An amazing cloth shroud, about 14.3 feet (4 m) long and 3.7 feet (1 m) wide, first appeared in 1357 in France and is now stored in Turin, Italy. The cloth has a realistic imprint that looks like a man’s face. According to tradition, the shroud was miraculously formed when it covered Jesus’s body in the tomb. Some people quote
Matthew 27:59,
Mark 15:46, and
Luke 23:53 to justify the possibility of this miracle.
These verses seem to indicate that a single cloth was used to wrap Jesus when He was taken off the cross. But was this same cloth wrapped around Jesus’s body when it was placed in the tomb?
After the crucifixion, Jesus’s body would have been bloody from Pilate’s whipping (
Matthew 27:26), the crown of thorns (
Matthew 27:29), and the nails driven into His hands and feet (
Acts 2:23). More blood flowed from the spear wound in His side (
John 19:34). So this cloth would have absorbed a lot of blood.
Now did this cloth remain on Jesus’s body as it was carried to the grave? From a cursory glance at the accounts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you might think so. However, John reveals more details (
John 19:38–40). Joseph of Arimathea took the body prior to its placement in the grave. Later Nicodemus joined him, applying about 75 pounds of spices and wrapping the body in several strips of linen.
To apply the spices, the caretakers must have removed the bloody linen covering Christ at the cross. We have no reason to assume that they reused this single cloth. Instead, we would expect them to follow Jewish customs of cleanliness.
Also, no Gospel author mentions a second single-cloth linen around Jesus’s body—only a small cloth wrapped around Jesus’s face and several other linen strips around the rest of his body (
John 20:7). Jewish burial customs usually involved strips of linen and a burial cloth around the head. In fact, John indicates Lazarus was given the same kind of burial (
John 11:43–44).
At Jesus’s resurrection, both John and Luke mention the strips of linen and the cloth on His face (
Luke 24:12;
John 20:3–7). They mention nothing else. We have no reason to assume any other cloths were present in the tomb. To do so requires us to impose our ideas on the Bible, contrary to reasonable inferences, which is not the way to “rightly divide the word of truth” (
2 Timothy 2:15).
The Bible, read carefully in context, rules out the Shroud of Turin as Jesus’s burial cloth.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v4/n2/problematic-apologetics