Springs Couple Keeps Focus on Famous Shroud
Mark Barna
(April 2009)
Finding physical evidence of Christ's passion and resurrection has been a dream of many Christians, but few have been as obsessed with it as John and Rebecca Jackson of Colorado Springs.
Every week, at least 40 hours a week, they tirelessly conduct research and lab work trying to prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, purported to be the burial cloth Jesus was wrapped in after his crucifixion. It's a task that takes on heightened significance during the Christianity's holiest week.
"The cloth, we think, is a witness to Easter," said John Jackson, a 63-year-old physicist.
In 1992, the couple started the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado Springs as home base for a mission that has taken them around the world to deliver academic presentations. In the small, dark basement suite of an office building on Lehman Drive, they host public lectures amid shroud-related displays.
Life-size Styrofoam figures hang in various poses on crosses. Three cardboard displays depict a man wrapped in burial cloth to resemble how the shroud encased a body. Copies of paintings from the Middle Ages showing Jesus being crucified with nails through his palms hang on the walls.
But the showpiece of their center is a large back-lit display of a blown-up photograph of the Shroud of Turin.
Their world is all shroud, all the time.
"It is practically everything in their lives," says Keith Propp, a Colorado Springs physicist for a local defense contractor, who has worked with the Jacksons on Shroud of Turin studies for 25 years and takes part in their twice-a-week lab sessions. "They are constantly working and thinking about the shroud."
SHROUD UNITES COUPLE
It was the shroud that brought them together in the first place.
Raised in a Jewish household in Brooklyn, Rebecca Jackson became interested in Christianity while still in her teens. In the mid-1980s she converted to the faith and enlisted in the Army. Soon after she was assigned to Fort Carson.
In 1990, while watching a documentary on the shroud, Rebecca was struck by the face on the relic, which to her resembled her Jewish father. Unable to get the image out of her mind, she contacted Jackson, who appeared in the documentary, and soon the two were researching the shroud together and falling in love.
Although she got a master's degree in business with the idea of hooking up with a large company, she dropped that goal to devote herself to the shroud.
"This is more important than anything I could do in the secular world," she says.
John Jackson's background is in physics, and he has taught at the Air Force Academy and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he still teaches part time.
He's a devout Roman Catholic as well, and those two factors in his life - religion and science - led him on his quest to authenticate the shroud as Jesus' burial cloth.
"I am using science to go into the tomb of Christ," he says.
He's been researching the shroud for 36 years, and, in 1978, served as lead scientist for a 35-member team that examined the shroud at the Vatican, where the original is kept in an airtight vault.
He's lectured widely on the shroud throughout the world and has appeared in numerous documentaries as a shroud expert. He has also written dozens of peer reviewed papers about it.
RESEARCH DRAWS CRITICS
But John Jackson, despite his credentials and years of research, has his share of critics among scientists. Some say he starts with the conclusion that the shroud is genuine, then funnels evidence to support it.
Critics also point to radiocarbon testing, conducted in 1988, that concluded the shroud was created between 1260 and 1390 - a little late to coincide with the death of Jesus.
Jane Cauvel, a retired professor of philosophy at Colorado College who has followed research on the shroud, said the 1988 radiocarbon testing by three different labs is pretty conclusive evidence that the relic is a product of the Middle Ages.
But the Jacksons are unmoved by the naysayers. They say that radiocarbon findings are meaningless because the relic has been exposed to too much carbon monoxide over the centuries to register an accurate carbon reading of its age.
"The shroud is not datable by carbon 14," said Rebecca Jackson, 60.
Rather than focus on a carbon 14 testing, shroud researchers are more likely to look for historical evidence of its authenticity. John Jackson has taken that route; he's created a timeline based on evidence he's found in Christian art and liturgies of the early church suggesting that the shroud may have existed in the first century. But he's not ready to go public with his findings.
Jackson's argument that the radioactive testing is flawed has been buoyed by the Vatican's announcement on April 5 that one its researchers claims to have found historical evidence purporting to date the shroud to the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. It's not the smoking gun, but it does move the date closer to Christ's time.
SCIENCE COMES FIRST
Although John Jackson admits to some bias about the shroud, he says he is a scientist first.
Twice a week, about a half dozen people, including the Jacksons, meet in an undisclosed location in a lab to do textile tests on linen similar to that of the shroud. They also conduct tests to see how blood flows and coagulates to compare their results with what is on the shroud. Their sessions can last more than five hours.
"It's a passion of science for them, not just a passion of faith," says Pete Schumacher, and expert in image analysis who founded the Shroud Exhibit and Museum in Alamogordo, N.M., and has performed his own research on the shroud, dating it to 350 AD. "They do real research. They are extremely well-respected in shroud circles."
Last week, as John Jackson showed a visitor around the Shroud Center, he could barely contain his enthusiasm as he pointed out stains on the back-lit photographic display of the shroud. One of his theories is that the shroud was not only the burial cloth of Christ, but also the table cloth for the Last Supper. Jackson gestured toward dime-sized stains on the cloth, which he believes were made from wine that spilled as Christ's disciples dipped their bread.
Other scientists can scoff all they want. He's convinced that soon enough, he'll be proven right.
"The Shroud of Turin will earn its rightful place in the world and Christianity by what it represents," Jackson said. "The shroud's best days are ahead."