The Shroud’s ‘3’ Mark — A Message to the World?
W
hat really is that mysterious “3” seen on the forehead of the man? The deep wound etched in the man
some believe to be Jesus first received significant notice after photographer Secondo Pia’s 1898 photo highlighted the artifact. Some experts and Shroud analysts
have detected multiple versions of the “3” symbol on the cloth, with the forehead most striking.
The number three is of course a key
number for Christians, as they believe it was on the third day Jesus rose from the dead.
And others say the Shroud’s “3” may
have a hidden message. The Book of Matthew records this
interlude between the Pharisees and Jesus: “Then some of the Pharisees
and teachers of the law said to him, ‘Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.’ He answered, ‘A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.’” (Matthew 12:38-41) Jesus’ reference to Jonah, the Old
Testament prophet who purportedly spent three days in the belly of a whale, is said to presage Christ’s own death and resurrection. Others suggest the “3” represents
Jesus’ last miracle to the world in the form of the Shroud. Some Christians believe that as we
live in “end times,” modern science has uncovered powerful evidence of the Nazarene’s death and resurrection in this ancient linen.
But the “3” may have a second, more
precise meaning. Scholars note that the photograph
actually flips the real image on the forehead, which is a reverse “3” that looks like the this:
John Nicholas Joseph Lupia, a
professor of art history and archaeology, has studied the epigraphy of the cloth and details his findings in The Ancient Jewish Shroud At Turin. Lupia says the “ ” wound on the
forehead is actually a “brand mark.” He writes that “Romans did not hesitate
to torture condemned prisoners prior to execution,” which often included defacing the victim’s bodies with “with pins, reed pens or stylus, branded on their forehead.” The mark on the man’s forehead, when seen as it actually appeared as “ ,” is the Greek letter Xi. Lupia says Xi “was used as a branding
mark on condemned prisoners.” He noted the unique depiction of the
“ ” for Xi is consistent with “first century Hellenistic orthographic style” — offering “further attestation to its antiquity and veracity.” Lupia hypothesizes that the Xi wound
was “made by several strokes of a sharp object that cut into flesh, muscle, and veins, which was apparently red hot to scar, mar, and cauterize the venal puncture.”
WHY THIS MARK? Lupia answers: “The is actually a Greek letter Xi signifying the word xylon — literally ‘wood’ and culturally the symbol of the ‘Cross’ and the ‘Gallows’ for all condemned prisoners executed by crucifixion under Roman law. Slaves were also branded on the forehead for various reasons. Branding prisoners on the forehead is where we get the phrase ‘He is a marked man,’ meaning a man condemned to die.”
The man who died and whose image
was captured on the Shroud was truly a marked man, not only for the purposes of his death, but for the significance his life has made upon the world.
able in the Middle Ages or earlier. “The probability the Shroud is a
fake is really very, very low. On the oth- er hand, our results, taken alone, can- not prove the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.” But, he added, when ENEA’s find-
ings were added “to all the other his- torical, medical, palynological, textile evidences accumulated in the last 35 years,” a different conclusion might be made. In its 1981 report culminating
nearly three years of intense study, the STURP group concluded that the Shroud was “not the product of an art- ist” but the image of a real “scourged, crucified man.” The blood seeping out of the de-
picted man’s countless wounds was, in fact, real, it said. “The bloodstains go all the way
through,” Liberty University professor Dr. Gary R. Habermas, a leading expert on the Shroud of Turin, told Newsmax. He notes the scientific studies demonstrate that “the image stains are . . . only on the top” of the cloth, with the picture of Jesus “only the top few fibrils, maybe one fibril, of a single thread.” At the same time, Habermas says
“the blood stains will show on the back” of the cloth, a pattern consis- tent with a bloodied man. The im- age of the man, he says, comes from “a totally different process than what made the blood on the cloth.” A number of key findings about the
image have been made by STURP and other studies:
It was not painted; no pigment found.
It was not scorched or burned.
It is a two-dimensional image with encoded three-dimensional information.
The distance between body and cloth is captured in the density of the image; closer is darker.
The image did not come from con- tact with the cloth.
Continued on page 52 APRIL 2023 | NEWSMAX 49
FARNCIS/ ALESSANDRA BENEDETTI - CORBIS/CORBIS / BENEDICT/SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES / PAULII/ VITTORIANO RASTELLI/CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES PAULVI/ KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES / JOHN XXIII/BETTMANN/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES / PIUSXII/KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES / PIUS XI/BETTMANN/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES
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