The Shroud of Turin: Burial Cloth of Jesus or Medieval Fake?

No relic has drawn more study than the Shroud of Turin, a strip of old linen carrying the faint image of a crucified man. Is it Jesus’s burial cloth or a medieval fake? Nephilim Death Squad put the question to Jonathan and Jacob of the Cult of Conspiracy podcast. They come at it from opposite directions and end up in the same place: they believe the shroud once held the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Here’s their case, point by point, and where it’s disputed.

This article follows the Nephilim Death Squad episode “The Shroud of Turin w/ Cult of Conspiracy” (above). Scientific and historical claims below are the guests’ as they presented them on the show. We haven’t independently verified them, and several are disputed.

Two guests from opposite corners

The guests picked this topic because they disagree about most things. Jonathan is a licensed hypnotherapist who does past-life regression using Dolores Cannon’s QHHT method, the more spiritual of the pair. Jacob is a Marine Corps infantry veteran, a Christian and, in his words, “a conspiracy head.” After going through the evidence, Jacob told the hosts that “beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt, Jonathan and I can fully stand on the firm footing that the Shroud of Turin at one time did in fact hold the body of Yeshua of Nazareth.” One of the guests credited much of his research to Father Andrew Dalton, a priest he said has studied the shroud around the world for years.

The cloth itself

According to the guests, the shroud is kept in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, in Italy’s Piedmont region, where it has been since 1578. Its current size is about 14 feet 6 inches by 3 feet 9 inches, but they said that’s only after it was steamed and stretched in 2002. The original dimensions, measured in cubits, matched a first-century burial shroud.

They said the linen is cheap material woven in an expensive way: a three-in-one herringbone twill, which is rare for the first century. One guest compared it to a Walmart hoodie and a $500 designer hoodie made of the same fabric. They said matching herringbone fabric was recently found at a Roman encampment in Egypt.

Burn marks older than the fire

One of the guests’ key points concerns the burns. The long brown scorch lines running down the shroud, they said, came from a fire in 1532, when molten silver from its container dripped onto the cloth. Nuns later sewed triangular patches over the worst damage, and four are still visible. But a separate set of small L-shaped burn holes shows up in the Hungarian manuscript of 1192 (the one usually called the Pray Codex) and in a painting from 1516. Both are older than the 1532 fire. In the guests’ view, that means the cloth existed long before the 1260–1390 window the carbon dating gave, which is discussed below.

What the image shows

The guests described the man in the image as clearly a crucifixion victim:

• Nail wounds in the wrists, not the palms. Their explanation is that a nail through the palm would tear through, so Roman executioners went through the wrist.
• Wounds all around the head, which they read as a crown of thorns. They said this was a rare punishment.
• Heavy scourging. They pointed to the rule of 40 lashes minus one and argued the shroud shows far more, along with marks from the beard being pulled out.
• A mix of blood and water at the ribs and head.

On blood type, the guests gave their own caveat. The blood has been tested as type AB, they said, but old blood tends to degrade toward AB, so that “doesn’t necessarily mean” Jesus was AB.

Two microns deep, no paint

The detail the guests find hardest to explain is the image itself. They said the threads are about 200 microns thick, but the image goes only about two microns into the top fibers. They also cited a figure of 200 to 500 nanometers. Scans have found no paint, dye or pigment, they said, and the image fades under direct light and is visible only with indirect light. The full detail didn’t come out until the cloth was photographed in 1898: on the negative, the image looks like a positive photograph.

How did it form? The guests pointed to researchers who argue for radiation. They named a Russian scientist, Alexander Belov, who they said proposed intense but brief exposure to light, and the Italian researcher Paolo Di Lazzaro. They said Di Lazzaro believes the radiation was ultraviolet and would have taken extremely short pulses (a fraction of a billionth of a second, as they cited it) at power levels beyond any UV source available even today. They also said researchers agree the source would have been vertical, coming from above the cloth. For the guests, that points to the resurrection. Skeptics don’t accept that conclusion, and it isn’t settled science. Scientific consensus on how the image formed: UNKNOWN.

Dirt from Jerusalem?

The guests also brought up soil. They said dirt was found on the feet, cheek and arm, and that later X-ray fluorescence and electron microscopy identified calcium carbonate with traces of strontium. They said it included travertine aragonite, which they said geologists match “like a fingerprint” to a grotto in Jerusalem, so it couldn’t have been faked in France. We report this as their claim. We haven’t traced the underlying studies. Independent verification: UNKNOWN.

The 1988 carbon dating

The biggest argument against authenticity is the 1988 radiocarbon test. Labs in Arizona, Zurich and Oxford dated the sample to between 1260 and 1390. The guests don’t accept it, for three reasons:

• They said the labs pooled their results rather than reporting them individually, and that two Arizona slides from about 2 cm of cloth came back roughly 200 years apart (about 1240 and about 1440).
• They argued the sample may have mixed original fabric with later repair material, since the shroud was patched after fires and other damage.
• They said the sample came from near a burned area, and that carbon dating in 1988 was a much younger science.

The hosts raised what they described as findings in 2024 dating the shroud to about 2,000 years old, along with an AI-generated face of Jesus based on the shroud, which they called “very strange.” We couldn’t confirm which study the hosts meant from the episode alone. Details of the 2024 findings: UNKNOWN.

The Gospel clue

One of the guests argued that some of the strongest evidence is in the Bible. He read John 20:4–8: the disciple who reached the tomb first stoops and sees “the linen cloths lying there,” then Peter goes in and sees the cloths and the face cloth, “folded up in a place by itself,” and the other disciple “saw and believed.” The guests take this as eyewitness testimony that the burial linens were left in the tomb.

A 2,000-year paper trail

The guests laid out the history they consider most likely, while noting that researchers disagree about some of the stops:

• AD 70: taken to Antioch, home base of the early church.
• 540: sent toward Constantinople ahead of a siege of Antioch. They said it first appears in 554 in a place whose name sounded like “Camuliana” in the audio, as the first recorded cloth with an image. It reached Constantinople in 574.
• 1204: taken by French knights during the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople. They cited a complaint to the pope that “the French took the most holy image of Christ.”
• 1349: surfaces at Lirey, France, owned by the knight Geoffroi de Charny.
• 1453: Margaret de Charny hands it to the House of Savoy in exchange for two castles. They said the Church excommunicated her for it.
• 1578: Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy moves it to Turin, where it has stayed.

Jacob’s conclusion: if it’s a forgery, the forgers got the blood, the wounds, the weave and the Jerusalem dirt so right that “we still can’t tell the difference today.”

Wear the relic

The shroud has its own design: the Shroud of Turin T-Shirt, also in the Shroud of Turin collection. For more scripture-and-prophecy designs, see NDS Bible & End Times, and for the giants side of the show, start with Who Were the Nephilim?

Episodes cited

• Nephilim Death Squad, “The Shroud of Turin w/ Cult of Conspiracy”