In January 2025, Mel Gibson sat down with Joe Rogan and talked about the most famous burial cloth in the world.
“I question carbon dating,” he told him, and a little later, “I can’t square it”.
Gibson is now finishing a two-part film about the resurrection, due in cinemas in May 2027.
However, the evidence that should keep that conversation going was never the famous picture of the man.
It is the blood soaked into two old cloths nearly 700 miles apart.
And when I put every published test on that blood through an AI, the answer stopped me cold.
My name is Elias, and one of those cloths is 14 ft long and kept in Turin, and you have almost certainly heard of it.
The other is about the size of a hand towel locked in a cathedral in northern Spain, and almost nobody has.
By the end of this video, you will know why the people who study them think they may have touched the same face.
So, here is what the AI came back with, in short.
The blood on the cloth in Turin went on before the image of the man, which is the wrong order for a painter.
That blood is still red after centuries, when old blood should have turned almost black.
And a second cloth, one your Bible actually mentions by name, carries stains that line up with the first in ways nobody has managed to explain away.
Any one of those would be strange.
All three together are what kept me up at night.
Start with the cloth everybody knows.
The Shroud of Turin is a strip of old linen about 14 ft long and a little over 3 and 1/2 ft wide, with the faint shape of a man on it, front and back.
He was laid on one half, and the other half was folded over his head and down to his feet.
In 1532, that cloth almost didn’t survive.
A fire tore through the chapel in Chambéry, in what is now France, where it lay folded inside a silver casket.
The silver melted and dripped through the folds, burning holes into the linen.
And 2 years later, a group of Poor Clare nuns spent weeks patching the damage by hand.
Melted silver, and the cloth came through it.
Somebody, somewhere, wanted it kept.
Now, look at the man on it.
His back and legs are covered with more than 100 small marks in pairs, the kind a Roman whip with weighted tips would leave.
His scalp is full of puncture wounds.
There is a wound through each wrist, wounds in the feet, and one wide wound in his side.
You don’t need a scientist to tell you whose story that matches.
The Gospels describe it in the same order.
Matthew 27:26 says, “And when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified”.
Then come the thorns, then the nails, and in John 19:34, a soldier’s spear in the side.
When Gibson talked to Rogan about that image, he said it had to have been some kind of intense light.
And he pointed out something strange, that you really see it in the negative.
He’s right about that part.
In 1898, an Italian lawyer named Secondo Pia took the first photograph of the shroud.
And when he looked at the glass negative in his dark room, he saw a clear, lifelike face staring back at him.
Far sharper than anything visible on the cloth itself.
Everybody talks about that face.
Hardly anybody talks about the blood.
And every one of those wounds has real stains soaked right into the threads.
In October 1978, the church allowed a team of American scientists, known as the Shroud of Turin Research Project, to examine the cloth for 120 hours, around the clock.
They photographed it, x-rayed it, studied it under different kinds of light, and pressed sticky tape onto the stains to lift off tiny fibers and flakes.
Five straight days with that cloth, working through the night.
Honestly, I would have skipped sleep, too.
Those tapes went home to America, and over the next few years, they were studied by some of the best specialists available.
Decades later, their results are scattered across papers, journals, and conference reports.
So, here’s what I did.
I gathered the published findings on the blood of both cloths, the tests, the measurements, and the objections, and I put them to an AI model.
I asked it to read the evidence the way a forensic examiner would, and to tell me plainly where it pointed and where it didn’t.
The first question was the most basic one.
Is the red on that cloth even blood? Not everybody thought so.
Walter McCrone, a well-known microscopist from Chicago, studied tape samples and concluded the stains were paint, made from red iron oxide and vermilion, the kinds of pigments artists have ground for centuries.
To him, the whole thing was a medieval work of art from around the 1350s.
I like a man with a strong opinion.
But hold onto that one, because two other scientists worked on the same kind of samples and came to the opposite conclusion.
John Heller, a physician and biophysicist, and Alan Adler, a chemist with deep experience in blood pigments, ran test after test on those tiny flakes.
They reported the chemical fingerprints of real blood, including hemoglobin breakdown products and serum proteins.
When I asked the AI to weigh the two sides, it said, “The published work of Heller and Adler identified the chemical signatures of real blood, not paint, and that the iron oxide McCrone saw is spread across the cloth, stained and unstained, in quantities too small to form the blood images.
Then, there’s the light.
The photographers on the 1978 team shone ultraviolet light across the cloth, the same kind of black light you’ve seen at crime scenes on television.
Around many of the blood stains, including the whip marks, pale rings showed up.
Those rings are consistent with serum, the clear part of blood that separates out at the edge of a wound as it clots.
How do you paint a ring that only appears under ultraviolet light centuries before anyone knew ultraviolet light existed? So, if it’s blood, the next question is when it got there.
Before the image of the man or after? Think about how you would fake this.
Say you are an artist in the Middle Ages.
You’d paint the man first, the face, the body, the whole outline, and then you’d add the blood on top, exactly where the wounds belong.
Picture first, blood second, because that is the only order that makes sense when you’re making art.
Alan Adler checked.
He took fibers with blood on them and treated them with an enzyme that digests the proteins blood is made of, dissolving the stain away so he could see the linen underneath.
What did he find? According to his published work, the fibers under the blood showed no image at all.
When I asked the AI what that meant, it put it in one line.
The blood appears to have been on the cloth first, and the image formed around it, not beneath it.
Then, it added something that stopped me.
In effect, the blood acted as a shield.
To be fair, critics have pushed back on this.
Some argue that a single kind of test isn’t enough to settle it, and they want it confirmed with modern methods that nobody has yet been allowed to use.
But if Adler was right, a forger would have had to work backwards.
If you are not subscribed yet, this is the moment to do it because the second cloth is where this story gets truly strange.
And what it reveals about the hours after that man died is something I still find hard to sit with.
And there’s a second thing a forger would have gotten backwards.
In medieval art, the nails almost always go through the palms of the hands.
On this cloth, the blood comes from the wrists.
In the 1930s, a French surgeon named Pierre Barbet experimented with cadavers and argued that nails through the palms would tear out under a man’s weight, while nails through the wrist would hold.
Luke 23:53 says Joseph of Arimathea took it down and wrapped it in linen.
A body just taken down from a cross is still bleeding, and that blood would mark the linen before anything else did.
Rushed and bloody.
That is exactly what a real burial would look like.
But the blood holds a stranger problem, and you can see it with your own eyes.
It’s the color.
Cut your finger and bleed onto a bandage, and by tomorrow the spot has gone brown.
Leave it a few years, and it’s close to black.
That’s what old blood does.
The blood stains on the cloth in Turin are still a reddish color after centuries in a box, a fire, and more handling than anybody can count.
Alan Adler had an explanation.
He reported unusually high levels of bilirubin in the stains, a yellow-orange pigment the body produces when red blood cells break down.
A body that has been beaten, whipped, and pushed into shock breaks down red blood cells fast.
Adler argued that this bilirubin helped keep the old blood looking red.
When I asked the AI what the bilirubin finding would suggest to a doctor, it was careful.
It said that if the reported levels are accurate, they are consistent with severe trauma and the rapid destruction of red blood cells before death.
It also flags that other researchers have challenged Adler’s explanation for the color and that the question has never been retested with modern equipment.
So, the color itself may be telling you what was done to him.
That’s hard to hear.
And his suffering started before the cross.
Luke 22:44 says that in the garden, his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
Doctors have a name for sweating blood under extreme stress.
It’s called hematohidrosis.
And while it’s very rare, it’s real.
700 years before any of this, Isaiah wrote, “But he was wounded for our transgressions.
He was bruised for our iniquities”.
And then the line so many of us learned as children, “With his stripes, we are healed”.
Stripes means whip marks.
So, what kind of blood is it? In the early 1980s, Pierluigi Baima Bollone, a professor of forensic medicine in Turin, ran blood group tests on samples from the cloth and reported type AB.
In much of the world, AB is the rarest of the main blood groups carried by only a small slice of the population.
Sceptics point out that bacteria and contamination on very old cloth can interfere with blood typing.
And that’s a fair objection.
Hold on to that letter combination anyway, because it comes back.
So, here’s where we are.
Real blood on the cloth first, still reddish, possibly type AB.
But people have argued over one cloth for centuries.
What if there were two? Open your Bible to John 20.
It’s Sunday morning and Mary Magdalene runs to Peter and John to tell them the stone has been taken away from the tomb.
The two men run.
John gets there first, stoops down, looks in, and sees the linen clothes lying there.
Then Peter comes up behind him, and Peter doesn’t stop at the entrance.
He walks straight in.
That’s Peter all over, isn’t it? And here is what he sees in John 20:7.
And the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
Read that again.
There are two cloths in that tomb.
The long linen for the body, and a smaller cloth that had been about his head, folded and set apart.
I had read right past that verse for years.
The old word for that kind of cloth is sudarium, which simply means a sweat cloth, the kind used to cover a dead man’s face.
So, if one burial cloth was kept, why not the other? There is a cathedral in Oviedo, in the north of Spain, that says it has exactly that cloth, and it got there on the run.
The main account of its journey comes from Pelagius, a bishop of Oviedo in the 1100s.
I’ll be honest with you about him, because his own contemporaries were.
Pelagius was known for forging documents, and historians have nicknamed him the prince of falsifiers.
According to his account, the cloth left Jerusalem in 614, packed in a chest of holy objects just ahead of the invading Persian army of Khosrau II.
A priest named Philip carried it to Alexandria, and when the Persians reached Egypt, it moved again, across North Africa and into Spain through the port of Cartagena.
From there, it went to Seville, then to Toledo, then north into the mountains of Asturias to escape the Moors, where it was hidden in a cave on Monsacro.
Around 840, King Alfonso II built a chamber in Oviedo to house it.
That room, the Cámara Santa, is still standing.
There is one more witness.
In the 1970s, a Swiss criminologist named Max Frei studied pollen trapped in the cloth and reported grains from along that same route, Jerusalem, North Africa, Toledo, and Oviedo.
Later researchers reported pollen from a species of oak that grows in the region around Jerusalem.
Frei’s methods have been criticized over the years, so treat that as one piece of the puzzle, not the whole answer.
Still, the paper trail doesn’t depend on Pelagius alone.
It starts on the 14th of March, 1075.
That’s the day King Alfonso VI rode into Oviedo with his sister Urraca, and beside them was the most famous knight Spain ever produced, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the man history remembers as El Cid.
El Cid, standing in the room.
That’s quite a guest list for opening a box.
The king and his court had heard about that chest their whole lives, but nobody living had seen inside it.
According to the record, they fasted, they prayed, and then they opened it.
Inside were relics said to have come all the way from Jerusalem, and among them was a small cloth stained with old blood.
An inventory was drawn up.
A record of that day was kept in the cathedral archives, and the chest itself was later covered in silver with an inscription naming the Holy Sudarium of our Lord.
That chest is still in Oviedo today.
Keep the year 1075 in your head because we are going to need it.
So, what is actually on the face cloth? The first thing you notice is that there’s no image at all.
The cloth measures about 84 by 53 cm, roughly 33 by 21 in, and it is covered in brown faded stains that repeat in a pattern, as if the cloth was folded over on itself.
It’s brought out for the public only 3 days a year on Good Friday, on the 14th of September, and on the 21st of September.
Would you make that trip to see it? For decades, a group of Spanish researchers linked to the Centro Español de Sindonología studied those stains, including José Delfín Villalaín, a specialist in forensic medicine.
They [clears throat] ran experiment after experiment with model heads and fluids trying to reproduce the stains the same way they were made.
When I gave the AI their published findings, it laid out the picture in plain terms.
It said the stains fit a man who died by asphyxiation, which means he could no longer breathe.
That is how a man dies on a cross.
You hang by your arms, and to take a breath, you have to push up on the nail through your feet.
When you can’t push anymore, fluid builds up in the lungs.
According to the team, the main stains on the facecloth are about one part blood to six parts of that fluid, which came out through the nose and mouth.
The AI called that a pattern consistent with death during crucifixion.
Then, it moved to the position of the head.
The team concluded the head was bent forward at about 70° and turned about 20° to the right.
That is the posture of a man who died hanging upright.
The next finding is the one that gets me.
According to the researchers, the cloth was not tied around the head.
It appears to have been pinned to the hair at the back while the body was still upright on the cross.
When I asked the AI to put the hours after death in order using the team’s reconstruction, it gave me a timeline.
The first stains formed while the body was still hanging.
Roughly an hour later, the body was taken down and the cloth stained again.
Then it lay on the ground for around 45 minutes before it was lifted and carried away.
And there are marks on the cloth that the team attributes to fingers, a hand pressing the folded linen against the nose and mouth.
Somebody loved that man enough to cover his face.
Think about that for a moment.
At the back of the head, there are smaller blood spots that the researchers say came from small sharp objects.
Matthew 27:29 says, “And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head”.
Now look back at the cloth in Turin.
On the forearms, the blood trickles run in more than one direction, as if the arms were held at different angles, hanging, then pushing up to breathe, over and over.
In 2018, forensic anthropologist Matteo Borrini and chemist Luigi Garlaschelli tested blood flows on a volunteer and concluded that the stains don’t fit any single position, which they read as a sign the stains were made artificially.
Other experts answered that a man on a cross is never in a single position, and that nobody knows how the cloth was placed or moved.
I’ll let you weigh that one.
So, what happens when you [laughter] put the face cloth next to the cloth in Turin? An American physician named Alan Whanger from Duke University spent years overlaying images of the two cloths using a technique based on polarized light, which let him see one image through the other.
He reported about 70 points where the stains on the face cloth lined up with the face in Turin, and around 50 more on the back of the head and neck.
If you are still watching and you are not subscribed, please hit the button now, because what comes next is where this stops being a curiosity and becomes a real problem for the official date.
In 2016, Juan Manuel Miñarro, a sculptor and professor at the University of Seville, tried it again with a detailed model of the head in a study sponsored by the Spanish center.
He reported more than 20 points of correspondence from the forehead down to the chin.
For context, many courts accept somewhere between eight and 12 matching points to identify a person.
The nose on the facecloth measures about 8 cm, and so does the nose in Turin.
And the blood on the facecloth was also reported as type AB.
I asked the AI one direct question.
Based on everything published, do these two sets of stains look like they came from the same head? It listed where they agree.
The most striking for me was the thorn wounds on the forehead and at the back of the neck in matching places on both cloths.
It also listed where they don’t.
The stains in Turin are sharper, the kind left by a body lying still, while the stains on the facecloth are soaked and spread, the kind left by a man who was upright and being moved.
Then it gave its reading, and I’ll read it to you word for word.
The published comparisons show a striking degree of anatomical correspondence consistent with two cloths placed on the same head at different stages shortly after death.
The same head at two different moments.
So, remember the date.
In 1988, three laboratories at Oxford, Zurich, and the University of Arizona carbon dated a sample cut from one corner of the shroud.
Carbon dating reads a slow clock inside anything that was once alive, like the flax plant this linen was made from.
In 1989, the results were published in the journal Nature, giving a date between 1260 and 1390, medieval in other words.
For many people, that settled it, and Joe Rogan himself told Gibson that carbon dating seems to be pretty rock solid.
But, the facecloth was being opened by a king in Spain in 1075, almost 200 years before the earliest date the labs gave the shroud.
You see the problem.
Both can’t be right if the two cloths covered the same head.
When I asked the AI about that conflict, it didn’t pick a side without showing its work.
It said that if the two cloths touched the same head, then the 1988 date cannot describe the whole shroud.
Then, it gave me the other side, too.
The facecloth has been carbon dated, as well, and those tests came back around the 600s and 700s, far later than the time of Jesus.
One lab even asked whether the cloth had been contaminated with oil because ordinary cleaning can’t remove it.
But, play the labs’ game for a moment.
Even at 700 AD, the facecloth is more than 500 years older than the date given to the shroud.
And how was the shroud sample taken? On the 21st of April, 1988, a single strip of linen, just a few centimeters long, was cut from one edge of the cloth, close to where it had been handled and repaired for centuries, and divided between the three labs.
Every date that followed came from that one small area.
Critics have argued ever since that one corner of a cloth with a history like this may not speak for the whole thing.
And there’s more pressure on 1988.
The chemist, Raymond Rogers, one of the original 1978 team, argued in 2005 that the corner used for dating contained material from a medieval repair.
In 2022, Liberato De Caro and colleagues in Italy used a different technique, X-ray scattering of the linen structure, and reported results compatible with a cloth about 2,000 years old under certain storage assumptions.
Back in 2013, Giulio Fanti, an engineering professor at the University of Padua, had already reported chemical and mechanical tests on shroud fibers that pointed to somewhere between 280 BC and 220 AD.
Fanti has gone further since, and he’s gone back to the blood.
In 2024, he described tiny particles in the shroud blood that he and his colleagues recognized as creatinine, along with signs of high urea.
In his reading, that is the chemistry of a body under very heavy torture with kidneys failing.
Other scientists have not independently confirmed that work, and Fanti is open about believing the cloth is authentic.
But notice how often the blood keeps pointing in the same direction.
None of these studies has ended the argument.
What they have done is make 1988 look a lot less like the final word than it did when I was growing up.
During the Gibson interview, Rogan’s team even read out a report of a sample dated to around 2,000 years.
So, what is the answer? Was it a genius in the Middle Ages painting real blood onto linen to match a cloth in Spain that he could only see three days a year? Was it pure chance? Dozens of matching points and the same rare blood group? Or was it the same man? The one John says was wrapped in linen with a napkin about his head.
The AI raised one last possibility itself, and it’s a clever one.
Maybe a medieval forger studied the face cloth and copied its stains to make his own cloth look real.
But that forger would have needed real blood instead of paint, would have had to lay it down before the image, and would have had to understand serum rings he had no way of seeing.
I’ll tell you where I’ve landed.
A painter matching blood he could barely see with stains that may not even be paint.
I don’t buy it.
But, I’d rather hear which one you’d pick.
Tell me in the comments.
Now, go back to the wound in his side.
John 19:34 says, “But, one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water”.
On the cloth in Turin, the blood stains carry those pale rings under ultraviolet light, the clear part and the red side by side.
John knew nothing about ultraviolet light.
He just wrote down what he saw because he was standing there.
Some doctors have suggested a spear through the chest could release blood together with clear fluid that had gathered around the heart or lungs.
Mel Gibson goes further than any scientist would.
On Rogan’s show, he claimed that just recently they verified the Shroud of Turin, and that is stronger than anything the published research actually says.
But, you can hear why the blood pulls at him.
A man who has spent two decades staging the Passion in painful detail looks at those stains and sees the same wounds he put on film.
And look at what John says was left behind in that tomb, the linen lying there and the face cloth folded and set in a place by itself.
Everything that had touched him stayed behind, but he didn’t.
That’s the image Mel Gibson has spent more than 20 years trying to put on screen.
He has called it the most important story in human history, and the first part of his film arrives in May 2027.
The cloths are still here, one in Turin and one in Oviedo, a long drive apart and kept by two different cathedrals.
And nobody has been allowed to run a full modern test on both side by side.
You can argue with a carbon date all day long.
It’s a lot harder to argue with an empty tomb and with two pieces of linen that may have been lying in it that Sunday morning.
One rolled with the body and one folded by itself, exactly where John said they were.
My name is Elias and stay close because if either cathedral ever allows new samples from the blood stains themselves, modern DNA and chemistry could answer in weeks what four decades of argument never settled, whether those two cloths really touched the same face.
