(2) A forger would probably not have produced such a shroud. Although the Shroud is harmonious with the gospel accounts of Jesus’ burial, a person reading John’s gospel would probably have gotten a different impression. He would probably have thought Jesus’ body was wrapped like a mummy. But there is no indication that this was the burial custom of the Jews, and closer analysis of John’s description of Jesus’ burial and comparison with John’s description of Lazarus’ burial (John 11:44) makes it plausible to suppose that the body was usually bound at the hands and feet, its jaw bound, and the whole wrapped in a linen cloth. But a medieval forger would probably not have known that. Nor would he have known to put the nail wound in the wrist rather than in the hand. All medieval paintings show the wounds in the hands, but this position of the nail could not support the weight of the body, as was discovered by a French surgeon in 1931. The word in the gospels for “hand” includes the wrist and forearm as well, and victims were crucified by their wrists, a fact no medieval forger could know.
(3) There are no known means of producing the image on the Shroud. The first photographs of the Shroud in 1898 revealed it to be a negative photographic image with lights and darks reversed. How could a medieval artist hundreds of years before photography have produced such a negative image? In 1973 it was discovered that the image lies only on the topmost fibrils of the threads and there is no trace of pigment. The most recent investigations confirm this, but found that the blood stains had penetrated the cloth, indicating that the blood had absorbed into the cloth while the man’s image only colors its surface. No painting could have produced such an image. That conclusion is reinforced by the evidence concerning a fire that damaged the Shroud in 1532. The heat of the fire and the water used to extinguish it would have discolored the image nearest the burn area. But there is no trace of such an effect: the color of the image is constant right up to the burn marks.
The painting hypothesis was decisively discredited as a result of perhaps the most amazing find of all concerning the Shroud. Using a VP-8 Image Analyzer, an instrument designed to study the relief of the surface of the moon and Mars, scientists discovered to their astonishment that the image contains perfectly three-dimensional data, such that the original body that produced the image can actually be molded. No painting or ordinary photograph yields such three-dimensional data. It has been suggested that the image may have been produced by a forger’s scorching the cloth, perhaps laying it over a heated statue. But the problem with this hypothesis is that such a scorch would be deeper where the most contact was made, for example, the nose. But in fact this does not occur; each fibril is an identical shade, and certain areas are darker only because there are more colored fibrils there. Hence, there is just no known mechanism by which a medieval forger could have produced this image. According to one member of the team of American scientists—all of whom, by the way, were skeptical before they began their research—who was interviewed on the television program “20/20,” “Very conservatively, very conservatively, the odds of the shroud being a forgery are about one in ten million.”
If the Shroud is not a fake, then the next question is naturally: is the man on the Shroud Jesus? There seems to be little reason to doubt that it is. Why would the burial cloth of any common criminal executed by crucifixion be preserved? Moreover, the puncture wounds on the upper part of the victim’s head seem to have been made by the crown of thorns that Jesus was forced to wear. Since that crown was in mockery of His claim to be King of the Jews, the presence of these wounds on the Shroud is like Jesus’ signature, since no other criminal would wear such a crown. If the Shroud is not a forgery, then it is probably Jesus’ image on the cloth.
How the image came to be is, not important here, for I am not saying it was produced by the resurrection. I am merely pointing out that the authenticity of the Shroud would confirm the burial story of Jesus—that He was indeed wrapped in the linen cloth and laid in the tomb, which we have seen to have been Joseph’s, just as the gospels say He was.
If the account of Jesus’ burial is historically reliable, then the tomb of Jesus must have been known to Jew and Christian alike. And if the site of the tomb was known, then the tomb must have been found empty, otherwise belief in the resurrection would have been impossible. Therefore the historical reliability of the burial account, which is accepted by far and away the most scholars, is strong evidence for the empty tomb.
2. Paul’s testimony guarantees the fact of the empty tomb. We saw that in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 Paul quotes an old Christian saying:
That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried,
and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
We have seen that the second line of this saying refers to the burial of Jesus in the tomb. When Paul then says “He was raised,” this therefore necessarily implies that the tomb was left empty.
That truth is evident from the very word used for the resurrection (egēgertai). Two verbs for “resurrect” are used in the New Testament: egeirein and anistanai. The main meaning of egeirein is “to awaken” from sleep. In the Bible, sleep is used as a euphemism for death. Thus, the picture here is of a dead person reawakening to life. The word can also mean “to draw out of,” as out of a hole. Both verbs also mean “to raise upright” or “to erect.” Thus, the words themselves refer to the body in the grave, which is raised up to new life. The very words imply resurrection of the body. It is the dead man in the tomb who wakes up and is raised to life. Therefore, after a resurrection, the grave would have to be empty.
Even today, if someone claimed that a man who died and was buried rose from the dead and appeared to his friends, only a theologian would think to ask, “But was his body still in the grave?” How much more is this true of Jews of Jesus’ day, who were much more physical in their understanding of the resurrection! The Jews of that time believed that at the end of the world, God would raise the bones of the people from the tombs and clothe them again with flesh and give them new life. Therefore, they were very careful to preserve the bones of their dead, collecting them in jars. When the Jews looked forward to the resurrection at the end of history, they were looking forward to a physical resurrection. The idea that there can be a resurrection while the body still lies amoldering in the grave is a subtlety of modern theology. E. E. Ellis comments, “It is very unlikely that the earliest Palestinian Christians could conceive of any distinction between resurrection and physical, ‘grave-emptying’ resurrection. To them an anastasis (resurrection) without an empty grave would have been about as meaningful as a square circle.”21 Therefore, when Paul says that Jesus was buried and then was raised, he automatically assumes that an empty tomb was left behind.