The Kilmon Correspondence
The following correspondence was received by John Elias from Jack Kilmon, in regards to the 'Kilmon Argument' concerning the validity of the Shroud of Turin, on Wednesday, August 9, 2017.
Historian Jack Kilmon's Website: The Kilmon Argument
Hi John:
Thank you for your note. As you know, the Pray Manuscript in the Budapest National Library written between 1192 and 1195 in archaic Hungarian (Finno-Ugric) clearly has an illustration of the shroud. The top panel of the leaf is an illustration of the crucified Jesus being placed on the shroud. This depiction of Jesus displays him naked (as in the shroud) with his arms crossed (as on the shroud), his thumbs turned in and not visible, as mentioned in my list (as on the shroud), a mark on his forehead (as on the shroud) and being laid on a shroud with a 3-hop herringbone pattern. The bottom panel depicts the corpse of Jesus with the shroud turned over the top of the head and down over the front of the body (as was the shroud) and with the L-shaped burned poker holes. This illustration created in this text 700 miles from Italy had to have used a drawing of the shroud made in Constantinople before the sack of that city in 1204 and obviously before 1192. This is the only way the artist in Hungary could have known those details. On August 5, 1205 Theodore Doukas Anglelos wrote to Pope Innocent III:
"The Venetians partitioned the treasure of gold, silver and ivory, while the French did the same with the relics of saints and the most sacred of all, the linen in which our Lord Jesus Christ was wrapped after His death and before the resurrection."
This letter to the Pope and the Pray Manuscript clearly places the shroud in Constantinople before the sacking on April 12, 1204. The pray manuscript illustration was done between 1192 and 1195. No one, since the 1988 testing, has been able to answer how a textile AMS dated to between 1260 to 1390 (understanding that there is a mean and the bottom date is the least likely) is illustrated in a manuscript dated to 1192. Some shroud skeptics attempt to do this by claiming the shroud in the manuscript is a sarcophagus. I find this argument to be ludicrous. Why would it be the lid of a sarcophagus? First, sarcophagi were not used for crucified Jewish peasants. Most of the wealthy class couldn’t afford them and they were outside of mainstream JEWISH burial practices. The Hellenistic kings, like Herod, had them. The first time I saw this almost cultic skeptical argument, I set it aside amused at how little the skeptic who claimed such a thing knew about 2nd temple period burial practices. The illustrator of the Pray Codex would have followed the Christian, Gospel described, burial of Jesus not of Agnes of Antioch or Stephen II (12th century Hungarian royalty) nor have been the only illustrator in history to illustrate a sarcophagus. I am going to unscientifically assume this shroud IS the burial shroud of a historical Jesus of Nazareth which is also claimed, in order to explain how it would have happened in the 1st century. Christians are a strange lot. Most of them know nothing about Jesus of Nazareth or the history and cultural anthropology of 2nd temple Jewish Palestine…I do.
There are some snippets of the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion and burial that do make sense for someone executed on erev pesach, which is their being removed from the stipes and patibulum before sundown. Bear with me, if you know about 2nd Temple Period Jewish burial practices and Roman crucifixions.
There is a ton of primary and secondary literature on this Roman practice. I am sure that the Exactor Mortis, normally an assigned position for a centurion, and his quaternio, a team of four legionnaires who performed crucifixions, had a specific location near major provincial towns where a stipes or few were relatively permanently fixed waiting for a condemned either nailed or tied to a patibulum. Wood was an expensive commodity in a region of the world where houses were constructed of mud brick. There were events in Roman history, however, when hundreds or even thousands of people were crucified and 2000 stipes for the Varus crucifixions, for example, would have been impossible. The New Testament story forms most images of crucifixions but they were the act of nailing or tying a victim to a stake, pole, tree, wooden building and were referred to as being "hung" in Jewish sources. We really have no idea of the form of crucifixion or its substrate use of Jesus. The image is of the "T" shaped cross with a stipes and patibulum is possible but it could have been a single stake with feet astride the stipes and nailed from the side or any number of positions.
Seneca, for example, refers to the Exactor Mortis as CENTURIO supplicio praepositus, De Ira 1.26. "Tunc CENTURIO supplicio praepositus condere gladium speculatorem iubet, damnatum ad Pisonem reducit redditurus Pisoni
... and Hermann-Josef Rollicke in Auf den Stufen (Berlin 2006), certainly a modern authority, states," Der CENTURIO als der exactor mortis, der den Tod des delinquenten om kreuz abzuwarten und zu bestatigen hatte..."There is a
ton of primary Latin material on this.
On the issue of Jesus' crucifixion and the offer of "Vinegar and gall," (which often contained a narcotic), I am specific because the sources are specific and historical criticism depends on EXTERNAL as well as internal evidence. The quatornio (execution team) under the exactor mortis (a centurion) were ordinary soldiers (miles legionarius), NONE of whom, under Roman military behavior and praxis, would have taken it upon himself to offer posca to Jesus whether to conform to the practice of preventing dehydration to prolong death or as an act of compassion (one of those things we will never know). Discipline in the Roman army was extremely rigorous, and the punishment for such a breech from the ranks would involve food rationing, hitting with the centurion's staff, or public flogging. There are also some very good texts on the praxis and discipline in the Roman military (Sarah Phang, Roman Military Service,Cambridge University Press) and any canon of historical criticism regarding the Roman participation in the crucifixion of Jesus would apply the same to the Legio X Fretensis in Judea.
It is also known that a crown of savage thorns was often used in the "king's game" described in other Latin sources. This entailed mocking the accused as a "king" and batting him about with staves while gambling for his
possessions. The "game board" for this action can be found carved in pavements throughout Europe and the Middle East including on the exposed 1st century pavement in Jerusalem. I have seen it.
Crucifixion often took days and death occurred from dehydration and hypovolemic shock...longer if the Romans gave the victim water to extend suffering. This is why the crurifragium (leg breaking) was done when death was being hastened. It would prevent standing on the suppedaneum (a small platform under the feet) to ease the pressure on the lungs and cause suffocation. In Jesus’ case he may have suffered from a hemothorax from the brutal scourging which caused death in a few hours rather than a few days. Jesus died by 3 PM and however many others were similarly executed would have had their legs broken to hasten death by sundown.
Prefects and Procurators (after 49 CE) were bound by the Edictum Augusti de Iudaeis (Edict of Augustus on Jewish Rights) of 1 BCE whereby they were to abide by all Jewish sacramental rites.
The 1st century fell within the period of ossilegium. The deceased would be laid on an arcosolium, a flat bench-like surface in a rock cut tomb. It was left there for a year to decompose after which the bones would be placed in an ossuary and then placed in a kokim (a small chamber for ossuaria). The manner in which the shroud of Turin indicates shroud use, i.e. corpse laid on first half with second half folded over the head and laid atop the body to the feet, has been used by skeptics (who again know little of burial practices) to argue against a shroud that should have been tightly wrapped horizontally, getting their “evidence” from Egyptian mummies. Egyptians were not going to open the tomb in a year (unless to loot) and collect the bones. The shroud of Turin model makes sense for the Jewish halakhic sensibilities where a recently dead body could not be touched or the burial clothes. Bones were considered ritually pure. I have argued this seemingly obvious model for years until recently the only other fragment of a shroud from the first century was found in a tomb at Akeldama (<Aramaic> “Field of Blood”) still adhered to the skull folded over the skull as in the shroud of Turin.
In the upper part of the Pray Codex panel is the body of the Turin shroud positioned on the first half of the shroud with folded creases in the small of the back, also as evidenced on the Turin shroud. The Skeptics arguing the shroud folded over the top as a “sarcophagus cover” is a hail Mary argument and really wrong on a number of levels.
The illustration of the Pray Codex invalidates the 1988 C14 AMS dating, that separate from the fibers from the SAME samples clearly showing alizarin dyed cotton that the nuns used to mend the shroud after the 1532 fire.
I am sorry about the length but as in any valid treatment there is always lots of context which these skeptic articles lack. To be clear again, I am more than a skeptic that a son of God, miraculous, pre-existent, (and all of the other wondrous things Gentiles made of this Jewish preacher), rose from the dead through this shroud which is left as proof of a resurrection. My position is that it has yet to be proven scientifically (without some screw-up like the sampling or silly arguments against the Pray Codex) that this is NOT an artifact of a Second Temple Period Roman crucifixion.
Skepticism should not be a cult just because It is the necessary ingredient of good science. That is all I require.
Best always,
Jack