Ian Wilson (author)


Ian Wilson is a British author of historical and religious books. He has written about such topics as the Shroud of Turin and life after death.

Life

Wilson was born in Clapham, south London, during World War II. Neither of his parents was religious. His school was nominally Church of England, but during scripture classes he was always, as he put it, "the number one sceptic". He graduated in Modern History from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1963.
Wilson is best known for his writings on Shroud of Turin. He first came across the Shroud during the 1950s when he was in his mid-teens in an illustrated article by World War II hero Group Captain Leonard Cheshire. It was the image on the negative of the Shroud that dealt the first blow to his agnosticism. In 1972 he converted to Catholicism. Classical historian Charles Freeman, writing in Free Inquiry, heavily criticized Wilson's writings on the subject.
He participated in Channel 4's three part TV series Jesus: The Evidence and wrote the accompanying book of the same name. The series proved to be highly controversial and sparked a national furore, marking a significant moment in the changing fortunes of religious broadcasting in the UK.
He lived in Bristol, England, for twenty-six years and resides in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife, Judith. They have two sons.

Publications

  • The Turin Shroud: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?, 1979
  • Mind Out of Time?: Reincarnation Claims Investigated, 1981
  • All in the Mind: Reincarnation, Hypnotic Regression, Stigmata, Multiple Personality, and Other Little-understood Powers of the Mind, 1982
  • Reincarnation?: The Claims Investigated, 1982
  • Jesus: The Evidence, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984
  • The Exodus Enigma, 1985
  • The Evidence of the Shroud, 1986
  • Undiscovered: The Fascinating World of Undiscovered Places, Graves, Wrecks and Treasure, 1987
  • The After Death Experience: The Physics of the Non-Physical, 1987
  • The Bleeding Mind: An Investigation Into the Mysterious Phenomenon of Stigmata, 1988
  • Stigmata: An Investigation into the Mysterious Appearance of Christ's Wounds in Hundreds of People from Medieval Italy to Modern America, 1989
  • Superself: The Hidden Powers Within Us, 1989
  • Holy Faces, Secret Places: An Amazing Quest for the Face of Jesus, 1991
  • The Columbus Myth: Did Men of Bristol Reach America Before Columbus?, 1992
  • Shakespeare: The Evidence : Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work, 1994
  • In Search of Ghosts, 1995
  • Jesus: The Evidence, 2nd ed., London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996. ; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.
  • The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World's Most Sacred Relic Is Real, 1998
  • Life After Death: The Evidence, 1998
  • The Bible As History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999
  • The Turin Shroud: Unshrouding the Mystery, 2000
  • Before the Flood: The Biblical Flood as a Real Event and How It Changed the Course of Civilization, 2002
  • John Cabot and the Matthew, 2003
  • Nostradamus the Man Behind the Prophecies, 2003
  • Lost World of the Kimberley: Extraordinary New Glimpses of Australia's Ice Age Ancestors, 2006
  • Murder at Golgotha: A Scientific Investigation into the Last Days of Jesus's Life, His Death, and His Resurrection, 2007
  • The Shroud: The 2000-Year-Old Mystery Solved, 2010
  • The Book of Geoffroi De Charny with the Livre Charny edited and translated by Nigel Bryant, 2021
Book reviews