By Dr. Don Bierle, FaithSearch President

Travel about fifty miles south of the Dead Sea, take a nearly mile-long donkey ride through a narrow rock-carved gorge called the Siq, and emerge before the stunning rock-cut façade of the Khazneh (“Treasury”). You stand there with fascination and awe. You have just repeated the experience of a million tourists in 2022. Tucked away in the red sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan, Petra was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, and in 2007 it was named one of the new seven wonders of the world.

By Dr. Don Bierle, FaithSearch President

I did a brief article on the Shroud of Turin about a year ago (Happ-O-getics, May 2022, Vol. 2, Issue 5). The Shroud is thought by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus (Matthew 27:59). What was already known at that time?

• Jesus was crucified at Passover in March-April.
• The extant burial cloth size (about 14’ x 4’) is typical of first century Jewish burials.
• The image on the cloth is of a scourged, crucified, and bearded Semitic male approximately 5’ 11” tall, whose blood serum shows evidence of great trauma.
• The blood stains correlate with the wounds in the biblical description of the crucifixion of Jesus.
• The image, a photographic negative, defies all known explanations of its formation.
• The Shroud is infused with Middle East pollen.

Additional evidence has now advanced the authenticity to make it nearly certain to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The Shroud is the most studied artifact in human history.

The Date

The radioactive measurement of the cloth in 1988 that indicated a thirteenth century origin, has now been conclusively shown to be based on a fiber of a reconstructed part of the Shroud (repaired after a fire). New evidence is two-fold. The flax fibers in the Shroud contain a compound called vanillin which decays at a fixed rate. If the Shroud was medieval in origin there should be at least a third of the vanillin left. There was none left, meaning the fiber is much older. Second, a new X-ray method of dating was used to make many measurements of the cloth. A first century date has been established. The cloth is from the time of Jesus.