Shrouded in Mystery

I can imagine Egyptians being like, this is an unusual number of frogs.

This feels excessive. This feels excessive.

Did you leave the fridge open? Because we have…

Honey, what are you making? Because there’s frogs.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things today, Dan?

Things go great. I’m… It’s a beautiful day, and I just got back from a trip. I went and saw my mom in Canada. So that was nice. That was nice. Hi, Mom.

And swung by our nation’s capital, or at least adjacent to our nation’s capital, to attend a… a podcast convention. Yeah. Yeah.

I took pictures of the Capitol, but I… I… I never… I got, you know, I was in Virginia. I was in Maryland. I was never in D.C. I don’t think I was ever officially in D.C. Is Reagan in D.C.? I don’t know.

No, I think it’s in Virginia.

I think it’s in Virginia.

So I don’t think I quite ever made it into D.C. I flew over, though.

Yeah. Good.

Good views. You fly out into and out of Reagan, you get good views.

Oh, it’s such a gorgeous area. I love the East Coast and particularly around the D.C. area. I grew up just on the other side of D.C. from where you were.

Oh, right.

Place called Gaithersburg or North Potomac. I think the name changed while I was living there, but I haven’t been back there since. So we left in July of 1993.

And, yeah, so it’s been 30 years since I’ve been back to the old stomping grounds. At some point, I’m going to get out there.

Yeah. Yeah, you should. All right, well, we got a show to do, so let’s… let’s do that show. We’ve got… we’ve got a couple things we’re gonna do. We’re gonna do a chapter and verse, and I’m kind of excited about it because today is Plague Day.

Plague Day.

We’re gonna do… we’re gonna do the Exodus plagues, and then we’re… Plague Day. You never… That’s right. That’s important. You don’t want… you don’t want skinny plagues.

And then we’re going to talk about the Shroud of Turin. That will… that’s also very exciting and topical. I don’t know. It shouldn’t be topical, but it has reared its head again.

And… and has suddenly started to come back.

With a vengeance and in an untimely way. And I’ll explain why it doesn’t make any sense. But, but yeah, fair enough. You reminded me. My wife and I try to go to a gym nearby whenever we can, which turns into like twice a month, some months and then, you know, we go twice a week other, other months. And we brought my 12-year-old daughter a couple of times last month and it was so funny after the first day we get back in the car and my 12-year-old daughter knows nothing about gym culture, knows nothing about all this stuff. It’s like, “How come there are so many guys that are just gigantic with tiny little skinny legs?” And I laughed for hours. It was so funny to me. Yeah.

Next, next take her to a cycling event and she’ll… she’ll be able to comment on all the guys with enormous legs and tiny little upper bodies.

Yep. Ah, that’s… it be like that. It do sometimes. So.

Yes, indeed.

Our chapter and verse.

Yeah, let’s, let’s, let’s do chapter and verse. All right, so our… our first thing. We’re in Exodus and we are going to talk about the plagues. The… the ten… question. Is it ten?

Well, that’s a… that’s a question.

Plagues of Egypt. Now these are the… all of… all of you who are like me, were raised watching the Cecil B. DeMille Ten Commandments movie. Every year you have one idea of the plagues, but if you haven’t read through them kind of carefully, it’s… it’s… it’s different, it hits a little different. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about what is so different about these plagues, about the experience of reading it and why it’s… And Dan, I do need some explanation because there’s… okay, that doesn’t make any sense to me or is weird or is… whatever.

So we’ll talk about it.

So what. So what we got, the background is apparently, at least according to this, Egypt has taken all of Israel, the Israelites into slavery and, and is holding them in bondage or in bondage as Charlton Heston would say. And, and so they, and so it’s time the Lord has decided that Moses and his brother Aaron are going to be freeing them, are going to make them free. And so it’s time to do that. Moses is now. So you know, there’s been a bunch of buildup to this, but now Moses goes to Pharaoh and, and you know, he’s been prepped for this by. By the Lord. The Lord has told him what to do.

Well, and oddly, if you go to the beginning of Exodus 7 , God is talking to Moses and says, look, I’ve made you a God to Pharaoh. Which is an interesting, interesting verse. Just start off with, and your brother will be your prophet. You’re going to tell Pharaoh everything that I tell you. And then in verse three says, but I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.

Yeah, that thing that messed me up.

Like, it’s not Pharaoh doing it. It’s the Lord playing a trick on everybody.

Yeah. And the point is, basically, I am going to create drama so that everyone can. So that I can manifest my signs and wonders. It’s like, you’re going to go tell him to do all this stuff. He’s not going to listen to you. And it’s going to be so aggravating. Just you wait and see. And then I’m going to come and do my. My light show, and then everybody’s going to be like, wow, that Adonai, that was something.

And it’s not just a light show. Like, people. And, like, people are going to die.

And. And we’re going to find out that, like, it’s not a small number of people. So it’s rough. It’s rough. But. But the Lord says multiple times throughout the story, this is so that everybody in the world will know how big and powerful I am.

So. Okay, so.

So Moses is like, okay, so I’m. I’m basically just doing repetitions here for no reason.

This isn’t going anywhere, but I got to do it anyway. All right.

Yeah. And it does feel like it’s going through the motions. And we’ll get to why the first plague, they, you know, they. We. We can skip the whole, like, Aaron turns his staff into a snake and then. But. But what’s important about that part of the story is that Pharaoh has his own magicians, presumably, who pray to their own gods. And so when Aaron throws his staff down and it turns into a snake, they do the same thing and their staffs turn into snakes.

Right.

Well, there are two things to say here. One is that Aaron’s serpent then consumes the magicians’ serpents. It’s basically saying, our God’s more powerful than your gods.

Right.

But there is an acknowledgment in there that those gods are real.

Exactly.

And we talked about this in the previous episode we did on magic, that they just presumed there was. There was magic all over the place. These people were getting away with it. They were it was real. And here the idea is, yeah, these gods are real. They have power, but their power doesn’t compare. And then the other thing I was going to say is we don’t have the prototypical Hebrew word for snake here. This isn’t a snake, clearly. Anyway, it’s. Tannin is the Hebrew word, which is the same word that is used for sea creatures or serpents or perhaps crocodile. So it’s not clear exactly what the staff is turning into.

Oh, okay.

It certainly could be a way to refer to a serpent, like a snake, but it could be something else as well. But whatever it is, yeah. The point is, okay, Egypt, you got your gods, but they’re no match for our God. This is the Harlem Globetrotters playing against the. What was it? The generals that they used?

Washington generals.

The Washington generals. And it’s just for show, right, because they’re going to get stomped. But.

And, but the thing is that they don’t get entirely stomped. They kind of. And. And this is the reason we bring this up is because they kind of match trick for trick for a while. Like, they keep. They keep trying to replicate the thing, which I think becomes very weird very quickly. And we’ll get to that.

Well, in. In. In Exodus 12:12 , we have the statement that God is executing judgment on all the gods of Egypt. And so the idea is that they’re in Egypt. That’s not Adonai’s territory. Adonai’s territory is Canaan. And so Adonai is away from home court. There’s no home court advantage for Adonai here. But Adonai is acting as kind of judge, jury, and executioner for the iniquities that are abounding in Egypt, which are attributed to their gods. And so the point of this. Part of the point of this is to say your gods have been naughty, and I’m executing judgment on them.

Yeah. So now we come to plague the first. Water into blood. Water into blood. Now, you know, in the C. B. DeMille thing, he touches the water with his staff, and it sort of water Kool-Aid. The…

The red.

The red spreads out and whatever.

Is it a practical or special effect in. In. In the DeMille film? Because I never saw it.

I think it’s practical. I don’t know how, but. Well, I mean, it’s some sort of. It’s some sort of weird effect. I don’t know exactly. I think they probably did a. Like a. No, it was a. It was an effect of some sort. Anyway.

In the book first. They first do the Nile. They.

They got the film version in the book version.

Right, exactly. They. They first smack the. The. The. That, you know, crocodile rod right onto the water and it.

The entire Nile turns into blood. But that’s not it. That’s not all. All the waters of Egypt, rivers, canals, ponds, pools, even the stuff in their water jugs. Their vessels. They’re very. You know, it says the wood vessels and the stone vessels.

Yeah. All of their ceramic vessels, the wood and stone stuff.

You were lucky enough to have one of those.

Which is horrifying. And it. And apparently it was stinky, it smelled bad, so that’s no good.

And then it says. And this is the first time it says this, but I’m very confused by it. It says Pharaoh’s magicians then did the same thing. They managed to pull the same trick off, which is like, “Wait.” Yeah, exactly. You just said all the water was already blood, so.

Oh, and this is something that’s going to come up again later when. When the livestock. Yeah, like the hail destroys the livestock. Yeah, like it. It’s emphatic. Every last one. All of it. It’s all gone. There’s none left. Everything. And then two verses later, it’s like. So there were still some animals left.

Right, exactly. That keeps happening.

So that’s tricky.

Well, here’s. Here’s an interesting thing about the. The. The plagues, which, by the way, the word plague is used a few times in the story, but they’re not as a group referred to as plagues.

Right.

The words that are used to refer to this set of events is signs and wonders. I’m gonna show my signs and wonders with these signs and wonders. And so we have come to know them as the plagues, but only a couple of them are actually referred to explicitly as plagues. The rest are signs and wonders.

Point of order.

In the. In the NRSVUE, it refers to them as plagues. Plenty. But just in the chapter headings that aren’t.

Right, right, right. Yeah. Because that’s what we. How we traditionally understand them. But when we look at the first nine, we’re going to call the ten. And this is not like the Ten Commandments, where there’s a place where it says the ten plagues or the ten signs and wonders, it just says these are the signs and wonders. The. The first nine of them, they’re divided into three groups, and in each group there’s a pattern to this. The first three, the first one, there’s a warning. Moses offers a warning outside as Pharaoh is on the way to the river in the morning. The second of each group, there is a warning, but it happens in the palace, and it doesn’t tell us when it happens. The third of each group, there’s no warning.

And so then. Then you get to the fourth plague, and it starts over. There is a warning, it happens outside, it happens in the morning. Second group, or second plague of the second group, there is a warning, but it’s in the palace. Third, there’s no warning at all. And so that happens for each of the three groupings of plagues.

Of this dirt, the red dirt. And that makes the water look red, like blood.

I remember hearing that.

Right. And then. And then the fish die because it’s. There’s too much silt in the. In the water. And then the frogs try to escape, and then everything dies. And then the gnats come, and then the flies come to eat the corpses of everything. And that causes pestilence for the animals. And so there’s this attempt to try to historicize everything. But the overwhelming consensus among scholars is that this is purely a literary creation.

But the other thing about that attempt to historicize is that it actually detracts from the point of the story. Because the point of the story is that it isn’t a natural occurrence.

Right.

Point of the story is that it’s God making himself. Like if this was a thing that just sort of happened every now and then, like, yeah, it totally ruins the story.

Yeah. Because then the Egyptians are going to be like, oh, yeah, that was totally natural.

Right. Oh, yeah, we. We have. We have records of this happening before.

Yeah. But the whole point is to. For God to show their signs and wonders. So that everyone will be in awe of all this that happened. Right. So.

So I’m. We’ll. We’ll keep moving through these. You. You already referenced. The next thing is frogs. The frogs come out, and apparently it’s so many that it’s, like, in everybody’s bedrooms and it’s in their mixing bowls, and it’s in there. Like, yeah, whatever.

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a place with lots of frogs.

No, I have not.

I love. When I lived in Bellingham in Washington. I don’t know if it was just our apartment complex. We were right by a gigantic field, like. Like, we were right by the wilderness, basically. So. But we heard frogs croaking all night long. I loved it. But I can. I can imagine Egyptians being like, this is an unusual number of frogs.

This feels excessive. This feels excessive.

Did you leave the fridge open? Because we have. Well, and then.

Honey, what are you making? Because there’s frogs.

In the Hebrew. It’s just in the. The noun is in the singular frog. Yeah. And so there. It’s a. It’s a collective noun.

Can be used to. To. And, you know, like, the word oph in Hebrew for bird. Birds is just singular. And so when it talks about, oh, he created the birds in. In Genesis 1 , it just says bird. So it’s collective. But you don’t know.

Maybe he only created one bird.

Well, which would mean that there was one gigantic frog that, like, climbed out of the. The Nile. And there is an ancient Jewish tradition, an interpretive tradition that. That understands this as. As a single one giant frog that, like, wreaked havoc on. That kind of a Godzilla-like creature stomping and stuff.

Yeah, I am into it. All right, I’ll go with that. So then Pharaoh, and this happens every single time. The way that each of these pestilences, plagues, whatever ends is Pharaoh’s like, oh, my gosh, I’ve been such a jerk. I apologize. Please make it stop. And then Moses goes, okay, and prays to God, and God makes it stop. The way that it make. He makes the frogs thing stop, by the way, is that they all just instantly die.

Yeah. It’s like, this is. This is a step backwards.

Yeah. Right now we have dead frogs. I don’t see how that’s better. And apparently they do. I was like, that’s going to stink. And then it says in. And then it says in the Bible and everything stinks. You know what I mean?

So there’s that. Then there are gnats. And again with the gnats, the magicians try to reproduce the trick. I’m not sure why, but they can’t. So now we have. So apparently gnats was a bridge too far for the, for the Egyptian gods.

I, I see Beetlejuice going, I don’t do gnats. I won’t do. I won’t do it.

Won’t do it. So next we got flies and, and this is the first time that he’s very clear that the Egyptian people will get flies.

But the. Is the Israelite people in Goshen now where it mentions Goshen a bunch of times as the place where the Israelites live.

How close is that to, to the Egyptians etc?

Well, the Egyptians are kind of spread out, but Goshen is an, a part of the eastern part of the Nile Delta. So if you look at a map and you see it kind of fans out up toward the, the Mediterranean. Goshen is on the east side of that. Now depending on where you date these events that didn’t happen, you might have the, the Egyptians being located in different parts of, of the Nile. But yeah, this is eastern Nile Delta area.

All the way.

As opposed to like are we to imagine that Pharaoh and the Egyptians that keep getting referred to are in the Cairo area or where, where are they?

Again, it depends on, on where you date them, but they’re probably. We’re supposed to be understanding them to be nearby. And so during the, the reign of Ramesses, I think. So it moved around a little bit. If you date it in the 1300s or the 1400s, it’s going to be in different areas. Pi-Ramesses is the city that was built as the new capital for, for Ramesses and that’s in the Goshen area. So that’s like eastern Nile Delta region.

And that’s. That. That’s a city that is mentioned in the book.

Yes. That they built that they built this, this city when they were enslaved. And, and also none of this is taking place during a period when they were building pyramids. In case, just in case anybody is trying to find a kind of chronological slot for all of this. Pyramids. They stopped building pyramids centuries before any of this happened.

Yeah. So in case you want to apply this fictional story to the pyramids and imagine the Israelites building those. Alas, no.

Yes, Alas, indeed not. Yeah.

Okay. And also one of the ways that we know like we. This is presumed. We have talked on this show about how the Exodus as a, as a thing is presumed to either be based on, based on a true story. But like so loosely that none of this actually applies to it.

Or just made up from whole cloth. Yeah, because. Because there’s no archaeological evidence or, or records of any kind that support any of this except this story in the Bible.

Right. There’s some people sometimes will point to the Ipuwer Papyrus as. Because it’s talking about. Talks about blood. It talks about the, the poor stealing from the rich. It talks about all this stuff that, that people try to squeeze into the round hole of, of the Exodus tradition. But in addition to the fact that most scholars think the story in the Ipuwer Papyrus dates to several hundred years prior, it doesn’t fit. It’s talking about societal collapse. It’s talking about invasion from the outside to exploit the weakness of the society. And it’s talking about the inversion of all of the, the, the social hierarchy and so that people will point to that. But yeah, for the most part, there’s not a place to fit this.

It does feel very much like the Egyptians might have written about all of these plagues happening to them. You know, remember that time.

When everything went horribly for us and then we lost 2 million of our slave of, of our labor force.

And they, they would have attributed it like people are like, oh, they’re not going to write about, you know, they only wrote about their wins. It’s like. No, they, they wrote about their Ls, but they just either said these people were mean to us or they will spin it into a W. So yeah, there would have been something about all of this happening since this would have fundamentally overturned their entire social infrastructure and way of life and everything that this could not have escaped some kind of indication in the, in the material and in the literary record. And we find nothing. We find pretty smooth transition in literature.

I mean, I could see them not writing, you know, not recording things about gnats and flies. The next one is flies or even frogs. But like all of the water turning to blood. That seems like it’d get written about. And then after flies, it’s the livestock one. And what that, that one is hardcore. That one is all of the livestock. And it, like you said, it’s very clear that it says all of the Egyptian livestock, including horses, donkeys, camels, herds and flocks. And then only this is what was funny. So they all die. Only the Egyptian livestock dies. Not the Israelite livestock.

Which made me go, well, won’t the Egyptians just go and take the Israelites’ livestock? Like they, they’re the slave owners. They would be the ones who. Anyway, but yes, all of their livestock dies. Then everybody gets. All the Egyptians get festering boils on their humans and their animals, which. What animals? Their livestock is dead.

And then what I wrote down is thunder, hail.

Because. Oh, I probably can’t sing that.

You’re not Thundercats. Thunder hail.

Thunder hail.

And it. I’m just gonna quote. This is chapter nine, Exodus, chapter nine. This is verses 15 and 16.

It says, indeed by now I could have stretched out my hand. I could have stretched out my hand and struck your people or struck you and your people with pestilence. And you would. And you would have been cut off from the earth. But this is why I have let you live. To show you my power and to make my name resound through all the earth. Which again, like, what. When we were talking about.

Even though you’re not supposed to say God’s name.

Okay, fair. That’s a fair point.

Or also like story came before that prohibition, right?

Yeah, okay, fair enough. But also, like, again, this story is contained in one place only. So if that, if the point of this was to make Adonai’s name resound through all the earth, it didn’t work. It resounded through their culture for a long time. But like.

Yeah, yeah, well, and you even have, you know, the practice of Passover is like explicitly intended to facilitate the remembrance of these events.

Right.

But yeah, this, this is something that we see a lot. These signs and wonders are intended to. So that people will know that I am Adonai or so that my name will be known. And we don’t find much remembrance in the historical record beyond what is in the, in the Hebrew Bible.

In fact, we can. You know, when you look at the, the Jewish settlements at the, the Jewish garrison at Elephantine in Egypt, there are some, some passing references to the celebration of something that sounds like the Passover, but they never talk anything about this story. But yeah, it’s. And then, and then you’ve got the additional idea that when God sets their hand to recover all of the lost tribes and bring everybody back and, and affect this gr. It’s going to make the story of, of God leading the Israelites out of Egypt look like, look pale in comparison. I can’t think of a funny comparison to make. But.

Oh, you’re, you’re, you’re vast trove of. Of pop culture references has failed you.

All right, so the thunder, hail comes and the thunder, hail destroys not just so. And this is where. This is where it says you better bring in all that livestock from the fields or it’s going to be killed by the hail. Which is funny because you literally just killed the livestock.

And this is where the hail destroys all the crops and quote, shatters the trees. So now there’s literally no food sources for presumably millions of people. Am I right? Like, if there’s no livestock, the fish are all dead, the. The crops are all dead. Mm, that feels bad.

Yeah, this. This pretty scorched earth. Yeah, there’s. There’s. There’s nothing to keep the Egyptians alive at this point, except for all the stuff that is down the street in the land of Goshen. Right. All the Israelites are. Are hanging out.

All the stuff that is down the street in the land of Goshen. Right. All the Israelites are. Are hanging out. And Pharaoh again promises that he’s going to let everybody go. He pinky swears, he double dog dares them to please get God to stop raining fire hail on them. That, by the way, there’s fire in the hail. I don’t know how that’s the case. And, and so they, they. Moses says, hey, God, let up. And then Pharaoh’s hard heart gets hardened yet again because we still have more. More things we got to do now. We got locusts, which by this point, who cares about locusts? You know what I mean? Like, it feels like after all of this stuff, it’s like, oh, bugs again. Okay, fine.

Oh, bugs we can eat this time, right?

Oh, thank you. Yeah. But the bugs eat all of the remaining crops, which I guess. I guess the stalks on the ground or whatever. So.

And then a wind blows them all into the Red Sea with, with. And you can help me with this one. I. A footnote that says. Or Sea of Reeds.

Yeah. The Red Sea is a misnomer. And it probably comes from the fact that in ancient Greek they referred to this as the Red Sea. That’s not what it says. In the Hebrew, yam suf means sea of reeds. And so in the Greek, some people think red. They use like, colors for cardinal directions. And so some people think that this was like the, the sea to the south or something like that. But there. There’s just this name Red Sea, from Greek. And so we have taken to calling it the Red Sea after the Greek. But in Hebrew, in the. In the Hebrew Bible, here, it’s yam suf.

Okay. So we assume that’s referring to the same sea.

Yeah. Mo. Most people pretty sure it’s the same sea. There’s some people who think, ah, it’s a different sea. But yeah, most people agree it’s the same.

Okay. And the sea of reeds was also what Moses ends up parting later on, Is that correct? Okay. Ninth plague is three days of darkness, which. Which would be annoying. That would be a problem.

Yeah, well, it’s not. It’s not like they’re living in Northern Alaska.

Right.

It’s like six months of darkness.

That’s right.

So. And then we get to the grand finale, which is. You referred to Passover before. This is the great plague. This is Israelites put mark their doors with. With sheep’s blood. And everybody else, the firstborn of their. Of their household is killed. And not just people, the firstborn of their livestock, which there is no more livestock. But even then, if you happened to get a livestock back, now the firstborn of your livestock is also killed.

Get a livestock back. You. You went into to the store and said, give me a livestock.

I need. All of my livestock were killed. I need at least one. Give me a livestock. So, and.

And there’s a. There’s an interesting thing. We haven’t really talked about the Akedah on the show. Have we talked about the sacrifice of Isaac?

I don’t know. Oh, you know, we need to. I don’t know if we have, because.

There’s an interesting thing going on here. One of the things that, that some scholars think the sacrifice of Isaac that story is doing is something that this story might be doing as well. It might be coming up with a. An explanation for why we have. We seem to have this command to sacrifice the firstborn child. Because in. In the end of, after this story, there’s going to be this idea that I, you know, I killed all the firstborn children and the firstborn livestock of Egypt. And so now in remembrance of that, you’re. You’re supposed to sacrifice your firstborn, but not really. You’re actually supposed to redeem them. And then you’re the. The firstborn of your livestock. You’re also supposed to sacrifice, except for certain among them, you’re supposed to redeem them as well. And so for some folks, this is an attempt to create kind of a narrative background, an ideology for this weird part of Exodus that says sacrifice your firstborn children. So that might be going on in the background here.

It’s. It’s woven in pretty intricately if that is the case. But. But yeah, the idea is that the death of this lamb, and in Genesis 21 and 22, there’s a ram that gets sacrificed in place of Isaac. Here, the lamb gets sacrificed as a replacement for the firstborn. So in that sense, it’s. It’s reflecting things from other, other parts of the Pentateuch.

All right, well, there you go. That’s. There’s some plagues for you. A little bit of plague talk for anyone who, who wanted it. I. It’s a crazy story. It is. That would not be a fun time.

And, and you see this in a few different places. And even that, one of the other explanations for that commandment to sacrifice the firstborn child, what we see in Ezekiel, Ezekiel 20:25 and 26. Ezekiel’s like, yeah, you guys were just so stubborn and hard-hearted. God was like, “You want to sacrifice something? I’ll give you something to sacrifice. Sacrifice firstborn children.” And the like. Ezekiel represents the point as he just wants to show you who’s boss and he just wants to, you know, decimate you basically and punish you. And so there is kind of a vindictive streak in a lot of the traditions regarding Adonai and his desire to show off, to make sure everybody knows his name by intentionally hardening somebody’s heart. So a lot of the free will folks, when they get into this part of the Bible, are finding themselves having to engage in all kinds of mental gymnastics to make this fit the notion that God respects free will.

Because. Yeah. Because here God’s like, ooh, you know what? I got an idea. I’m gonna put on a show and to do it, I need to kill a bunch of people and I need to ensure that Pharaoh does not undermine my drama.

Yeah. Yeah. Because one plague could have been plenty.

I mean, that first plague, the water into blood. Yeah, that should have been more than enough.

Yeah. Pharaoh could have been like, oh, you’re serious. Serious. Okay, yeah. Cool. Yeah.

Do your thing.

I really liked that water, so.

My bad.

Off you go.

All right, let’s move on. We invented a new category of our segments for this one. We’re gonna call this one Artifacts and Fiction. So there is an artifact. There is a thing, we know that it exists, and that is the Shroud of Turin. And it is, just as a description so that, I mean, most people probably know what it is, but just quickly, we are talking about a long piece of fabric, sort of, kind of a burlapy sort of weave that has in it an image that looks like a bearded man with like sort of a ruddy red color.

Yeah. So it’s pretty faded. It’s really, really long. And it’s a really long rectangular piece of cloth with some holes in it, but if you folded it in half, then you have the front and the back image of this person.

Right.

And it’s supposed to be the shroud that was used to bury Jesus.

Supposed to be. I think you mean it was the shroud in which Jesus was buried. Because a whole bunch of TikTokers have been saying lately, that’s exactly what it is and we know it for a fact.

Yes. It has been reported recently that scientists have confirmed the authenticity of the shroud. Now, by the time this episode comes out, I don’t know how dead this story will be, but at the moment there have been several days of prominent social media personalities.

It’s going to be going strong. So refer people to this episode as needed.

Yeah, so there is a lot of reporting that scientists have confirmed this through new tests. But I just want to briefly cover the origins of the Shroud of Turin, because the first time it pops up in the historical record is in 1356 in a town in France where our first records of it are all rejections of its authenticity. People saying, “Hey, there’s somebody going around with this fake relic, trying to pass it off as real.” In fact, a bishop of this town in France in 1389 wrote to Pope Clement VII saying that this thing has been a part of a faith healing scam in which people were hired to pretend to be sick. And then once the shroud was brought to them or they were brought to the shroud, they would suddenly pop up and, “Hey, I can walk again,” and you know, they have been healed.

And according to this letter that was written to Pope Clement VII, after a thorough investigation, they found the artist who created it and he admitted to having painted it, what, 1389.

Oh wow.

However, it makes its way to, to Turin where it has become cemented in, in the, in the lore.

So Turin is, is Torino, Italy.

Yeah, yeah. So there have been tests run on this thing for years. And in 2019, and then again in 2022, there were a team of Italian scientists who published a couple of papers in an open access journal called Heritage. And the 2019 paper was called X ray dating of ancient linen fabrics. And then the 2022 paper was called X ray dating of a Turin Shroud’s linen sample. And they’re engaged in something called wide angle X ray scattering, which is, that sounds very sciency. It is very sciency, but it is new sciency. It is something that has not been. This is the, these are the first actual publications of attempts to use this to date fabric. And so it is an innovative means of testing and it has not been well established. It’s just these two papers. And what they’re suggesting is, look, we got the, we got some fabric that was found at Masada, so we can date very securely this fabric to the first century CE.

And then we’re, we’re doing this wide angle X ray scattering analysis on that fabric and then this fabric and other pieces of fabric and we’re going to try to basically calibrate this, this way of testing it. And, and they claim that the results from the Shroud of Turin are consistent with 2000 year old fabric. Although, and here’s the part that baffles me, they suggest that the results only work if the Shroud has been kept in an environment with a temperature that averages between 68 and 72.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Which is not the Eastern Mediterranean.

Right.

You get degrees much lower than that, particularly during the night and during the day and during, during certain periods of the year, temperatures much, much higher than that.

Right.

And so there are going to be criticisms of these papers, but it’s these papers that people are suddenly in the year of our Lord 2024, becoming aware of and saying new, new science just dropped that has proven that it is authentic. When it’s really just this claim that, hey, this new kind of testing could suggest it’s 2,000 years old.

Even if that testing was a hundred percent accurate, the most that it would be capable of doing is telling us that, that is telling us a date for that fabric potentially that still doesn’t get us anywhere near. This was definitely the thing that Jesus himself was buried in.

And, and there are a bunch of problems with even that, because this fabric is a particular kind of weave, a herringbone weave that requires a specific kind of loom. Unless you’re doing it by hand, running a little shuttle back and forth right by hand, which is not something that they did 2,000 years ago for long pieces of fabric. This particular weave was not done.

And that particular type of loom was not existing 2,000 years ago. It was very common in the 14th century, though.

And are you denying the miracle of the loomed weave fabric?

I am suggesting that the data do not support the antiquity of this. And there are a bunch of other things. I saw the Daily Mail, like, posted a video, scientists have come to a chilling discovery. And then like two days later, they did another video. It was like, scientists have arrived at another chilling discovery. And then they shared this. This. They said scientists looked at the blood, the blood stains that were evidently on the fabric, and they determined that they had the owner of that blood, had suffered from severe trauma, had been tortured.

And how do you determine that from the blood?

Well, they suggested the. There were certain chemicals and things like that, that the blood reacted a certain way. That usually happens when there is some kind of torture going on.

Just like a high amount of cortisol or something.

Something like that. The. And what the Daily Mail piece forgot to go look up was the fact that this was a. This was a paper that was published in 2017 and was retracted by the journal that published it shortly thereafter. The editors commented, concerns have been raised that the data presented in this article are not sufficient to support the conclusions drawn.

And here we are. Shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Indeed. So the, the chilling discovery is actually just a chilling misrepresentation of, of the science.

Yeah. Now it’s so weird to me because even if all of the, the nonsense that has been presented about this turned out to be true, it’s still not evidence of what they’re claiming it’s evidence of. Yeah, like it’s.

You know, if you, if you can find that. I mean, I, I did a TikTok live fairly recently and someone, you know, I was chatting with somebody, and she was a very sweet person, but was like this. They even tested the blood, and it was the same blood type as Jesus. And I said, how. How do you know what Jesus’s blood type is? Where is that? Somewhere buried in Matthew? It’s like, and, lo, the Lord was O negative. What are we talking about?

Yeah, yeah, there, there’s an awful lot that, that is riding on faith, which is, which is an interesting part of this because you have their, oh, what do they call them? Oh, I don’t think they call them authenticists, but they, they have a, some of the scientists who work on this kind of stuff. They have a, a label for the folks who are dogmatically committed to the authenticity of the Shroud. And, like, one of the people who worked on one of those studies from 2019, 2022 and 2017, like, claimed in an interview that they had personal revelation in the 90s while they were standing in front of the Shroud that it was authentic. And it’s like, you can’t, you can’t reason with that level of commitment to that dogma. You cannot reason with that, nor should you.

I mean, like, at that point, just admit that this is a, this is a faith belief.

Right.

And don’t worry about proving it. Just, just keep believing it.

Yeah. And then in 1988, there was radiocarbon testing done on, they took a patch from the, or I don’t want to say patch, because people are, I’ll get to the reason why, but they took a piece of the Shroud and they divided it up into a bunch of different pieces and sent it away to three different laboratories for radiocarbon dating. And this was all blind. None of the laboratories knew what the other laboratories were doing. They all come up with roughly the same result. This dates to the mid-1200s to the late 1300s CE.

When was the first time that anyone ever mentioned the Shroud of Turin? In the mid-1300s CE. So, medieval production.

Right.

And immediately afterwards, of course, you have a bunch of people crying foul that they did it all wrong and that, oh, and there was one person who published a study suggesting that the radiocarbon dating had actually come from a patch that had been sewn into the Shroud that was of medieval production.

But if you go read the 1988 paper where they talk about the radiocarbon dating, they’re like, we took this piece from just this part of the Shroud that was not near any patches.

Right.

And, and the claim is that this was a patch that was so expertly woven into the Shroud that it is impossible to detect with the naked eye. So it’s an invisible patch.

Right.

But it’s of medieval production, unlike the rest of the Shroud. And, but then there, there have been studies done more recently than that that have said no, we’ve relooked at all of this stuff. And the argument that they’re using for how this can be a patch doesn’t fit the data there. You’re going to have back and forth until the Earth crashes into the sun or the sun engulfs the Earth, whichever happens first. There’s going to be back and forth about this because this is a matter of dogma. This is not a matter of critical thinking or rational thought for some folks.

Which if, yeah, I mean, the thing that miffs me, I guess, about things like this is that when you, is that if they just leave it in the realm of this is a dogma that we, that we believe, that’s one thing.

And that’s, that’s where the cries of persecution ring hollow. It’s like if you’re going to, if you’re going to start talking about scientific data and you’re going to start trying to prove all of this stuff. Yeah. You’re going to be criticized for it because you are in, in another person, you’re in the realm of scientific inquiry. There’s a, there’s another scientist, Luigi Garlaschelli, I think his name is. Is pronounced. He and some other scientists have done a few different analyses on this. They looked at the blood. So there’s supposed to be some blood stains on the, on the shroud showed that. Tested how blood would drip and flow with the arms in various orientations and showed that whoever this was here, that blood could not have flowed the way it did with them laying down. They had to have been standing upright for that.

Oh, wow.

Blood to flow the way they did. And they also pointed out there, there is blood that is like flowing on top of hair. And they’re like, blood does not flow over hair. If you have an injured scalp, the blood just mats. But when you look at the, at the, at the shroud, you see curly little rivulets of, of blood flowing across the top of hair. So it is, it is very clearly a, a product of the 14th century or maybe the late 13th century, an artistic work. We have that testimony of the thing.

That almost nobody is talking about. I never see anybody say this. Maybe they do and I just haven’t heard it. I just haven’t come across it. Is that it’s not very well rendered. It doesn’t like, proportionally, it doesn’t look correct for a human face.

Correct.

It’s not the right proportions for a person.

Right. And it’s. The head is too small for the body.

Right.

The, it shows the feet laying flat. Oh, not, not upright laying flat, which you cannot do without at least a 90 degree bend in your knees, which is not what happened. But, and there are so many other problems with it. Like if you, the hands are covering up the genitals conveniently, but if you lay flat and cover, cover yourself with your hands and then you just go limp. Your, your hands separate because your elbows fall to the floor. That is not a natural position. And the, the one of the hands is grotesquely longer than, than the others or the other. And, and it also doesn’t fit historically, according to the practices of the time period, a dead body, the first thing that would have happened to it as they prepared it for burial before they wrapped it in any kind of shroud would have been to clean the body.

Right.

Clean off all the blood. And then they would have applied all kinds of oils and, and things to it. And then they would have wrapped it in some, a few layers of a very thin fabric and then they would have put a shroud over top of it. So it doesn’t fit historically either. There, there are far too many problems with this for, for it to be, continue to be taken seriously. And, and some people have said, oh well, no one has ever been able to reproduce it. Also false.

Right.

This guy, Garlaschelli, he was like, oh, I can do it. And showed that if you take. There was a. Back in the 80s, one of the guys who was invited to be on the little team of, of shroud scientists who was the pioneer of microscopic analysis, was like, oh, there’s no blood anywhere on this shroud. This is all red ochre and vermilion and things like that. It’s paint.

And it is, it is deteriorated. And what’s left is just the chemical etching on the fabric of this. Of this chemical sitting on it for centuries. But this other guy was like, oh, so let’s just take some red ochre, some vermilion and some other stuff, and we’re going to lay a piece of fabric over top of a bas-relief showing this face. And I’m going to do kind of a rubbing with this ink. And then he stuck it in an oven for a little while to try to simulate centuries of. Of wear and tear and everything. And then washed the paint off and showed that the. Just having the paint on there baked to simulate that aging and actually created an image on the fabric that the paint was gone, but that chemical etching remained and was like, this is how it was done.

I have a question. What blood type was the red ochre?

I’m trying to think of, of paint brands, and I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Sherwin-Williams negative. I, you know, it’s—I referenced it earlier, but it does, it does—I want to reiterate it. I don’t know why I got into a little bit of a, you know, our friend, friend of the show, David Burnett, posted on Facebook a thing about “Enough with the Shroud of Turin already.” And somebody piped in and was like—because he’s like, there’s no evidence for it. And somebody’s like, “Do you mean no evidence as in zero, other than the fact it clearly displays the imprint of a man who suffered in a way consistent with the manner Jesus’ death was described in the Gospels?” And I just thought, yeah, okay, it—that’s what we see there. But Jesus is not the only person that could possibly have suffered in that way. Like, yeah, people need to be better about understanding what something is evidence for.

And, and you know, if you were going to fake something like this, you would try to make it match the story that you’re trying to.

Right? Yeah. If I’m, if I’m a guy who’s walking around with an artifact trying to tell people that they can have faith healings because of it, I’m gonna try to make it look a lot like Jesus’s shroud would look. I’m gonna put things—holes in the hands. I’m gonna put, you know, crown of thorns blood on the head. And yeah, you’re going to—that’s exactly what you would do.

And the, and the—I don’t know if you’ve seen this as well, but there’s been, in response to the, you know, science has proven the authenticity of the shroud, somebody used AI to try to recreate what Jesus would have looked like based on the Shroud. And it’s, it’s white European Jesus, right? From, from the medieval European arts world. And it’s no coincidence that the Jesus on the Shroud happens to match the depiction of Jesus, including the artistic styles that were in vogue during the time period that the Shroud suddenly popped up on the scene. Like that’s what we would expect. But as, as I am wont to say on my social media channels, learn to think critically and google competently. That’s right. And you can free yourself from the grips of these dogmas.

And you’ll learn an awful lot of cool stuff along the way too.

I think that’s a great place to close us out. Yep, a good final message. Get out there and critically think and google—and competently Google—everybody. And with that, that’ll be it for the show. If you would like to help make our show go, and in so doing, get yourself access to an early and ad-free version of every episode as well as the potential if you, if you’re at the right level to get the extra bonus content every single week, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you want to reach us, it’s contact at dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Shrouded in Mystery

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The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology