Even if we go too far by saying there was no Jesus, it is not much of a mistake, considering that the story is full of lies. The Jesus of religion is very different from what any real Jesus would have been.
The Turin Shroud, the supposed burial cloth of Jesus with the front and back of his corpse impressed on it, gives Christians hope that they can at least prove there was a Jesus.
Yet the image shows parts of Jesus' body that would not have touched the cloth. And there is a light yellow substance that sits on the fibers, making the image on one side, and it sometimes appears on the other as well without passing through the cloth. This happens mostly with the face image, which is another indication that the cloth really just cares about Jesus' face the most, as it would if it were a forgery. It is not a contact print, for parts of the body that would have been inches away from the cloth and could not have touched it show up clearly. And there would be tell-tale creases. So, the cloth has no hard or soft evidence that it involved a real body or depicts a real man, as opposed to a statue or something—never mind Jesus. The cloth is meant to appear as a contact print, but it fails. It is meant to fool the untrained eye of pilgrims. The artist of the Shroud perhaps made the image vague to help avoid detection or to prevent skeptics in the Church from ruling the day. A fraud has to be rigged up to survive being exposed. Many do. The cloth is really about appealing to ghouls who want an image of death, blood, and gore. It gives no indication that Jesus miraculously rose from the dead.
It is necessary to see if the Shroud of Turin is really absolute and scientific proof that Jesus lived. A complete refutation of the claims made for it can be read in my eBooks.
There is no proof that the Shroud dates from the time of Christ. Except for the Gospels, which never mention the fate of the Shroud, no Shroud was mentioned in the early centuries of the Church. The Shroud could have been mentioned, even if it could not be shown in those times.
Even if the carbon dating, which revealed that the Shroud was created in the Middle Ages, is not an absolute refutation, it is still most likely to be accurate. The Shroud man has too much blood coming from his wounds after he was laid in the cloth to have been a dead man. If Christians want to venerate a relic that attacks the resurrection, then they are welcome to.
The hair and the beard hang down as if the man was standing up in it. The hair would not be doing that if the man was lying down, and the beard would have been pushed against the chin and throat. The Christians object that the hair and beard were stiff with dried blood, so they stayed in the position they were in when he was upright on the cross. But the hair is still too straight, for Jesus would have hung his head down at times and rested it on the left shoulder and on the right shoulder, which would change the way the hair would set. And the hair on the Shroud man just has specks of blood on it and is not matted with blood. Close up, the hairs look mostly clean. They look like they do not have a crusted cover of blood over them. The arguments used to defend the Shroud often overlook key issues. If you have to go too far to defend something, as they do, and make it seem plausible, then what you are defending is probably false. End of story. What they are doing is assuming the cloth to be genuine and then twisting everything to make this look possible and even probable. True science is open-minded and keeps assumptions out.
The Shroud man looks Jewish, but there is evidence that, if Jesus existed, he did not look like a full Jew, for the Jews insinuated that, according to the Gospels. Top second-century Christian St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, said Jesus died an old man, while the Shroud man is young. Had there been a Shroud, he would have been contradicted and would have corrected this.
The real Shroud would have been taken by the Romans, for if the body disappeared, they would have needed it to conduct an investigation. The Shroud image should be distorted. The image on it would have looked more like a painting than anything else, for real bodies give distorted prints, so it would have been burned soon after. If such an article had been found in the tomb, the Romans and Jews would have had a field day. They could say it was evidence that some deceiver had been in the tomb and planted it. The first Christians believed that it was unclean, and so they would have burned it if they had it.
The man was not Jesus. Jesus was repeatedly hit in the face, according to the Gospels. The man on the Shroud had no great swelling, which he would have had had he been Jesus. Far from being overly swollen, his face is unnaturally thin.
The Shroud is not evidence for Jesus, even if it is not a forgery, for it is not Jesus that is on it. If the Shroud is a miracle, it is a miracle, but it cannot stand as evidence for Jesus because of the errors on it. For example, the purported blood sitting on top of the fibers means it never soaked in like real blood would have done. It would be strange if Jesus, who took a fundamentalist approach to the Old Testament—accepting the Noahic Flood, Adam and Eve, Jonah and the big fish, and the glorious reign of Solomon as historical—left the miracle cloth behind him when it is undeniable that the Old Testament has been definitively refuted in archaeology books like The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (Touchstone Books, New York, 2002). A Jesus who could not get his facts right could not have created the Shroud, so it was some other miracle man or a lucky alchemist who did that. The reign of King David seems to be a legend, and when Jesus claimed to be his successor, it is undeniable that only fake Messiahs and sons of God succeed mythical kings. When David or his life story was a myth, why not think that Jesus was one of those too?
All the strange features of the Shroud were replicated in 2005, as explicated in the French science magazine Science and Life. They even duplicated the 3-D effect.
The Shroud is not the only strange thing—or allegedly strange thing—out there. And nobody sees the other things as miracles. Once you have an odd religious artifact, the miracle imagination sets in.