Since AD 1390, the Shroud of Turin has evoked great veneration and great mystery. The blood stain patterns on the Shroud appear to represent the image of a crucifixion victim from antiquity...

Because the Shroud of Turin has received much public attention in the news, on television and on the Internet, it needs little introduction. However, there has not been much truly recent news about the Shroud in the popular media, so I thought it was time to see if anything had slipped under my radar.

This final part of the Shroud of Turin's Earlier History addresses the means by which it left Constantinople in the east (in or not long after 1204) and reappeared about 150 years later in the little village of Lirey, France. The relic's 'good' history is acknowledged by almost all to begin about 1355 when a minor French nobleman with an outstanding reputation, Geoffrey de Charny, is believed to be the cloth's first certain owner... 

Part 1 of this survey began an admittedly sympathetic summary of Ian Wilson's theory (updated) that Jesus' NT burial shroud was quietly preserved from antiquity, but only gradually introduced into Christian traditions as The Holy Image of Edessa. This was a famous cloth on which Jesus supposedly imprinted his face and sent to 1st century King Abgar V in Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey.

The Shroud of Turin's Earlier History is a four part review of the historical evidence for the Shroud of Turin from the 1st century to the beginning of the 15th. In Part 1 a mysterious picture slowly emerges from antiquity as a cloth on which Jesus supposedly imprints his face and sends to a king in the northern Mesopotamian city of Edessa. But during the 8th through 10th centuries additional evidence suggests that this is a large, folded cloth depicting Christ's full, bloodied body.

If Biblical Archaeology is defined loosely as 'the study of the ancient things related to the Bible,' then surely the sindon, linen used to wrap Jesus' body in death, has to be of interest. Most informed Christians now know that there is a serious candidate, the Shroud of Turin.

The results of the 1988 radiocarbon dating were shocking to many Shroud watchers...

ABR subscribers and readers may have noticed that interest in the Shroud of Turin continues in scientific and historical researches, books, articles, conferences, TV documentaries, etc.