David Rolfe did not begin as a believer. He was a filmmaker and a sceptic, and he approached the Shroud of Turin the way sceptics approach relics — as a puzzle with a mundane answer waiting to be found. His intention was to expose it.

His research took him to the opposite conclusion.

What he encountered was a body of evidence that resisted every ordinary explanation he tested it against.

The image on the cloth shows a crucified man, and the details align with the biblical account of the death of Jesus with uncomfortable precision — the wounds, their placement, the pattern of injury from scourging, the marks around the head. Not a general impression of a crucifixion, but this specific one.

The formation of the image is where the sceptical case runs aground. Scientists have not been able to explain it. It is not painted. It is not applied. The evidence points to the image having been produced by an intense burst of energy, a flash powerful enough to mark the linen's surface fibres and nothing beneath them.

There is no known natural process that does this, and there is certainly no medieval technique that does.

The supporting evidence runs the same direction. Pollen recovered from the cloth traces back to plants native to Jerusalem — placing the linen in the right region, not in medieval Europe where a forger would have had to work. The weave matches first-century textile production, consistent with the period rather than with the era in which the Shroud's critics claim it was manufactured.

Rolfe went looking for the seam in the story. He could not find it. The investigation he began in order to debunk the Shroud ended by convincing him of its authenticity.

That is the part worth sitting with. This was not a believer assembling evidence for a conclusion he already held. It was a sceptic who set out to take the relic apart, followed the evidence honestly, and found that it pointed somewhere he had not intended to go — to a crucified man in a linen sheet, and to the reality of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

The face on the Shroud of Turin, 1909 photograph. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.