The Journey Podcast 165
James Day
THE FRAUD OF TURIN and The Passion of Jesus Christ

Publisher R. A. “Kris” Millegan speaks with James Day, whose new book, THE FRAUD OF TURIN, reviews the evidence for a medieval creation of the world's most famous religious artifact, the Shroud of Turin, and it shows how all-consuming the Passion of Jesus Christ was to the medieval mind. James’ other books include THE MAD BISHOPS: The Hunt for Earl Anglin James and His Assassin Brethren, about the peddler of phony degrees who built a network of contacts that led to the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK.

Topics discussed:

THE MAD BISHOPS shows through the JFK assassination story that there’s not one big evil out there. Many different people are running around with different agendas. Sometimes they come together to work together on different things [and sometimes they compete and fight, and they can be used by intelligence agents and others to accomplish things unknown to the participants].

James was asked to prove that the Shroud of Turin was created by Jesus’ resurrection. He found evidence to the contrary. “The hate mail has already started, even before the book came out officially.”

The JFK assassination and the Shroud both have people saying, “This is how it was done, or this is who did it.” In both cases you’re dealing with religious institutions and chivalric orders. James has continued to put out research and commentary on the Kennedy assassination. (See his work here, JamesFDay.Medium.com.

There’s a tradition of putting Christ’s face on cloth and imagery and icons. In the 1980s three different labs with the approval of the Church carbon dated a piece of the Shroud. All three studies produced a range between 1260 and 1390 AD as the date of the cloth, which corresponds with the historical record of when the Shroud appeared in late Fourteenth Century France. That closed the case in some ways for many secular authorities.

In James’ Catholic experience in grade school, high school, college, and graduate school in Catholic schools, the Shroud was not dealt with. “To this day the Church does not have a formal opinion on the Shroud of Turin. It is housed in the cathedral of Turin, and it is brought out every once in a while, which helps its aura of wonder [that it is shown infrequently]. But it’s officially declared an icon, not a relic.”

A relic is something tangible from Jerusalem, from the apostles, or from the saints. An icon is something that East and West Christianity adopted and respect as something that the believer gazes on as a devotion, or something that brings them closer to the divine. And that’s what the Church encourages the Shroud to be seen as, something to gaze upon and inspire one to think about Jesus’ whole purpose and the way of the cross.

To many Catholics, the Shroud isn’t going away. There is a whole school of apologists peddling the Shroud as authentic [as being created by the resurrection in the First Century] despite the carbon-14 dating, asserting that there was an error in those tests and the Shroud proves the truth of Christianity.

James set out to find the truth. He found that its apologists say a lot about the Shroud but not about the world of the Shroud, not about the medieval mind that was consumed with the image of Christ. People in the 1300s declared it to be a fake.

First Century studies, the century before and the century after Christ, are fascinating. Many now say, “Christ never lived. It was a story made up to get people behind the Romans.” Kris, through research, is satisfied that Jesus was an actual historical figure, and Kris always liked Albert Schweitzer and thought his research and questionings were very good.