Dr Don Bierle

In the last issue of Happ-O-getics, I challenged the view held by some scholars that the illiteracy rate among people at the time of Jesus was at least 98% (they could neither read nor write). Based on the many libraries and volumes of written documents that existed even then, the statistic is quite unlikely. This leads us to ponder another question: was Jesus literate? 

I also quoted Helen Bond, a professor of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh who said, “If Jesus was a carpenter/mason, as we generally suppose, then it’s not impossible that he had some rudimentary grasp of letters and/or numbers for the purposes of his trade, but I think it very unlikely that Jesus could read or write.” 

In this issue, I want to challenge the naivety or nonsense of this statement regarding Jesus. 

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I did a brief article on the Shroud of Turin about a year ago (Happ-O-getics, May 2022, Vol. 2, Issue 5). The Shroud is thought by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus (Matthew 27:59). What was already known at that time about the Shroud’s authenticity?

• Jesus was crucified at Passover in March-April.
• The extant burial cloth size (about 14’ x 4’) is typical of first century Jewish burials.
• The image on the cloth is of a scourged, crucified, and bearded Semitic male approximately 5’ 11” tall, whose blood serum shows evidence of great trauma.
• The blood stains correlate with the wounds in the biblical description of the crucifixion of Jesus.
• The image, a photographic negative, defies all known explanations of its formation.
• The Shroud is infused with Middle East pollen.

Additional evidence has now advanced the Shroud’s authenticity to make it nearly certain to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The Shroud is the most studied artifact in human history.

The Date

The radioactive measurement of the cloth in 1988 that indicated a thirteenth century origin, has now been conclusively shown to be based on a fiber of a reconstructed part of the Shroud (repaired after a fire). New evidence is two-fold. The flax fibers in the Shroud contain a compound called vanillin which decays at a fixed rate. If the Shroud was medieval in origin there should be at least a third of the vanillin left. There was none left, meaning the fiber is much older. Second, a new X-ray method of dating was used to make many measurements of the cloth. A first century date has been established. The cloth is from the time of Jesus.

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