed to the side. It observes that the Inquisition often nailed people up as a form of torture. The man was not nailed to a cross in the eyes of this book and it sees the blood flow as backing this up (page 223). The blood flow then would mean that the man was not Jesus for the man was not nailed to a cross and could indicate that the man was nailed up on purpose for making the Shroud.
 
Nobody knows for sure if shroud man has one leg longer than the other.

WASHED OR NOT?

If Jesus was washed after being removed from the cross then the Turin Shroud is a forgery. Shroud man was not washed.
 
The Church universally believed from early days that Jesus was washed for burial (page 6, The Blood and the Shroud). This shows that if the Church had the Shroud it knew that the unwashed man in it was not Jesus Christ. Or it might show that the Shroud never existed at that time meaning that the man still had no chance of being Jesus Christ.
 
The blood would have been washed out of the hair by the heavy rain gushing out of the heavens when Jesus was on the cross. The gospels say there was climatic upheaval at that time such as earthquakes and darkness so we can safely infer that if we asked the gospellers if there was rain they would say there was. The blood blots around the head are not watery from the rain at all which adds weight to the cloth being a forgery. The hair would have been tossed by the wind. It is just too tidy as is the beard.

The bloody hair does not fit a man who supposedly was in the rain and washed afterwards.

Schwortz criticised a sceptic who observed the hair is not arranged like it would be if a man were lying down.  It looks as if Jesus was standing up.    “He hasn’t noticed that the hair is tight to the head because the man on the shroud has a ponytail.  Plus, it was stiff from being soaked with blood and sweat.”  This is total rubbish for the hair on the sides hangs down as if the man were standing and that has nothing to do with a ponytail.  The stiff hair is too neat!  How did they get it so tight to the head if it was rigid?  Was Jesus keeping his head erect on the cross?  How odd! 
 
Plus there should be a pool of blood on the shroud instead of trickles here and there that look like they have levitated. The blood in the head area should have some evidence of hair both in actual hairs or the tracks of hair should be in the blood. The blood looks like it had nothing to do with the head and was put on separately.

The biggest error on the winding-sheet is how the man is too clean in most areas.  It is if he just bled to make marks on it.
 
Conclusion
 
The Shroud man is not Jesus Christ.  It is not the shroud of anybody.  It is not a contact print.  If you disagree then admit then that it is more likely if real to be the shroud of a man who was killed like Jesus allegedly was.  So it could be real without being Jesus' shroud.  The man could have died in the medieval time given by the carbon dating for the age of the cloth.  Jesus lived so long ago that that alone makes it more likely to show somebody else.

If the Shroud is a real image of a real man then it does not depict Jesus Christ and we can be fully certain of this. We have already seen that it does not tally with the crucifixion of Jesus and other things. When the Jesus records are opposed to the Shroud they take pre-eminence because unlike the Shroud they tell us about a Jesus and can be proven to be the nearest records to Jesus’ time which can’t be said of the Shroud. The gospels have to tell us about Jesus before we can know the Shroud is him.