I was reading Fox News today and came across an article reviewing the new book The Jesus Discoveries by Jeremiah J. Johnston. I love books, stories, and information about religion—specifically Christianity, the life of Christ, and things that might be related to the Book of Mormon.
What caught my interest was what the article said about the Shroud of Turin. Personally, I don’t believe the Shroud of Turin is the cloth that Jesus Christ was wrapped in—but the theory is fascinating. There were things the article presented as facts from the book that gave me pause.
“The image is only 0.2 microns thin. You realize that’s one-fifth of the thickness of a piece of our hair?” Johnston said. “That’s how superficial the image on the shroud is.” Fox News
That’s interesting.
Lazzaro’s testing found it would take “a burst of 34,000 billion watts of radiant energy delivered in one-40 billionth of a second to create the image,” according to Johnston.
“That’s why I say the Shroud of Turin is not a death cloth; it is a resurrection cloth. That is the moment when Jesus’ physical body came back to life,” he claimed. Fox News
Now, I’m not going to investigate the claim further. I’m already skeptical of the Shroud, and I often feel that the pursuit of things like this is not what builds faith. What builds faith is our relationship with God and our ability to feel and recognize the promptings of the Holy Ghost.
If my testimony were built on something like the Shroud of Turin having supernatural significance, I’d be in a strange position—needing proof to believe or reinforce my belief in God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Then what happens if it’s disproven? What happens when the evidence I based my testimony on turns out to be wrong?
Why is that a concern? Because we are moving headfirst into an age of deception—where right is called wrong and wrong is called right, and where even the very elect may fall. If we are not in tune with the Holy Ghost and do not have it as our constant companion, we will not endure. The Shroud of Turin does not equal faith.
What fascinates me, though, is the idea that it would take a burst of 34,000 billion watts of radiant energy in one forty-billionth of a second to create the image—to burn it into the cloth. That reminds me of the silhouettes burned into walls from atomic blasts.
Here is an image from National Geographic of a silhouette created by the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The claim is that the Shroud of Turin would be the opposite: rather than blocking light and heat, the image may have been formed by a source of light and heat.
No one knows, and the Gospels do not explain how the Resurrection happened. Some say that when a sperm fertilizes an embryo, a burst of energy is emitted. It’s often cited as an argument for life beginning at conception. Is that burst of energy the beginning of life? Is it the spirit entering the body? Does something similar happen when we are resurrected? Or, because He is God, would something entirely different have occurred when Jesus Christ was resurrected?
Who knows—we may never know. But The Jesus Discoveries may be worth reading.