(Frontpage Mag)—I recently had the great good fortune to attend the SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium in Florissant, roughly twenty miles northwest of St. Louis, Missouri. This conference was held between July 30 and August 3, 2025 on the 284 acres of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. The campus includes lush woods, prairie restoration, walking paths to the Missouri River, and a two-story glass-walled dining room offering treetop views. Conference papers were presented by forty-nine speakers from at least seven nations with degrees from a variety of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, law, history, theology, medicine, mathematical modeling, crime lab analysis, and mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering.
The Shroud of Turin is an approximately fourteen-feet by three-feet piece of linen cloth that bears an image of a man crucified as Jesus was, as described in the Gospels. Image features include puncture wounds on the head, where a crown of thorns might have penetrated the scalp, a side wound consistent with the size and shape of a Roman lance, beard-plucking, facial injury, and scourge marks. Some believe that the Shroud of Turin served as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Others insist that the Shroud is a reprehensible hoax. Controversy surrounds the Shroud, often described as the single most studied artifact in history.
The agreed upon history of the Shroud begins in mid-fourteenth century France. Geoffroi de Charny (d. 1356), was a well-thought-of knight. Perhaps in 1355, in Lirey, Charny began to exhibit what came to be known, centuries later, as the Shroud of Turin.
Most participants on most sides of the debate agree on the above. Those who argue for the Shroud being the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ cite centuries of evidence from historical documents and artifacts. Going back to Christianity’s early centuries, commentators have recorded mentions of reverence for a piece of cloth that bore an image Christ. One such possible candidate for the Shroud is the Image of Edessa, which is first mentioned in the fourth or fifth century. Art history is replete with possible copies of such an image, copies that replicate multiple features of the image on the Shroud, including details not relevant to an image of a crucifixion. For example, the Shroud includes a pattern of l-shaped holes. The man on the Shroud crosses his hands, and his thumbs are not visible. Those three features appear in a twelfth-century image in the Hungarian Pray Codex. The Pray Codex is dated earlier than fourteenth-century, the proposed 1988 carbon date for the Shroud.
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