Transcript: Jeremiah Johnston’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

And so they didn’t practice mummification. This is why when you read the gospels and women are coming to the tomb of Jesus on that, what became that first Easter morning, which we know is April 5th AD 30 or April 9th AD 33, depending on which year you go with women are coming to complete the spicing of the body.

Why? Because the body would stink. The body’s in Rigamortis. Jews would mourn the dead for seven days inside the family tomb. They would mourn, they would spice the body. And so the women are coming there on that first Easter morning, not realizing they’re going to be the first evangelists of the Christian faith because the tomb is empty and they see Jesus alive again.

Jewish Burial Traditions

TUCKER CARLSON: What does it mean to spice a body?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: They would perfume it with myrrh, with olives, because of Jewish burial traditions. Remember when, when Lazarus dies, he’s been dead for four days and Mary and Martha are like, “Jesus, don’t open the tomb. The body stinketh.” According to the King James version. Well, that’s why they would spice the body, because for seven days you mourn the dead at the family tomb.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you have to spice sit next.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: To the corpse and the corpse is rotting. Yeah, I’ve been in hundreds of Jewish burial tombs. They’re all like the shape of our hand. And so you would walk in the tomb, it’s always cut out of limestone and the tomb has different niches. So my, the fingers represent the niches.

But you would pray, you would worship, you would mourn the dead inside, essentially a gathering point within the tomb of Jewish burial traditions. And there’ll be slots cut into these niches. Right. And in those niches are these bone boxes called ossuaries.

Because one year after your family member, your loved one died, you would collect the bones and those bones would then be placed in a bone box. This is a thing called oscillagium. And that’s why when you go to the land of Israel today and you see 150,000 bone boxes on the Mount of Olives, that’s all Jewish burial traditions. And so this is very insightful because we see a correspondence with everything we learn about the shroud, and it bears correspondence with the first century world of Jesus.

Evidence of Crucifixion

TUCKER CARLSON: So, okay, but of the thousand hundreds of thousands of shrouds like this that exist, why do we think this one can has an image of Jesus on it?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Because all of it matches the way in which Jesus was crucified and that’s what’s powerful about the Shroud. Okay, for example, for example, on the Shroud, we have blood all over it. And 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.

And so 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 pre mortem and postmortem blood all over the Shroud. So that’s interesting. So 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 im, what we have is the front on the left lined up perfectly.

Here in the middle of the camera, we see the face of the crucified man. And what sticks out, you can actually see between rib 5 and 6, a gash in the side. Well, Jesus, we know from John’s gospel, he is penetrated through rib 5 and 6 by a spear. And that spear John says blood and water comes out. Well, that’s postmortem blood. We know that that blood differs from the other pre mortem blood on the Shroud.

So, so many of these factoids are indicative 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: How do we know that the man pictured on the Shroud was crucified?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s a great question. Because there are crucifixion nail wounds. You can actually see in the forearms of the crucified man. We see, by the way, wrist, hands, the entire hand, it’s all the same Greek word. And so Jesus, he, we know that the nail penetrates through the wrist and the palm, and that’s how the Romans would crucify their victims.

In fact, we have 21 different evidences of crucifixion with nail penetrations just in the land of Israel in the first century. So this was a common way that the Romans had perfected in killing people.

Historical Evidence for Crucifixion

TUCKER CARLSON: So we know that crucifixion was a historical practice.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely. And it’s the best established fact of the ancient world. Jesus, death by Roman crucifixion.

TUCKER CARLSON: What does that mean?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Meaning that if we can’t know that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion, based on the historical record, we shouldn’t believe anything from history at all. We have as much evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus that we have from Roman empires of the same or the Roman emperors of the same period, which is remarkable.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where does that. It is remarkable. Where does that evidence come from?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It comes out of all of the sources. Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian. We have 11 different sources within. And I always use what the most critical scholars use. Within 100 years of the time of Jesus, which his ministry begins in 26 to 27 A.D. he’s crucified, as we said, on that First Easter weekend, April 5, he’s resurrected, he’s crucified. April 3, AD 30. We know the exact date, which is fascinating to know that.

And then we have 11 sources. AD 30. Right. And so we have 11 sources that talk about this Jesus, this Chrestus. He’s spelled in variant ways, but they’re all talking about the same person, this Jesus Christ, who’s crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate at the hands of the Jews. And that’s written in Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus.

There’s some remarkable work coming out with Josephus recently. That Josephus, who we’ve already mentioned, the first century Roman historian, he would have had a firsthand knowledge. He would have had friends who were at the trial of Jesus. And he writes about that.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was not a Christian.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No.

The Historical Evidence for Jesus

TUCKER CARLSON: So of those 11, obviously you got the authors of the four Gospels who testified to this all Paul.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah, Paul. Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: Those are all followers of Jesus. But you have non Christians, you have.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Hostile witnesses who give voice to the historicity of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting, interesting. So what does the face tell us?

The First Photograph of the Shroud

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The face is remarkable. When you look at this, this is truly remarkable. So let me back up for a minute. In 1898, the first photograph is taken of the Shroud. Okay. Remember, photography has only been invented in the 1840s.

And so in 1898 when the shroud has been on display. The Shroud has only been on public display a few times in its entire history. And right now you have to see it through a private viewing. Very few people. This is the closest. This is what’s so cool about our broadcast today. I mean, this is the closest the audience will ever get to the Shroud of Turin. What we’re bringing today on your network.

What’s amazing when you look at the face is we see an actual image in Secondo Pia when he takes the photograph in 1898 of the Shroud. There was no electricity in the church, Tucker, so he had to bring in generators. He had to take flash photography. The exposures took 14 minutes and 20 minutes.

When I was in Turin, Italy recently, I saw the actual camera he used. It looks like a dormitory refrigerator. He used glass plates to take the picture. And in the dark room. Now, Secondo Pia is a lawyer and he’s just a hobbyist photographer because who was a professional photographer? No one in the 19th century.

And he’s in the dark room and I want to show you what he sees using my cell phone. And when I speak on our tour events, I have our entire audiences do this. If you take your phone and if you put it in classic invert and you just bring up the camera and if you focus in, I want you to do something. I’m going to hand you my phone. I want you to focus in on the image and you’re going to see exactly what Pia saw this image and he’s a follower of Jesus and he believes he’s looking at the face of Jesus Christ.

Keep in mind, he would be the first one to see the face of Jesus since the apostles. And what does he say in the dark room in 1898? Never more appropriately, “Oh, my God.” And so in 1898, he sees this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really, it’s so much clearer.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is photographic negative, right?

The Mystery of the Negative Image

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The negative is actually the positive. And so if you trace and go to the back, I want you to look at the back of the image. The head, the blood, the back, all of those hash marks, the abrasions. I estimate there are 700 wounds on the crucified man of the Shroud.

No one was crucified the way Jesus was crucified in antiquity. The crown of thorns. You asked, so you ask about the face. Secondo Pia believes that he’s looking at the face of God in that image. Of course, he was immediately accused of being a fraudster, a hoaxer, because photography is so new. The dark room. This can’t be an image, right? He had to have faked this.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t understand. Just as a kind of physics question, how would a photographic negative be clearer?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right? Isn’t that fascinating? I mean, that’s the thing about the Shroud. The physics contradict the chemistry, the chemistry contradicts the physics. Welcome to Shroud of Turin. You’re being red pilled on the Shroud right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m being baffled right now.

The Scientific Impossibility of the Image

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So the image, what’s remarkable about this image is that you have to stand at least 8 feet away to see it with the naked eye. As we are right now. The image vanishes if you get closer. It’s hard to trace because the image is superficial.

Tucker, I mentioned the blood earlier, and there are pints of type AB blood, pre mortem, postmortem pints, pints of blood all over it. I mean, this was a very, very badly wounded man. So again, indicative, what we know of crucifixion, pints of blood type AB blood.

And then in addition to that, when you look at the Shroud and you see this, and you see all of the image itself that’s left. The blood absorbs all the way through the linen, but the image is superficial. Now, this is where you have to stay with me. The image is only two microns thick. It does not absorb all the way through.

So if this was a hoax, if this was a work of art, if there was pigment, if there was dye, if there was paint, it would absorb fully. But 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. That’s what’s fascinating about the shroud. The image. There’s no paint, there’s no dye, there’s no ink. The image is actually something chemically has happened.

And we believe it happened at the moment of resurrection. 34 billion watts of energy in one fortieth of a billionth of a second. A physicist, my friend Paolo Delazo at ENEA Laboratories right outside of Rome spent five years. He’s a laser expert. He’s a physicist who works with lasers.

And they were able to duplicate the chemical change of what happens with the linen fibers. 34 billion watts of energy at peak power. But the thing is, it was a cold energy. It happened in 1/40 of a billionth of a second. And that is what changed the chemical structure to leave this image on the shroud.

So that answers your question. How is there a photograph? Well, scientists don’t know the mechanism. We have no way to quantify how this happens. The best scientific laboratories, when you look at it, SANDIA Labs, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Lab, ENEA Laboratories in Rome. The world’s best scientists cannot reproduce this image that’s in the shroud.

Unique Among Ancient Burial Shrouds

TUCKER CARLSON: Does any other of the many burial shrouds from the region and the period, any of them contain images?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: None. We have blood on them. We have Hansen’s disease. The tomb of the Shroud. We actually had leprosy. Yeah, exactly. That was discovered. The Bible denier said there was no such thing as leprosy, so Jesus couldn’t have healed lepers. Well, we have a shroud that actually has leprosy on it.

None of the shrouds that we have have this image which you’ve just seen, which is, it’s mysterious because the shroud is the most lied about artifact in the world, Tucker. And that’s why I so appreciate you having me on your program today. It is the most hated artifact in the world. It’s the most lied about artifact. It’s the most misunderstood artifact in the world.

I have an allergic reaction to Catholic relics. There are over 20,000 relics in the Catholic Church. And a relic is interesting because it has this apocryphal history to it and yet it can’t be studied by the physical sciences.

The Catholic Church has only two artifacts now that we can call both an artifact and a relic. We have the Shroud of Turin because it can be tested through history, through sciences we’re going to get to the pollen spores. I mean, this is like a CIA CSI experiment. When you look at the shroud, it’s amazing.

And then we have the Sudarium of Oviedo in Spain, which is the face cloth that John’s Gospel talks about that covered his face. That was in the corner of the tomb when the disciples came to see that the tomb was empty that first Easter morning in John chapter 20. So in that cloth also has human blood. Guess what the blood type is? Type AB. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s mind boggling.

The Image Becomes Clear Through Photography

TUCKER CARLSON: So that image was not really clear to people until 1898.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: 1898, the first photograph. And then in 1931, Giuseppe Enrie, the first professional photographer, takes these high resolution images for his day. And that sent shock waves throughout the scientific community.

So much so you have thinkers like C.S. Lewis. I used to live in Oxford when I did my residency and I would often go to the kilns, to Lewis’s home. And you can go in the bedroom of Lewis’s home where the man lived, the great thinker of the 20th century, who was an atheist, who became a Christian.

And I look up and above the mantle in his bedroom, I can see it right now in my mind’s eye. He has Enrie’s image of the face of the crucified man. Because every morning that C.S. Lewis woke up, he wanted to be reminded. Our God has a face. Jesus narrates God to us. If you want to know what God’s like, look at the face of Jesus. And Lewis needed that reminder.

And so if CS Lewis takes the Shroud of Turin seriously enough to have a picture of it above his mantle in his bedroom, where he’s the first thing he saw every morning when he put his feet on the ground, I wanted to take it more seriously.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. And he was of course Anglican, you know, right? Not Catholic.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

Extensive Scientific Testing

TUCKER CARLSON: What kind of testing has been done? Scientific testing.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That is such a great question. This is where I went from being a Shroud skeptic, because I was conditioned in Oxford in my residency, that we deny miracles, we deny anything supernatural. Oxford is really a factory for creating apostate Bible scholars, by and large. I can say that having been there and been in Faculty of Theology and Keble College, I know that’s not popular, but it’s true.

I would often go home to my flat in Summertown after reading the Greek New Testament with my cohort. And I would ask my wife, Audrey, “Am I the only one who actually believes in Jesus in this group?” And that’s okay. And I was conditioned that this is a Catholic relic. There’s no historicity behind this. It’s a joke. And I was conditioned by that.

And then I was scared. And this is why your voice is so important, Tucker. So many people, they know enough to be dangerous. They’re TikTok smart, they’re YouTube smart, they have a sound bite, but they have no substance to their faith. And I want to have a substance to my faith. I’m a truth addict. I follow truth wherever it leads.

And my pastor, Jack Graham, began encouraging me to just look into the primary sources for the Shroud. Not to pay attention to the blogosphere, but to pay attention to what do the scientists actually tell us? And once I began to look at the scientific studies that undergird all of the facts I’m sharing with you, I remember being. It took my breath away, the evidence was so compelling.

So to answer your excellent question, given that framework, 102 scientific disciplines have studied the Shroud and produce peer reviewed journals, studies and cases for all the different aspects. And when I so when I tell you it’s the most studied artifact in the world, I mean it. 102 academic disciplines have spent 600,000 scientific hours, like my friend Paolo Delazo, studying the lasers, like my friend Bruno Barberis, the mathematician from University of Turin.

Not a theologian, not a preacher, great guy, good friend of mine, Bruno is a mathematician and he took all of the excellent questions you’re asking me. The correspondence of how do we know he was crucified? How was he crucified? What blood type, crown of thorns, nail print, hands, nail scarred side, nail prints in the calcaneus, the heel, which is interesting. We’ll talk about that. The scourge marks and then the patibulum abrasions, the cross beam.

When he factored all of those probabilities together, Bruno Barberis, the mathematician, said there is a 1 in 200 billion chance it’s anyone else other than Jesus of Nazareth. 1 in 200 billion.

TUCKER CARLSON: I like my odds because the physical, the representations in this image track so precisely to these scriptures.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. Not only with scripture, but with what we know of crucifixion. From Josephus, from Philo, from all of the other first century historians as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you mean there are holes in his heels?

The Brutality of Crucifixion

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah. This is amazing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you describe crucifixion? What was it? What was the purpose? How did they die?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Crucifixion was the most heinous way to die. It turns out humans are really good at figuring out terrible, tragic ways how to destroy ourselves. And crucifixion brings that to a fever pitch.

The Persians likely invented it. Alexander the Great, who gives us the language of the Bible, Koine Greek, he also made crucifixion fashionable throughout his Hellenization of the world. The Romans come along and they take crucifixion that they learn from Greek Hellenization and they perfect it for 700 years.

Remember, Josephus tells us that during the Jewish revolt AD 66 to 70, Titus and Vespasian are crucifying 500 Jews a day. And so they were experts. Now it wasn’t like they had a crucifixion manual. There were 30 provinces in the empire during the time of Jesus. Remember we have Pontius Pilate who’s governor, we have first Augustus who’s emperor, and then we have the other emperors who followed.

During the time of Jesus, there’s 30 provinces. And the provinces would practice crucifixion in different ways. But it was in the Syrian province where Judea was, where it was particularly heinous. I already mentioned we have 21 different records of crucifixion with nail piercing.

Nails were iron. I actually have a nail artifact that I’m going to show you. In fact, this is a great time to do that. I want you to hold the replica of the crucifixion nail. This is a crucifixion nail. It was circular on top, and then it was actually a spike. It was an iron spike.

And the Romans would drive this crucifixion nail through the wrists, through the palm area, and then through the heel, the calcaneus. Our heels are very brittle. And so they had to be very accurate when they would pin someone to the cross. And they would likely straddle the heels on either side of what was called. There you have the patibulum, and then you have the cross beam. Then you have the center vertical beam. And the heels would be fastened straddling the beam.

And the victim would be crucified completely naked. There was no loincloth. I know we see that represented in traditional Christian art. But Jesus would have been crucified naked because the Romans were saying something with this. The Romans were saying, “Don’t ever defy us. We are the truth.”

Remember, Augustus was called the Son of God. And so when Mark comes along and says, “No, Jesus is the Son of God,” I mean, those were seditious words for the time because Augustus was called the Son of God. When Augustus gave good news, it was called the Gospel. Christianity takes that term. No, it’s not the gospel of Augustus. It’s not the gospel of the Roman Empire. It’s not Pax Romana. No, this is the gospel of the true Son of God, Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead, and so he’s crucified.

Crucifixion as Roman Punishment

TUCKER CARLSON: And so crucifixion was – I mean, at least one gospel account describes the other men on either side as criminals or rebels, but malefactors who got crucified.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, this is interesting. It turns out we really hate to crucify slaves and we want to do it in the worst way possible. That was the Roman view. And so non-Roman citizens, however, we do have citizens like Antigonus, the last of the Hasmonean rulers, who’s a Roman citizen, but he defies Rome. This guy named Mark Anthony, who becomes Augustus, crucifies Antigonus in a really despicable way. He actually beheads him first and then crucifies him. We have all of his remains.

It’s interesting because these crucifixion nails were thought to be something like amulets, phylacteries. They were thought to bring you good luck. And what’s interesting is crucifixion nails were reused again and again. So the very nails that pinned Jesus to the cross had probably been used many times before that to kill.

TUCKER CARLSON: Other Roman victims because iron work is expensive.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right. And again, the Romans, they were a slave machine. They knew how to kill people. They knew how to enslave. Forty percent of the empire were slaves. And so they had to know how to crucify them. And so you have this slave crucifying machine that is the Roman Empire. And then if you were a citizen, but you defied the empire, you would be crucified too.

The Mechanics of Death by Crucifixion

TUCKER CARLSON: How does crucifixion kill a man?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It’s really interesting.

TUCKER CARLSON: Were women crucified, by the way?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes, in fact, they were crucified naked, often facing towards the cross, just for pornographic reasons.

TUCKER CARLSON: How does it kill you?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It kills you in a variety of ways. It doesn’t kill you quickly. It maximizes torment while minimizing the – actually maximizes the length of death and it prolongs death.

And so when we study the blood work, so there are some amazing hematological reports that I’ve enjoyed reading thoroughly. When we study the blood that’s on the crucified man, it bears correspondence with that Jesus. There’s high levels of creatinine, which means he was suffering from kidney failure, high levels of ferritin. His body had inflammation all over it. He was dehydrated.

You read John’s Gospel. Remember in John’s Gospel, Jesus one of the certain sayings, “I thirst.” He’s dehydrated. We know that Jesus likely lost one third of his blood volume during flagellation. So he was dying of a variety of things.

Many thinkers believe that he died of suffocation, asphyxiation because of pulmonary edema. And we see that pulmonary edema reflected both on the shroud cloth and on the Sudarion of Oviedo, the face cloth. It’s six parts pulmonary edema, one part blood. Again, a hoaxer is not going to make this stuff up. I mean, it becomes so crazy pulmonary.

So your lungs fill with fluid, fluid mixture. In fact, there is a translucent mixture of fluid around the side wound. We looked at the side wound there between rib 5 and 6, just above that triangle, which is really a patch from a burn hole. There’s actually a translucent serum around that. That again is consistent with what John’s gospel said. Blood and water flowed out of Jesus because he was already dead.

And so the crucifixion would prolong that. High levels of ferritin, high levels of creatinine. Jesus is suffering liver failure, kidney failure. His body has inflammation all over it. I believe, though, that Jesus died of cardiac arrest, massive heart failure, congenital heart failure because he has labored breathing. We know all of this from the blood samples.

The Urgency of Removal

TUCKER CARLSON: The New Testament, one account says that his tormentors wanted him off the cross by the Sabbath.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s Deuteronomy 21, actually. Before nightfall.

TUCKER CARLSON: Before nightfall, right. So they broke his legs or they were planning on breaking his legs. They didn’t because he died.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And that’s consistent with Messianic prophecy in David’s Psalm 22.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, but why would breaking the legs of a crucified man hasten his death?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: A wonderful question. Thank you for asking it. So the one way you could prolong your life is you would kind of have essentially tried to stand up while you were being crucified, even though your feet were nailed straddling the cross. And you would just edge up ever so often while you’re trying to breathe. And that would prolong your life. So if you broke your legs, obviously you can’t stand up.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the point is, when you’re hanging by your wrist, you can’t breathe.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. And you suffocate. You die in your own blood, essentially. And so you can’t do that. And so that’s why. But they come to Jesus even though they break the legs of the criminals on the right or left, indicating that Jesus suffered a different kind of torment than they suffered in his flagellation. We’ll get to that here in a moment.

But they didn’t need to break his legs because he was already dead. In fact, they’re surprised. Remember, Pilate is shocked that he was so soon dead. Jesus begins the crucifixion around noon. He’s dead by 3pm. The Jewish day would begin at 6pm and so they only have about three hours to get Jesus off the cross. Ask for the body of Jesus from Pontius Pilate and then lay him in a tomb that was not far, probably 150 feet away from where Jesus was crucified.

Carrying the Crossbar

TUCKER CARLSON: What does it mean that they carried the crossbar? What’s the crossbar?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That is such a great question. So, and this is what’s so amazing when again, I don’t privilege this. I just look at this through historical eyes. When you look at the back, the dorsal image on the shroud, you can see that there are scourge marks all over it. But in the right shoulder coming down, at a diagonal, there are abrasions all over the back.

We mentioned that Jesus, the man of the crucified man of the shroud, weighed around 100 to 180 pounds. The patibulum, which is just the cross beam. So they didn’t carry the whole cross. They would only carry the cross beam. And again, that wood was scarce as well, by the way, in the Roman Empire. So that cross beam would have been used again and again for other crucifixion victims.

And so Jesus experiences the scourging, and then he’s asked to carry the cross and that cross, the cross beam, the patibulum weighs around 125 pounds, and he can’t carry it. He falls. And this is one of the most moving experiences for me when I was studying the signatures of the pollen.

We actually have not just pollen, but we have limestone and clay soil that is native only to Jerusalem. And it’s on three parts of the crucified man in the shroud. Are you ready for this? It’s on the feet, obviously, because he walked barefoot. It’s on the knees and then the tip of the nose.

So when Jesus is carrying the patibulum, he falls. And he not only falls, he falls hard. He collapses. And his face gashes the ground because we have in the tip of his nose actual soil from the land of Israel, from Jerusalem.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the crossbeam is the piece of wood to which his wrists are nailed, and that’s tied to a vertical post?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: To match the Greek letter tau, so it would look like a capital T. We see that. And he’s tied to that post, but he’s nailed to it. Make no mistake. He was nailed to it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, but the cross is tied.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why the letter Tau? Was there a significance?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: There wasn’t. The Christian movement makes it significant. We call the staurogram, where you write the letter tau and then the letter rho. So the two letters. And we actually see that used in early Christian scripture. It’s like an A. It’s essentially just a quick way of saying Jesus was crucified. It becomes an early Christian icon.

A Torture Device as Symbol

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just – so this is not really an execution method per se, as much as it’s like a way of torturing someone to death. It’s like the rack or the spiked coffin.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. But much worse, because it prolonged the agony. Some would be crucified outside of Jerusalem, they’d be on the cross three, four, or five days.

TUCKER CARLSON: So this was for the most reviled enemies of the state. Like, there’s no respect at all. Not like executing a man by beheading or firing squad in later periods. This is like for slaves, right? Insurrectionists. Like the worst of the worst.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And thinking about the heel, you think about the first gospel message. It’s actually called the protevangelium. In Genesis 3:15, remember that first prophecy that his heel, he would crush his head, but the enemy would strike his heel. And we know that the enemy did his best to crucify Jesus and did strike his heel.

And then you look at that blood that was prophesied even as far back as Genesis 3:15, that Jesus would smash the enemy’s head with his feet, even though his foot was crucified and pierced. And we see that it did take blood and a lot of blood. And I think sometimes we can look at this so academically, we forget. No, this was a real historical person who suffered this torment.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just kind of wild, if you think about it, that the early church took a torture device, like the scariest and most humiliating of all torture devices and made it the symbol of their religion.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Totally. And I mean, again, what is that? Well, if we were making up a religious movement, we would never start there.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think so.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Make no mistake. I mean, if you and I…

TUCKER CARLSON: No, because you’d want your God to be triumphant, you wouldn’t want your God to be humiliated.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Certainly not crucified.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not by some colonial governor and a bunch of local dumb religious leaders.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And I think the message in this. And there’s so many points of application, many people wonder if God really loves them. And they say, well, how do I know God loves me? Or if I send away God’s love for me?

Paul wrote in Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrated His love for us, and that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” And the shroud is a beautiful demonstration. It’s a great reminder that God gave his best for us, Tucker. When he sent his son, he didn’t give us second best. He gave us his very best.

TUCKER CARLSON: But wait, I mean, if God’s going to come to Earth and redeem humanity, why would he allow himself to be ritually humiliated and tortured in the most embarrassing possible way? Wouldn’t he show up and be like, “I’m God, you’re all wrong. I’m here now. Daddy’s home. Knock it off. I have all power.”

He wouldn’t like, why would he submit to some ludicrous local authority and die with criminals on either side? It’s like the opposite of what you would imagine.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It smacks of authenticity to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I agree with that, because it’s so not what you would expect.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No, you wouldn’t. And 2nd Corinthians 5:21 says, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might be the righteousness of God.” And so that means that God treated Jesus, and we see that very clearly and depicted in the shroud as if he lived your life and mine, so in Christ, and this is the beautiful message of grace.

He could treat us as if we live the life of Jesus, and that’s the message of grace. It doesn’t make sense. There’s not an equation that’s going to help us make sense of grace.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s like the early church decided to brag about its weaknesses, right?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And that’s the foolishness of preaching that Paul talks about. It’s the foolishness of preaching. It’s the wisdom of God to those who believe in foolishness, to those who deny it.

The Physical Torture Before Crucifixion

TUCKER CARLSON: Walk through in clinical detail the torture that this man endured before the cross.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Tucker. It’s something I’m still learning about because it takes my breath away, even though I’ve published 250,000 words and academic works on the resurrection and on the physical torment of Jesus. I’ve published several popular books on it. I’ve talked about it. And I can’t get over it because there’s a realism to it that reminds me of how shameful my own sin is.

TUCKER CARLSON: But pretend you’re a police reporter here, right? So Jesus is with his disciples at night. Judas shows up in the bunch of olive trees, are kind of standing around. Romans show up. Local religious authorities show up, grab Jesus. He goes on trial. Walk us through what happens.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, it started before that. It would have started before that night. Because Jesus cleanses the temple and he literally reserves his fiercest words for the corrupt religious establishment. Jesus hates hypocrites. He hates corrupt religion. In this case, it was the corrupt Jewish priesthood. It was the corruption of what was happening and taking place at the temple.

The money changers. You had to put all of your currency in the Tyrian Temple tax. And they were ripping everyone off and they made God’s house a den of thieves. Jesus clears the tables. That’s a messianic sign. Who can do that? Only God himself can cleanse his house. “My house shall be called a house of prayer.” And so that’s when they begin to decide to kill him.

Who’s they? The Sanhedrin. The 70 members of the Jewish ruling council ask Pilate to crucify Jesus under the reign of Caiaphas.

TUCKER CARLSON: So after Jesus rolls into the temple and overturns the tables of the money changers and says get out.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: They’re like, we’re going to crucify him. We’re going to kill him. We want him dead. And again they, Pilate had to sanction that. And so Pilate being the politician he was, he says, okay, we’ll do it.

And so Jesus is arrested. He’s taken to the home of Caiaphas. You can go to this home today. It’s the first century steps that Jesus would have been led to Caiaphas’s home. He spends his final night there, which would have been Thursday night.

He is beaten, he’s tortured. They put a blindfold on him. They began to hit him. They club him. There are marks on the crucified man that are different from the scourging. He’s clubbed. Someone took something that’s the equivalent of a bat and struck him with like a rod. And that’s when they’re saying “Prophesy to us. Preacher. Who struck you?” because they blindfolded him.

And then he is led from there to Herod Antipas. Who says, “I find no fault in them. Send them back to Pilate,” everyone trying. Herod Antipas was the tetrarch of Galilee. He was one of the Jewish leaders who was put in place by the Roman who beheaded John the Baptist. He was the one who killed Jesus’s friend.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was like a local guy who was a stooge of the Roman government.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Totally, but from Galilee. But they all came to Jerusalem for Passover. So this is not unusual. And then ultimately Jesus ends up in praetorium at the hands of Pilate.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s praetorium?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It would have been right off the Temple Mount. This structure where the Romans were headquartered to keep peace in the city. So you have the Jewish priests and they have their armed forces that arrest Jesus like they’re Jewish police. And then Jesus is handed over to the Roman authorities to be crucified.

And in John 19:1, I think it’s one of the most overlooked, understated passages in all the Bible. “And Pilate had Jesus flogged.” And if we read that too quickly, we just don’t understand the impact of it. And that’s why I’ve brought these artifacts for you. I want you to, this is a flagrum that we had commissioned. I want you to hold this Tucker, and I want you to get it in your hand.

The Flagrum: Instrument of Torture

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a flagrum.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: This is a flagrum.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so this is a wooden dowel with three rawhide lines coming off it and lead balls on the end, right?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And I have two of them because we know from the crucified man that there were two torturers. So Jesus is being whipped simultaneously by two different executioners.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the purpose of the lead balls on the end of the rawhide is.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Is to inflict as much torment as possible. And so sometimes you would have flagrums with bone ends, but there are all these barbell shapes on the hash marks of the crucified man, which leads me to believe that it was used in something just like this. So this is again a one to one flagrum that the Romans would use.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you hit someone with a length of rawhide and a piece of lead balls at the end, I mean, you kill someone with that.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And this is where Jesus loses one third of his blood volume. And I want you to understand something for the benefit of our audience. Notice how short this is. I mean, this is not like an Indiana Jones whip, right? I mean, there was a demonic intimacy to this torment. And the blood of Jesus would have been splattered all over the executioners.

And so they flogged Jesus. There are 200 wounds on the dorsal on the back image. So if we took time right now to count them up, there’s over 200 on the back. There’s 172 on the front. There is not an area of Jesus’s body that has not been tortured, including the pelvic region.

TUCKER CARLSON: They hit him in the crotch with this again.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And again with lead tips. And not only that, take the skin.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right off a man’s body with that.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And actually, according to the hematological reports, Jesus is, we think his right eye was blinded. So there’s not only, we’ll get to the crown of thorns here shortly, so hold your breath for that one. But his right eye, there are wounds consistent with flagellation.

So we don’t know if the guys were drunk or if they were just going to town on him. But they whip him, and at some point, the scourge hits him probably from the back of the head, in the eye right here, and likely blinds him in the right eye because his right eye is severely punctured in the image of the crucified man.

And also his left cheek, probably from the rod beating at Caiaphas’s home, is also hugely, I mean, it’s like he’s been in a heavyweight boxing match. I mean, he can’t see out of his right eye. His left cheek is raised. And so this is the flagrum.

TUCKER CARLSON: So this was before he was sentenced to crucifixion. Before he was sentenced to death.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Pilate, again, he brings Jesus after. And again. So 372 wounds that we count. But again, we don’t have the lateral side. So again, I want to reiterate. He’s probably, there’s probably 700 wounds on his body, if you count them up.

TUCKER CARLSON: You couldn’t survive that long term. Right?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And this is where Pilate then fashions a crown of thorns.

The Crown of Thorns

TUCKER CARLSON: Thorns.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And he places it on Jesus’s head. And let me set these so we can make some.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s the halo of thorns?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No, actually not. Let me show you. I thought it was a halo because you and I, we’ve both been so influenced by early Christian art and specifically medieval art, but this is what took my breath away. And I want you to be careful with this, because these are Bethlehem thorns.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thorns.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: This is the crown of thorns. This is the helmet of thorns. This was not a wreath, Tucker. This was not like a sweatband you wore around your forehead. They fashioned this diabolical crown of thorns, these Bethlehem thorns, that when they dry, they’re as sharp as nails. You can feel that. I mean, it pricks your finger right to the touch.

And they ram this on Jesus’s head. And I want you to let this set in, because there’s 50 puncture wounds on the head, both the forehead, the top and the back of the head of the crucified man of the shroud. 50 puncture marks. And so you can imagine.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s all detectable on the shroud, right?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: On the shroud you can see the back of the head, all of the blood pooling in the back of the head from this crown of thorns being rammed on his head. So Jesus has 700 scourge marks and then they slam this on his head.

And this is where Pilate brings Jesus before the Jewish mob. And this is where we hear in the Latin “Ecce homo, behold the man.” Pilate says, and he’s bloodied. How does he even stand? We don’t know. His love compelled him to stay standing on our behalf.

And this is the point. Imagine seeing a man in this state. He will very quickly be dead. And it’s not enough for the crowd. They begin to yell, “Crucify him. Crucify him. Crucify him.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Demons.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And this is where Pilate says, I.

The Innocent Victim

TUCKER CARLSON: I should also note as a historical fact, he never did anything wrong. Like he was never even accused. He was never accused of hurting anybody.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Remember, all of the false witnesses came forward when Jesus is in this dummy trial at Caiaphas home, and they say, well, he’s a bastard. Remember, Jesus is accused of being an illegitimate child. He’s accused of blaspheming, of casting out demons by Beelzebub, by the prince of demons, of these false accusations are brought against him, and Jesus doesn’t open his mouth.

TUCKER CARLSON: But just to be clear, even if the false accusations were real accusations, if they were true, he’s still never accused of hurting anyone.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right? No sin was.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s not even accused.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right, Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So just to put it in context, so it’s like they didn’t even claim, like he killed a man in Reno, you know, shot a man, just watch him die, you know, there’s nothing like that at all. He cheated people out of money or where he, you know, kicked out the money changers and stole the money.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nothing like that.

The Crown of Thorns Evidence

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right? This was diabolical in every sense of the word, as you rightly point out. And this crown of thorns, the first time I saw it was in Jerusalem and Tucker. It took my breath away. It still takes my breath away.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the reason that you’ve revised, or you’re going with the modern revision to the common halo of thorns is based on the shroud, the blood record right there.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely. The punctures, the wounds, the basically the pathology of his head and his face and the back of his head. And this is what, you asked, how do we know this is Jesus? Well, the helmet of thorns leaves it beyond all doubt. In my mind. I believe this is a slam dunk case, that the crucified man is the historical Jesus. Without a doubt.

TUCKER CARLSON: Based on the evidence, if you were to recreate. If you were to take the Gospel accounts and Josephus and the 211 total accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion, which I think is accepted by everyone, atheist and Christian alike, as a historical fact.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you were to take all those facts from the record and try and create an image of them, could you create this?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No. No. That’s the fascinating thing. The best scientists in the world cannot explain how there’s an image there and they cannot replicate it.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it couldn’t be replicated now.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No. Even with our best technologies today, it can’t be replicated in any way.

The Provenance Question

TUCKER CARLSON: So this brings us to, I think, one of the central questions, which is the provenance of this. Where did it come from? What do we know?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s the fascinating thing about where this has been for the last 2,000 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Has been for the last 2,000 years.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, it turns out there’s a scientist, a criminologist by the name of Max Frei, who was involved in the Nuremberg trials, a very respected criminologist. He spent five years of his life. Again, this is where I say 102 academic disciplines are men and women who risk their academic reputation. And again, why I’m so grateful you’re bringing this to light today on your program. Max Frei, who’s now dead, spends five years of his life studying the pollen spores on the shroud.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s a pollen spore?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, I have it on me. From this beautiful state we’re in right now. From traveling here and all of the allergies here right now. But there are 56 different specimens of pollen that Max Frei detects from plants. From plants, plants. From plant life, botany.

And what’s amazing about it, again, if we’re making this up or trying to hoax this, we would not have known this 700 years ago in medieval Europe.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: There are certain pollen flower plants that bloom only in springtime. Where? In the land of Israel. Where? More specifically, in Jerusalem. And that pollen is on the shroud. So you have pollen flowers that only bloom in April in the land of Israel. And that pollen signature, according to Max Frei, that pollen species we have 56 of them is embedded in the Shroud chemically.

What’s fascinating is we don’t just have pollen from the land of Israel, we have pollen that traces the provenance of the shroud from Jerusalem AD 30 to Edessa, which is far eastern Turkey, where it’s there for 900 years. And then we have pollen from Constantinople.

TUCKER CARLSON: The Eastern Roman Empire.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right, Constantinople. And again, the Shroud is constantly escaping the caliphates of the time. So it goes from Constantinople around 1200 through Athens, finally up to Lirey France, with a knight, Geoffrey de Charnay, who we don’t. He never says how he got it, but he has it.

And then ultimately he sells it for two castles to the Savoy family of France, and then it’s moved to Chambery, France and it’s under the House of Savoy. And then it becomes very political because the Savoys then relocate their kingdom to Turin Italy. And to solidify their political rule, they make sure they bring the Shroud with them in the 16th century to Turin Italy, where it’s.

The Written Historical Record

TUCKER CARLSON: So where, as a matter of written record.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah, great question.

TUCKER CARLSON: Leaving aside the modern chemical analysis of the Shroud, how far can we trace it back so we know it was where.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: We trace it first? Of course, as I already mentioned, the Shroud is mentioned in all four gospels. And then we have Eusebius, who’s the most respected church historian. He’s at the Council of Nicaea in 325 talking about the face cloth, the image cloth of Jesus. He’s the one who gives us the story of the Shroud going from the land of Israel to King Abgar, who’s the king of Edessa, where it stays for 900 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: And we know it was there. Right, okay. So.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And it’s known by different names, though. This is the thing that I want to say. I’m a huge Kansas City Chiefs fan. Kansas City Chiefs were not always the chiefs. They were the Dallas Texans before they moved to Kansas City. It’s very similar with the Shroud. It’s known by different names, but it’s the same object. The Mandylion, the image of Edessa, the face cloth.

And as we continue to red pill ourselves with this Tucker, you have the pollen that matches it, you have the textual records that match it. Eusebius, we have these other wonderful early Christian historians who are talking about this face cloth.

TUCKER CARLSON: When’s the first written reference to it?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Eusebius, the great church historian. Early fourth century, early three hundreds. Right. 325 AD is Council of Nicaea. So it antedates that. So early hundreds.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And he’s bishop of Eusebius. And keep in mind, what is Eusebius?

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, but hold on, but just so as a. Okay, so we know this has existed for at least 1800 years.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the written record shows it. So that’s kind of not in dispute.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if this were a forgery, it would have to have been a forgery at least as early as the fourth century.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so that right there kind of tells you, like, if modern science can’t replicate this.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Good point.

TUCKER CARLSON: Probably not possible in 320 A.D. right.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Incredibly not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so I didn’t know that.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No, nobody does. And because I was told by Reader’s.

TUCKER CARLSON: Digest in the 70s. No, I’m serious. I first.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Strange stories and Amazing Facts. It was a Reader’s Digest book that I read in 1980 in summer camp. And I read about this. They’re like this amazing thing and photographic negative. We know it’s a product of the Renaissance or the late Middle Ages.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: False.

TUCKER CARLSON: But there was already a written record of it going back to the greatest.

Eusebius and Early Church History

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Historian of the early Church, Eusebius, who, I was going to mention it. He’s in Caesarea. He has a library. We don’t know the sources he had, but he had an incredible library. So he’s standing on the shoulders of historians before him. And so this is a long standing historical tradition in the Church.

One of the things that’s interesting to me and one of the things I had to get over as I began studying the Shroud, Tucker, is I thought it was a Catholic relic. Now we need to. Again, I want to just hammer on this because you have a lot of Protestants that watch your program and a lot of Christians who think, oh, that’s just a Catholic relic. I’m not interested in the Catholic Church, therefore I’m not interested in the Shroud.

The Catholic Church did not take control of the Shroud of Turin until 1983. Two years of probate court. The last king of Savoy bequeaths the Shroud to the current Pope, who was Pope John Paul II at the time. And after two years of probate court, finally the Catholic Church becomes the custodian of the shroud in the 1980s.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it was in private hands. So you said it was in eastern Turkey for 900 years. Where?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: In Edessa, which is eastern Turkey. It was a stronghold of the Christian movement as it was escaping the. But then when the Muslim invasion started and again the 7th century, it escapes to Constantinople and then Athens and then beyond that, as I mentioned, it keeps moving west.

TUCKER CARLSON: As the Ottoman Empire rises.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Rises totally.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Islam sweeps over the land of the Bible.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Remember Islam killed the bishops, the Bibles and the buildings. And so it’s escaping that. So it’s amazing the embarrassment of riches we have from an artifactual standpoint.

The Face of Jesus in Art and History

And then when you actually look too, there’s something else we haven’t touched on. The iconography. The early Christian art, Tucker, I mean is remarkable. On my social media, we created an AI image. My friend Doug Powell and me. Doug gets all the credit. He’s an amazing artist. He imported the information of the face of the crucified man and compares it with the icon pantocrator, Lord over all, which is at the currently at St. Catherine’s Monastery where it’s been since the 6th century. This is an icon of Jesus. It’s famous.

When he put those two images, the face of Jesus in the Shroud and the icon pantocrator in Sinai, he put that into mid journey and created an AI rendering of what Jesus would have looked like. It is so moving. It’s powerful to look at.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s interesting. The face of Jesus on the shroud before us, even at this distance, it’s recognizable as the Jesus from antiquity. From the artistic representations of Jesus all the way up until George Floyd became Jesus in 2020.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Not the gay looking Jesus of the medieval era. Yeah, no, I mean, and I really mean that. If you look at Jesus depictions in the medieval era, it’s a very effeminate Jesus. Jesus, no facial hair, weak, small, a white Jesus. That’s not what we have reflected.

So again, if we were a hoaxer in the medieval era, we would have created the Jesus of our time, which is this effeminate Jesus. No. What do we have in here? We have a man’s man, a long haired man, a man. We know Jesus walked 20,000 miles in his ministry. If you just add up his trips to Jerusalem and his public ministry. Jesus being about 30 according to Luke’s gospel, when he begins his ministry, Jesus was walking all the time. This, there was no Ubers or rideshare apps. Pound for pound, a strong man, a physically fit man. And that’s why he could probably take the brutality that he endured as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s such a. That’s just so interesting though. But the face is distinctive and the face is reflected through Christian art going back a long way. Like, if you just showed me that, that face, I’d say, oh, that’s Jesus’s face.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the question always was like, well, how do we know what Jesus looks like? And this is the.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah. And so all the icons, what we call them is all the iconography, all the icons of Jesus. There’s over 200 of them. They seem to have the same source material. And when you compare it to the Shroud, it’s like they all trace the face of Jesus off the man of the Shroud.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wild.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And not only that, you have the numismatics. This is the study of coinage from the ancient times. And you have all these Byzantine coins that look just like the image of the face of the man of the Shroud.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So, like, what are all these people looking at if the Shroud was invented, by the liberal scientists want us to believe in the liberal Bible scholars who are apostate, in the 14th century.

The 1988 Carbon Dating Controversy

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s the claim.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The claim is based on one fact. The carbon dating of 1988 that you brought up 1260 to 1390 is what they wrote on the chalkboard in October of 1988 that the carbon dating said.

TUCKER CARLSON: So let’s get into that in some detail.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t mind?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I would love to.

TUCKER CARLSON: So everybody remember. So I guess I misremembered. I was told it was probably fake in 1980, but it was, you’re saying was not till 1988.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: October 88.

TUCKER CARLSON: October 88. There was a carbon date radiocarbon dating of the Shroud itself. Right before you debunk it, if you wouldn’t mind just explaining who did that.

The Scientific Discovery of 3D Information

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right. So the agreement was again, the Catholic Church did not take control of the Shroud until the mid-80s. First, if you don’t mind, could I just back up to 1978, Tucker, to the original scientific research. So, I mean, this is amazing, which I’m glad we have this time.

In 1976, I want to set the context. Two Air Force Academy professors, Eric Jumper and John Jackson, use a machine that was developed to study the effects of the nuclear bomb called a VP8 image analyzer. It’s a brightness measure map. And they would use that to scan the impact of the nuclear bomb. So that’s what the machine is. These are not pastors, these are not theologians, these are professors at the Air Force Academy.

They get an image of the Shroud of Turin, likely the 1930s image that C.S. Lewis had in his bedroom. And they put it through the VP8 image analyzer and they realized there is 3D information encoded in the Shroud of Turin. No other picture does that. I want to make sure this sets in. There’s 3D information. There’s like a holographic topography, brightness map of the man of the Shroud that looks like you’re looking at the surface. You know, geography, topography.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s like depth.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: There is depth. There’s 3D. The way they said it, analytically, there’s 3D information encoded in the image of the crucified man. And when they put pictures of their grandchildren through it, it was just smeared 2D images. So no other image does this. So that VP8 image analyzer, you can go on YouTube and watch it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Done.

The STURP Scientific Research Team

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Is what gave rise to what’s called the Shroud of Turin research project. The scientific STURP team, which consists of 33 scientists, 26 who went to Turin, Italy. They had five days. They had 120 hours to study the Shroud. Keep in mind, the Savoy family allowed this, not the Catholic Church. This is controversial, but I don’t believe the Catholic Church would have ever allowed the Shroud of Turin to be researched. And that’s not me saying that. That’s Barry Schwartz, who is the documenting photographer who photographed the shroud in 1978.

It was the private family, the Savoys, the House of Savoy, who allowed this research team, 33 scientists to study the Shroud for five days. Okay, so they took four years. They didn’t go on Twitter, didn’t exist. They didn’t go on social media, didn’t exist. They took four years to publish all of their findings.

And I haven’t used this word yet until this point in our interview. The STURP team, these 33 scientists. By the way, Roy Rogers says, “Give me 15 minutes in the scientific method and I’ll prove it’s a hoax.” He wasn’t saying that after 15 minutes of studying the Shroud. They all thought they had a free trip to Italy. They were in the lobby. Barry Schwartz, one of the original STURP teams, and I met many of them. Sadly, many of them are now dead.

But they’re meeting over drinks in the lobby of the Italy Hotel in Turin, which is a beautiful city to visit, and they’re all joking that they have a free trip to Italy to debunk this hoax. No one was saying that a few days later.

So these 33 scientists publish and they prove – this is the word I’m going to use – it’s proven the Shroud is not a work of art. It is not a man made image. They can’t tell you how it’s made, but they prove there’s no pigment, there’s no dye, there’s no paint. They cannot explain how the image is there, but it is not man made.

So for the Christians out there or religiously minded people who think that we’re violating the second commandment right now, looking at this, we’re not violating the second commandment, Tucker, so we can be at ease.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the second commandment?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: “You shall not worship a graven image.” A graven image is by definition a man made object, a handmade object. The shroud is not man made. It’s otherworldly. So we’re not violating the second commandment, so that allows people to.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what’s otherworldly about it?

The Moment of Resurrection

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The 3D that the image we’re – here’s the cool part about the Shroud. I believe we’re looking at the moment of Jesus’s resurrection. Ultimately, all of this conversation leads 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. 40 billion, literally 40 billion watts of energy. But it happens. It’s peak power. It’s not like the power when you flip on – it took me a while to learn this. It’s almost like a cold energy because it happens so quickly in a twinkling.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of an eye and it doesn’t evaporate.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s what the labs – the labs could heat up and essentially tattoo the shroud. But 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 1/40 of a billionth of a second, we believe is that moment that Jesus’s body is resurrected. And that’s what leaves this image.

TUCKER CARLSON: But whatever it was, it was.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: A process that chemically changed the fibrils at a 0.2 depth, which is surface level, to leave this image.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that cannot – just for the fifth time – that cannot be applied with a brush.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No, it can’t be duplicated and it hasn’t been. One man in Britain offered a million pounds to anyone who could replicate the shroud and no one’s taken them up on the offer.

The Historical Record vs. Scientific Claims

TUCKER CARLSON: So if we have a written record of the Shroud going back to the 4th century, how were scientists allowed to say that it – I mean, if we know it existed because contemporaneous sources described it, then how are they allowed to say it was a Renaissance creation?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, how are they allowed to say anything that’s unfactual? They’re liars and they hate truth and they hate God.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yeah, aware of that, but like, just on logic grounds, it’s – how could – I don’t know. Did anybody say, “Well, wait a second, we’ve been, you know, someone in the 320s wrote about this.”

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, they don’t know that. Honestly, scientists, they don’t read these truths. They don’t read Christian history. Most, you know, most media people have never read the Bible. They don’t even.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but if they’re studying the Shroud of Turin, you’d think they would have some grounding in the Shroud of Turin.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right, exactly.

The Flawed Carbon Dating

TUCKER CARLSON: So they do radiocarbon dating. This was the headline from ’88, I guess, right?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So then in the late 80s, thank you for bringing me back. It’s agreed upon that seven laboratories would do blind research, carbon dating of the Shroud. And the scientists who studied it said, “Whatever you do, don’t take the sample from the fringes because the Shroud has been repaired.”

There’s two things we’re looking at, Tucker. That took me again a minute to learn all this. There’s these parallel lines. Those are burn marks, those are scorch marks. These 16 triangular shapes, those are patches. The Shroud survives a fire in 1532. The nuns stitched it up with a backing cloth. And they also many.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where was the fire?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: This was in Chambéry, France, 1532, before it moves to Turin in 1578. So it survives this fire, it’s doused. The Shroud has survived at least three fires. And so there are also water stains. You can see those water marks as well on the Shroud.

This is what’s amazing. Like, if this was work of art, it would have diluted it. The image would have smeared or vanished. None of that happens. The image is still, as you just saw with the classic invert on my phone, very apparent.

And so it survives all of that. But it did come in contact – I mean, millions of people have likely touched this shroud. I mean, it would be brought out for baby baptisms. That upper right corner would be cut off. Like, if I really loved you, Tucker, I would give you a piece of the Shroud to take home with you after having dinner with me, if you visited me and one of my Catholic castles.

I mean, so it’s known that aspects of the Shroud were given out even for indulgences. So in the top left, you can see with the naked eye. Anyone who pulls up the Shroud can see it is a contaminated area of the Shroud. It’s dark, it’s been touched a lot. It’s the fringes of the Shroud. And so there’s an invisible weave there that many great scholars believe that was patched.

And so the scholars said, “Whatever you do, don’t carbon date the corners of the Shroud because it’s been so contaminated. It’s a contaminated sample. Get in the middle of the Shroud and carbon date those samples.”

So what did this community do, these seven labs that were supposed to carbon date it? Actually only three labs did. No one ever answered why seven labs didn’t do it. It wasn’t done blindly. Three labs, Tucson, Arizona, Zurich, Switzerland and Oxford, England, carbon date the Shroud. What part did they take? The upper left hand corner that any non-scientist can see as a contaminated sample. And they carbon dated that patch. Exactly. Thank you for noticing that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. You’re talking about the very top left. That’s a different color.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right. It’s dark. That is what they carbon dated. And then, ironically, the British Museum suppresses the data, the raw data of the carbon dating for 29 years. Only in 2017, through a French attorney who I’m going to be with very soon at the International Shroud conference in St. Louis – I encourage people to check it out – the French attorney, through the equivalent of a Freedom of Information act, finally got the raw data released for the carbon dating.

And what did they find? The sample that was used to carbon date it has cotton within the sample, not fine linen. The rest of the Shroud is fine linen. That’s indicative it was patched. So this whole bias towards the Shroud is based on bad science and suppressed science, by the way. 29 years, suppressed.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know if there was cotton in Europe or the Middle East.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah, there was in Europe because they would use it for patchwork. These invisible weaves, these seamstresses.

TUCKER CARLSON: No. Right. But 2,000 years ago, this was fine linen.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: We don’t have any other Shrouds with cotton. This is the patchwork that was done in medieval Europe to protect the Shroud, to preserve it. And so that is what the carbon – so if we’re stacking up all of the evidence for and against the Shroud, we’re in the middle of presenting a voluminous amount of evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud and that it is indeed Jesus’s burial cloth. And we have one bit of evidence to deny the Shroud. This erroneous carbon 14 dating.

TUCKER CARLSON: Has anyone ever carbon dated the linen?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No. No, it’s not been allowed to be dated since.

TUCKER CARLSON: What? I don’t understand how you could carbon date what’s obviously a patch.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That I can see.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, we weren’t even made aware of what was dated until the data came out.

TUCKER CARLSON: So they knew that there was cotton in the sample, which just immediately disqualifies it.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. It’s a contaminated sample.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they knew that and they hid it for almost 30 years.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re sure.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Welcome to Shroud of Turin Research. Yeah. And Ray Rogers, the chemist, who said, “Give me 15 minutes in the scientific method,” debunked it in a scientific journal, and then sadly died a month later of cancer. And his debunk of the carbon dating got no traction. So I’m happy to bring it up on your program and give him all.

The Catholic Church’s Position

TUCKER CARLSON: So why has – why not just take – I mean, it’s kind of a significant question. Right? If it’s 2,000 years old.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, because the Catholic Church is afraid of it. And the Catholic Church has still never come out in support of the Shroud. Are you aware of that? Like, they’re ambivalent about it. They’re indifferent about it. They’re all – and I was just in Turin, so I’m thankful for everyone there who welcomed me. I met all of the scientists, my friend Enrico, the chemist.

The Shroud is now currently kept in what’s called a reliquary. A little – it’s the exact size of the Shroud. This is fascinating information. The company that creates all of the materials for the International Space Station is based in Turin. That same company created the box that preserves the Shroud.

TUCKER CARLSON: So where is it? In a church.

The Shroud’s Current Location and Conservation

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It’s in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in this reliquary, this box. You can walk in and see it today, but it’s a covered box and it’s 99% argon gas. Because the two enemies of the Shroud right now are light and arguably oxygen. And so they’re preserving it.

So the Catholic Church has no interest in educating people about the Shroud. Again, I’m thankful that you’re having me on. I don’t understand why their only interest is in conservation. So they’re conserving the Shroud right now. The Shroud hasn’t been on display since 2015, publicly. We don’t know when it will be on display again. And yet it’s this key to the whole message of Christianity. I mean, it is the death, burial and resurrection in an artifact. Nothing else does that outside of the Bible. Except I’m confused.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would a Christian church want to hide what appears to be physical proof of the resurrection of the core story of its religion?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the answer?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I wish I knew.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who makes that decision?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The Pope. So technically the Pope is the custodian of the Shroud.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s because it was left to the Pope, not the Catholic Church. And I was there during conclave, which was an interesting experience, but I just don’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Do you think they’re worried that it would turn out to be fake?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right? I think so. I can’t speak. I don’t know what’s in their mind.

The Radiocarbon Dating Controversy

TUCKER CARLSON: But just to be clear, so far as you know, the shroud itself, the actual linen cloth, has never been radiocarbon dated.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Just the patch, just the upper left corner, which is a contaminated sample. So it was the patched sample, not a fine linen sample.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So not the real thing.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Correct. And that’s not just me. That’s Paula Delazaro, that’s Bruno Barbaras. I mean there’s Ray Rogers. I would encourage people to study these scientists.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any way, doesn’t radiocarbon dating destroy the sample?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely right. So I mean, 25% of C14 dating is thrown out anyways. So my area specialty is paleography and codicology. How we date Bible manuscripts? And we date Bible manuscripts through paleography, not through carbon dating. We date it through handwriting styles to get a date range roughly 100 years to date Bible manuscripts. We don’t do that because to your point, excellently, it destroys the actual artifact.

Alternative Dating Methods Prove Ancient Origin

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any other way to date it?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes, in fact, it’s been dated. That’s the thing. Again, thank you so much for asking these questions, Tucker. It has been dated in four other scientific ways that conclusively all show that it’s a first century artifact.

We have breaking news on your show. Wide angle X-ray scattering out of the Institute of Crystallography in Rome has shown that the Shroud has been getting old. It’s been decomposing, it’s been degenerating for 2,000 years. They took a sample of a shroud from Masada that’s conclusively dated to A.D. 70, and they compared the Shroud of Turin using wide angle X-ray scattering. This is the Institute of Crystallography. And what they found is that the samples have both been getting old at the same time for 2,000 years. So it’s not been getting old for 700 years. It’s been getting old for 2,000 years.

There was another study done. Linen is made from flax and it has a substance called vanillin in it. And it takes hundreds if not thousands of years for there to be no trace elements of vanillin in the fine linen. Guess how much vanillin there is in the shroud of Turin? Zero. So if it was 700 years old, there would still be traces of vanillin. Chemically, there’s no vanillin in the shroud. So I don’t want to bore you with these details, but they’re very important.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re not boring at all.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: There have been other scientific studies that have been suppressed. All of the other studies, to answer your question, have proven that the shroud is 2,000 years old. From a scientific standpoint, I think it’s pretty wild that the authorities, the British Museum, is that what you said?

Financial Incentives and Suppressed Evidence

TUCKER CARLSON: Would hide relevant data, suppress it for 29 years. I mean, how can you do that? How is that science? I don’t understand.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: One of the lab officials, Tucker, I mean this is all – if people just read for themselves and think for themselves. I mean, one of the professors who wrote on the chalkboard “1260-1390” was given a 5 million dollar endowed chair right after this announcement in 1988.

TUCKER CARLSON: By whom?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: By his cabal that was backing him. So again, people need to follow where the evidence leads. And again, I’m following forensic science. I’m following the iconography. I mean the blood samples alone, the hematology. If we wanted to fake the shroud, do you realize we’d have to kill someone? We would have to get blood, pre-mortem blood, and then we would have to stab them in the heart and get post-mortem blood and translucent pulmonary edema and smear that.

And then we’d have to know that there are certain plants that only bloom in Jerusalem in April. We would then have to get – we’d have to know the provenance of the shroud. I mean, when there’s over 30 things a hoaxer would have to know to fake the shroud and then you’d have to apply it in some unknown fashion that cannot be replicated even now.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then we would have to know how do we change two microns deep? So surface level and every – so we have a traveling exhibit right now that we’re doing where I have 50 artifacts that show these things through infographics. And we have panel 13 in our traveling “Who is the Man of the Shroud” exhibit shows each fiber, each thread has around 250 to 200 fibers. So you think about 0.2 microns of each fiber of each thread. I mean that’s how superficial the image is. We couldn’t fake that. No one can. We don’t have the technology to do that.

The Pattern of Suppressing Religious Evidence

TUCKER CARLSON: I just, I’m fixated on the idea that the custodians of the science around this at the British Museum, which is the most famous museum in the world, whose job is to search for the truth. That’s what science is, the pursuit of truth. That they would hide facts and mislead the public on purpose. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because this is a religious artifact that speaks to the veracity of the world’s greatest religion, which has many opponents.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Discovery and Custody

TUCKER CARLSON: So it does raise questions about other archaeological finds that are relevant to Christianity. And the big one, of course, the Qumran scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls, found right after the Second World War by a shepherd.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: 1948, a Bedouin.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, a Bedouin shepherd boy throws a stone into a cave, hears something, pottery breaking, goes up there and all these jars with these scrolls in them. That of course was the same year that Israel became a nation, 1948. And they become the custody, or some of them become the custody of the Israeli government. And they’re written right around the time of Jesus, probably a little before, correct me if I’m wrong on the facts, 250 BC to 50 BC, this monastic community called the Qumran community in Qumran.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re, you know, many portions of what we refer to as the Old Testament. At least that’s what we’ve been told. But then I’ve always wondered like these are in the custody largely of a government. And they slow rolled. I mean they could just like take pictures of every single fragment and put them on the Internet. And anyway, there are a lot of questions, but my main question to you, I think you know something about this is do we have all the Qumran scrolls that are in custody? Are they available to the public and to scholars?

Ongoing Discoveries and Suppression

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Because they keep coming to light. I mean, there’s the Cairo Geniza fragments, so there’s also Dead Sea Scrolls outside of the Dead Sea, if that makes sense. So like there’s the Cairo Geniza fragments. This brings up a great question. I mean, the antiquity of all artifacts is sketchy to be clear. And you know, when you look at the great artifacts from history, how people come into control of these artifacts, there’s a lot of money involved, there’s a lot of corruption involved, candidly.

TUCKER CARLSON: But could it be? Is it plausible or is there any evidence that scripture from the Qumran cache, the Dead Sea Scrolls, has been suppressed?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Oh, certainly, absolutely. There’s absolutely ways in which all – I mean, there is a demonic hatred towards anything biblical. I mean, not just in the Dead Sea Scrolls community. I mean, I’ve seen this with all biblical fragments. There is a hyper skepticism towards biblical fragments that, a framework, a worldview that we don’t foist on anything else except biblical fragments.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, as long as they’re available to the public, I’m okay with that. As long as people can, you know, have the information, decide for themselves. But my concern is that they’re not available to the public.

Hidden Fragments in Academic Collections

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, I worked in the Griffith Papyrology Lab in Oxford, which is formerly known as the Sackler Library. They took the Sackler name off, but when I was there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was the Sackler family killing a lot of people?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah. So now it’s just the Ashmolean. So in the Griffith Papyrology Lab, I mean, we have a half million fragments that have not been categorized, they have not been cataloged. So I mean, I say this as one who does this. I mean, yeah, there are biblical fragments that have not been brought to light.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, I mean, it’s a great question.

TUCKER CARLSON: How hard is it to take a picture of them and put it on the Internet?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. And there are great people doing it. I mean, my friend Dan Wallace at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, their entire aim is to photograph as many biblical texts as they can and to make them available. So there are great groups out there that are doing it, but the hoops they have to jump through with these libraries and where these manuscripts are living.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would it be controversial to take, you know, a 2,000 year old fragment of scripture, take a picture of it and upload it onto the Internet. Why would that be? Why would someone want to prevent that?

The Innovation of Early Christian Manuscripts

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I can only speak to my experience and so many of the papyrologists who I’ve worked with, so many of those are people that work with the papyri. So biblical fragments or papyri first. And then that was the original work of the scripture. And then of course, scrolls. Scrolls, honestly, so many of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: So papyrus made from plant papyrus, plants that grow in wetlands.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The early church was innovative. It used something called a codex. It did not take scrolls from Jews. It wanted to have this book form with writing on the recto and verso, the front and back of each page. And it was cheap, it was inexpensive, it could be hidden. Unlike these scrolls that were – I mean, I have Jewish scrolls. They’re beautiful, but they’re heavy. They’re hard to transport. They’re only written on one side. You had to unroll the whole thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re made of animal skins.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right. Parchment. Parchment would be bovine. They’re all bovine. They’re animal, they’re calf.

The Enlightenment’s Anti-Biblical Bias

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Okay, so but any of this stuff is not, I mean, like, what would be the justification for keeping it from the public?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah, well, I mean, so much of it comes out of the Enlightenment movement of Europe. I mean, coming out with what we called higher criticism. The German scholars, the height of German scholarship in the 1800s, that Jesus didn’t exist. If he did, he was probably gay with a mortgage.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I get it, I get it.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You have this. Pontius Pilate didn’t exist. And so much of that influenced modernity in a way that has wreaked havoc on all of our divinity colleges.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure. But I’m just saying now, 2025, if you have a bunch of scrolls that are found in a cave in 1948 that speak directly to, you know, the world’s great religion, how can a government be allowed to hide those from

Academic Resistance to Biblical Evidence

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, you’re immediately accused of being a sensationalist. I’ve been ridiculed and attacked for bringing the shroud to light. You’re called a popularizer. This is a very high view, hyper skeptical community that catalogs biblical manuscripts. All you have to do is go to society of biblical literature with 5,000 Bible scholars to see how crazy some of these people are.

I’m sure there is a hatred towards truth. The man who defended my thesis – I write about this in my book “Body of Proof.” I’ve spent three years studying the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus. I’ve written a 93,000 word dissertation on the history of resurrection belief in the Judeo-Christian motif.

And I come to my viva, where in England it’s pass fail. So if you fail your PhD viva in England, you can never do a redo again. You get what’s called an MPhil and there’s no do overs. So I come to my defense, Tucker. And I have a Bible study scholar who did not believe in the miraculous, did not believe in the historicity of the resurrection. And he looks at me and he says, “Jeremiah, do you actually believe the resurrection happened or is that just imaginative storytelling?”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well, that doesn’t surprise me at all. How many Episcopal priests believe in God?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: None.

TUCKER CARLSON: None. No, I know some who do, but like the minority. That doesn’t shock me that they would – that corruption exists. It’s the suppression of information. It’s Wikipedia that drives me crazy. It’s gatekeeping information that prevents the public and interested parties, researchers, from even knowing that that information exists. That is so sinister.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I’m a victim of it. I was taught that the Shroud was a Catholic relic and there was no science behind it at all. I was taught that at the intellectual Jerusalem that is Oxford. I’m a victim of this. I understand it completely and I guess I’m numb to it, Tucker, that it’s my world. I’ve been in it professionally in the Academy since 2009. It’s just a miracle if truth actually gets out. And that’s why I’m so grateful for your program.

Future Research on the Shroud

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have hope that there will be further study of the Shroud, or do we not need any?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I’m doing all I can to make that happen. This is changing people’s lives, this truth. Because when we look at this mystery, it actually reveals the message of Christianity, God’s love for us. And that he sent Christ to die in our place and raised from the dead. That’s the gospel. That’s the good news. And that this event actually happened in history. Jesus physically, bodily rose from the grave. And there are great reasons to believe that.

I have another artifact I want to hand you though, Tucker. I want you to hold the replica of the spear. This is amazing. This is a replica. There’s a weight to it. Now you mentioned that they did not break Jesus’s legs, but let’s make sure he’s really dead. So they take this spear, this lance, and they stab Jesus according to John’s gospel.

And remember John’s gospel, this is not a scientific or medical journal. It says that blood and water came out of the body of Jesus. Jesus is stabbed between rib five and six. And we see that reflected on the shroud with the post mortem phantom type AB blood that pools just above that triangle right parallel with rib 5 and 6. And you’re holding in your hand the spear that would have inflicted that punishment on Jesus’s dead corpse by the Roman executioners.

TUCKER CARLSON: Damn. And so the spear likely had an iron tip on it.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. And it punctures about 3 cm wide. And again, the scripture said Isaiah foretold it “by his stripes, which were healed, by his stripes were vindicated.” And we see that reflected in the spear, the lance wound, that Jesus body, and we see that reflected on the shroud, which is just fascinating to think about.

Other Physical Artifacts of Jesus

TUCKER CARLSON: Last question. Are there other physical artifacts extant that you’re satisfied are genuine, whose providence is knowable that point to the historical reality of Jesus?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Oh, absolutely. We have an embarrassment of riches, of artifacts, archaeology. This is the beauty of Christianity. This is the beauty of our faith, Tucker, that our faith intersects with archeology, where I often say that, and I say this in “Body of Proof,” archaeology is Christianity’s closest cousin.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s amazing is what extent can Christians – I mean, because all this is taking place in a non-Christian country.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely. Well, I know atheist Jews who are archaeologists, and they use six sources to make sure their archaeological sites exhibit verisimilitude, that they’re digging in the right place. And you’ve probably heard of these sources. Tucker, are you ready for this? These are atheist or agnostic Jewish archaeologists.

In the land of Israel, there’s around 100 archaeological sites at any one time. Most of them are secular, completely secular secularists. But they still use six sources to make sure they’re digging in the right spot. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the book of Acts and Josephus. So if the critical archaeologists are going to use our sources because they’re so good, I’m going to use them too.

Archaeological Oversight and Integrity

TUCKER CARLSON: But I mean, why should we try? I mean, if you have people who are opposed to Christianity, is there oversight? Are there – do we know that historical information isn’t being suppressed?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No. I mean, there needs to be more integrity to it, for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are there people who aren’t attached to that government who are on the archaeological sites watching the stuff?

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: There are. I have great friends who are there who have incredible credibility, like my archaeologist friend, Scott Stripling. He’s the lead digger at Shiloh, or what the rest of the world calls Shilo. He’s in season five. So there’s great archeologists out there doing great work, but they’re fewer and far between. That’s why we need more people to do what we do.

TUCKER CARLSON: Jeremiah, thank you.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Thank you for having me. Love your program. Love you.

TUCKER CARLSON: And this is a horrifying device. Thanks.

JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Thank you.

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