Pastor Josh Howerton is not the kind of man you would expect to spend 90 minutes talking about the Shroud of Turin. A self-described "team Protestant" pastor at Lakepointe Church in Dallas, Texas, Howerton openly admits that his first reaction to seeing Dr. Jeremiah Johnston on the Michael Knowles Show was skepticism. "Who hoodwinked Knowles?" he remembers thinking. Relics were a Catholic thing. He wanted nothing to do with it.
Twenty minutes later, everything changed.
That story alone tells you something important about where the Shroud conversation has moved. This is no longer a debate confined to Catholic devotion or fringe speculation. Serious Protestant scholars, pastors, and scientists are taking a hard look at the evidence and arriving at the same conclusion Dr. Johnston has been proclaiming around the world: the Shroud of Turin is authentic, and it may preserve the very moment of Christ's resurrection.
In a special pre-Easter episode of Live Free (Episode 69), Dr. Johnston sat down with Howerton and co-host Carlos Erazo for a conversation that has already reached over 92,000 views. For those already familiar with the foundational evidence of the Shroud, this episode breaks significant new ground.
One of the most striking revelations from the conversation involves C.S. Lewis. Dr. Johnston shared that during a recent visit to Lewis's bedroom at The Kilns in Oxford, he noticed something remarkable above the mantle of Lewis's fireplace: a framed image of the man of the Shroud.
A Lewis scholar on site confirmed it. "Lewis kept an image of the Shroud of Turin above his mantle piece as a reminder that our God had a face and of the incarnation," she explained.
Lewis himself wrote in a letter to an Anglican nun: "Thank you so much for the head of our Lord from the Shroud. It has grown upon me wonderfully. I don't commit myself to the genuineness. One can never be quite certain, but the great value is to make one realize He was a man and once even a dead man. There is so much difference between a doctrine and a realization."
That last line deserves to sit with every believer for a moment. There is so much difference between a doctrine and a realization. Lewis, one of the finest Christian minds of the twentieth century, kept that image so that every morning his feet hit the ground, he was reminded: our God has a face.
Pull quote: "There is so much difference between a doctrine and a realization." C.S. Lewis, on the Shroud of Turin
For those who have followed the Shroud debate, the most common objection remains the 1988 carbon dating that placed the cloth between 1260 and 1390 AD. Dr. Johnston addressed this directly and decisively.
First, the 2019 Journal of Archaeometry published findings confirming that the sample tested in 1988 was not homogeneous with the Shroud itself. The British Museum suppressed the raw data for 27 years. When researcher Tristan Casabianca finally obtained it through a legal process similar to a Freedom of Information Act request, the conclusion was clear: those carbon dating results cannot be relied upon. Three labs may not have even tested actual Shroud material but rather a cotton patch used to repair a fraying corner.
But Dr. Johnston went further with a piece of physical evidence he brought to the broadcast: a Roman Solidus gold coin from the late seventh century bearing the face of Christ. Allan Wagner, a professor at Duke University, identified 200 points of correspondence between the face on this coin and the face of the man on the Shroud. That number far exceeds what is required in a court of law for positive identification.
The implications are significant. If the Shroud were a medieval forgery created sometime after 1260, how does a seventh-century coin bear a face with 200 matching features? Combined with over 200 ancient icons of Christ dating back to the fifth and sixth centuries that all share the same source likeness, the medieval forgery theory collapses under the weight of its own timeline.
Additionally, Wide Angle X-Ray Scattering (WAXS) dating has compared the degradation of the Shroud with a burial cloth from Masada definitively dated to the AD 70s. Both cloths have been aging together at the same rate for approximately 2,000 years.
Pull quote: "You need to update your research. The 1988 carbon dating is no longer acceptable." Dr. Jeremiah Johnston
Perhaps the most electrifying portion of the conversation centered on the work of physicist Paulo Di Lazzaro at ENEA Laboratories in Italy. Di Lazzaro spent five years attempting to replicate how the image could have formed on linen without paint, dye, pigment, or brush marks. His team grew linen and subjected it to ultraviolet laser radiation. After five years, they were able to change the coloring of an area the size of a postage stamp.
The energy required? 34 billion watts of vacuum ultraviolet radiation traveling at one-fortieth of a billionth of a second.
That was enough to alter a postage stamp. The Shroud is 14 feet long.
When Dr. Johnston asked Di Lazzaro directly whether he believed it was Jesus, the physicist responded simply: "Well, of course."
This is where the Shroud transitions from artifact to witness. As Dr. Johnston told the Live Free audience, "The Shroud is not a death cloth. It is a resurrection cloth." The image was not created by contact with a decaying body. There is no bodily decay present on the cloth whatsoever, fulfilling the prophecy, "My body will not see decay" (Acts 2:31). Instead, the evidence points to an instantaneous burst of radiant energy at the moment the body passed through the cloth.
Jesus did not stand up and remove His grave clothes like Lazarus. His resurrected body emanated through the Shroud, leaving behind a signature of light. Every post-resurrection appearance of Christ in the New Testament describes Him manifesting as brilliant light. Paul described his encounter on the Damascus road as "brighter than the noonday sun" (Acts 26:13). The Transfiguration tells us "His face shone like the sun" (Matthew 17:2). And the promise of the new heaven and new earth is that it will have no need for the sun, "for the glory of God gives it light" (Revelation 21:23).
Pull quote: "The Shroud is an itemized receipt of how much Jesus loves you." Dr. Jeremiah Johnston
Dr. Johnston also shared his meeting with Bruno Barberis, a mathematician in Turin who has personally been with the actual Shroud over 100 times and has delivered more than 4,000 lectures on the subject. Barberis calculated the probability that the man of the Shroud is not Jesus of Nazareth based on the cumulative correspondence of wound patterns, blood type, burial methods, and crucifixion details matching the Gospel accounts.
The result: one in 200 billion.
When Dr. Johnston asked Barberis directly if he believed it was Jesus, the mathematician responded with visible frustration at the question: "How can it not be? The numbers forced me to believe it's Him."
This is a man without a theological agenda. He is a mathematician. And the math leaves no reasonable room for doubt.
Dr. Johnston closed the conversation by pointing listeners back to John 20:5-8, where John arrives at the empty tomb, sees the linen cloths lying there, and believes. He offered a compelling speculation: in the early morning darkness of that first Easter Sunday, with no electricity and no sunlight reaching into a rock-hewn tomb, the Shroud may still have been glowing from the residual energy of resurrection.
John saw. And John believed.
As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:6, God gives us "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The Shroud may be the physical record of that very light.
For believers who have followed Dr. Johnston's work on the Shroud through his appearances on Michael Knowles, Piers Morgan, Glenn Beck, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, this conversation with Josh Howerton represents an important next chapter. The Shroud conversation is reaching a new generation of Protestant pastors and churchgoers who are discovering what 102 academic disciplines, 600,000 hours of scientific research, and one Italian mathematician's probability calculation all point to: a real man died on a real cross for the real you.
We encourage you to watch the full episode and share it with someone who needs to see the evidence this Easter season.
Dr. Johnston's newest book, The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds That Bring Us Face-to-Face with Jesus, is available now and explores these findings and more.
Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston, PhD, is a New Testament scholar, president of Christian Thinkers Society, and the author of The Jesus Discoveries and Body of Proof. A leading voice on the historical evidence for the resurrection, Dr. Johnston has presented on the Shroud of Turin at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on the Daily Wire with Michael Knowles, and in churches and universities around the world. Christian Thinkers Society exists to teach pastors and Christians how to become thinkers and thinkers how to become Christians. Learn more at christianthinkers.com.
