Transcript of Dr. Jeremiah Johnston on The Michael Knowles Show

It didn’t occur to me, you know, a lot of my Protestant friends, they don’t. They’re not that into relics, they’re not that into religious artifacts. Some of them have real theological disagreements with even certain religious artifacts. And so it didn’t occur to me that non-Catholics believe in the Shroud of Turin. And then on top of that, even I as a Catholic as a kid was told the Shroud of Turin is fake.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: There was a study in the 80s, it debunked it. It’s a medieval forgery. You got to be crazy to think that goes all the way back to antiquity. So why do you think it’s real?

Scientific Evidence for the Shroud’s Authenticity

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Based on the evidence? Because I’m not irrational, Michael. Because 102 academic disciplines have spent over 500,000 hours of scientific studies and published in peer-reviewed journals their findings. And because I’m not irrational, I not only believe that the Shroud is authentic, it’s not a medieval fake, it’s not a medieval forgery.

And like you said, every time the media brings out a picture of Jesus, it’s either a gorilla or it’s an effeminate male that does not smack of authenticity of a Jewish crucified man of late Second Temple Judaism. And what we have in the Shroud, it gets everything right.

Here’s why this is so important for the audience today. In one archaeological artifact we have the death, burial and resurrection that brings all three together. And speaking of non-Catholics, you bring up a valid point. I used to be a skeptic of the Shroud when I was sitting at Faculty of Theology in Keble College working on my 93,000 word thesis on the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. I was conditioned by Faculty of Theology and I worked, I read in the Bodleian Library, Griffith Papyrology Lab. I was conditioned that the Shroud is a fraud. That’s just a Catholic hoax.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

From Skeptic to Defender

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And so I paid no attention to the Shroud. In fact, there’s early YouTubes of me where I’m being interviewed about the evidences for the resurrection. I had a very high brow Oxford answer, UK answer. “Oh, I deal in the evidence, I deal with the real world, authenticity, none of that superstition.”

And then I moved to Oxford in 2009, my wife and I and our daughter. At the time we only had one child and now we have five, by the way, including triplets. So I have a dog in the hunt of why I’m interested in this. I go to CS Lewis’s home. Have you been to the Kilns?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I have, yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Have you been in Lewis’s bedroom?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yes.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: In Lewis’s bedroom, above the mantel, in the room he slept in, there is a picture of the 1931 honor photograph of the Shroud of Turin. Because Lewis, who of course is Anglican for the benefit of our audience, not a Catholic. Lewis wanted to look at the picture of the man in the Shroud every day to be reminded that our God has a face.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I didn’t notice that when I was there. I walked all around the house. I took notice that he and his brother would ash their pipes.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Rub it into the car. Kind of a bachelor pad. I remember walking by his bedroom where he died. You know, they found him on the floor or something and I didn’t notice that he had a picture of the shroud.

The Face of God

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And according to Lewis, we have to be reminded our God does have a face. Jesus narrates God to us. If we want to know who God is, we look no further than Jesus. And so scientists take the Shroud seriously. And so I want to encourage people in this program to take the red pill with us, Michael, because we’re going to go down the trail together.

And the evidence is overpowering. I believe the shroud speaks for itself. It’s the greatest mystery of all time because it speaks to the greatest message of all time. The death, burial and physical bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I love that you make this point right off the top here because there…

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Are going to be.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: People say, well, who cares what Jesus looked like? Who cares? You know, I’ve even heard from people, very faithful people who say, oh, you know, look, there are depictions of Christ as black or Indian or this or that. And sure, because there is neither Jew nor Greek or slave nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus. Right?

However, he does look like something. Yes, because he’s not just an idea and he’s not just an abstract spirit. In fact, the crux of the faith is that God, the son of God and the divine logic of the universe enters into history and has a face and has a body and dies, is executed by a real civil authority in history, in a real place. And maybe there’s even physical evidence to that day of that event.

Christianity Grounded in History

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And do you understand that Christianity, unlike Islam or the other religions or especially the made in America cults and religions, only Christianity says you can test our belief against history. Archaeology is Christianity’s closest cousin. I love the programs you do with archaeologists because again, for those of us trying to pass on a faith to our children, the Bible is about real people, real places, real events.

I don’t check my brain at the door to become a follower of Jesus. It actually is a leap into the light. 228 times in the New Testament: “Edon,” the Greek word to see. Open your eyes and see the truth. Look, look, don’t be misbelieving, but believe John 20:8.

John goes to the tomb that first Easter morning. We know the date. I talk about this in my book Body of Proof, Michael. April 5, AD 33, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, which by the way, studied the Shroud. One of the 102 academic disciplines that have studied the Shroud. Sunrise that first Easter morning, April 5, AD 33, would have been 5:43am.

Mary goes to the tomb very early. It’s still dark. Why? She’s mourning the dead. She walks into the tomb, she stoops down, she looks in. What does she see? She sees the linen cloths lying there. And I believe when she goes to get Peter and John – this is brand new for your program I’m publishing right now with an archaeologist on what I’m about to share – it wasn’t when they saw the 2,750 pound stone removed that they believed. It wasn’t even when they saw that the tomb was empty and there was no body that they believed.

The Moment of Belief

The scripture is very clear. There’s an economy of words in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We only have 89 chapters in the Gospels that cover 26 days of the life of Jesus. That’s all we have. Remember John said if we wrote everything, the libraries couldn’t contain it. But these have been written so that you believe.

John stoops down and looks in and it says when he saw the Athonia, the Sindon, the Sudarium, the Shroud, he believed, he saw and he believed. And what I’m publishing right now, I believe that the Shroud had the face of Jesus glowing on it. Why else could it not? Every time Jesus manifests himself, he always manifests himself according to scripture, in magnificent light.

Think about Saul the Apostle. You just quoted him. Galatians 3:28, you were quoting. He’s on the way to Damascus. And I have filmed on first century roads when it’s hot in Israel and the sun is blazing. You probably have too. And yet he sees Jesus. And the evidential narrative that we have in the Book of Acts is that it was lighter than the noonday Sun. In Mark 9, when Jesus appears to the disciples, literally Jesus’ body is glistening. Same thing we see in the Old Testament.

What the Shroud Shows

And so why would I want to make sure our audience – because I understand people are hearing about the Shroud for the very first time today – the Shroud is an image of a crucified man, the front and back of a badly traumatized crucified man with wounds that correspond to the brutality that Jesus of Nazareth experienced.

The image we believe was formed by 34,000 trillion watts of energy in 1/40 of a billionth of a second. According to Paul Delazo, my friend at ENEA Labs in Rome, this is the moment of resurrection. We have God, if you will, in Jesus, taking the first selfie and it’s the moment of resurrection.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I’ve never heard it put that way.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It’s helpful.

The Photographic Nature of the Shroud

MICHAEL KNOWLES: This is why when you say you have this thesis that what they see is this is a glowing shroud, or, you know, because whatever you want to say about the Shroud, we know that the image of the man on the shroud is not painted on. And it actually seems that it’s kind of a photograph because it looks like a photographic negative.

And so what you’re saying is, well, the image was produced by some kind of light. We at least know that. And so if you connect that fact with what we know about the Shroud, which at least some of us believe to be the burial cloth of Christ, then surely that would have some resonance with whatever was going on in the moment that the apostles see that he’s resurrected.

Scientific Mystery of the Shroud

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And what caused me to move from skeptic to defender of the Shroud is scientists in the 21st century. The best scientists we have today, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs, the Air Force Academy. I’ve already talked about ENEA Labs in Rome, 102 academic disciplines, they cannot explain how the image is in the Shroud. The image is superficial, meaning if we get closer than 8ft to the shroud, it vanishes. You can’t see it because it is so superficial.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Hold on, say that again. I don’t quite get that.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: If you get closer than 8ft to the shroud, the image vanishes because it’s… In other words, you have to stand 8ft or more away because the image is so superficial. And this is specifically what science cannot reproduce. How do you get an image that’s only on two or three microns of each fiber within the herringbone weave that is there.

It’s not paint, as you rightly said. And we can use the word proven. The STIRP Project, the Shroud of Turin Research Project, who had 120 hours, thanks to the Savoy family of Italy, probably your relatives in Italy had a weekend with the Shroud, where they then took three years to publish their findings, Michael. And we have proven – I use that word according to science – it is not man-made, it is not pigment, there’s no dye. It is not an artwork.

The Desire to See Jesus

And so I want to help some of the fine Christians that you brought up are like, “Hey, I don’t need this shroud. Take it or leave it. I have my Bible, you know, it was good enough for Paul it’s good enough for me. That’s all I need is the Bible.” Well, can I just say something to my friends who have that pious view? It wasn’t enough for the writers of the New Testament.

There would be no New Testament had they not had these experiences. Acts 1:3 said Jesus proclaimed himself to be alive from the dead with many infallible proofs. In Luke’s enkippet, which is the beginning of his narrative, he actually uses the word “autoptes” in Greek. It’s the word we get autopsy from.

There is a fascination from nascent Christianity to current with seeing the face of Jesus. First Corinthians 13:12. In that beautiful love chapter, Paul wants…to see Jesus face to face. Revelation 22:4. John wants to see Jesus face to face.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I mean, the words of our Lord himself. He who has seen me has seen the Father. Exactly.

The Evidence for Faith

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So it’s okay. I’m looking for evidence for my faith. First Corinthians 15. Christianity puts the entire message, the entire worldview to the test. First Corinthians 15:19. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, people should feel sorry for us. But First Corinthians 15:20. This is Saul Paul. He has risen from the dead. We know this based on the evidence. Then he gives the kerygma, the appearance tradition, the empty tomb tradition.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: When you say that the shroud encompasses the death, burial and resurrection, you have all of this in one event. It strikes me that the shroud in a way kind of unlocks the key to two different religious errors. The error. Well, there are multiple errors in these religions, but for Islam, one of the chief errors is the denial of the crucifixion.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It crucified him not, says the Quran. And for Judaism, they deny the resurrection, they don’t deny the crucifixion, but they deny the resurrection. And in the shroud you have evidence and as you’re saying, good evidence of both. So then let me just go back to my eight year old self.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes.

The Carbon Dating Controversy

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Which still. And I still maintain a critical eye toward information that’s presented to me, but certainly I did then. I was told 1987 or 1988, they radiocarbon tested the shroud and the shroud dates back to the 13th century or something like that. So, you know, come on, where’d that come from?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely. And it’s more fun in the interview if you push back, because otherwise I go on autopilot. So I like this because so many of us, we wake up with an allergy of skepticism every morning, and that’s healthy. Again, I want to make sure that I learn from everyone, but no one should think for me. This is why I have a ministry called Christian Thinker Society. We love God with our heart, soul and mind.

So you’re asking great questions. 1978 is the STURP project, so the Shroud of Turin Research Project. They published their findings in 1983. The Savoy family allows the carbon 14 dating to go forward. I want to also answer quickly, if I may. It does not come under the control of the Holy See himself until 1985 after two years of probate court.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Right.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So for evangelicals or Protestants or Greek Orthodox who may be watching your program, they think, oh, that’s just another Catholic relic. Well, it is a relic. It is an artifact. But it’s not just a Catholic artifact. That would be anachronistic to say that. It does not come under the control of the living pope until 1985.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It was given as a gift to Pope John Paul II.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Pretty recent pope.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes, exactly. But yet the Catholic Church hasn’t really come out to say, as a matter of fact, this is the burial cloth of Jesus. So I wanted to answer that.

So back to the carbon dating. So 1988, it’s carbon dated. The carbon dating is rife with problems, Michael, and I’m so glad to update your audience with this. The British Library, the British Museum, where I’ve spent countless equivalent of days, suppressed the raw data of the carbon 14 dating for 29 years. And I was reading the raw data last night to prepare for your show because I got to be on my A game with Michael Knowles. The raw data is rife with errors. I’m not even sure that one of the labs even tested the pinky of fabric that was cut from the cloth.

So if I may, above your left shoulder in the top corner is the pinky size fragment that was cut from the cloth to supposedly be carbon dated.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Now, excellent thinkers like Joe Marino have published rebuttals to the carbon 14 dating and they believe that the fragment that was used is contaminated because he claims—I’m quoting Joe Marino, I like to quote the sources—that there’s cotton, this is a patched corner after it survives the fire of 1532. I mean, it’s a miracle we have the shroud today. It survived three fires, it’s been doused with water. So that holds a lot of weight with me.

And then we can go down the rabbit trail. Seven labs were supposed to carbon date it, only three did.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Right.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The man that published it wrote on the chalkboard 1260-390. The gentleman who announced the findings that it was a medieval hoax, he did something that scientists never do. He was anti-Catholic. The Carbon 14 data, when it was published, ardent atheists were the editors of the journal. This was an absolute onslaught against the Catholic Church and against people of faith.

So if you and I put on the table today all of the evidence that we have in favor—the 102 academic disciplines, and by the way, we’ve dated the shroud in five other ways that are non-carbon 14 dating. The only thing a skeptic would hold up and wave and say, oh, it’s not authentic, is the carbon 14 dating, which has been proven to be erroneous.

Alternative Dating Methods

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So what are the other ways that we’ve dated the shroud? I’ve never heard.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Fascinating. Ready to have your mind blown?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I am.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So part of the breaking news that you’re aware of is two years ago, wide angle X-ray scattering. The Institute of Crystallography in Italy. And I would encourage people, download the Heritage Journal for yourself, read the data for yourself, and then you decide.

The Institute of Crystallography, Jewish burial traditions, which I happen to be an expert in. I can talk all day long about Jewish burial traditions. The Gospels get it right. The way Jesus dies, is buried. That’s where I’m saying this comes together. We have other burial shrouds. We have other linen burial shrouds from late Second Temple Judaism in the time of Jesus, such as the Shroud of Masada, dated to AD 70. The invasion of Titus. Think about that.

So this Institute of Crystallography, using a new technology called WAXS, wide angle X-ray scattering, compared the degradation. How long has the shroud been degrading? Based on the Masada shroud. And they showed correspondence, meaning that the shroud, for lack of a better term, has been getting old for 2,000 years. That’s just one of the datings.

There’s another. The lack of vanillin in the flax. So linen comes from the flax. It comes from the flax plant. And there’s no vanillin in the linen cloth. One scholar says it takes two to five thousand years for a linen cloth to age to such an extent that there’s no trace of vanillin in the chemicals. So, you know, we have the Tarkhan dress that is from 3000 BC, 3000 years older than the Shroud of Turin. Linen will last forever given the right circumstances. And so there’s no vanillin in the wide angle X-ray scattering. And there’s other datings as well that have been widely published.

And this is where I bring in my expertise as well, Michael. Carbon 14 dating 25% of the time is thrown out in scholarship and academic conferences.

The Sudarium of Oviedo

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Well, there’s actually a related case here, which also raises questions about the Shroud, which maybe we’ll get back to. But the Shroud is not the only burial relic of our Lord. The other one, the other big one is the Sudarium of Oviedo.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: And this is the head cloth. But I remember reading that the Sudarium of Oviedo does not actually go all the way back to the first century. That actually it’s just from the ninth century according to radiocarbon dating. But what’s a real rub for this claim is that we have a definitive history of the Sudarium going back to the sixth century.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So we can actually just trace it in documents and in history. So then you say, well, hold on. If the radiocarbon dating was that wrong, and we know with certainty at least until the 6th century, then why do I believe the radiocarbon dating from the 80s, especially when there were all of these other methodological problems with it.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. And we’ve brought the Sudarium, a replica of it for your studio for this program.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Oh, marvelous. Can we.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely. Thanks, Powell. It’s coming right now. Thanks to my good friend, scholar Doug Powell, who has brought his replica for us. This is a replica, and I’ve never seen this until today. Michael, this is a replica of the Sudarium of Oviedo. And I want you to meet Doug Powell. Doug.

DOUG POWELL: Hey, how’s it going? Michael, nice to meet you. Yes, you as well. Thank you. Wow, this is good.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Who else did you bring back? Do we have any other relics?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: We brought a museum. That’s right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I should have known, though, that if one travels around with a full scale replica of the Shroud of Turin, probably he’s going to be the kind of guy who has the Sudarium of Oviedo. So, okay, this is supposed to be the head cloth. My first question, when I even learned about the head cloth, which was kept separately from the shroud, and they kind of have made their ways all around the world. Why would Christ’s face be on the shroud? Wouldn’t it only be on the head cloth? Isn’t the fact that Christ’s face is on the shroud an argument against the Shroud?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It’s not. Doug, go right ahead.

DOUG POWELL: Well, if you read John’s account of the discovery with the Shroud, they also find the head cloth in a separate place. So there are other cloths than the burial cloth around Jesus. And so the fact that there is a head cloth means there’s another cloth. And the fact that there’s no face on it means that it wasn’t in contact with whatever made the image on the shroud when the image got made.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So it’s separated at some point.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And this is what is believed to be that cloth. And what I might add is, when was the cloth wiped, wrapped around his face? Jesus dies at around 3pm on the cross. He’s hanging there, he’s dead. Jewish sensitivities are such that even the blood that’s dripping from the body would want to be collected and not just out on the ground. So that is when they wrap his face with the sudarium, is when he’s still on the cross, coming down from the cross, that remains on his face until they bring the body in the tomb where it is taken off and Jesus is wrapped with the shroud. Does that make sense, the timing?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: That does make sense. I’ve just never figured it out. That’s never been presented to me before. But I suppose that would make sense because then you would also say, well, hold on, if it were just on the whole time or if it was just part of the wrapping, why isn’t there an image, 3D image like there is on the shroud? Why isn’t there one on the Sudarium?

Blood Evidence and Correspondence

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And Doug, I wonder if you would talk about the correspondence of the blood type or you already have your mind blown further.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I am.

DOUG POWELL: Okay, well, what you’re looking at here is it’s oriented. So this particular stain, you can see there’s three areas of stains. You have this one, this one and this one. This area right here was in direct contact with a face that matches exactly the face on the shroud. It’s a one to one correspondence. And if you line up the nose, if you register the nose, then this kind of concentrated area of blood is right around the mouth and the beard area. And you can see how it kind of hooks around like the beard does.

And then this vertical area goes right down the bridge of the nose. And this would be on the forehead right here. This epsilon shape right here is the edge of this. And then you can see this blood stain corresponds here. And there are a number of other ones. That one corresponds there. And so if you do an overlay, like if you outline this and you put it right onto that, it’s an exact match in size.

Not just in size, but in blood type as well. First of all, scientists have been able to recreate this stain right here by taking a head, a glass head that is filled with blood mixed with pulmonary edema, which is the fluid that’s generated in the lungs during asphyxiation or other kind of torture or duress. And that’s the blood. That’s the blood mixture that is on here. And that’s also the blood mixture that you see in different places on the shroud.

Like here, it’s six parts pulmonary edema to one part blood. So that’s what’s coming out of the lungs. And so that’s what’s coming out of his mouth of the man who had the sudarium wrapped around him. So it matches like that. It’s also type AB, which is also the type on the shroud. It’s also postmortem blood. Right. And type AB is the rarest blood type. It’s about three times more common in Mediterranean Jews than it is in Europeans.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: The eucharistic miracles.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Same.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: The type is always AB.

The Sudarium of Oviedo and Its Connection to the Shroud

DOUG POWELL: Pretty amazing. So the idea is that the sudarium was affixed to the back of the head here. And if you look really close, you can see these holes where pins were put through to the hair. There is a ponytail shape funnel right here of his hair. And this is where it would have affixed to. And this butterfly shape fits right onto the ponytail. And then you can see these little pinpoints of blood wounds match this exactly.

And then it would wrap around the front, so it gets around to the front and makes contact with the face. But it’s not wrapped all the way around the head because the face, scientists have figured out is lulled forward and to the right like this. So they can’t get it all the way around when he’s on the cross. So they double it back and that’s what creates that stain.

So now it’s folded back and they have determined his head was in this position for about 45 minutes to an hour. And then the body is taken down and laid face down with the feet slightly elevated, which causes the blood to go down the nose and pool onto the forehead, which is what makes that. And he’s in that position for 45 minutes to an hour. And so that gives enough time for Joseph of Arimathea to go get permission to bury the body.

Then the body is flipped face up for about five minutes. And there are actually finger marks where somebody reached over the back of the head to pinch the nose shut to hold the blood in. And the body’s in that position face up for about five minutes. And so if you’ve ever been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the space between Golgotha and the tomb is more than enough. You know, you can cover that in 90 seconds. And so that’s where all the stains. That’s how to make sense of the stains here.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So, okay, we know the Sudarium comes from at least the 6th century.

DOUG POWELL: No one disputes that it’s been in Oviedo, Spain, since Oviedo was founded at the end of the 8th century. And so it’s been there. The documentary evidence is that it enters Spain around 711, ahead of the Muslim invasion.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Where was it? Do we know where it was before 711?

DOUG POWELL: The documentary evidence actually matches the pollen evidence. And you’ll get to the pollen evidence on the shroud. But there’s pollen on both the Shroud and the Sudarium. And the pollen on the Sudarium is from various locations. Oviedo is in the very northern part of Spain, kind of in the center of the coast, about 15 or 20 miles inland in the mountains of Asturias. So there’s pollen from around there. There’s pollen from around Toledo, right in the middle of Spain. And then there’s pollen from North Africa, probably the area around Alexandria, which is where the documentary evidence says it was after Jerusalem and before Spain. And then there’s pollen evidence from Jerusalem.

The Historical Timeline Challenge to Carbon Dating

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So all of this, at the very least, we would have to say not only from knowing where it was in the church, but even beforehand, the pollen and the documentary evidence that we’re firmly in antiquity. Oh, yeah. And call it whatever, you know, whatever. I’ve read the 6th century, though many people would say, no, it actually goes to the first century. Right. But I guess my point is, if we know for a fact that we can place this in antiquity, and the skeptics of the Shroud of Turin are arguing that it’s a medieval forgery, then how do the images match perfectly? Did some medieval forger know about the sudarium? Maybe. And then just even if it were possible to create the image through artistic techniques, just manage to match it perfectly without anyone figuring it out.

DOUG POWELL: That’s the fascinating thing—this may be the key to the case against the medieval dating of the Shroud. The final piece of the puzzle is connecting these two things because we know of the existence of this definitely 600 years before the earliest date within the radiocarbon dating. So once we show this correspondence, and it’s like I said, it’s an exact match, that totally blows apart the idea that the Shroud was created 600 years later.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And, Michael, I want your audience to appreciate, I know of no other program that has a Shroud, museum quality, licensed, authentic replica, along with the sudarium that we’re comparing right now, that’s going to live forever. This is so helpful. I wish when I began learning about the Shroud, I could have seen a video with two Shroud scholars comparing the two. This debunks the carbon 14 dating.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Were you always shroud pilled, for lack of a better word?

DOUG POWELL: No, I was always interested in it, but what I was unsure of was what the credible evidence was for it.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

DOUG POWELL: And I studied in a master’s program under Gary Habermas, who’s one of the leading experts in the historical evidence for the resurrection. And one day he just went off talking about the Shroud and he started listing all of these evidences that I’ve never heard before. And so he became my guide into the credible evidence. And Jeremiah is a good friend of Dr. Habermas as well.

So he was an early advocate for it. In fact, one of the members of the STURP team wrote two books with Dr. Habermas, who was not on the STURP team, as kind of the theological guide for understanding the scientific evidence. So he goes all the way back to the STURP team without being on it. And he’s been in from the very beginning. So he was an excellent guide.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I do find people who make really strong arguments. Not all the time, but sometimes they started out as real skeptics.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You know, and it kind of gives them a bit more zeal. Doug, I’m sorry we don’t have a chair for you. But anyway, thank you for coming on and showing us.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You’re welcome. I know Peter’s going to come out next from the Pearly Gates. Stay tuned till the end of the broadcast.

Addressing Skepticism About Ancient Artifacts

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So I’m trying to think of any good arguments against this. I mean, I guess there’s the general argument against relics and religious artifacts, which is, come on, 2,000 years. Like, come on we don’t keep track of things for that long, which is. I know now that I say that that’s not a very good argument, but.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You’re catching the zeitgeist of the day. Where I have TikTok theology, I’m as dangerous as the last reel that I just saw. And I’m not actually infected with knowledge. I’ve never actually learned how to think critically about my faith or why I believe anything’s true.

When you think that the two best sources for Alexander the Great are Arrian and Plutarch writing 400 years later, and nobody ever questions Alexander the Great, there just seems to be a hyper skepticism about Christianity and Jesus in general that brings out the ire of many people who hate God, they hate Christianity and they hate truth.

And this is where I love your voice, Michael, because you are a warrior for truth. You teach your audience how to think and then how to converse about what we think in a way that’s cogent, effective, persuasive, and doesn’t back down. I am concerned about the next generation. And yet we have the greatest evidences of all time at our fingertips.

This is where the school of archaeology and the points of tangency with archaeology and the material culture come. They fit like a hand in a glove with the things that we hold dear from the Christian faith. And yet most people go to Google instead of God’s word and they just think that, oh, this is like a myth, like a fairytale, like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. There’s nothing really persuasive about my faith.

I want to be clear. Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion, which we’re about to look at in a way that very few people have ever seen in your audience. I’ve had to travel the world to bring these artifacts to your program. Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion is the best established fact of the ancient world. If we cannot believe that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion, the only thing on par with that, historically speaking, are the Roman emperors themselves. Let that sink in. And I mean on par with that by the sources that we have for Jesus.

Historical Evidence for Jesus

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Okay, so then what are the sources? Because I’ll hear this. I’ll hear things like, I remember before I was totally convinced you’d hear things like there were 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection, which is not something that I say. But, you know, what’s the evidence, right?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The evidence is the letter written to the Corinthians by Saul of Tarsus that no serious scholar doubts that Paul wrote it. I’ve been to Corinth where literally the church of Corinth was that Paul’s writing to. It’s written in the early 50s. That tradition, though, rises up within six weeks of the resurrection event itself, which is 20 years prior.

You have 11 sources that talk of Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion within a historically plausible acceptable timeline of 100 years. So of course you have the biblical writings, you have Tacitus, you have Suetonius, you have Roman authors talking about this Jesus guy, this Christos. Yes. There’s variants in how his name is spelled, of course, just like there were variants about. There was never a document that didn’t have a variant on it.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: There are variants in how my name is spelled. I go to Starbucks, it always on my cup.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: That’s not how I.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Before the invention of the printing press, there was no carbon copy, photocopy, Xerox source. Everything had variants. And so those are taken very seriously by scholars and scholars of every stripe.

Examining Ancient Artifacts

And then I’m so excited. I want—we can learn a lot from the material culture. I’ve brought some things that I’d like you to hold, Michael, if I could have your permission.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Happily.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The first thing that I want you to hold. This is very rare. This is not a reproduction. Don’t let this get lost in your pocket. This is the temple tax coin. This is 14 grams. This is a full shekel. This would have paid for the temple tax for two. The temple tax was a half shekel.

I want you to hold this. That is Tyrian silver, my friend, dating from the time of Pontius Pilate. In other words, that was in circulation from 26 to 36 AD. If you were a Jew or a God fearer coming to Israel. And by the way, this program is airing at Passover.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So this could not be more relevant. You had to change your currency into the temple tax, which was the Tyrian silver coin. 14 grams. And Jesus has the whip. He goes and he sees the money changers. And it’s just like you and I, we would never change our money in the airport because the rates are always bad. It was that times 100 at the Southern steps of Jerusalem. That right there also, Judas was paid 30 of those.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: This is it. This is the coin.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That is the Tyrian silver coin. Also, when Jesus performs a miracle and he says, he tells Peter to catch a fish and there is the temple tax in the fish’s mouth. It could have been that one. It’s one of that. And my Torah scroll are the two most valuable artifacts that we have in our possession of our organization.

I wanted you to hold that because coins were the social media of the day. Michael, this is where if I have my triplets with me who are 8 years old, and I’m trying to kind of answer your question about the artifacts. And this shows us that what the scriptures say matter, it really did happen. Had we been there that day, we would have seen them.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: This is even down to the make believe, like the quotidian details of this coin. It’s amazing how well preserved it is.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I know. That’s what makes it exceedingly valuable as well.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I have nickels that aren’t as well.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Preserved from 2004, and that’s a full shekel at 14 grams. And so if you go to the southern steps today to the Jerusalem Archaeological park, you can hold that in your hand and then imagine in your mind’s eye what was happening during Passover that weekend. And all of the factions and cultural fractions helping as well.

I have another coin. Hold onto it. Keep it over there by you. Now, in a hundred years, I can use this coin to prove the resurrection of Jesus from a location standpoint.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Okay.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The Holy Sepulcher Church, without a doubt, archaeologically speaking, is the place where the edicule is inside. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the very spot where Jesus walked out of the tomb alive. How do we know that? Well, we need to thank Emperor Hadrian. I want you to hold this bronze coin. That’s bronze. That was silver. Tyrian silver. This is bronze.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I can tell because it’s got, you know, it’s a little more.

The Historical Significance of Ancient Coins

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And this is also very well preserved patina. Again, not a replica. This is an actual bronze coin from the second century. This is currency. So, Michael, if we time travel and we went back to the second century, right now, it would be a whole different era. And if we’re in the city of Jerusalem, we would have to say, “Michael, let’s get the coins. We got to figure out who the God is. What’s this town even called? Where are we?” So the coins teach us so much.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Well, guess what?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Hadrian, because of his hatred of the Jews, and he saw Christianity as just a Jewish sect, he wipes out Israel during the Jewish uprisings. Remember, there are three great Jewish revolts, culminating, of course, in Bar Kokhba. But prior to that, Hadrian. This is why I never use the word Palestine. Palestine, which is a pejorative term against the Jews, was coined by Emperor Hadrian, no pun intended.

Literally imprinted on that bronze coin is Aelia Capitolina. He raises Jerusalem to the ground. He renames it Aelia Capitolina, the City of Jupiter. Rather than calling it Jerusalem, he learns of this early venerated site, of this dying rising God that early Christians who he thought were Jews worshiped. And what does he do? He actually demolishes it. He puts a temple to the God Venus and Jupiter at the site of Golgotha and the tomb of Christ of the Resurrection, thereby preserving it for us until Helena gets there 200 years later, Constantine’s mom. So I can use one coin to prove the Resurrection.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: That’s called being hoisted with your own petard. I think that’s accidentally preserving the site.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Because that’s another unintended consequence.

The Holy Sepulcher vs. The Garden Tomb

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I’ve never been to the Holy Land. I’ve been invited and wanted to go, and then it’s just—

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s because you need to go with Audrey and me, apparently.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Seriously. Well, it’s better that than pulling up Google and trying to find the pyramid. But I’ve never known. I’ve heard conflicting reports as to whether or not the Church of the Holy Sepulcher really is the Holy Sepulcher.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, is it okay if I’m transparent on your show for the audience? I love the Garden Tomb. I lead tours there. So for the benefit of our audience, there’s two sites. Non-Catholics always go to the Garden Tomb because everything is magical about it. It’s a garden. The tomb is there. You take communion. It’s worshipful.

But even my good friend, who’s the director of the Garden Tomb, believes that it happened at the Holy Sepulchre Church. The tomb is 800 years older than the time of Christ. It’s just too early. And for evangelicals, now, this wasn’t my experience at the Holy Sepulcher Church. But some evangelicals go there and, you know, Michael, if they’re not used to the incense and smells and bells, the sincerity of worship, because again, six different denominations—it’s not just Catholics. Six denominations vie for control of it. So, I mean, you have a lot of interesting worship rituals happening.

Everything’s right about it. Archeologically, it goes back to the first century. It’s limestone. Speaking of that, back to our signature piece. There is a limestone signature from the grottoes, as you would call it, of Jerusalem, from the tombs that appears on the Shroud. Doug mentioned the pollen. I just had a friend who became a Christian, 88 years of age, an Ivy League man, by the way, like you’re—

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You’re only diminishing his credibility.

Scientific Evidence for the Shroud’s Authenticity

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah, that’s right. An executive, but a thinker. And when he listened to my lecture on just the pollen spores that are found on the Shroud, that bloom only in Israel in the time of Passover, if you’re a forger, how are you going to know that? How are you going to do that? And so there’s pollen, but there’s also a specific limestone signature from the soil of Jerusalem that’s on the Shroud.

And guess where it’s at. I’m going to try not to choke up at this part. This is so moving to me, because we know Jesus carries the cross. We know this is the back, right here, of the man of the Shroud. There are additional abrasions on the shoulder. Can you imagine being flogged and scourged? You’re dehydrated, you have high levels of ferritin, you’re experiencing organ failure. Creatinine’s off the charts. Your kidneys are shutting down. You’re dehydrated. Then you’re asked to carry the cross at least a half mile to Golgotha.

It weighs 125 pounds. Jesus only weighs maybe 170 pounds and less after the loss of bodily fluids. He falls to the ground, Michael. And the tradition is that Simon of Cyrene is tasked by the Romans to carry it accordingly. The man of the Shroud—there is soil in the feet, but there’s soil all over the knees and then in the tip of the nose. When Jesus falls, carrying the cross for us, he falls face down into the ground. And there’s even soil samples at the tip of the nose where he fell. Of course, he has a separated septum, broken nose, all of that.

God’s Love Demonstrated Through Suffering

And I’d like to share a little bit more. And I’m just praying right now, even as I’m sharing with this, that those that are watching will realize the message of the Shroud ultimately is God’s love for you and me.

So we have an anxiety epidemic, as you know. You’ve covered it. We have loneliness, suicidal ideation. This time of the year causes many people to reflect. Does God really love me? I mean, how do I know, right? All you have to do is look at the cross and what Jesus went through. St. Paul said in his letter to the Romans, “But God demonstrated his love for us.” What a demonstration, Michael.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Because even some people, they don’t like to look at the crucifix.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Or even, I suppose, the man on the shroud, this beautiful bronze statue you just gave me, or sculpture, rather. And they say, “No, well, you know, Christ came off the cross and then he was resurrected. But why would you want to look at the bloody, tortured body of Christ?” But the answer is just as you say, because that’s how much he loves you.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. It is love in its most radical form. Michael, I could sit here today and tell my wife, “Oh, I love you so much.” But you know what I did before I flew here last night? Total power move. I left a note on the pillow for her about her strong faith and a book that she’s reading by Tom Wright right now about small faith and a great God. And I just said, “Your faith is magnificent.” I express and translate my love to my wife in a way that she knows is unique.

How do we know God loves us? He translates his love for us in the cross. And also, there is such a lightweight view of sin today—we call it everything but sin, don’t we? Relativism has so permeated our culture, it’s become completely dangerous to have any beliefs because, “Well, that’s your truth.” We’re not going to say that’s wrong. No. Sin disfigures the beautiful face of my Savior.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, yeah.

The Physical Reality of Crucifixion

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It disfigured his face. Jesus said, and it’s quoted in Hebrew, “Sacrifices and offerings you did not require, but a body you prepared for me.” When I look at the body, I think about all he went through and what sin cost God. Sin cost God everything. It cost him his son. We have sons. I have four, you have three. You can imagine you would never love someone enough, even the most righteous person, to allow your son to die in their place.

I want you to hold the replica of the crucifixion nail, nine inches long. This is one of the most striking features that again, smack of authenticity of the Shroud. In early Christian art, we have the holes in the hands, right here in the palms. But actually, of course, for the Greek scholars watching, which there are very few, God bless those of us who are, the same word in Greek is hand, palm and wrist.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: The wrist, right? Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: The shroud gets it right. Michael, I want you to see the shroud. You can see the arms that are folded. They come down in a V shape and the penetration is perfectly in the wrists. Because a forger wouldn’t have known this. If you crucified someone and put it through the hands, it’s not going to support, of course.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Medieval art, Renaissance art, really, even art today, takes license. Takes license and places the wound in the hands. But I remember even when I was a kid, this was some good catechesis pointed out. You know, really, it’s the wrist. If it would have been the hands, it would have just fallen off.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And that is consistent with the nail prints, the scars, the wrists of the crucified man, of the shroud and the feet.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Wow. I guess this is the recurrent theme, is if it were a forgery, this would have had to be—I mean, it’s sort of preposterous even to suggest, but it would have had to be the most detail-oriented forger ever to get exactly the right dust.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: A miracle forger. Go buy a lottery ticket, right, if you’re that person. And again, it just goes beyond the pale. This is again, how much information is enough to be convinced? And we don’t stop there. If I may, Michael, please, the flagrum.

The Roman Flagrum and Christ’s Suffering

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Flagrum, yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I think it’s the most understated verse in the New Testament: “And Pilate had Jesus flogged.” That’s all the verse says. This is a Roman flagrum. I wouldn’t call it a cat of nine tails. That’s kind of a modernism. This is a Roman scourge. We know that the crucified man—as scholars counted up the amount of wounds, this is going to blow your mind—372 wounds over 120 lashes. Each lash would leave three impressions. You see the lead barbells, the dumbbell-shaped bar, and you feel the weight of those.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, yeah. So that we know that it would have had three.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: That’s kind of fitting, isn’t it? You know, the tripartite—exactly. God.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So much of this is interesting.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Or rather the three distinct persons and one divine unity, the Godhead. Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So there’s two executioners, as it were, scourging him. And Michael, in our tour, “Who is the man of the shroud” that we’re doing across the country right now, we have an image. There is not a part of the body of Jesus that was not abused, traumatized, beaten, every aspect, front and back. Even in the pelvic region. We don’t have the lateral sides in the image. We only have the front and back.

And so I estimate 700 wounds from the flagrum alone on the crucified man of the Cross. Even Mel Gibson didn’t really come close in the R-rated Passion of the Christ. That’s how bad it is. I don’t think any of us could watch it.

So Jesus—again, I’m going somewhere with this. As a New Testament scholar, I’m not privileging this because of a religious bias. I am taking this to what I personally know of Jewish burial traditions and Roman crucifixion and execution. No one was crucified the way Jesus was crucified. He’s crucified in a particularly heinous, demonic way that makes him utterly unique as our Messiah who dies in our place.

The Holy Week Prayer Experience on Hallow

MICHAEL KNOWLES: If you asked Pilate or some Roman centurion, “Hey, how come you’re crucifying this guy this way?” Especially after Pilate says, basically, this man’s done nothing wrong and I wipe my hands of it. And my wife’s having nightmares.

By the way, pious tradition. Yes, what tradition says about the nightmare. This is just tradition. There’s no scriptural basis for this.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Educate me.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: The pious tradition says that Pontius Pilate, who condemns our Lord to death, his wife has problems. “I’m having dreams about this man. Don’t get involved with this man.” And the sacred tradition says that the dream she has is hearing her husband’s name chanted in every church in the world for 2000 years during the Creed.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Wow.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: “Crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death and was buried.”

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Wow, that gives me chills.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So again, it’s a pious tradition.

Understanding Jesus’s Crucifixion in Historical Context

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I point this out in “Body of Proof” that Jesus was… Why is he crucified? Because these are excellent questions we have to ask critically, what is it about Jesus that caused this particular hatred? Well, sure, there’s a demonic influence behind it, without a doubt, but there’s also historical influence.

Jesus is not the only messianic contender in the first century. I actually list all 10. We have 10 different men who stepped up and said, “Hey, I’m the Son of God. Follow me.” In fact, two of them are mentioned in the book of Acts. They have much larger followings than Jesus. Remember the one who went out in the wilderness in Egypt? Another had a following of 4,000.

So Jesus, though I believe Pilate, who had a no-win job by the way, and he would later get on the outs with Tiberius and die by suicide. So Pilate essentially takes out all of Roman anger on these messianic contenders. In his mind that would come against the throne. And again, you have a lot of influence from the Essene Dead Sea scroll community at this time as well. Remember the Dead Sea scrolls prophesied that someday a messianic figure would come, would kill the Katim, the Romans, would kill the Roman Empire and then set up rule today right now in the land of Israel.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So one can imagine why Caesar and Pontius Pilate were a little close.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right? These were fighting words. And so Jesus has put down the titulus. Have you seen the titulus in three languages. “Iesous Basileus,” you die on here is “Jesus Christ the King of the Jews.”

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Oh yeah. “Rex Judeorum.”

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes, in Aramaic.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I can’t do the other ones, only the Latin.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: In Latin, I did the Greek, you did the Latin. Well done. So we just need an Aramaic. Now do we have any ancient Jews coming right out.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: We only have young Jews in the building.

The Lance and the Evidence of the Shroud

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Another thing I would like to point out, with your permission, Michael, is the spear, the lance. Doug pointed something out, and I want to make sure it’s not lost on the audience. Jesus, of course. Passover is happening. Jesus is on the cross. Pilate is shocked that he was so soon dead, if you recall. And yet, because of Jewish sensitivities, Pilate knows I’ve got to get these dead bodies off the cross. This is a high Sabbath. This is the Passover. This is a major Jewish festival. Everything’s at a powder keg. “Go break their legs.” They go to break the criminal’s legs. They don’t break Jesus’s legs because they see he’s already dead. But just to make sure, if I may.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I brought this. It was so fun getting this on American Airlines.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I can’t bring my Bic lighter.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I want you to hold this. The weight of this spear, it’s three and a half centimeters wide. Just to make sure. Again, back to the demonic way Jesus is killed. Just to make sure he’s really dead. Let’s just go ahead and lance him in the heart. And what do we have on the shroud? Jesus is pierced in the side through rib five and six. It goes a few centimeters up, it breaks through to the heart, the chamber around the heart. Blood and water. How would a forger know this? Et cetera comes out. And as Doug pointed out, that blood in the side wound is post mortem blood. So if we wanted to fake it, Michael, let’s just kill a guy in the process to make sure we really get the forgery right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: If you faked it, presumably it would be living blood.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. From a living man, not post mortem blood like this in the sudarium. So are you seeing the trails I’m leaving right now of evidence? I mean, it’s hard to fathom. This is why I say I believe in the authenticity of the shroud, because I’m not irrational.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: How much more it’s like to those who have faith, you know, no evidence is necessary, and to those without faith, no evidence is sufficient.

The Importance of Seeking Truth

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right, exactly. And I want to speak to that. And this is where your program is so important. The most dangerous place a person can get is when you stop seeking truth, when you stop learning truth, because you then insert your own truth, which is relativism.

Fascinatingly enough, Jesus performs his greatest miracle in the last week, and he goes to Bethany each night during passion week, 1.8 miles from the city center of Jerusalem. I filmed inside the tomb of Lazarus. He performs a miracle in John 11 and he raises Lazarus from the dead. And there are still truth deniers, Jesus deniers, people that hate God, they hate the gospel, they hate truth, they hate salvation, they love Satan and they say, “Oh, no, now we have to kill Lazarus and Jesus. We have to kill them again.”

Some people are so hardened in their disbelief, no evidence is enough. And that is a dangerous place to be. So one of the outcomes or applications of this interview is we have to ask ourselves, am I still seeking truth? Am I seeking truth? Am I a truth seeker? Or have I created my own truth? Am I foisting on some false narrative on my life? And why do I believe what I believe? These are all very healthy questions.

The Crown of Thorns

Now, what I’m about to show you, Michael, leaves this question beyond all doubt. Whether or not the man of the Shroud is Jesus. If it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. Right. The crown of thorns. I was under the impression with some kind of wreath.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, in art, right? It’s just a little…

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah, just something. Again, just for right or wrong. Influenced by ancient Christian tradition and art mainly. I’m in Jerusalem here. I’ve published 250,000 words on the Resurrection. I thought I had learned everything there was to learn until I saw the crown of thorns. It not only took my breath away, but Michael, I want you to hold this.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: And at risk of maiming myself.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes, but it’s worth it. This is the helmet of thorns.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yes, So I had heard. I remember reading or hearing at some point that actually it’s like 3D or not just 3D, but it goes around the whole head. The whole head and is really like…

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: A helmet, like a cap, a helmet. And so what do we see? The correspondence with these are 3-inch Jerusalem thorn, excuse me, Bethlehem thorns. When they dry, they’re as sharp as nails. I’m going to say to you what I said to my triplet boys here. Try to prick your finger on the end of one.

You can see this crown of thorns. The Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest gospel, it says, and the Romans fashioned a crown of thorns and placed it on his head to humiliate him. This is the king of the Jews. They place this on his head. And what do we see on the Shroud? 50 puncture wounds in the scalp. It would have caused profuse bleeding. And so when he goes “Ecce homo,” the man, you can imagine crown of thorns, blood stained. The scene would have been incomprehensible.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It also just occurs to me, looking at this, for people who will find it unfamiliar, that’s not what the crown of thorns looks like. This is what an actual crown looks like.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Actual crowns are not headbands.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Have you ever seen like the crown of St. Stephen?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes, whatever.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You know, a crown in the UK. They look like this.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: They cover your whole head. Huh.

Mathematical Probability and Authenticity

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And isn’t that fascinating? This is what leaves it beyond all doubt to me. Speaking from a historical scholar’s perspective, it could not be anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth. My friend Bruno Barbaras, who I will be with in just a few weeks in Turin, Italy, has assigned a probability to is this anyone other than Jesus? And he’s published his findings. Again, not a preacher, not a priest, he’s a mathematician at University of Turin. The probability, the man of the Shroud, according to mathematician Bruno Barbaras, is anyone other than Jesus, is 1 in 200 billion. So I guess there’s still a chance for the skeptics.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You’re saying there’s a chance, but the connection being that the wounds from this particular crown of thorns match the man of the Shroud in a way that, you know, a little laurel wreath or something wouldn’t have.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And leaves it beyond all doubt it’s anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Because the other guys didn’t get this.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No, no one did that. We know. We know of one in history who was crucified. This is one of one utterly unique. And again you come back to the personal application of this is love in its most radical form for us.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: That, you know, when you handed it to me, I thought, oh, should I try it on?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah, exactly, give it a try.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I prefer not to, if possible.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And there you go. And I love that this is the centerpiece of our interview. Exactly.

Relics and Scientific Evidence

MICHAEL KNOWLES: What do you make of the claims of relics of the crown of thorns that go back a long way? Like when Notre Dame de Paris burned down some years ago, a priest ran in because there was said to be a piece of the true crown. Do any of those claims convince you?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No, they don’t, because they’re unlike the Shroud in that you just can’t test it scientifically against anything. And so I’m not discounting it, but this is kind of my skepticism also oozing out of me again, in that when you ask me a historical question, I give you a historical answer, not a faith answer. I don’t privilege it.

And so the interesting thing about the Sudarium and the Shroud of Turin is in the Catholic Church, it is both an artifact and a relic. Meaning those are two of two. There are no other relics that can also be scientifically studied.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Interesting.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes. Because…

The Scientific Evidence of the Shroud of Turin

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Right, so what you’re saying is, if someone, if you found out, someday you get up to the pearly gates, you find out actually the crown of thorns in Notre Dame, that actually was part of the crown, you’d say, okay, yeah. But what you’re saying here is you can know with certainty through natural reason that the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo are legit Jesus grave clothes. They’re actually Christ’s grave clothes. Whereas with the other relics, you think, oh, is this a piece of St. Anthony’s bone? Maybe. Maybe it is. But you just say, I can’t test it.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right, exactly. And that is the fascinating thing about these two relics, the Sudarium and the Shroud. You test them, it is the moment of resurrection. It’s captured in history. Blinding light in ENEA laboratories, 34,000 trillion watts of energy in 1/40 of a billionth of a second. Otherwise it would have scorched. I mean, think about that. This is what science can’t reproduce, is how this flash happens.

I speak to young people all the time about the Shroud. It’s the equivalent of 6.4 gigawatts. And you and I will remember the greatest movie of all time, 1985’s Back to the Future, Doc Brown, 1.21 gigawatts to go back in time. So five times the amount of that energy to bring the body of Jesus back to life, we just can’t quantify it. We can’t reproduce it. We don’t know how it occurred. We just see the effect of it.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Wow, that’s an amazing approach to it, because I’ve come across a number of relics and some, you know, have really undeniable provenance.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: This is St. John Vianney’s heart.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It would be hard for them to fake that. Some, though, that go back to antiquity. I believe, as a matter of faith, I believe in the relic and maybe it’s got good sort of oral history and provenance to it, but I can’t, you know, as you say, I can’t really test it. Whereas with something like the Shroud, what’s the argument against it other than carbon dating? We’ve talked about the carbon dating thing. So what would be the best argument you could make against the Shroud and/or the Sudarium?

Arguments Against the Shroud

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I couldn’t make a cogent argument academically against the Shroud. I would have to appeal to certain arguments from silence in certain times. That might be the strongest. An argument from silence. Well, we should have more information about this. Why don’t we see it appear more.

But again, when I understand, when I’m infected with knowledge of history and I understand the miracle it is that before the Edict of Milan AD 313, it’s a miracle we have any fragments of the New Testament and yet we have 5,000, I began understanding, wow. It’s a miracle that we have what we have. We do in the Christian faith, have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to artifacts.

The only thing the skeptic who is YouTube smart or TikTok smart, it’s a good phrase.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I’ve never… YouTube smart.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah. The only thing they’ll wave in our face is this erroneous carbon 14 dating. And we don’t use that in biblical scholarship. We don’t use that to date anything because it destroys the sample. It destroys it.

So my prayer is that ongoing research will be done. But I have enough to be convinced that I wouldn’t be sitting here today in your beautiful studio if I didn’t think this was the grave clothes of Jesus, if I didn’t think the Sudarium was authentic.

When you look at the blood type, type AB blood, if there was ever a priestly bloodline, it would be Semitic blood that less than 3% of the world’s population has, type AB blood. When you think of Max Fry spending five years of his life studying the pollen spores and they’re like breadcrumbs on the Shroud. As I already mentioned, they only bloom in springtime. But there’s also pollen that traces the antiquity of the Shroud that antedates the carbon 14 dating.

We have pollen in the Shroud from Edessa, where it appears in the early Byzantine time, the 7th, 6th century. We have pollen from Constantinople, where it was again, it seems to always be advancing and escaping the Muslim invasions, the caliphates, and then into Greece. We have it, we believe in Athens. Then pollen, of course from France, and then ultimately in Turin.

Now, other why this program is so important today, what we’re talking, I don’t know if you’re aware, the Catholic Church held a press conference in the last few days and the Shroud will not be on display this year for the Jubilee.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I’m going to Italy this year, so it better be on display.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. I certainly want to be Archbishop of Turin. It’s not going to be on display. They’re doing a virtual thing. And it hasn’t been on display since 2015 publicly.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I wonder the first place my mind went. And maybe it’s because you just mentioned the Muslim invasions. Are they afraid of some kind of attack?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Obviously, and they’re wanting to preserve it. There is some concern, Michael, that the image is vanishing, that the image is going away. We don’t know that the image will always be there again. It’s razor thin, 0.2 microns. You know, it’s superficial, the image itself.

So this is as close as we’re going to get to the Shroud on the Michael Knowles podcast. And what’s fascinating about it, too. Do you have your phone with you, by chance?

Seeing the Shroud in a New Light

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yes, I do.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I want you to do an exercise on camera with me, if you don’t mind.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Okay.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Open up settings. We can’t help the Android people that are watching. You want color inversion settings, click on Accessibility. Find Accessibility should be near the top.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Accessibility.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And then click Display and Text.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Display and text.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And then scroll down to Classic invert. You can do this at home watching the Michael Knowles show. Do you have it? Now? Open your camera. Ooh, Michael.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, I look at the shroud and.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You’re going to see what Secondo Pia saw. Look at the face of the shroud right here.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Oh, man.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Take a picture and you can trace the entire body. You’re going to go down to the crown. You can go to the face, the chest, but go down to the nail prints and the wrist. You’ll see the abrasions on the arm. You’re seeing with Secondo Pia, 1898, in the dark room, where his two exposures took 14 minutes and 20 minutes on glass plates. And he never, more appropriately, Michael, uttered the following three words when he saw the face. Oh, my God.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Not in vain. Not in vain. Wow.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: So you’re seeing what you believe is the negative, Michael, but it’s really the photo positive. Right, and I want you to look at.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: The pictures because you can just see. I mean, may I please? Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Do you see the hair?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Am I going to see your skeleton?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes. Do you see the hair?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: This is really cool. Revelation, chapter 1, verse 14 says that Jesus hair is white like wool, and the resurrected man of the shroud has white hair, just like Revelation, chapter one says, Jesus in all his glory. You can do this with your boys. If you see the shroud even on the computer screen, you could invert their tablets if they have one, and you can have them see this.

And by the way, while you have it in classic invert and it’s color inversion for the androids, you can see the back, you can see the abrasions on the shoulders that go at a diagonal shape down to the left shoulder. You can see all the whipping. The blood really pops out, especially the postmortem blood. And again, you’re seeing it. It’s like you have X-ray vision right now.

And this is the powerful part that kicked off modern scientific exploration of the shroud. You say, JJ, when did the research begin? It began with Secondo Pia in 1898 when this photo came out. And then more higher resolution for their time, the 1930s photos came out. And that’s what C.S. Lewis has in his bedroom.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You know, I love these little winks of Providence. This might be a little bit of a bigger wink of Providence that when you mention something like his white hair, that that’s a little wink, you know.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: What does that mean?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You know, the Christian view is so rich in symbols and that you say, better believe it, you know, and even the notion that one would not be able to decipher the shroud for 1800 plus years until photography is invented, it’s.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Like God knew this would happen in the future. He has eternity. Almost as if a controlled, I’m calling it now, a controlled revelation tied to technology. As we get closer to the second.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Coming of Jesus Christ, we’re getting closer every day.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And we shouldn’t be surprised by, based on the archaeology, if the resurrection of Jesus really happened, and we believe it did with all our hearts, there should be evidence like this.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Of course. Of course. Yeah. And how do you fake it?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah. And the cool thing for your audience is I know of no other program that has all the artifacts, the Sudarium and the Shroud all in one show in one sitting. So my prayer is that this broadcast will be used for years to come to set the record straight on the Shroud.

Jewish Burial Traditions and the Shroud

MICHAEL KNOWLES: So I have a Jewish friend who I try to have at least a few of those. Yes, absolutely. A Jewish friend of mine says that the way in which the man of the Shroud is buried is not how a Jew of the first century would have been buried. And I don’t know, you got to ask him how he thinks would be buried. But from your historical understanding, does that hold any weight?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: No, no. Jesus is buried properly, not honorably, but properly, according to Jewish burial traditions. He’s buried by members of the Sanhedrin. According to the Mishnah, if the Sanhedrin condemned a criminal to death, it was the Sanhedrin’s responsibility to bury them. What do we see in the eyewitness testimony embedded in the Gospels? Two members of the Sanhedrin request the body of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. So they’re following Jewish burial traditions.

I would actually quote a friend, an atheist friend, an atheist Jewish archaeologist by the name of Jodi Magnus, who I quote in Body of Proof. She’s an atheist, she’s an archaeologist, and she says the Gospels get it right according to Jesus burial traditions. They get it completely right. Jesus is buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. The body is placed in a burial shroud.

We have the shroud at Masada. We have the man of the shroud that was discovered actually buried with an individual who died, who had Hansen’s disease. You know, the Jesus denier said the New Testament was wrong, that there was no such thing as leprosy. And then they found the tomb of the Shroud in the old city of Jerusalem. And it was airtight when it was located, when it was discovered by James Tabor. And what’s fascinating, there was still flesh on the linen garments, on the linen burial clothes showing that the person had died of leprosy. So I would just kindly respond to your friend that they need to read up a little bit more in Jewish burial tradition.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I won’t be that kind.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: I’ll be actually very blunt. You couldn’t be more wrong.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: My same Jewish friend, he objects to the Shroud because he says that Gospel of St. John describes our Lord as being wrapped in strips of linen and that the burial tradition would have involved strips of linen, not a single cloth. So what do you say to that?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Well, I would open my Greek New Testament again very kindly with your friend. And I would say there are three. My wife helps me be kind. One of my New Year’s resolutions, I would show him that athonia in Greek, which is fine linen, is used in the singular and plural in all four of the Gospel accounts, sinden is used in sudarium. Those are the three Greek terms used to describe the linen garments that Jesus is buried in.

The sinden, Michael, for your Jewish friend, is like a pita that wraps the body. It is the complete cloth from back to front that wraps over the body. The linen strips would then wrap around horizontally, keeping the feet together, the hands together, and then sometimes even a jaw band because you don’t want to look like this when you die.

And again, that is consistent with the burial traditions with Lazarus. So there is no contradiction between what we see with the Shroud and the Athonia in singular and plural in the New Testament, Sindon and Sudarium. Does that make that clear? It covers the arms, it covers the feet, and it keeps the body together. When the body begins to decompose, it doesn’t fall off the shelf, etc.

The Jewish Burial Practices and the Shroud

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Right. No, that does make sense also because there were just random strips of linen. I don’t know, you’d have, like, flesh peeking out.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You would. And the Jews did not practice mummification, they practiced burying in a shroud.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, because he had also said to me, as he was preparing me for all of my skepticism about the Shroud, he said, well, they just wouldn’t have had time between, you know, they take him off the cross at 3pm they got to get ready for the festivities of the evening. So they wouldn’t have. But I thought, how long does it take to wrap someone in a shroud?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: About one minute.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You’re right. Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And Jesus is only buried 200ft. Remember Joseph of Arimathea, his tomb, which was hewn into a rock quarry where I filmed at the edicule entrance in and out of town. A lot of people too, doubt the Church of the Holy Sepulcher because they forget that Agrippa extended the walls of the city, the Old City of Jerusalem in AD 44. So it would have been outside the city where Jesus was crucified. In Golgotha, overlooking the quarry, it’s only 200ft from where he was crucified. So we can walk 200ft, wrap a body in a shroud. And then I would remind your friend, they would also have to become ceremonially clean themselves. They would have had to visit a Mikvah before sundown. So, yes, they did it in haste, but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t wrap the body properly.

The Three-Dimensional Properties of the Shroud

MICHAEL KNOWLES: One of the notable features of the image, it’s not just that it’s photo negative, but that it seems to. I’ve at least heard, I don’t really know the evidence for this, that it’s like three dimensional.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Correct.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: How’s that?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Michael, you’re hitting a very fascinating aspect. In fact, the question you’re asking right now is what gave rise in 1976 to the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project. Two Air Force Academy professors, physicist Eric Jumper and John Jackson, they’re at the Air Force Academy’s professors. They have a VP8 image analyzer. You can look this up on YouTube and see how a VP8 image analyzer works. It was designed by NASA to study the topography of surfaces of planets.

They take an image of the Shroud and they use the VP8 image analyzer to analyze the Shroud. And they begin to notice there is a topography. There is 3D information encoded in the linen shroud that when you look at it, you see the face of Jesus pop out in a 3D way. The man of the Shroud, and nothing else did that. When they put pictures of their children through the VP8 image analyzer, they’re just marred and sloppy and there’s no definition. But when you again put the shroud back in, there’s 3D information. And that 3D information is what kicked off the scientific studies in 1978 that went on to prove that the Shroud is not a man-made work of art. There’s no pigment, there’s no dye, there’s no paint. They can’t explain how the image is there, but they know it’s not man-made. The VP8 image analyzer is fascinating.

Addressing Religious Concerns About Imagery

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You know, I’m a mackerel snapping papist, so I’m not concerned about religious imagery. But some of my more puritan friends are, my more iconoclastic friends are. And they might say, they might say that that’s a violation.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely. This is. I’ve toured with the Shroud around the world and this is a huge question. It’s one of the main reasons that Protestants are anti-Shroud. They view it as a violation of the second commandment. Let’s update the audience. The second commandment says that you shall not worship any image. That’s the good King James Version. A graven image, by definition in the Hebrew is a man-made image. You create something and then you begin worshiping it.

In all the years that I’ve been studying the Shroud now, I’ve never seen anyone worship the Shroud. I’ve seen them kneel around it and pray. They’re not praying to. This is an object, it is a reflection of Jesus that is enhancing their faith and their understanding of the Gospel. Much like when you and your wife go to Israel with me, it will enhance your understanding of the Gospel to walk in the very footsteps of Jesus. It will again show the credibility of the Scriptures. These are real people, real places, real events. We can’t say that enough, especially modernity in our postmodern era, these events really occurred. And so it is not a violation of the graven image command. Because think about Peter and John. They would have been more sensitive to it than you and me.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: They’re Jews, right?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And yet they see this shroud and then they believe it wasn’t a graven image. It smacked of the authenticity. And so many people in our audience, there were Thomases and we don’t want to put them down either because they desire evidence. Yeah, Thomas wasn’t there. Can you imagine the first Sunday when Jesus appears? He’s missing.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, in Thomas’s defense, you know when our Lord says that he’s going to go die in Jerusalem.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: He’s gone.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s right. He was ready to. And yet none of the disciples, and I point this out on Body of Proof, expected the Messiah to die the way he did, let alone rise from the dead. Isaiah 53. And we see that interpretation today, but that was not a widely held interpretation in the time of nascent Christianity or the Judaism of the first century. And what do we see with Thomas? He says, unless I see the nail prints.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Unless I see the side. What I love about Jesus. And it gives us hope because we wake up with this allergic reaction of skepticism every day. Jesus doesn’t shame Thomas for his doubts, he sharpens him.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And he says, Thomas, don’t be doubting. But bro, check it out. Check out my side. Check out my wrists in Thomas in Greek. Ha Theos. Ha. Curious. My God, my Lord, my Lord and my God.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: This is the background of my iPad. Is the Caravaggio doubting Thomas?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes. He’s got his eyes wide open and you need to touch the shroud before you leave, Michael.

What Jesus Looked Like

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Happily yes. One time I was on a show, I was on Tim Pool’s show actually and someone said, what do you think Jesus looked like? Was he this color or that? He said, we know he looked described some modern Arab trader or something. No, I actually think he looks like the guy on the shroud to me. I think he looks exactly like the guy on the shroud. But so what does the guy on the shroud look like?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: He looks like a Jewish man from the first century. 5 foot 11 inches, 170 pounds. He would have had a long beard. He would have taken the vow of the Nazirites. So we estimate that his beard grew 21 inches during his three and a half year ministry. He had a long beard. Might have even come down to here. The beard is plucked. Some Shroud deniers take an ultra-literalistic wooden exegesis from Isaiah that he was beyond recognition. His beard was plucked, meaning that it would look like mine clean shaven. That is not the force of the Hebrew.

A plucked beard. I used to have a beard before it all went gray when I had triplets, Michael. So I used to have a nice full beard. And I remember those babies of mine, if they would even pull one hair, one whisker out, it killed. And yet there is this inverted V of Jesus beard, the man of the shroud, the face of the shroud being plucked from the front. And so again, that doesn’t mean he’s clean shaven as we are right now. It just means that there were aspects of his beard that were plucked and again, showing correspondence.

He has long hair again. Nazarite vows. Others will erroneously bring up 1 Corinthians 11, a man shouldn’t have long hair, which Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church. And we forget that we have to see Jesus through the eyes of the first century. He’s a Jewish man. He is a man of his time in Judaica. Of course he would have had long hair. Of course his beard would have grown. He would have looked like many of the other rabbis of his era.

Implications of the Shroud’s Authenticity

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Because I guess because there will be. There are right now watching this show, people who say, yeah, but, you know, I don’t know, it’s a little. It’s just I would have to believe things that I don’t want to believe necessarily.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: If this is true, then I would have to believe that a man was resurrected. A man who was a man who claimed to be God was resurrected. And I would have to believe that Christianity is true if this is real. And I’m just not willing to go there. And so I guess what I would ask that person who I know is watching right now is, okay, I get it. You don’t want your whole view of everything to be changed and improved immensely and worldview upgrade. Yeah, worldview upgrade to the truth. But okay, I get it. I get that that’s very disorienting, but what’s your explanation? Right, I’m all ears. Give me. I’m all ears. I was a big skeptic for like a decade. I’m all ears. Haven’t heard a good one.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And that’s a profound question because what are the implications, Michael, since the resurrection happened? Well, it validates everything Jesus taught. We’ve already said we have aspects of 26 days of the life of Jesus recorded in the 89 Gospels. His teaching changes the world. The Christian movement becomes the greatest force for good on planet Earth, which is fascinating. Just the blessing that the Christian faith has been to women. In the early church movement, Christianity is 2/3 female by AD 80, 50 years after the resurrection. Christianity’s closest competitor was the cult of Mithras, which was a male only cult, very popular in the Roman legions.

Christianity, you already quoted Galatians 3:28. There’s neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. We’re all one in Christ Jesus. This message shook the Roman Empire. This message of unity and freedom in Jesus Christ and this whole notion that God loved us. We hear a passage like John 3:16 for God so loved the world and we think, oh, I’ve heard that, we see it at football games, whatever. That was a message no one had ever heard in the first century before that God loved someone.

The Roman deities were capricious, they were vindictive. They were a lot like us. We made those Roman deities in our own image. We like to get back at people, we like to play games with people. But this God of the Bible comes along and he treats Jesus Christ as if he lived our lives so that he could treat us as if we lived Jesus’ life. That’s the beauty of the gospel. And Michael, if it sounds too good to be true, you’re beginning to understand what grace really is.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. And you know, if it sounds too good to be true, we’ll look at the evidence.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You know, I get it. It does sound too good to be true. Maybe. But you know, it means too, it goes even deeper. Well, it goes sort of endlessly deep. But if the shroud is real, it vindicates the teachings of Christ, as you.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Say, validates them in every way.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: On everything. It means everything. It means the things that you. It means the parable of the talents that you have trouble understanding. The Good Samaritan. It means the Good Samaritan who is my neighbor. Yeah. It means hell and the possibility of going to hell.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It means grace and redemption. It means how we cooperate with God’s grace. It means everything he told us, even the really hard sayings. You know, probably the best example of it, when our Lord says, my flesh is true food. And whoever does not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood has no life in him. And the Jews debate among themselves and they don’t like it. And then a bunch of the disciples don’t like it and they go away. And then our lord turns to St. Peter and he says, you don’t go away. And he says, lord, to whom do we go? Where do we go? You have the words of life.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Whom would we see?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: And. But you gotta kind of put yourself in the shoes of the Jews and the disciples who. That is a hard saying. And our Lord says this is a hard saying. But if. And it’s not. I mean again, I’m not in any way trying to make an idol out of the shroud. I’m trying to take the shroud on the evidence that is presented to me using my natural reason, at least at first. But you know, the natural evidence is pretty good. And so based if that’s true, like that’s hard saying is true too. Right. And you have to believe that hard saying.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You have to reckon with it. And here’s the thing about truth, why I love your program. Truth has to make us miserable before.

The Truth Will Set You Free

MICHAEL KNOWLES: It sets us free.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: John 8. You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. But the truth will make you miserable. And this is true in life. I’ve been on a weight loss program.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: And the truth of me needing to be—

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I’ve been on a weight loss program.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yeah. Actually I’ve been on the—I had triplets and I enjoy eating. But the truth of my doctor made me miserable at first. You need to lose weight. You’re going to take 10 years off your life if you don’t get it. So how much more should spiritual truth first make us miserable before it sets us free? And that’s what people have to grapple with. Yes. It might make you miserable for a moment and then it will set you free.

Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” No one—that is the definite article in English and I understand Latin doesn’t have a definite article. But I am the way, the truth and the life. You cannot have peace with God and know truth. Truth is personified. I spell truth J-E-S-U-S through Jesus. That is the worldview. I see truth now.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: And no one comes to the Father except through him, except through Jesus. You have to—if you—

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It is an exclusive claim.

Evidence of Miracles

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah. If you take—if you are convinced by this evidence. And I mean we were talking about AB blood.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Yes.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: There are—for people who read about these things maybe in the paper, there are sometimes claims of miracles, you know, eucharistic miracles in particular. And sometimes it’s like fungus or something. Sometimes there’s a totally natural explanation and it’s not blood. It was like a red kind of mold. Okay. That can be the case on an unconsecrated host or who knows? But sometimes they test the host, the consecrated host, and sometimes it’s blood and cardiac tissue.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: And what’s really—it shouldn’t be shocking, I guess, but it’s always AB blood.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Always.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: From a man from the Middle East.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Every time.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You can’t fake that. And who would know that before with these eucharistic miracles? Also, to quote my good friend Craig Keener, dear friend, he’s the one who helped inspire me to write Body of Proof. He wrote a two volume work on miracles. There’s been more documented miracles since 1975 than the previous thousand years combined. Again, back to this controlled revelation. And this is a classicist writing his two volume work on miracles, Craig Keener. Miracles are happening. Now, what do I think about the Shroud? I think the Shroud is a natural effect of a supernatural event.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yes, yes.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: A moment of resurrection. I think it’s just simply a natural effect of this because I almost wanted—

MICHAEL KNOWLES: To correct or have a caveat in what I was saying when I said it’s natural because everything I’m inferring from this route is natural. But a person emitting this unfathomable amount of light at the moment of his resurrection in the body is a supernatural aspect to that.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Absolutely. And the interesting thing about the light, the light emanates from the entire body, not just the heart or the face or the head. The bolt comes from the entire body. That’s why you have this contiguous image.

The Reality of Faith

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Yeah. You’ve left me basically speechless, which is very rare. It’s very rare. It’s the title of my book, the only book I have with words, but one simply has, and I suspect this will be the case for people watching this, even those who are shroud pilled, who have, as I was, every single new fact you learn. This happens to me sometimes, certainly since my reversion a lot, where something happens, you know, some coincidence, some little wink from heaven, sometimes a little more. Shake your shoulders from heaven and you are struck with the reminder that, oh, right, it’s all real.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s right.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Oh, right. But even I, I go to church on Sunday, I try to confess my sins, sometimes I’m a little slow on it. I say my prayers, I, you know, I really believe in it. I assent to it with my intellect, you know, I really do believe in it. And yet sometimes you just confront some evidence or something happens. You say, oh, oh, yeah, I forgot, it’s all real.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: That’s right. Well, and you know what? You’re in good company saying that, Michael, because even Paul in his mountain peak passage of First Corinthians 15, where he talks about the evidence for the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus. It’s the most respected chapter in the 260 chapters in the New Testament by scholars. He begins chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians saying, “Now I want to remind you, brothers and sisters, of the gospel that I preach to you, in which you believe and in which you stand.” And then he gives the kirgamma that Christ died for our sins according to the scripture, that he was buried and that he rose again on the third day according to scripture, and that he was seen and he goes into the appearance tradition.

We all need reminders. We’re so forgetful of the great price that Jesus paid for us. And the beauty of this broadcast today is it brings living hope to us. Hope has a name. It’s Jesus. But it is a living hope. It’s the hope that according to scripture, is an undying hope. It’s a hope that never fades. 1 Peter 1:3. 1 Peter 1:3 says that blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with a living hope because of the fact of Jesus resurrection.

So, you know, this Easter season, as people are watching this, this may be their first Easter season without a loved one. Maybe they’ve buried a child. And the beauty is we can talk about our loved ones who have died in Christ. We can speak of them in the present tense. They’re more alive today than they’ve ever been before. This is why I love your program, that we’ve had time to get to the implications. The implications are what Paul wrote to the church at Thessaloniki where I was just at recently. Yes, we grieve for our dead, but we don’t grieve as one without hope because Christ died for our sins and rose again. We will see them someday. So, yes, we can grieve, but grieve in hope.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I like that too. Because, yeah, we don’t have to not be human. Like, we don’t have to be slappy happy idiots.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Exactly. You can grieve. Jesus wept for Lazarus, knowing he was going to raise him from the dead. Death was never part of God’s original creation. It was a disruption that—

MICHAEL KNOWLES: The implications.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Part of it is.

Personal Implications

MICHAEL KNOWLES: That’s the reminder. Maybe I’ll have to put that on repeat for myself when I go back to this. Because think like, if you just look at it and say, huh, wow. Okay, I’m persuaded by this, Rod. Pretty wacky, huh? Boy, that’s pretty. No, but do you know what that means, Michael.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: It means that there was a moment on the cross. We don’t know when exactly, but you were on his mind. Your sin was there and he did it loving you. And if you were the only one who ever believed, nothing would change. He still would have gone through it all. That’s the beauty of grace.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Jeremiah.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Thank you for—

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I gotta demand more of my guests. Now you’ve really raised the bar on bringing the goods. You brought the goods, Jeremiah. Thank you very much.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: You’re a scholar and a gentleman, sir.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: You as well, I think. Probably a little more so than me.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: What did you say?

MICHAEL KNOWLES: 95,000 words?

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: 93,000.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: I don’t want to over—one of my books. Does that—Anyone? This book. Body of Proof. The seven best reasons to believe in the resurrection of Jesus and why it matters today.

DR. JEREMIAH JOHNSTON: Go get it.

MICHAEL KNOWLES: Happy Easter.

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