Carbon-dating of the Shroud has indicated that it is approximately 750 years old, which would seem to prove it wasn't in Palestine 2000 years ago.  The image on the Shroud is that of a well-built, six-foot tall, physically fit man of obvious European descent.  It is unlikely that Jesus, a native Palestinian, would have looked like a European.  A copy of the wanted poster that was issued by Pontius Pilate for the purpose of arresting Jesus is included in the Slavonic Josephus, a written record of Palestine from the third and fourth decades AD that was compiled by the historian Josephus.  In the wanted posted the man known today as Jesus was described this way:  "... A man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high, hunchbacked with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows... with scanty hair with a parting in the middle, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard."  A height of three cubits would make Jesus approximately four-and-a-half feet tall, though he may have been taller than that and only stood that high because of his hunchback.  Incidentally, a hunchbacked person being crucified would suffocate much faster than a person with no spinal deformation, which is consistent with the Biblical stories of what occurred at Golgatha.  When the Roman soldiers arrived to break Jesus' legs he was already dead.

In the Acts of John (which never survived the censors at the Council of Nicaea) Jesus is again described as one of small physical stature:  "... I was afraid and cried out, and he, turning about, appeared as a man of small stature, and caught hold of my beard and pulled it and said to me: 'John, be not faithless but believing, and not curious.'"

Finally, in Luke 19:3 there is a passage about a man named Zaccheus who tries to see Jesus through a crowd:  "And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and he could not for the crowd, because he was low of stature."  In all fairness, this passage could be interpreted in two ways.  Either Zaccheus was small of stature and couldn't see over the crowd, or Jesus was small of stature and couldn't be seen because he was in a crowd of taller people.  The ambiguity of the passage is probably the very thing that allowed it to survive the knives of the censors at the infamous Council of Nicaea.

Anyway, the point is that the man known as Jesus did not, in all probability, look like a six-foot tall, physically-fit European.  It follows logically that if Jesus did not look like the image on the Shroud, then the image on the Shroud is not the image of Jesus.  So who was he, this man who left his image on the Shroud?  Since the Church won't tell you, I will.  His name was Jacques de Molay.

Jacques de Molay was born in eastern France in the year 1244.  At the age of twenty-one he joined the Order of the Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (more commonly known as the Knights Templar.)  He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming Master of the Temple of England and later Grand Marshal of the Templar military forces.  In the year 1292 he was elected Grand Master of the Templars.

By the years 1292, the Knights Templar were richer and boasted a more powerful army and navy than most countries.  Yet their future was in peril, since their nominal reason for existence was now gone.  The Templars had originally been created by Hugues de Payen in 1118, supposedly for the purpose of guarding the road to Jerusalem (though that was not their actual mission.)  By 1292, the Holy Land was in the hands of the Muslims, and the Templars were without a purpose.  Since the order was based in France and many of the Templars were French, they returned to that country to see what the future held.

The king of France at that time was Phillip IV, known as Phillip the Fair ("fair" as in good-looking, not "fair" as in just or even-handed.)  He was an ambitious man, but he was burdened with a crippling national debt.  One of his plans to increase his treasury was to tax the Church, but Pope Boniface VIII would not agree to allow Phillip to levy taxes against the Church holdings in France.  Phillip accused Boniface of various forms of depravity (including a widely-believed tale that the Pope kept a demon in a ring he wore, and at night he would let the demon out of the ring and have sex with it) but to no avail.  Finally, in 1303, Phillip sent agents to the Vatican to kidnap Boniface, but Phillip's men were unable to escape with the Pope.  However, the ordeal so weakened the aged Boniface that he died five weeks later.

The new Pope, Benedict XI, began his office with a friendly tone toward Phillip, but he still refused to allow Church holdings in France to be taxed.  Phillip quickly had Benedict poisoned and appointed Bernard de Goth, the archbishop of Bordeaux, as the next Pope.  Bernard took the name Clement V, and was essentially Phillip's puppet.  He allowed Phillip to levy a ten percent tax on all Church holdings in France, and even moved the Papal seat from the Vatican to Avignon.  But even with this new source of income Phillip still had terrible debt to deal with.

After much planning, on July 22, 1306 Phillip sent his troops throughout the country and had every Jew in France arrested.  Soon afterward, the Jews were exiled.  When they departed they naturally left all their holdings and wealth behind, which was transferred to the crown.  The architect of this plan, Guillaume de Nogaret, was so pleased by the plan's success that he formulated an alternate version to be used against the fabulously wealthy Templars.

The Templars had always been a secretive order, with hidden ceremonies and covert signs and codes.  Unfortunately, this wound up working against them, for it allowed Phillip to accuse them of heresy, saying why else would they conduct secret ceremonies if not to worship the devil?  Phillip managed to convince the Pope that the Templars were working against the Church, which was crucial to Phillip's plan.  Since the Templars had a Papal Rule, they were answerable to no man save the Pope and were outside the laws of every country.  Once the Pope agreed that the Templars should be arrested and questioned, Phillip gave the orders.  On October 13, 1307, all fifteen thousand Templars in France were to be arrested.

To Phillip's great frustration, however, when the Paris temple and its treasury were seized, there was no gold found in the vaults.  The Templar fleet which had been moored in the harbor of La Rochelle had been forewarned, and on the morning of the 13th when Phillip's agents arrived to seize the ships they found the harbor empty.  It is believed that the gold from the Paris temple was transferred onto these ship in the days preceding the 13th, and that the Templar fleet sailed off under cover of darkness.  Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Templars, may have suspected Phillip's treachery and wanted to safeguard the order's money.  It is unlikely he would have been too concerned for his own safety or that of his men, since they were supposedly protected by the Papal Rule.

In his rage over the loss of the wealth he'd intended to steal, Phillip ordered Guillaume Imbert, the Grand Inquisitor of France, to spare no torture in extracting confessions from the Templars.  De Molay, the accused heretic, was tortured in what Imbert thought was a fine example of irony.  De Molay was nailed to a doorway, with one arm above his head and the other at a ninety degree angle to his body.  Nails were driven though his wrists and feet, and a crown of thorns was forced onto his head.  He was scourged, and a dagger was driven into his side.  After hours of this torture, the sixty-three year old de Molay was ready to confess to anything.  Since Imbert was under strict orders not to kill de Molay, he stopped the torture once he had extracted the confession he sought.  De Molay was taken down from the doorway, wrapped in a linen shroud, and placed on a soft bed, where he lay through the night while Imbert waited to make sure he would survive.  The next day de Molay was given into the care of the family of Geoffrey de Charney, the Templar Grand Preceptor of Normandy.  De Charney had also been tortured nearly to the point of death, and his family took both men in and nursed them back to health.  The shroud de Molay had been wrapped in was transported with him to the de Charney residence where it was washed, folded, and put away.

De Molay and Geoffrey de Charney were given time to regain their health while Phillip continued his political maneuvering.  De Molay recanted his "confession" but was ignored.  Finally, on March 19, 1314, he and de Charney were executed together, roasted slowly side by side over an enormous fire.  The shroud of de Molay remained at the de Charney residence, forgotten about for the time being.

It was not until 1356 that the shroud was first displayed publicly in Lirey by Jeanne de Vergy.  Her husband, Geoffrey de Charney (the grandson of the Geoffrey de Charney killed with Jacques de Molay), had been killed at the Battle of Poiters and she needed money.  She never claimed the shroud was the burial shroud of Jesus, and she never said where she had gotten the shroud.  Nevertheless, pilgrims were soon flocking to northern France to see the burial shroud of a man who had been crucified, had a crown of thorns placed on his head, had nails driven through his wrists and feet, and had been stabbed in the side.

The Church must have been instantly aware of whose image was actually on the shroud.  After all, they were privy to the tortures that had been carried out on Jacques de Molay, and they knew to whom de Molay had been taken to recover after those tortures.  Less than fifty years later, the granddaughter of the man whose family had taken in the pseudo-crucified de Molay was displaying a shroud, upon which was an image that resembled Jacques de Molay and that bore wounds identical to those de Molay would have borne.  The Church made numerous strong attempts to get the shroud taken off display, but the attempts were unsuccessful.  They strongly denied that the shroud was a holy relic, and specifically stated that it was not the burial shroud of Jesus.  The pilgrims journeying to see it were unconvinced by the Church's statements.

In 1453 the shroud was sold (traded, actually, for several castles) to the Savoy family of Italy, who placed it in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, where it remains to this day.

Incidentally, the date of the Templars' arrest in France, Friday the 13th of October, 1307, was long remembered as an evil day.  To this day, it is the reason why Friday the 13th is widely considered in the Western world to portend bad luck.  Or so one version of the story goes...

For anyone who is stirred to any kind of emotion by the contents of this page, whether it is doubt, anger, or whatever, I would strongly urge you to read "The Hiram Key" and "The Second Messiah", both by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas.  They have done astounding research into this and other Church-related issues that rings true in every aspect, at least in my mind.

As a final note, in 1998 the Vatican finally agreed to carbon-dating of the shroud.  Several universities from various parts of the world conducted their tests separately.  The testing was conducted in February, but the Vatican held onto the results for a while.  The date the Vatican chose to make the findings public was October 13th, the same day as the arrest of Jacques de Molay 691 years earlier!  This could be a coincidence, but even if you take into account other noteworthy dates (such as his birthday, the day of his death, the day he joined the Templars, etc...) the chances of this happening by mere coincidence is less than one in three hundred.  Could the Vatican have chosen that date to indicate the true origins of the shroud?  It is certainly possible.