Barrie Schwortz: “The Latest DNA Results on the Shroud of Turin Defy Explanation”

Barrie Schwortz: “The Latest DNA Results on the Shroud of Turin Defy Explanation”

The shroud of Turin is no forgery.

Forggery rather.

The shroud is a cloth that according to tradition, >> there is a piece of cloth sitting in a cathedral in Turin, Italy that has defeated every scientist who has ever tried to fully explain it.

Not some of them, all of them.

Governments have studied it.

NASA imaging specialists have analyzed it.

Forensic pathologists have examined the blood stains under electron microscopes.

And in 2015, geneticists extracted ancient DNA from its fibers and found something so geographically impossible, so biologically strange that the lead researcher said the results were quote, “not easy to explain.

” Hi, my name is Matthew and this is Reef Discovery.

Who is Barry Schwarz and why should you trust him?

Let me tell you something about credibility.

In a field absolutely drowning in believers, true believers, people who have already made up their minds and are simply collecting evidence to support what they already know.

Barry Schwarz is something genuinely rare.

He is a man who did not want to find what he found.

Schwarz is a professional documentary photographer, Jewish by faith, skeptical by nature.

And in 1977, he was recruited as the official documenting photographer for Stur, the Shroud of Turin Research Project, the most comprehensive scientific investigation ever conducted on a single object in human history.

Schwarz was brought in precisely because he was not a true believer.

The team needed someone who would document what was actually there, not what they hoped to find.

He spent five straight days inside the Cathedral of St.

John the Baptist in Turin photographing every centimeter of a linen cloth that millions of people believe wrapped the body of Jesus of Nazareth after the crucifixion.

And his initial conclusion fake, almost certainly a medieval forgery.

He went home to California, went back to his life, and figured that would be the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

Over the following years, as the STR team’s scientific papers began to be published, Schwarz kept reading and reading, and he found himself unable to answer a question that should have been simple.

If it is a forgery, how was it made?

Because nobody, not then, not now, has been able to answer that question with a replicable method that matches all the physical evidence simultaneously.

By the 1990s, Schwarz had become one of the world’s leading authorities on shroud research.

Not because he converted to Christianity.

He remains Jewish to this day, but because the evidence would not let him walk away.

He founded shroud.com, the most comprehensive database of Shroud research on the internet, and has spent decades ensuring that the science, all of it, the confirming and the contradicting, is available to anyone who wants to look.

When Barry Schwarz says the latest DNA results are difficult to explain, you should probably listen because this is not a man who says things like that lightly.

What is the Shroud of Turin?

Really?

Let us make sure we are all starting from the same place.

Because the Shroud of Turin is one of those things that people think they know about but usually do not.

It is a linen cloth 14t 3 in long, 3′ 7 in wide.

On it in pale sepia tones is the faint image of a man front and back as if the cloth was laid beneath the body and folded over the top.

The image shows a bearded man in his 30s, roughly 5′ 11 in tall, heavily muscled with wounds that read like a forensic report from the first century.

Nail wounds through the wrists, not the palms the way artists have traditionally depicted them.

Puncture wounds scattered across the scalp, consistent with something pressed into the skin like a crown.

A large elliptical wound in the side consistent with a spear or lance thrust and over 120 scourge marks across the back and legs consistent with a Roman flagrum, a whip tipped with small pieces of metal or bone specifically designed to shred skin.

The Romans were very good at what they did, terrifyingly systematic about it.

The cloth itself first appears in documented European history in 1357 in the small French town of Lere.

A knight named Jeffrey Darnney put it on display and claimed it was the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ.

He did not explain where he got it.

He did not leave notes.

He just displayed it, collected the pilgrims, and touched off a controversy that has not stopped for 660 years and counting.

The local bishop declared it a forgery almost immediately.

The exhibitors kept displaying it.

The pilgrims kept coming, which honestly sounds about right for how these things tend to go.

For the next several centuries, the cloth passed through various hands.

French nobility, the house of Seavoi, a chapel fire in 1532 that left burn marks still visible today until it settled in Turin, Italy, where it has lived ever since in a specially climate controlled case inside the Cathedral of St.

John the Baptist.

Then in 1988, the scientific community decided it was time to end the debate permanently.

Three independent laboratories, Oxford University, the University of Zurich, and the University of Arizona, each received a small sample cut from one corner of the cloth.

Each lab conducted radioarbon dating independently without consulting the others, and all three came back with results in the same range, 1260 to 1390 CE.

Medieval.

The cloth was at most 700 years old.

Case closed.

Everyone go home.

The Shroud of Tin is a very impressive medieval forgery, and we can all move on with our lives.

Except the scientists who had actually spent time studying the physical cloth were not satisfied.

Not because they were believers desperate to protect a relic, but because the radioarbonate flatly contradicted what the physical evidence of the cloth itself was telling them.

The pollen, the weave structure, the blood stain chemistry, the image properties, none of it behaved like something made in medieval Europe.

That tension between what the carbon dating insisted and what everything else kept showing is exactly what drove the next 30 years of research.

And eventually, inevitably, it drove someone to ask a question nobody had thought to ask before.

What does the DNA say?

The DNA study nobody talked about enough.

In 2015, a team led by Jeani Barkatcha at the University of Padua published a paper in Scientific Reports, which is part of the Nature Publishing Group.

Not a fringe journal, not a religious publication, one of the most respected scientific outlets on the planet.

The team had developed a method of collecting genetic material from the shroud without cutting or damaging the cloth itself.

They used adhesive tape to lift dust and particulate matter from the surface of the linen, the kind of microscopic debris that accumulates in the fibers over centuries of handling, storage, exhibition, and contact with human hands and breath.

They also used a vacuum device to collect material from specific areas of the cloth.

From this material, they were able to extract and sequence both plant DNA and human DNA.

And I want you to sit with what they found because it is genuinely strange.

The plant DNA represented an enormous range of species from an enormous range of geographic regions.

They identified sequences from plants native to the Mediterranean, plants native to the Middle East, plants native to the Americas, which the last time I checked the calendar would not have been visited by Europeans until the late 1400s, long after the cloth supposedly existed.

Plants from Europe, plants from Asia.

Now, some of this can be explained by centuries of contact with pilgrims and handlers from all over the world.

If millions of people have touched or been near this cloth over hundreds of years, you would expect a cosmopolitan collection of environmental DNA.

That part is not shocking.

What is shocking is the human DNA.

The mitochondrial DNA sequences which trace maternal lineage represented Hapla groups from an extraordinary geographic spread.

They found lineages associated with North Africa, with the Middle East, with the Indian subcontinent, with East Asia, with subsaharan Africa, and with Europe.

Baraca himself described the results as consistent with a relic that had either been in contact with people from across the ancient world or one that had been produced in an area that was a crossroads of multiple populations.

He
Noted specifically that several of the sequences were consistent with geographic regions along the Silk Road and ancient trade routes connecting the Mediterranean to the east.

Here is the part that nobody quite knows what to do with.

One of the most represented Hapla groups in the human DNA results was a lineage predominantly found today in the Middle East and among certain Jewish populations.

Not exclusively, but predominantly.

A Jewish man photographed the cloth.

A Jewish man runs the most comprehensive database of its research and the DNA found in the fibers points among many other places toward a Jewish geographic origin.

I am not saying that proves anything.

I am saying it is the kind of detail that makes you put your coffee down.

The latest results what Schwarz is now saying.

In his most recent interviews and public presentations and Schwarz gives a lot of them, the man is tireless.

He has been increasingly direct about what the accumulated evidence now suggests.

The 2015 DNA study did not exist in isolation.

It corroborated something that had already been bothering researchers for decades.

The pollen.

Beginning in the 1970s, a Swiss criminologist named Max Frii, who had actual professional credentials in forensic palinology, the study of pollen, conducted a systematic analysis of tape samples from the shroud surface.

He identified pollen grains from 58 different plant species.

38 of those species were plants that grow in or around the region of Jerusalem and the broader Middle East.

Several were species that grow exclusively in the area around the Dead Sea exclusively.

They do not grow in Europe.

They do not grow in France where the cloth supposedly originated according to the medieval records.

They grow in one place.

When Schwarz discusses this in his presentations, he tends to get quiet in a particular way.

Like a man who has been living with a piece of evidence for so long that he no longer needs to dramatize it.

He simply states it.

The pollen does not lie.

Pollen is not deposited by pilgrims the way human DNA might be.

It settles from the air from direct contact with living plants.

To have dead sea region pollen embedded in the fibers of this cloth, the cloth had to have been in that region, not displayed near someone who once visited that region, actually there in contact with those plants.

The new DNA findings, Schwarz argues, are not a standalone anomaly.

They are one more layer of a pattern that the evidence has been building for 50 years.

A pattern that points consistently and uncomfortably toward a cloth with genuine ancient origins in the Middle East, not 14th century France, not medieval Europe.

He is careful, and this is one of the things I genuinely respect about him.

Never to make the jump from ancient Middle Eastern cloth to this is definitely the burial shroud of Jesus Christ.

That leap requires faith.

And Schwarz is a scientist before he is anything else.

But he will say flatly that the evidence for medieval forgery has never been as strong as the 1988 carbon dating made people believe.

And the evidence for ancient origin has never been as weak as the skeptics’s claim.

The image nobody can explain.

Here is where I need you to really pay attention because this is the part that keeps scientists up at night.

Not the blood, not the DNA, the image itself.

Sturp’s core finding published after their 1978 investigation and subsequent years of laboratory analysis was this.

The body image on the Shroud of Tin is not paint.

It is not dye.

It is not any known artistic pigment or medium.

There is no brushstroke evidence.

There is no directionality to the coloring that would suggest application by hand.

The image does not flues under ultraviolet light the way any known organic pigment would.

What the image actually is at the chemical level is a yellowing of the outermost fibers of the linen, not the threads, the individual fibers within the threads.

The coloration affects only the topmost two or three fibers on the raised portions of the weave.

It does not penetrate.

It does not soak through.

It sits on the absolute surface of the cloth like something that happened in an instant rather than something that was applied over time.

Stur’s own summary signed by all 24 of their scientists, regardless of their personal religious beliefs, stated that the image was formed by, and I am going to paraphrase carefully here, some dehydration and oxidation of the linen fibers consistent with a burst of shortwave radiation or perhaps a chemical reaction, but no known mechanism could be confirmed as the cause.

They were saying, “We know what it looks like.

We know what chemistry it resembles.

We cannot tell you what made it.

NASA got involved.

No, really NASA because one of the STRP team members was Dr.

John Jackson, a physicist at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, and he used the VP8 image analyzer, a piece of NASA imaging technology designed to convert image density into three-dimensional relief.

When you put a normal photograph into this machine, you get a distorted, unreadable mess.

The machine is not designed for photographs.

When they put the shroud image into the VP8, they got a perfect anatomically accurate three-dimensional representation of a human body.

The image contains three-dimensional spatial information that a normal photograph or a painting or any known artistic medium simply does not contain.

Nobody has explained that.

Not in 1978, not today.

And by the way, every attempt to artificially replicate the shroud image, and there have been many, some by very clever people with very good equipment has failed to reproduce all the characteristics simultaneously.

You can get the superficiality.

You cannot get the three-dimensional information.

You can get the negative image quality.

You cannot get the lack of any binder or pigment.

The cloth keeps winning.

The blood that should not be there.

The blood on the shroud is, if anything, even more forensically disturbing than the image.

First, the basic facts.

The blood stains were tested by STR member Dr.

Alan Adler, a chemist specializing in blood chemistry at Western Connecticut State University.

Adler confirmed the presence of hemoglobin, aluminum, and Billy Rubin in the stains, all consistent with human blood.

The blood type tested as AB which is relatively rare present in roughly 3 to 4% of the global population but disproportionately common in the Middle East.

Now here is what makes the forensic pathologists uncomfortable.

The Billy Rubin levels.

Billy Rubin is a compound produced when red blood cells break down.

It is normally present in blood in small amounts.

But when a person underos extreme physical trauma, prolonged beating, severe blood loss, the kind of physiological stress that pushes the body to its absolute limit, Billy Rubin levels in the blood spike dramatically.

The blood on the shroud contains Billy Rubin levels consistent with the blood of someone who suffered catastrophic physical trauma before death.

Not a small injury, not a clean death, a prolonged, violent, physically overwhelming death.

Then there are the serum halos.

Around each blood stain on the shroud under certain lighting and imaging conditions, you can see a faint halo of a different substance.

These halos are consistent with blood serum, the clear liquid that separates from clotted blood as it dries.

This is exactly what you would see in a forensic context around real blood stains from real wounds.

Forgers in the medieval period did not know this.

The mechanism of clot retraction and serum separation was not understood until the 20th century.

A medieval forger painting blood stains with red pigment would not have included serum halos because they would not have known serum halos existed.

The stains also flow in anatomically correct directions.

The blood from the wrist wounds runs at angles consistent with a man hanging with his arms raised above his head.

The blood from the side wound pulled in a pattern consistent with a body in a horizontal position lying down after it had already formed while vertical.

Two different gravitational directions, two different positions, exactly what you would expect from someone who died hanging and was then laid flat.

The image and the blood are also chemically distinct from each other.

The body image does not extend under the blood stains.

The blood stains appear to have been deposited first and the image formed around them.

Which means if this is a forgery, someone put the blood on the cloth before creating the image and then created an image that carefully avoided going over the blood at a microscopic level using a mechanism that no scientist has yet identified.

I will just leave that there.

The carbon dating problem.

We need to talk about 1988 because that is the year the skeptics point to with the most confidence.

Three labs, medieval date done.

Except it is not done.

And here is why.

The sample taken for carbon dating in 1988 was cut from a single corner of the shroud.

The same corner, it turns out, that had been handled most heavily throughout the cloth’s known history.

A corner that shows visible differences in weave pattern from the rest of the cloth under certain imaging.

A corner that textile experts, including Dr.

Mechtild Fury Lemmberg, one of the most respected linen conservators in the world, have suggested shows evidence of repair.

The invisible reweave theory, first proposed by Sue Benford and Joseph Marino in 2000 and subsequently supported by textile analysis from multiple independent researchers, suggests that the corner sampled in 1988 was repaired sometime in the medieval period, probably the 16th century, when the cloth was damaged by fire.

Using cotton threads skillfully interwoven with the original linen in a technique that makes the repair nearly invisible to casual examination.

If the sample was a mixture of original ancient linen and medieval repair cotton, the radioarbon date would be skewed significantly toward a younger result.

In 2005, chemist Raymond Rogers, a STR member and self-described skeptic who fully expected to debunk this theory, published his analysis in the peer-reviewed journal Thermochemica Acta.

He had obtained fibers from the raised corner adjacent to where the 1988 sample was cut.

He found cotton fibers intermixed with linen.

He found evidence of a chemical coating consistent with a repair technique.

He concluded in his own words that the sample used for radiocarbon dating in 1988 was not representative of the whole cloth.

Rogers died in 2005 shortly after his paper was published.

He spent the last months of his life writing it.

A man who went in wanting to debunk the contamination theory and came out unable to.

The carbon dating is not settled.

Anyone who tells you it is settled has not read Rogers.

What the critics get wrong fair is fair.

Let us talk about the skeptical position because it deserves a real hearing rather than a dismissal.

The strongest skeptical argument is this.

The carbon dating performed by three independent laboratories with no connection to each other all return consistent results pointing to medieval origin.

Contamination, if it existed, would have to be both massive and uniformly distributed across the sample to shift the date by 13 centuries.

That is a lot to ask of any contamination theory.

Joe Nickel, probably the most rigorous and persistent shroud skeptic, has also pointed out that artists techniques in the medieval period were more sophisticated than modern audiences realize.

He argues that a talented medieval artist using iron oxide pigments and a specific application technique could have produced many of the effects that Stur researchers found puzzling.

These are reasonable points.

I am not going to pretend they are not.

But here is what the skeptical position has consistently struggled with.

It cannot produce a forger, not a name, not a workshop, not a technique, not a single replication that accounts for all the evidence simultaneously.

The serum halos, the three-dimensional image information, the superficiality of the coloration to the outermost fibers, the anatomically correct blood flow directions, the pollen from the Dead Sea region, the DNA pointing toward ancient Middle Eastern populations.

Each
Individual anomaly can perhaps be explained away, but the accumulation of them, the sheer number of features that all independently point in the same direction toward an ancient cloth with genuine contact with a human body in a violent death, becomes increasingly difficult to wave away as coincidence.

Schwarz puts it this way.

He says he has never met a skeptic who could explain all the evidence, just selected pieces of it.

That is not a debunking.

That is a work in progress.

What Schwarz believes.

Now, here is the part of this story that I find genuinely moving.

And I say that as someone who tries very hard not to editorialize.

Barry Schwarz was 1977 when he first stood in front of this cloth with his cameras.

He was a Jewish man in his 20s, brought in as a skeptic, expecting to document a medieval forgery and go home.

He is now in his late 70s.

He has given his professional life, not a part of it, essentially all of it, to documenting, archiving, and honestly representing the research on this cloth.

And he still will not tell you it is the burial shroud of Jesus Christ.

He is very careful about that.

He says that is a question of faith, not science.

And science cannot answer questions of faith.

But he will tell you what the evidence shows.

And what the evidence shows in his careful measured photographers’s assessment is that this cloth is not a medieval forgery.

That it has ancient Middle Eastern origins that the DNA and pollen evidence now strongly support.

That the image on it was created by a mechanism that no scientist has yet identified.

That the blood stains are forensically consistent with a real human death by crucifixion.

And that the carbon dating result from 1988, which the whole world accepted as the final word, was almost certainly based on a contaminated and unrepresentative sample.

He says this not with triumph, not with the satisfied air of someone who has won an argument.

He says it the way people talk about things that have changed them against their will, the way you talk about evidence that followed you home and never left.

In one interview, he said something that I have been thinking about ever since.

He said that being Jewish actually made the shroud more difficult for him, not easier.

Because if the cloth is authentic, it is not a simple story.

It is not a comfortable story for anyone.

It raises questions that Judaism and Christianity have wrestled with for 2,000 years and have not resolved.

He did not go looking for those questions.

The cloth handed them to him and he kept showing up anyway.

For 40 years, he kept showing up.

There is something almost stubborn about it.

A refusal to look away that I recognize from other researchers.

I have covered on this channel.

People who stumbled into a mystery that was bigger than their original framework and chose at some cost to keep following it honestly rather than retreat to the comfortable explanation.

Schwarz is one of those people.

And the shroud, whatever it ultimately is, has found in him a witness it probably deserves.

What this means.

So, where does this leave us?

The DNA results from 2015 are real, published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The methodology was sound.

The geographic anomalies in the human mitochondrial sequences are real.

The pollen from Dead Sea region plants is real.

The forensic blood evidence is real.

The three-dimensional image information detected by NASA technology is real.

The failure of every replication attempt is real.

The contamination problems with the 1988 carbon dating are real.

None of these things have been explained away.

Some of them have been contested.

None have been refuted.

And at the center of all of it is a piece of linen that has been sitting in a cathedral for centuries, refusing to give up its secret, outlasting every confident explanation that has ever been applied to it.

I think about what Jeremy Wade said, and regular viewers of this channel will know I have covered his story, about being a witness, about spending a career looking at something the rest of the world had already decided it understood, and finding that the reality was more
Complex, more strange, and more significant than the settled consensus allowed.

Schwarz is a witness.

The scientists of Stur were witnesses.

Barkatcha and his team sequencing ancient DNA from linen dust in a Padua laboratory were witnesses.

What they witnessed does not have a clean ending.

It does not resolve into a single satisfying answer that everybody can take home and file away.

The cloth does not do that.

It has never done that.

The harder you look, the more questions emerge.

The more rigorously you test it, the more it resists the easy explanation.

That is either the signature of a medieval forgery so extraordinarily sophisticated that it anticipated forensic techniques that would not be invented for 600 years.

Or it is the signature of something else.

Something that actually happened, something that left a mark on a piece of linen that science with all its tools and all its brilliance has not yet been able to fully read.

The DNA results are in.

The image remains unexplained.

The blood tells a story that forensic pathology confirms and cannot account for.

And a Jewish photographer from California who went to tour in in 1977 expecting to debunk a forgery is still decades later the most credible voice in the room.

The cloth is still there.

The questions are still open and the evidence, all of it, not just the convenient pieces, is still waiting for someone brave enough to follow it wherever it leads.

That is the truth about the shroud of Tin that nobody has been able to explain away.