Why We Believe

IN ITS 2000 year history, the Shroud of Turin has been the focus of many truly intriguing stories. Naturally many of the tales concern the Shroud’s origins, its compositions and its travels. Some of the most fascinating are centred on the people who have come to see the Shroud as the centrepiece of their lives and work. Understanding the Shroud and all its mysteries, telling the world about the Shroud with its history and meaning, or simply contemplating the majesty of the Shroud, has knitted together a remarkable network of individuals across continents and through time. Of those people, John and Rebecca Jackson of Colorado Springs are an incredible mix of science, faith, history and journey; a merging that makes the heart swell and the mind wonder at the sheer coincidence of these two meeting, and the clear sense that it was all meant to be.

John Jackson’s first encounter with the Shroud was as a 13-year-old boy. His mother had told him that she had a picture of Jesus and he asked to see it, and when he saw the picture of the Shroud he was very confused, because he had been expecting a portrait of the whole body. What he saw was both much less and much more. It took him a while until he recognized that it was a face that he was looking at, “suddenly, I was looking at the face and that face was looking at me, as if into my own soul!”

This first gaze upon the Shroud, even once removed in a picture, stays with him today, “little did I realize that that event was to shape the rest of my life,” but even more importantly for him is the effect that the seeing of the Shroud has on others.

His first exposure to the power the Shroud had on others was about four years later when he was a freshman at college and his roommate, Fred, was a man who described himself as an ‘agnostic,’ an intellectual type of person that John had never met before, and the two of them quickly fell into a pattern of regular discussions about faith. At one point John borrowed his mother’s picture of the Shroud and showed it to Fred, and “he just stopped and stared at the picture, as if it was something for which he was totally unprepared.” Fred asked if he could show it to some of his professors. And I realized then the power of the Shroud, and its ability to touch something in believers and non-believers alike. That sense has been re-enforced over the years after more than 2,000 lectures and meetings about the Shroud.”

 

Speaking to the heart

 

John Jackson believes that that something which the Shroud touches is the essence of human nature itself: “The Shroud speaks to the very heart of humanity. Interest in the Shroud is universal; it doesn’t matter if you are male or female, if you live in America or Europe, how old you are, or how young. What the Shroud does, if authentic, is to address the universally human question of what happens when we die. The Shroud is not just about what Jesus looked like; it is about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is a powerful antidote to the secular, atheist idea that when you are dead, you are dead.”

John Jackson’s connection with the Shroud was both scientific and religious. In 1978, at the age of 32, Jackson led the first modern scientific examination of the Shroud: The Shroud of Turin Research Project. His team of 35 specialists, including Barrie Schwortz as the team’s documenting photographer, changed the world’s understanding of the origin and meaning of the Shroud. For five intense days they gathered scientific data that has been the subject of intense examination and study ever since. Jackson at the time was a member of the US Air force, and he and his colleagues had access to some of the most sophisticated tools available then. The data they collected is still being examined to this day. There are still important questions to be resolved, including the issue of whether the Carbon Dating of the Shroud (which seems to indicate that it is too young as a piece of material to have been used as Jesus’ burial cloth). These questions, however, demand research dollars and facilities, but the physicist in John Jackson is confident that eventually the Carbon Dating ‘controversy,’ as was the case with many other issues regarding the Shroud’s origins and meaning, will be resolved, because certain data from the 1978 expedition provides, according to Jackson, “a compelling argument that the Shroud of Turin physically existed well before the radiocarbon date.”

 

Radical event

 

Many of the glib, easy dismissals of the Shroud and its origin and meanings simply don’t stand up to the rigours of science. “Whatever put this image on the cloth is a radical event that is still beyond our current knowledge of chemistry and physics. The more you look at the image structure, the idea that a hypothetical someone in the 14th century was able to do this seems like a real stretch.”

That is a sentiment that Rebecca Jackson, John’s wife, shares completely. Unlike John, she came to that conclusion as an adult, after an intriguing journey - one involving changes in her career, location and faith.

 

Inevitable meeting

 

Rebecca grew up in Brooklyn in a devout Jewish home, but an active mind and deep curiosity meant that by her teens she had started exploring Christianity. In her thirties that exploration led to a couple of significant life changes: she joined the US Army in 1982, and a few years later, in 1987, she converted to Christianity. However, it was watching a TV documentary on the Shroud that took her where she never imagined. The documentary featured researcher/scientist John Jackson, and she became so fascinated by the Shroud that she tracked down Jackson to learn more. Within a very short time they were collaborating on Shroud Research, and through that fell in love and married. When Rebecca talks about the sequence of events, it is with a true sense of peace and ease, as if being with John and working on the Shroud was inevitable. Since meeting John, she became a Catholic before their marriage in Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church in Colorado Springs, and the two of them are graduates of the 4-year Catholic Biblical School and the 2-year Catholic Catechetical School of Denver. In a sense there is no separation between their faith and their views on the Shroud, but each insists that their faith doesn’t blind them to reality and the obligations of performing correct and objective research on the Shroud, which actually makes reality easier to understand.

 

 

 

Important contribution

 

Rebecca brings to Shroud research more than just passion and fascination. If, as she likes to say, John uses science to “go into the tomb of Christ,” Rebecca brings a deep understanding of Jewish burial customs as they were applied at the time of Jesus’ death to both explain why he wouldn’t have been buried in a traditional fashion, and why that matters so deeply to the question of the authenticity of the Shroud.

“There are several very important reasons why Jewish burial requirements would have caused Jesus to be buried as seen in the Shroud, including the way he was put to death. Jewish burial customs are complex and not widely understood. If the Shroud was some 14th century forgery, not only did the forger need scientific tricks that none of us can explain, but he would have needed to be an expert in intricate Jewish burial customs as well.” Both John and Rebecca think that the combination of such skills being used to forge the Shroud beggars the imagination.

 

Double use?

 

Rebecca’s deep grasp on Jewish culture at the time of Jesus’ execution is unusual “not even many deeply devout Jews are familiar with the culture at that time and in that place,” Rebecca added, and this has been significant to the Shroud research performed in Colorado, along with its other colleagues. A significant example is the theory that the Shroud is more than just a burial cloth, and that it might have even other deeply important historical meanings. In a paper the Jacksons published in Italian some years ago, they make the hypothesis, based on liturgical studies and the Shroud itself, “that the Shroud of Turin is at the same time, both the burial cloth of Jesus and also the table cloth used for the Lord’s Supper. If this hypothesis is correct, it would represent an important archaeological evidence of the first Eucharist and provide new insights into the liturgy of the Mass.”

The question of the possible double use of the Shroud is not without controversy, even among the small group of Shroud researchers and experts, but everyone acknowledges the importance of getting the cultural and scientific issues settled. John Jackson thinks it matters to history and to our faith: “If our studies of authenticity and image formation hold up to critical scrutiny, then we propose that the Shroud, in its own way, would touch the cornerstone belief of Christianity, namely the Resurrection of Jesus himself. This cloth would have been, to our thinking, an archaeological witness on cloth to three of the key moments in Christ’s life simultaneously: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. Not that the Shroud can replace faith; it can’t. But through its illumination provided by correct scientific and historical research, the Shroud could bring us to a deeper insight of what the events of the three days of the Holy Triduum really were.”

 

Best days ahead

 

Much of John’s life and a good part of Rebecca’s has been devoted to exploring and explaining the Shroud. They have travelled to Europe, the Middle East, South America and throughout North America, taking their studies of the Shroud to groups large and small. They acknowledge that there is still much to be done, and despite being in their late 60s they are intent on being part of the on-going exploration of the mystery and majesty of the Shroud of Turin. They believe that “The Shroud of Turin will earn its rightful place in the world, and for Christianity, by what it represents.”

“The Shroud’s best days are ahead!”