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ASHLEY ON
Health & Wellness, Spirituality, and all things New.
ASHLEY ON
Ashley On - The Shroud of Turin with Barrie Schwortz
This show is with Barrie Schwortz who participated in an amazing mission with elite scientists to verify the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin and has been featured on Gaia TV and many other programs discussing this amazing artifact. Barrie runs theShroud.com website: "The Shroud of Turin is a centuries old linen cloth that bears the image of a crucified man. A man that millions believe to be Jesus of Nazareth. Is it really the cloth that wrapped his crucified body, or is it simply a medieval forgery, a hoax perpetrated by some clever artist? Modern science has completed hundreds of thousands of hours of detailed study and intense research on the Shroud. It is, in fact, the single most studied artifact in human history, and we know more about it today than we ever have before. And yet, the controversy still rages."
Welcome to Ashley On, your one-stop podcast where we talk about health and wellness, spirituality and all things new. Stick around as we delve deep into innovations to support a better world.
SPEAKER_02:Hello and welcome to the show. Today's show is with Barry Schwartz. Barry runs Shroud.com, which is a website dedicated to the Shroud of Turin. He is a professional photographer and was on a mission several years ago, and we'll talk about it in the show, with several experts, very renowned scientists who led an expedition to examine the Shroud of Turin and try to determine whether you know, it's history and whether or not it's, uh, it's a valid that it's, that it's not, uh, you know, been photographed or reproduced in some way or is fake in some way. And so they were sent on a mission to kind of debunk that or to find out the truth. Um, very interesting and a great program, um, that, that we talk a lot about, you know, his, his technical process. And then also just the, you know, the, the, the overall, um, political situations associated with the Shroud of Turin when it comes to religious artifacts. So it's a really good interview and very interesting. Hope you enjoy the show. Thank you. As always, this show is brought to you by packedwithlife.com, your source for functional mushrooms. Lots of great information there and links to awesome products that support natural healing, new neuron growth in your brain. Think about that for a second, growing new neurons, probably pretty important thing to do. Lowers inflammation and provides natural energy without caffeine. Just so many benefits to functional mushrooms like lion's mane, cordyceps, chaga, turkey tail, those sorts of functional mushrooms so check it out now at packwithlife.com oh barry schwartz welcome to the show thank you for joining us today
SPEAKER_01:thanks for having me on ashley the
SPEAKER_02:shroud the shroud of turin um that's the topic today and i'm very fascinated about this and um before i i butcher the uh the explanation i'm just going to turn it over to you why don't you just start by telling our audience um A little bit about yourself and then how you're an expert in this subject matter. And we'll go from there with our conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well, I'm going to go on the assumption that people know what the Shroud of Turin is. It's a sheet of 14 and a half foot long sheet of linen cloth that bears the full ventral front and dorsal back image of a crucified man. It's got bloodstains for decades. crucifixion wounds, spear wound in the side, blood stains on the head from a cap or crown of thorns, and crucifixion wounds in the feet as well, and also scourge wounds that cover not only the back of the body, which artists over the years have depicted, But in real life, if you're scourging somebody from behind and you take a baby step closer, those thongs of that whip's gonna come around and it's gonna hit the front of the body. And we see that on the shroud. So it's forensically really more accurate than any of the artworks depicting the scourging of Jesus that have been done through the centuries. My involvement with the shroud came because I'm a professional photographer and I operated a studio in Santa Barbara, California at the time. And I was approached by a local company that was a contractor to Los Alamos National Laboratories. They needed somebody with darkroom skills, photographic skills. And I had several darkrooms at our studio. And I did a seven-month project with this local company as a contractor or subcontractor to Los Alamos National Laboratories. And it was about atomic bombs, so I can't really tell you much more about it because it's all classified. But I spent seven months doing the project with a gentleman from that company that was contracted at Los Alamos. We finished that project, and just within maybe just a few weeks later, the same gentleman called me back, a man named Don Devan, Don Devan called me up again. And when you're self-employed and the phone rings, you're always hoping it's the next job. So I called, so Don called me and I'm thinking, well, maybe another project for Los Alamos. And he said, well, not exactly. He said, what do you know about the Shroud of Turin? And at that moment, I kind of laughed. I said, but Don, I'm Jewish. And Don laughed and said, so am i remember he was one of the other jewish guys on the team so uh he explained to me he was an imaging scientist and he explained to me that they had done a test with a shroud photograph in an instrument called a vp8 image analyzer which basically black and white video camera inputs the image into the device it displays it on a green screen monitor And the device allows you to take the lights and darks of the image and stretch them into vertical 3D space, proportionate to each other. Well, normal photograph, you get this distorted, jumbled, grossly distorted faces and stuff. They put the shroud image in there and got the natural relief of a human form, 100% accurately. And they decided that that was a unique enough property that they should put a team together and see if they could get permission to go to Turin and examine the shroud and try and determine how that image was formed. Historically, people said, oh, it's a painting or it's a scorch or it's made photographically. Some people even said by Leonardo da Vinci, amazingly enough, nevermind the fact that the shroud was being publicly displayed a hundred years before da Vinci was born. I mean, he was a great artist, but he wasn't that good. So, so, um, So they basically, they wanted to put this team together. Many of the experiments that needed to be performed were photographic experiments. And so he asked me if I would be willing to be a participant in something like that. And frankly, I said, Not really. No, I don't think I'd want to do that because I didn't want to get involved in something that was perhaps religious oriented. I don't have anything against religion. I was raised in a half Jewish, half Italian neighborhood, so Catholics and Jews side by side. So I didn't have any problem with that. It's just that I wasn't knowledgeable in those areas. And he reminded me, he said, look, this isn't about religion. Nobody cares what your religious background is. We're asking you to participate because of your skills as a professional photographer. And we're there to study the image and determine how it was formed. We're not there to determine if it was Jesus or if it proved the resurrection or anything like that. Those are all items that were relegated to people of faith. We were there to do science and examine the shroud. So although I said no initially, I ultimately agreed, particularly on his word, that this was going to be about science. And he proved to be 100% correct. There was never a whole lot of religious talk about the Shroud. I mean, we worked with the Holy Shroud Guild, which was by then only three of four priests had been promoting the Shroud in the United States since the 1950s. And the reason we worked with them is that one of those priests, Father Peter Rinaldi, was a close personal friend of King Umberto II, the legal owner of the shroud in 1978. And so he was our liaison with not only the king, but with the Turin custodians. The people in Turin were formally and officially the custodians of the shroud. So it was in their care. And the king had brought it to Turin in 1578. And it had been in Turin for over 400 years, right around 400 years at that point in time. In fact, there was a public exhibition in 1978 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Shroud being in Turin. And it was at the end of that public exhibition that our team was ultimately given permission to examine the Shroud. And we spent five days and nights literally around the clock working to do our photography and our spectral analysis and chemical analysis and tape sampling and X-ray fluorescence analysis. So we did all these scientific tests all based on determining What comprised the image? Was it a painting, a scorch, a photographically made image? And ultimately, our primary purpose was to answer that single question, how is the image formed? And after all our work, we spent 17 months preparing, five days and nights on site with the shroud in front of us. And then almost three years after we came back and reviewing all of our data and writing it into scientific papers and publishing that in peer-reviewed journals. And after all that, we really couldn't answer the one question we went to ask, which is, how is the image formed? We could tell you what it's not. We've proven it's not a painting. There's no painter pigment responsible for the image. We've proven that scientifically. It's not a scorch. I won't go into technical details, but one or two of our experiments proved it was not the product of a high temperature event. It's not a photographically made image because you need a light sensitive material or chemical compound to create a light sensitive image. And historically that's always been silver or salt silver salts and there were no traces of silver anywhere on that cloth if it had been made photographically then the image would be made comprised mostly of silver and there would be plenty of silver around it in the background maybe of lower quantity in the end there was no silver anywhere on that shroud so we could exclude Photography is a mechanism for creating the image. So in the end, we could tell you what it's not, but we don't know of a mechanism to this day that can create an image with the chemical and physical properties that we documented on that piece of cloth.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. That's quite the story. So what...
SPEAKER_01:You asked.
SPEAKER_02:No, it's great. It's fascinating that... Number one, there's something that's been passed around that long of time. It's easy for the Senate to say, well, it's probably just a fake or something that somebody came up with. I deal
SPEAKER_01:with them on a daily basis.
SPEAKER_02:So what do you say to that person?
SPEAKER_01:Look, there's plenty of peer-reviewed science in highly regarded journals, not magazine articles, not books, not blogs, not websites, not podcasts. Peer-reviewed scientific journals, some of the finest journals of the day, that published our work. And you don't get your work into applied optics and journals of that caliber unless you have your act together. And we did. I mean, if you look at who the guys were on our team, there were representatives from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, two of our team members, both of them sort of my heroes, especially one of them, Don Lin. He was head of imaging for NASA on the Voyager, Viking, Mariner, and Galileo projects. And he was a member of our team. The other gentleman, John Lohr from Jet Propulsion Lab, spent his last days before he passed away scouting the solar system for asteroids that might be on a path towards Earth to protect our planet. So these were high quality, high caliber scientists, not just a bunch of wackos as some of the skeptics like to proclaim. These were first rate empirical scientists, so much so that I learned empiricism from these guys. I mean, I've worked with lots of researchers over the years None, none have been as empirical, as honest, and true to the science as the guys that I dealt with on the Shroud of Turin Research Project, the team that was formed for us to do our work. And so I'm very grateful to have that opportunity. You got to remember, I don't have a science degree. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in photography, although I have a strong technical background, which is what obviously got me involved here. These are hardcore scientists. So when people demean them and say, oh, they're just a bunch of religious wackos. Not really. And we should all be grateful that Los Alamos and Sandia Laboratories and the Air Force Weapons Lab didn't hire a bunch of wacko crazy people or they could have blown the planet up by now. So, you know, these were all high caliber scientists.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that's great. Thanks for sharing that. They kind of knew what they were doing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. More so than I ever imagined.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So what was the, what was the fabric made out of? Like, what is the, what does it feel like? I don't know if you can touch it, but describe the fabric of the.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the fabric is a three over one herringbone weave. I'm trying to remember what the, I'm not a textile expert, so I don't always have these words at the tip of my tongue.
SPEAKER_02:That's okay.
SPEAKER_01:But it's a very kind of a complicated weave. This would have been an expensive piece of cloth. It's made of pure linen, which is from the flax plant. Jewish law forbids the mixing of the kind, it's called, so that a burial shroud of somebody of high caliber, and in this case, this would have been somebody of certainly high caliber, Must be pure linen, could have no mixing of wool or cotton in with it. And consequently, this would have been an expensive piece of linen. Now, according to the gospel accounts, it was provided to Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. They didn't tell us much about Joseph other than he was a wealthy man. And that makes sense because he already had a tomb. Consequently, he already had a shroud and it would have been an expensive shroud, a proper shroud for somebody of high caliber. And so he made that available to wrap Jesus's body. And so that's consistent with what we know. And consequently, I'm confident that this is the cloth that wrapped the historical Jesus. Now, people have said to me, well, wait a minute, you're not even a Christian. How can you believe that and still not be a Christian? And the answer is very simple. Everything that was done, and if you read what's in the New Testament describing what took place in that tomb, it's, to me, as soon as I read that passage, I immediately recognized it as an authentic first century Jewish burial. And here's why. You know, when he was taken off the cross, Just like we do today, they covered his face. He was deceased. They covered his face. We still do that to this very day. And that probably goes back throughout human history that when somebody dies, we cover their face. Well, the cloth that they used to cover his face as they took him off the cross and brought him to the tomb had his blood and pleural fluids from his lungs soaked into the cloth. Not an image, just his blood and pleural fluids. Jewish law says anything with a decedent's blood must be buried with the body. So when I read that, and it talked about that second cloth folded and separate, but kept in the tomb, authentic Jewish burial. because only the Jews put so much value on the blood that even to this day in Israel, if there's a terror attack and people are blown up, they have righteous men with clean claws sopping up the blood and keeping it with the body so that they can be buried. And I think the concept is that Jews believe in the resurrection, where it comes from the Old Testament, but they believe the body needs to be as intact as possible, and they put so much value on the blood that they made it a rule, a law, if you will, that anything with the decedent's blood must be buried with the body. So when I read that in the New Testament, the first thing I said was, well, that's an authentic Jewish burial, because only the Jews would do that. And so what we have is something that's like a document of what was done to him. The bloodstains came onto that cloth by direct contact with the body. They're forensically accurate according to a whole slew of forensic experts who've studied it. And so what we have is an artifact of Jesus. And so even as a Jewish man, I can accept the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. I mean, his life, I mean, he's got more impact in the world today than when he was alive. And so why wouldn't we have an artifact of his? It makes sense that somebody of such importance, that somebody would take a great risk in rescuing that cloth out of the tomb and preserving it. Because if you got caught doing that, you might be the next one on a cross. And that certainly the iconoclasts would have destroyed that cloth. And of course, The image itself is unique because it's not a contact image. I mean, contact is part of it. But there's imaging taking place at a distance of up to about four centimeters between the cloth and the body. For example, if I'm laying on my back and I cross my arms over my torso, I'm going to lift the cloth away from my torso where the hands are crossed. And the image around the hands is more faint because the distance is greater. So you can actually see that effect on the cloth. And so there's plenty of evidence that this wrapped a man who had been scourged and crucified and crowned with a cap of thorns. And when people say, well, how do you know it's Jesus? Well, we know that the Romans crucified lots of people and they scourged lots of people. They might have even speared a bunch of people. but only one man that we know of in all of recorded history that the Romans dealt with, where they crowned him with a crown or cap of thorns to further humiliate him. because he had proclaimed himself king of the Jews. Oh, so you're the king, huh? Well, here's your crown. And of course, his scalp is covered with wounds from a really sharp thorn bush. Now, they didn't weave a pretty little circular crown the way artists have depicted it over the years. They just took a nasty thorn bush and smashed it down on his head. And you can see the wounds all over his scalp. So everything about it tells me that of all the people who've lived on this planet, it makes very good sense to me logically that something of his would be preserved through the centuries and cared for and from a Christian point of view, certainly have significant meaning for our faith. So I see it as an object of faith for millions of people, but it's also an object of curiosity, an object of science, an object of history. And we did recently, Joe Marino, who's a Shroud scholar, called me up and said, look, I'm going to write an article on the different disciplines that are involved in the study of the Shroud, because most people think it's very simple and you're done. I had estimated maybe 30 different disciplines before he wrote the article. When he finished the article, he was up to 104 disciplines and sub-disciplines that have been directly or indirectly involved in the study of the Shroud of Turin. So it's far more complicated and complex an issue than most people realize. But those of us who've been involved with it from a scientific point of view have had the opportunity to see all the different disciplines that have been necessary to be involved in the study of this cloth to try and answer some of the questions. And many of the questions still remain unanswered. You have to remember, we did one set of in-depth tests 45 years ago. It's now 45 years later. Technology has advanced dramatically in 45 years. We would love to see another go-round of tests that could perhaps further our knowledge of the shroud and at the same time verify the data and conclusions that our team formed based on our preliminary examination. Our goal was to go back and do it a second time, but church politics got in the way for the second go-round. And in the end, we were never given permission to come back And ironically, no one has been given permission to do any further examinations of that cloth since then, since 1970.
SPEAKER_02:Who owns it now?
SPEAKER_01:It's owned by the living Pope. It was owned by King Umberto until 1983, and it had been in his family for over five centuries. Instead of leaving it to his son the way his predecessors had done, he decided it should belong to one person not to the church as an institution. If he left it to the church, it would take 130 cardinals to vote on anything. And he knew that that doesn't necessarily bode well. And so he decided it should be in the hands of one man, decided it would be the living pope, would be the legal owner of the shroud. He died in 83. The will was probated and finished by 85. And Pope John Paul II became the first legal owner of the Shroud outside the Savoy family in over 500 years. Upon his passing, of course, it went to Benedict and then from Benedict now to Francis. And so Pope Francis is the legal owner, but not the church as an institution. The Pope as an individual is the legal owner of the Shroud.
SPEAKER_02:Very interesting. Yeah, okay. So what, based on what you saw and what people have estimated from that, what was the size of Jesus? Like what, do they have an estimate on how big?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, that's a common question. And here's a couple of things you have to remember first. Starting off with the fact that this is a herringbone woven cloth, twill, that was the word I couldn't remember earlier. A herringbone twill, that's the descriptive term for it. you can stretch that cloth literally a couple of inches in any direction just because of the way it's woven. So right off the bat, you have a problem. If you smooth it out and you pull it too much in one direction or the other, you can easily distort the image. So that's one problem. The other problem is this. Unlike an artwork, which would have a very defined edge, because an artist usually starts with an outline and then fills it in, The shroud image fades out. Remember, we talked about the image being a function of distance. And as the distance around the edges of the image increased, the image just fades into the background. There are no distinct edges. So there's no place easily where do you start and end your measurements. So the best we can do is an approximate value. 5 foot 10, 5 foot 11 is the approximate value. But Think about this. In 2002, they did a restoration of the shroud, removed the patches, got rid of many of the creases, steamed it, smoothed it out. It's now seven centimeters longer than it was when I photographed it in 78. And what impact did that have on the image? Right. So it's quite possible that that kind of a measurement can never be as precision as we would if we had an actual body to measure in front of us.
SPEAKER_02:So what, you know, one of the, you know, I appreciate hearing your personal perspective and the work that you guys have done. And I've reviewed, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And I'm a believer as well. The question that I have, though, and I wonder if you can just lend some perspective to this would be why if, you know, they obviously didn't like this person. very much at all. Jesus, the character, right? I mean, we... Why would they allow him to have a traditional Jewish burial of someone of importance when they just...
SPEAKER_01:I'm not a New Testament scholar, but I think that's reasonably made clear in the New Testament that I guess it was... Sorry, I've forgotten his name. The representative of the emperor there in Jerusalem... who authorized them to give him a burial for Joseph of Arimathea to collect the body and give him a burial. And they didn't specify whether it could be a Jewish or non-Jewish burial. By then it was irrelevant. They had already killed him.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. I didn't know that. So that's in the Gospels
SPEAKER_01:itself. Yeah, it's in the Gospels. Again, I'm not a biblical scholar, so I'm sorry that I'm not well-versed there.
SPEAKER_02:No, no, it's fine. I'm not either.
SPEAKER_01:But it is mentioned that, and I'm so frustrated, it's what happens when you get old, you know, you start forgetting things. Can't think of his name, but it'll come to me later in the interview, I'm sure. Yep,
SPEAKER_02:yep.
SPEAKER_01:That's the way it works.
SPEAKER_02:So what about... What about your feelings? How did you feel? You go and you're experiencing this. You're not overly religious, you say. You've got a background around Catholicism.
SPEAKER_01:I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, you were? Okay. Pretty Jewish then. What was your feeling with the shroud? Can you shed some light on that?
SPEAKER_01:Look, I did not have nearly... the kind of an emotional response to it that any Christian obviously would. I knew about it. I knew of it. But I did not have that emotional attachment to it. But I'm sure that there were several, at least several of the other team members who were Christians deep in their faith that would have probably had more of an emotional response to it than I did. You have to understand this. We spent 17 months planning to go over there. Then when we got there, 80 crates of our equipment that we'd shipped over were seized by customs. We were there a week early to unpack and set everything up. And for five and a half days, they wouldn't release our equipment to us. So we were pretty stressed out by the end of that. We were there a week early to get everything set up. And we were one day and a half before the shrouds to be brought to us where they finally deliver all these 80 crates of equipment. So now we had to unpack them all, move them all into the royal palace where we did the examinations and unpack all these crates and set up all the instruments and calibrate everything. So we were down to the wire. So I think that we all had to somewhat set aside our emotional responses because we had such a responsibility of getting this put together and getting everything ready. So when the shroud was brought to us, we'd be prepared and ready to go. We had spent an inordinate amount of time in the planning stages. The one thing we didn't figure is that One of the pieces of equipment we had with us was a low power x-ray machine and a very low power because x-rays could be harmful to an old sheet of linen. And the problem with that was on the crate, that that x-ray machine was in was a radiation sticker. And that radiation sticker apparently put the fear of God into the Italian customs people because that was the primary reason they held all of our equipment. It took some convincing and five and a half days before they ultimately released the equipment, or that would have been the end of the whole deal. So it was touch and go. Listen, there wasn't a day that went by. Sometimes multiple times during a day when a crisis would come up and we would have to immediately drop everything and solve that issue. And that, that was continuous. It happened throughout that whole 17 months. It happened throughout the time we were in Turin. So we were ultimately, you know, under a lot of pressure. And so I think it wasn't until we got started, things started settling down. We started, uh, doing our test plan, which was detailed in five minute increments. It's a big, long piece of cloth so we could have several experiments going simultaneously at different parts of the cloth. So once we got all that up and running and organized, I think things calmed down and I'm sure that it was then as things got quieter and a little more intense that I'm sure that more of the members of the team might have had time to consider it from more of an emotional or spiritual point of view. But we were there to do science and I would say that the majority of that team probably had less of an emotional reaction to it than one of curiosity and science and hopefulness of some of these tests answering the questions that we were there to answer.
SPEAKER_02:Did it look brittle or frail in any way, being so old, or brittle or
SPEAKER_01:frail in any way? It was surprisingly more pliable than I expected. But also remember this, most of the ancient things that we find came out of the ground. They were buried and they had to be unearthed. And so being buried in the ground, that environmental factor can obviously cause harm and degradation of a cloth. Where this had been preserved, it was never actually in the ground. It had been preserved, hidden away, taken good care of. The Savoy family had it rolled up on a dowel in a wooden reliquary box, which they traveled with and would unroll it and show it to people. But it was in better shape than I expected it might be, but it was still heavily damaged by a fire in 1532. And there were triangular shaped patches that had been sewn in two years later by the poor Clare nuns in 1534. And then they sewed a backing sheet onto the entire cloth and sewed everything down to that backing sheet just to add some substance to it because it had been pretty severely damaged by the 1532 fire. So it was in pretty good shape considering what it had been through and how old it ostensibly was.
SPEAKER_02:Well, very interesting. I, I'm, uh, Really glad that you're able to join and talk through this with us today. Are you, is there anything else you'd like to share that I didn't ask and maybe I should have?
SPEAKER_01:No, look, I mean, I always leave it up to the host to fire away and I'll do my best to answer every question. And listen, I'm one of the few guys that you can get on your program here that if you ask me a question and I don't know the answer, I'm going to say that. I'm going to say, I don't know the answer to that. I'm not good at faking it, okay? And if you're going to be honest and be truthful, there are some times where the truthful answer is we don't know. And that's how the image was formed. That was the primary question we wanted to answer. And although there's still a few theories that might be viable and some that have been proven or disproven, the only correct answer is how's the image formed? We don't know. That's the honest answer.
SPEAKER_02:As always, this show is brought to you by packedwithlife.com, your source for functional mushrooms. Lots of great information there and links to awesome products that support natural healing, new neuron growth in your brain. Think about that for a second, growing new neurons, probably pretty important thing to do. Lowers inflammation and provides natural energy without caffeine. Just so many benefits to functional mushrooms like lion's mane, cordyceps, chaga, turkey tail, those sorts of functional mushrooms. So check it out now at packwithlife.com.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for listening to Ashley on Nothing But The Truth for a better you and me.