My guess is that many of you have heard of the shroud of Turin, and also heard that it has been debunked as Jesus’ burial cloth. Personally I’ve given no attention to the shroud because I recall that about forty years ago they carbon dated it, and came away saying that it was only 800 years old or so. But a few months ago I was watching a YouTube interview, and it has completely changed my mind on the shroud. The video un-debunked(bunked?) it for me.
There’s a lot to cover here, but let’s start with the first problem: how do we reconcile the carbon dating problem? It turns out it is a pretty easy to explain the discrepancy. You see, over the first thousand years or so of the shroud’s existence, it was damaged. As you might imagine, most of the damage is around the edges… fraying and such. So, what do you do when you have an irreplaceable cloth that is damaged around the edge? You fix it. New linen was sewed onto it to prevent unravelling and preserve the main cloth.
However, when researchers wanted to verify the claims about the shroud, do you think they took a sample from the center of the cloth to carbon date? Of course not. They were respectful(or if you’re more cynical, they intentionally sabotaged the effort), and took something from the edges which was dated as being from around 1200-1300AD. So yes, the linen on the edges may have been sewn on around that time, but what about the main cloth? The problem is that in the years since that dating the shroud has moved from a private collection to being held by the Vatican, and they have not allowed anybody to take a sample from the interior of the cloth to redo the carbon dating process.
If we believe that explanation about the dating of the cloth, we’re back to something truly incredible. The image that is on the shroud is a photographic negative, and while we have hundreds of burial cloths from the middle east, there are none – not a single other one – with an embedded image in it. Not only an embedded image, but one of a man that has complete correspondence with what we know of crucifixion in the Roman Empire, specifically as it relates to Jesus of Nazareth.
Here’s what researcher Jeremiah Johnston had to say about the evidence:
“For example, the shroud has blood all over it. The blood is interesting. It’s been tested. It’s type AB blood, which is Semitic blood. The fewest amount of people in the world, only 6% of the world’s population has type AB blood. This is human blood. It’s male blood. It’s not blood of an animal. It’s not a hoax. You would have to actually kill someone if you were trying to reproduce the shroud because we have premortem and post-mortem blood all over the shroud. So that’s interesting. This tells us that someone died a torturous death, a death where he was flogged. We see scourges. There are hashes all over the front and back images.
“You can actually see between rib five and six, a gash in the side. Well, Jesus, we know from John’s gospel, he is penetrated through rib five and six by a spear. And that spear, John says, blood and water comes out. Well, that’s post-mortem blood. We know that that blood differs from the other premortem blood on the shroud. So, so many of these factoids are indicative that this was a man who had suffered crucifixion under the Romans. They were experts at it. And we see that all of this bears correspondence with what we read in the gospels about how Jesus died.”
Johnston also points out that there are around 700 wounds on the back of the man who was crucified. This is not normal. Nobody was crucified the way Jesus was with all of the beating and torture in advance of the crucifixion.
However, what I find to be the most interesting part is that the blood absorbs all the way through the linen, but the image is superficial. The image is only two microns thick. It is it does not absorb all the way through. Think about it: if this was a hoax there would be pigment, dye, or paint, and it would absorb fully through the cloth. But Johnston says, “If we took a razor to the actual shroud, we could shave off the image because it’s that thin. And this is what the best scientists in the world cannot replicate.”
He goes on to say, “I believe we’re looking at the moment of Jesus’s resurrection. Ultimately, all of this conversation leads to that something powerful happens on that first Easter morning. It’s electromagnetic radiation that’s so powerful. We don’t have this amount of watt power on Earth: literally 40 billion watts of energy… The labs could heat up and essentially tattoo the shroud, but it would it would burn up instantly. It would scorch. This didn’t scorch. It was the pulse rate which was so – and I know we’re getting deep – but it’s important to be nuanced in this conversation and precise the pulse rate power 40 billion watts traveling at 140th of a billionth of a second we believe is that moment that Jesus body is resurrected and that’s what leaves this image.”
Personally, I find this fascinating. So of course, we have to take a look and see what the Writings say about the moment of Jesus’ resurrection. The most direct teaching I could find about the moment of resurrection comes form Doctrine of the Lord #35: “As His body was no longer material, but Divine substantial, He came in to His disciples when the doors were shut (John 20:19, 26); and after He had been seen He became invisible (Luke 24:31). Being such, the Lord was then taken up, and sat at the right hand of God.” The key bit being the body was “no longer material, but Divine substantial.” So something very real changed.
Usually though, the Writings teach this in terms of Jesus’ “glorification.” Throughout His life, the finite, material human nature He had received from His mother Mary was completely put off (rejected and transcended), and in its place He put on a Divine Human from the Father. “By means of temptations and continual victories… and by the passion of the cross which was the last of the temptations, the Lord completely conquered the hells, and fully glorified His human.” (Doctrine of the Lord, paragraphs 73 [3] and 74 [4])
Swedenborg stresses that the empty tomb (John 20:1–7) and the angels’ message prove nothing material was left behind—unlike every other human, whose physical body remains in the grave while only the spirit rises. The Lord’s body was transformed into Divine substance at the moment of resurrection, allowing it to be fully visible and tangible yet unbound by physical laws, hence that ability to walk through the closed door and to ascend to heaven. This completed the union of His Divine and Human natures so completely that “the human too became Divine.”
These teachings appear consistently across Swedenborg’s works (with echoes in True Christian Religion §§92–93 and related sections on the Lord’s glorification), but Doctrine of the Lord gives the clearest, most concentrated description of the resurrection moment itself. The Lord rose not as a revived physical corpse, but as the fully Divine Human—God in visible, tangible form—having left no material body behind. Did that transformation create a 40 billion watt energy pulse that left an image of that body on the burial cloth? I don’t know about you, but I think it did.
I encourage you to watch or listen to the interview yourself. It’s 90 minutes long, and so goes into greater depth than I can do here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKMQY49py4w