The Shroud of Turin and the Meaning of Faith

Guest columnist Deacon David E. Pierce makes the case that treating religious relics as scientific evidence is a mistake, and why he thinks Leonardo da Vinci may have created the Shroud

In June of 2024 Skeptic magazine returned to the subject of the Shroud of Turin in Andrea Nicolotti’s guest columnist article on this platform, “The History and Legends of the World’s Most Famous Relic,” which we subsequently published in Skeptic as “Unraveling the Myths Surrounding the Shroud of Turin.” Dr. Nicolotti is one of the world’s leading experts on the Shroud and authored the definitive book on the subject The Shroud of Turin: The History and Legend of the World’s Most Famous Relic. As I noted in my introduction, “If the basis of religious belief is faith, why do believers continue to insist they have physical evidence—here in the form of a burial shroud of someone whom a 1st century Jew would resemble not at all?”

In this edition of the column, guest columnist Deacon David E. Pierce, Ph.D., makes the case that treating religious relics as scientific evidence is a mistake because that is not what faith is about and, intriguingly, suggests who he thinks might have created the hoax in the first place—none other than Leonardo da Vinci.

David E. Pierce, Ph.D. has been a Catholic deacon since 2007 after converting to Catholicism in 1994 when he concluded that science and religion can mix, provided both camps are tolerant of each other and respect each other’s different outlook and understanding of life, and death. David is a former Director of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries dealing with all facets of marine fisheries management and science. He retired in 2019 after 48 years of service to the Commonwealth. He received his B.S. (1971) and M.S. (1981) in Marine Biology from UMass Dartmouth and his Ph.D. (1996) in Environmental Science from UMass Boston. He taught a graduate course on Marine Policy for 10 years at the UMass Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology.

The Shroud of Turin and the Meaning of Faith

As a Catholic deacon for 18 years, I suspect that for many Christians faith just isn’t enough anymore, and many are Doubting Thomas’s who insist on seeing the evidence for themselves. They no longer seem to subscribe to the biblical and useful concept of Christians walking by faith alone, as in 2 Corinthians 5:7: “For we live by faith, not by sight.” In this sense, the Shroud of Turin is the sought-after way many Christians need to deal with their doubts. They cannot put their fingers into the cut in Jesus’ side, or feel the nail holes in his hands and feet, but when they see the Shroud, they see Jesus after his crucifixion and burial in a tomb, then his resurrection.

In this article I would like to make two points. First, the Shroud of Turin should not be a substitute for Christian faith in things not seen and used as evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection. Secondly, and admittedly an untestable hypothesis, the argument that the ingenious scientist/artist Leonardo da Vinci crafted the Shroud is compelling and intriguing.

Faith and Evidence

Why the need for more emphasis on the Shroud being hoped-for, direct evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection? Christianity continues to suffer a dramatic downturn. Former pastor Brian McLaren, in his 2021 book Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to do About It, notes that 65 million adults in the United States have dropped out of active Church attendance, with about 2.7 million exiting the pews every year. McLaren proposed a model of faith development in which “questions and doubt are not the enemy of faith, but rather a portal to a more mature and fruitful kind of faith.” Unfortunately, many Christians have met the enemy, and it is them.

Quite surprisingly and to my amazement and disappointment, very influential and renowned Bishop Robert Barron, who I admire, of the evangelizing Word On Fire Institute and ministry, passionately and reverently declared in his 2024 Easter on-line homily that the Shroud was “the most famous relic in Christendom—the cloth that covered the body of Christ in the tomb—the same cloth we can see and bring us to belief: the moment of the Resurrection through the power of the Holy Spirit.” In 2023, Bishop Barron had over 3.1 million Facebook fans; 1.86 million YouTube subscribers; 530,000+ Instagram followers; and 324,000+ X followers.

Even though I am a deacon, I’m not a believer in the Shroud of Turin being literal, historical evidence of Jesus’ resurrection. I simply rely on my faith. I would never use the Shroud as the way to defend and prove my faith in Jesus and his resurrection. Even though we never will know conclusively how and when the Shroud image was created, religious faith should not demand or expect proof. Do we Catholics demand such proof for what is placed in the Church tabernacle or what happens when priests say the Eucharistic prayers (consecration)? Needing proof undercuts Catholic faith in things not seen.

Leonardo da Vinci and the Shroud of Turin

So, how was the Shroud created? I am intrigued and swayed by the hypothesis that the Shroud was created in the medieval period by none other than Leonardo da Vinci, at the behest of his wealthy patrons as an “instrument”, a money maker and prestige builder for the Savoy family. In 1453, the House of Savoy, an Italian royal family, apparently acquired a shroud and moved it to a chapel in Chambery (now part of France), but a better and far more believable shroud was required by the family. Allegedly, the shroud they had purchased proved to be a bad fraud.

It has been surmised that the brilliant Leonardo faked the current Shroud in 1492 at the Savoy’s request. In the late 1480s or early 1490’s Leonardo was in Savoy. The Shroud finally was returned to public viewing in 1494. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 so he would have been about 40 years old in 1492. The figure below is a display of the Shroud in the chapel of the Dukes of Savoy (miniature from the Prayer Book donated in 1559 by Cristoforo Duc of Moncalieri to Margaret of Valois. Turin, Royal Library, Varia 84, f. 3v. Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, Regional Directorate for Cultural and Landscape Heritage of Piedmont. The image was provided by Andrea Nicolotti and featured in his article).

Notably, Leonardo wasn’t a fan of the Church. He would not live by strict Church rules. He dabbled in alchemy. He was a man of science, not religion. A documentary—Did Leonardo Da Vinci Create the Mysterious Shroud of Turin?—shows how the Shroud could have been created by Leonardo using a camera obscura. In 1490, Leonardo fully fleshed out this camera obscura in his 1,286-page Codex Atlanticus.

The argument made is that the Shroud image could have been created by Leonardo through prolonged sunlight exposure of a silver sulfate-soaked shroud (making it light sensitive, like photographic film) held in a dark box (camera obscura) with a sun-lighted human model outside the box projected through a pin hole to strike the soaked shroud (like a pin hole camera). This approach, highlighted in the aforementioned documentary, is described by Nicholas Allen in his 2017 book: Turin Shroud: Testament to a Lost Technology. Here are some screen shots from the documentary, demonstrating how it could have been produced, followed by the finished product:

Here is a Leonardo quote from one of his “Da Vinci Notebooks” I find relevant to the Shroud: “Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles deceiving the stupid multitudes.”

I wish the Shroud would be further examined to test such hypotheses. The Church will not allow further examination for good reasons, although I sometimes wonder if the Church fears a scientific explanation that the Shroud is indisputably not the burial cloth of Jesus. I’d especially like to know if traces of silver would be found throughout the fabric, especially on the image, or perhaps some other photosensitive chemical.

Some might wonder why I should care about Shroud enthusiasts and their efforts to evangelize Christianity with this “direct evidence” of Jesus’ Resurrection. What’s the harm in this belief? Much of Christian faith requires a suspension of disbelief, meaning sometimes we must suspend our critical thinking and logic in order to enjoy a story, and there are many rewarding, compelling, and enlightening faith stories to enjoy that appeal to and enlarge the heart, mind, and soul. However, faith leaders pushing and “selling” the shroud as direct evidence compel me to no longer take their insistence seriously that we must have faith in things not seen. Fortunately, I’m pulled back from this spiritual dark abyss by Pope Francis, who in his written message to viewers of a new display of the Shroud in 2013, said the Shroud is an icon, not a relic, i.e., not miraculous, and he offered:

This image … speaks to our heart and moves us to climb the hill of Calvary, to look upon the wood of the Cross, and to immerse ourselves in the eloquent silence of love...the merciful love of God who has taken upon himself all the evil of the world to free us from its power. This disfigured face resembles all those faces of men and women marred by a life which does not respect their dignity, by war and violence which afflict the weakest.

I conclude with a repeat caution—one provided by Nicolotti and highlighted by Shermer. It is especially relevant to Skeptic and its readers as it pertains to C-14 dating. I’m especially drawn to Nicolotti’s concern about creationism and fundamentalism and the rejection of science in favor of what I term religious fantasizing, e.g., the denial of evolution and believing that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. As Nicolotti wrote:

Others [Shroud believers] preferred to deny the validity of the method of radiocarbon dating as such. Sindonology had by now assumed the character of pseudoscience, and it is not surprising that it drew not only on the ruminations of the traditionalists but also on the war chest of creationist and fundamentalist literature. The method of radiocarbon dating is in fact used to date objects up to 50,000 years old, which stands in contradiction to the idea of those who believe that the world and the life in it were created only a few thousand years ago. What follows from such creationist convictions is the wholesale rejection of radiocarbon measurements, as well as the rejection of more popular scientific explanations of the origins of the universe, the existence of the dinosaurs, human evolution, and so on. Creationists and fundamentalist Christians had already prepared a whole list of alleged errors in the method of C-14 dating, which was promptly copied in the books of sindonology (my emphasis). The alleged errors generally concern cases of objects of a known age that—so they claim—once dated, would yield a result that was off the mark by several hundred or even a thousand years.

Being a deacon with a science education and profession, I often struggle with Catholics believing that Adam and Eve were real or that there really was a Noah’s Ark with all those animals two by two. Too many adult Catholics rely on their grade school Catholic education and children’s Bible stories. Thus, many Catholics are fodder for naive beliefs fitting their immature mindsets not advanced or corrected by knowing priests and/or deacons. C-14 dating—and truth—are two casualties. As Leonardo da Vinci declared in one of his “Da Vinci Notebooks:”

There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.

Indeed.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters, to be published in 2026.