What did Peter find when he entered the tomb? The eyewitness John reported: “He viewed the bandages lying, also the cloth that had been upon his head not lying with the bandages but separately rolled up in one place.” (John 20:6,*7) Notice that there is no mention of the fine linen—only of bandages and the headcloth. Since John specifies the bandages and the headcloth, would it not seem likely that he would have mentioned the fine linen, or shroud, if it had been there?
In addition, consider this: If the graveclothes of Jesus had his image upon them, does it not seem that it would have been noticed and would have become a subject for discussion? Yet, beyond what is in the Gospels, there is complete silence in the Bible about the graveclothes.
Even the professed Christian writers of the third and fourth centuries, many of whom wrote about a host of so-called miracles in connection with numerous relics, did not mention the existence of a shroud containing the image of Jesus. This is hard to understand, since 15th- and 16th-century viewers, according to Jesuit scholar Herbert Thurston, “describe the impressions on the shroud as so vivid in detail and colouring that they might have been quite freshly made.”