The Shroud of Turin - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 11/7/24

Published Nov 8, 2024, 10:34 AM

George Noory and filmmaker David Rolfe discuss the Shroud of Turin, the purported burial cloth of Jesus, the evidence supporting the authenticity of the Shroud, and if the burst of energy that made the image was to preserve it for future generations.

Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.

And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you. David Wolf with Us is one of the foremost British experts on the Shroud of Turin. He's an Academy Award winning producer and director with a long career in British television and film. His website is who caneb dot com. It's an amazing say David, you do a great job. Welcome to the program.

Thank you, it's great to be here.

How did you get involved in the Shroud of Turin?

Well, I suppose in a kind of miraculous way. Really, I was a graduate of the London Film School way back in the last century, and back in those days, most of the work I could get with corporate work. It was interesting. It was people building great civil engineering projects around the world, and I enjoyed that. But I wanted to get my teeth into something a little more interesting, and I sent out a press release to all the local newspapers in the UK saying that independent producer looking for ideas, and frankly I was deluged. I mean people had gone up into their attics and dusted off things that they taught about ages ago and I, and I, of course, having advertised for them, I had to that was obliged to wade through them all. And there was nothing really inspiring until one envelope I opened had a photograph of the face and it was purported to be the face of Jesus, and it was sent to me to buy a a historian called Ian Wilson. Now I wasn't religious, but I had been, being a photographer and a filmmaker. I was aware that this image that was on a linen cloth was really something quite unusual. Fact, when you saw it in the naked eye, it looked a bit like a negative, and sure enough, when you actually turned it into a negative by reversing light and shade, it suddenly became extremely vivid, and it was an image, unmistakably of a crucified man. There was only a history of the cloth back to the Middle Ages, and so one was obviously a bit suspicious that this might have been some medieval fake. But it turns out that once the investigation underway, what the most important thing is. Of course, as an independent producer, that will tell you have an idea but an idea is no good without the money to make it. And I had located a priest in New York who had actually had was brought up in Turin and emigrated to New York, and I was put in touch with him. I said, look, I've come across this shrowd. It's insuring. No one's really ever heard of it, but it sounds fascinating. And he said to me, just come and see me. Well, i'd never been to America at that time, and it was nineteen seventy eight. It was quite an expensive thing to me. Anyway, we got there and he put me in front of somebody who had inherited a huge fortune from one of the brewing companies. And I was one of several people who had who made a pitch that day to this gentleman over lunch. And again, luckily for me, the other guys that were pitching didn't really inspire this chat. But when I started talking about the Shroud of Turin, this multi millionaire got very interested and said to me, well, mister Wolf, how much money do you need? And I actually hadn't done a budget at that time. Was it was still early stages. But when you asked the question like that, and you have to come up with something.

You need a quick answer, right, don You need a quick answer?

When he does that, I need a quick answer. And I said the three hundred and fifty thousand pounds and that was the equivalent back then of about a million dollars. And this sentlement said hmm, and he sort of scratched his chin for a moment and said, okay. I walked. I walked. I walked away from that meeting with a million dollars. And the time I was thrown back to London that the money had reached my bank account and I was away for the film who can he be?

It's an amazing thing that.

For the first film. I'm going back now to nineteen seventy eight. That first film was called The Silent Witness and it won a British Academy Award and it set my career on the path. And I then made lots of documentaries for TV. And then in the nineteen eighties, the Shroud had got so famous that the the Vatican decided that it needed it could be very useful. And you may have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were papyrus that were found in the desert and they had been accurately dated using a new technique where you could you could measure the ratio of carbon fourteen in something like that and get an accurate age. And it turns out that Sea scrolls were actually two thousand years old, and that was a huge of an interest to Israel. And if you go to Jerusalem now you'll find their biggest exhibition is of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Well, I think the Vatican thought, well, if you can date the Dead Sea scrolls, if we could date the Turian shild and that turns out to be two thousand years old, what will that do for us? And so the process started and I was because of my interest in an association with it. I was there following the whole process, and quite rightly, the Turing authority says, well, we can't be seen to be presiding over this because we've obviously got a vested interest in it being authentic, and so they decided to give responsibility for organizing the test to the British Museum, probably one of the most august bodies then that they could think of. However, the British Museum is made of beautiful stone and solid but inside it our people and the people there have their own hopes and fear them ambitions. And it turns out that there were two individuals at the British Museum who had their own motivation for financing their own institution, the Oxford Radio Carbon Unit, and they were desperate to actually get the job of dating the Turin trail because they knew the publicity that would be given to them, and so they ended up presiding over the tests. Now it's a very human thing. The day came for the test to be carried out on this trail, which only used to come out every ten years or so for people to see, was taken into the room prepared for it, and the individual scientist in Turin when it came to it, and even though the protocols have said you've got to take you've got to take samples from least six or seven different parts of the shrowd, they didn't need much. Just a sort of square inch or so. You need to take it from different areas of the shroud and then average out to get an.

Accurate because some sections could have been tainted with earlier or later materials.

Right exactly, you had to average it out. But when it came to it, the the person presiding over it insurance said, look, you know this is this is the shround that wou cross. You don't need to take you only you only need to take one sample. But unfortunately, instead of the British Museum saying no, no, no, no no, we've agreed this protocol. We've got to take protocols from every part of the cloth, they abandoned that and agreed and agreed that they would just take one sample from a corner of the cloth to day, and that's where it always another expression. But that's what's went badly wrong. We now know that the corner that they dated because the shroud was such a well known object in the Middle Ages and in every religious festival it was held up in the hot Mediterranean heat by by those bishops selected to the honor, and they gripped it closely. You have to remember, back back in then, relics were so important. The closer you could get to a relic, the more religious value you got from it. And the same applied. The tighter this cloth could be gripped, the more value they get from it, and the corners from which it was held up got worn out. And because textiles were so valuable back in those days they could be repaired with beautiful skills, so that you could not see from the other side that something had been repaired. And what happened was the corner was repaired in the Middle Ages, and it came to it with all the all the attention on it and so on, and with with the decision to say, just take one sample from a corner that they took the example from there, and we now know that the sample that they cut and dated was a medieval repair.

It was, it was accurate, but it was medieval by.

Mistake, absolutely, and the British Museum couldn't bring themselves to to say, oh, no, well we made a mistake, and they stuck to there and they stuck to their death their finding that it was medieval. And unfortunately, from that moment on, the shrouds represent reputation dipped. And if anyone has seen Mark filming, the image itself is encoded with three dimensional information. So when you scan it are doing the climact of this film, the body of Jesus can put with CGI just from the data on that cloth can be completely realized. And the other thing, of course, is is that CRUCIFIXI, all the all the depictions of crucifixion down the ages were done in much later times, long after the Romans had stopped crucifying people, and the technique, for want of a better word, had become unknown. But when you were crucified, and please forgive me that this you know it's not the most persant thing to hear, but the actual way you finally died was a suffocation. They were once once you run the cross, you pushed down on your feet in order to be able to breathe, and you could see on the blood flows of the shell there's two body positions where were raised up the blood went one way and down in the other. So every forensic detail was accurate.

And David inteen In twenty twenty two, Italian researchers used a technique called wide angle X ray and that showed something dramatically different, didn't it.

That the various because of the shu represents such a significant thing. If it's authentic, which I believe it is, it's not only an image of Christ but itself. It's miraculous because the only thing that could explain them is because it's it's encoded with three dimension information, so that the tip of the nose for example, is more dense than the eye socket because there's a difference between them. The only thing that can explain the image is that at some point there was an incredible burst of energy, energy that could would, under normal circumstances have blown the cave that the tomb a part. But this energy was released for such a short milli second of time that what it actually did was just scorch the cloth, and it did so in such a way that whichever part of the cloth was closer got slightly more scorched, so that, as I said, the typical nose is darker than the eye socket. So as seen in the climax of this film, with modern technology, we scan the image and take that three dimensional information and you can actually recreate the body that's lying there using nothing more than the data that's on the cloth. And we're two thousand years on now from the actual moment of the crucifixion. I've come to believe, and a lot of people who've seen the film now share that belief, is that somehow, as we reached the two thousandth anniversary of the of the Crucifixion and the resurrection, this shroud and the modern technology now available has given us, gives us the opportunity to witness for ourselves exactly what happened in that tomb.

Do you believe that the burst of energy that left the shroud the way it is was done on purpose to leave it behind for us to see this as a witness, or do you think it just was something else?

No, No, this, this is such a phenomenon. And we know I mean the thing about the Gospel and Jesus, I mean he turns water into wine. He's capable of doing these things. But this ultimate miracle, we know, crucifixion, and it was a common thing that the Romans used, but we didn't really understand the technique of it. And please forgive me. Your readers might find listeners might find this, But I think what you actually died of was suffocation, because in order to breathe, you had to push down on your nailed feet and put yourself up with your hands just in order to be able to take the weight off your chest so that you could breathe. So the whole process was one ghastly sea sort of rising and falling. And you can see the way the blood angles go on the arms and legs. It depicts those two positions of the body on the cross, every possible detail you could think of on this image on the closs. No artist in the Middle Ages could have done it, because no one knew how to crucify anybody in the Middle Ages. Thank God they'd stopped doing it. But the images, the evidence on the cloth takes us right back to that moment, the pivotal moment really if you like, the Western civilization, because it was the belief, it was the belief that even the disciples themselves suddenly realized just how Jesus significance was. That they went then off around the world and spread Christianity. So that was the pivotal moment, and it's captured for us on this cloth. And so one of the most powerful sequences I think in the film is I found a forensic pathologist in Los Angeles who somebody who has examined more dead bodies, probably than anybody else, and he lays out the film, He lays out the full length image of the body and carries out an autopsy on it effectively, and we suddenly discover through the autopsy and the marks on the cloth, exactly what happened during the process of crucifixion.

David, do you follow this story of Veronica when Christ was carrying the crucifix the cross with Simon of decree and then she ran up to him and put a cloth on his face and he left an imprint on that.

Yes, and as famously it exists, it does not stand up to the same close close examination that the shild does. Now I wouldn't I wouldn't want to write it up altogether because I haven't really studied it that closely. But as far as I'm aware, the actual comparison, listen to the image on the show itself does not stand up. But please, I'm not an expert on the Veronica. I am on the Shroud of Turin. The first film I made about it was in nineteen seventy eight. That's the one I want a British Academy Award, and I've just made what as I've got to my retirement. Really, I wanted to do something to restore its its status after that rogue carbon fourteen test, and that's what the new film Who Can He Be? I think achieve?

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