The Shroud of Turin is one of most mysterious article of this century because of its fragility, the shroud was rarely exposed to public view. But this was done in May 1898 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom of Italy. For the first time, photography was now available and, after considerable persuasion, an amateur photographer, Signor Secondo Pia, was granted permission to photograph it. This was a difficult task with the equipment available at the time, made all the more so because Princess Clotilde had insisted that a thick plate glass screen be placed between the Shroud and the public. For the negatives, he was using glass plates approximately 20” x 25” in size. His first attempt ended in failure, but fortunately his second was successful. He took the plates home immediately and proceeded to develop them. He tells us that he almost let the first plate drop to the floor in his excitement at what was revealed there. Under his very eyes had formed a commanding face of calm and majestic beauty. This is explained by the fact that the marks on the cloth must actually be a negative and when Signor Pia developed his negative, it was really a positive, or an actual photograph. As might be expected this finding caused a world-wide sensation and even greater controversy. Signor Pia was even accused of falsifying his results, possibly because he had worked in private. A French priest, Ulisse Chavelier, who was considered a great authority on such matters, declared it a fake; Fr. Herbert Thurston, an English Jesuit, who had made a life-long study of such matters, stated flatly that it was painted. Strangely, while Church experts were attempting to debunk the Shroud, agnostic scientists were rallying to its defence. One of these, Yves Delage, an eminent Professor at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris, who was known for his uncompromising stand against the supernatural, even jeopardized his career by defending it.
These pictures were not very good by modern standards, and in 1931 when the cloth was exhibited again, new photographs, some in colour, were taken by a professional photographer, Giuseppe Enrie. This time there could be no suspicion of trickery since the photos were taken in the presence of 100 witnesses. More pictures were taken in 1969. During all this time, the evidence of these pictures caused most experts to believe that the Shroud was indeed authentic. But then, in 1988 came carbon dating. Permission was given to three laboratories which had the necessary equipment, one in Oxford, on in Tucson, Arizona, and one in Zurich, to test the Shroud using this new method. In all three labs, the results were very similar, showing that the cloth had been made somewhere between the years 1260 and 1390. Unfortunately, Prof. Edward Hall, who did the testing at Oxford, made a regrettable statement at a press conference, “There was a multi-million pound business in making forgeries during the 14th century,” he said. “ Someone just got a bit of linen, faked it up, and flogged it,” which slur cast doubts on the impartiality of his work. After this, nevertheless, it would seem that the Shroud was dead. But even more recently, scientists have begun to cast doubts on the accuracy of carbon testing, particularly when the material in question has been subjected to intense heat as was the Shroud and which might well change the constitution of the material.
The Shroud of Turin, usually called, is reputed to be the cloth in which the body of Lord Christ was wrapped for his burial. It is undoubtedly the most controversial relic of all time, the object of mystery and fascination for Christians for centuries. No other such object has been subjected to such intense and prolonged scrutiny particularly in this century atleast.
According to Thomas de Wesselow, formerly of Cambridge University, the controversial shroud is no medieval forgery, as a 1989 attempt at radiocarbon dating suggests. Nor is the strange outline of the body on the fabric a miracle, de Wesselow writes in his new book, "The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection" (Dutton Adult, 2012). Instead, de Wesselow suggests, the shroud was created by natural chemical processes — and then interpreted by Jesus' followers as a sign of his resurrection.
"People in the past did not view images as just the mundane things that we see them as today. They were potentially alive. They were seen as sources of power," de Wesselow told LiveScience. The image of Jesus found on the shroud would have been seen as a "living double," he said. "It seemed like they had a living double after his death and therefore it was seen as Jesus resurrected."
'It seemed like they had a living double after his death.'
- Thomas de Wesselow, book author
Believing the shroud
these details are important in determining the authenticity of the Shroud. There are many marks on it. On the night of 3/4 December 1532, a fire broke out in the chapel where it was kept in a silver repository. The molten silver scorched the cloth in several places before it was rescued. Later triangular patches were sewn in to repair the worst of the scorch damage.Those marks are at the sides and do not interfere with the main image.
The marks are a faint representation of a human body, both back and front, a bearded male with long hair, 5’ 11” tall and weighing approximately 175 lbs. Apparently the body was laid on the cloth with its feet at one end, and the cloth doubled back over the head down to the feet again so that the whole body was covered. Consequently there are two life-size images, back and front, lying head to head down the middle of the cloth.
Now that we have considered the evidence against the Holy Shroud, let us look at the evidence in favour of it, and so put you in a better position to judge its authenticity for yourself. The main argument against the Shroud is the lack of any documentary evidence that it existed at any time before 1354. However, there is no proof that it did not, and there are hints that it may have. For instance, there is a reference to a Shroud of Christ in the 5th or 6th century by St. Nino, a native of Jerusalem. More importantly, in Byzantine art, beginning in the 5th or 6th century, Christ was frequently represented with details that are visible upon the Shroud of Turin. William of Tyre, who accompanied the King of Jerusalem to Constantinople in 1171, reported that the Shroud of Christ was preserved in the imperial palace, and there are several references to the presence of the Shroud in Constantinople from the 12th to the 14th century. How could the Shroud have got from Constantinople to France? The crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204 and Geoffrey’s granddaughter stated that he had obtained it as part of the “spoils of war”, i.e., as a reward for partaking in the crusade. So there is nothing in the historical evidence to suggest that our cloth could not be the actual Shroud of Christ.
Let us now examine the cloth itself. The weave is a herringbone twill, which was the type used in the Middle East. The presence of cotton fibres mixed with the linen means that it could not have been made in Europe since cotton was not grown or used in Europe during the Middle Ages. The absence of wool is consonant with its being of Jewish origin, since the Mosaic law forbade mixing linen and wool in the making of garments, and the presence of even one wool fibre would have proved that this could not have been a Jewish burial shroud. In 1969, a Swiss expert, Dr. Max Frei, removed some pollen from the cloth and discovered that some of it was from plants known to have grown in Palestine at the time of Christ. So it is highly likely that the cloth originated in the Middle East, probably in the general area of Palestine.
But the strongest evidence for the Shroud’s authenticity comes from the image of the body itself. How could a forger have such an accurate knowledge of human anatomy as this image reveals when this knowledge was not available in the 14th century. Michelangelo in the 16th century used to secretly perform autopsies on the corpses of paupers (a crime punishable by death) in order to acquire this knowledge. Again, how could a forger imprint the image on the cloth since there is not a trace of paint or of any known pigment on it. As mentioned above, the image is only on the surface of the material. The only other known example of this type of imprint is the image of the Blessed Virgin imprinted on the shepherd’s cloak in Guadeloupe in Mexico in 1531, an imprint which is accepted as being miraculous. Another important proof is that the image is a negative. How could anyone living in the 14th century have known how to make a negative when the camera was not invented until five centuries later?
Perhaps the most significant detail of all is that the body has the nails driven through its wrists. Now, this was the accepted method of crucifixion in the time of Christ, but this knowledge was forgotten after the Emperor Constantine abolished the practice in the year 315 A.D., and, since the Gospels say that Jesus’ hands were nailed to the cross, every medieval depiction of the crucifixion, every painting, sculpture, carving, shows the nails driven through the hands of Jesus. In fact, this is still the practice at the present time. How could a 14th century artist have known about this custom which were not rediscovered until our own century? Still further on this point, it has been established in this century, that when a nail is driven through the wrist, the thumb is forced back across the palm. On the Shroud, we see the back of both hands but there is no sign of either thumb, but how could a person in the 14th century have known about this?
All the blood marks, too, are exactly where they should be if the victim were crucified, the blood stains from the crown of thorns, from the wounds in the wrists and feet, and from the wound in the side, so are the marks of the scourges, some delivered by a tall person, and the others by a shorter one. Yet strangely there is no trace of actual blood on the cloth. A final point on the evidence from the body is this. After the Second World War, the American space program invented a method of reconstructing the relief of the moon’s surface from photographs. This was applied to the picture of the shroud and it was found that the image on the Shroud is three-dimensional, a property unheard of in the history of art or photography.
So much for the scientific and historical proof for the authenticity of the Shroud. But for me personally, even if all this scientific and historical evidence were lacking, one single fact would be sufficient to prove its genuineness, that is the face on the Shroud. The face that was revealed when Secondo Pia developed his negative is one of calm and majestic beauty. It is a face which was described by the prophet Isaiah as having “an appearance so marred beyond human semblance, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” [Isaiah 52:14, 53:3] yet a face of tranquil dignity, of royal authority, of divine beauty. Only the greatest artists in the history of the world could have painted such a face, and to have painted it as a negative, when negatives were not known, using a method which still defied analysis, beggars belief. In the words of Philip McNair, “the Shroud appears to be intrinsically unfakeable.” The man has apparently suffered considerable violence in his life. Careful examination reveals the abrasions, bruises and swellings, there are traces of various blood flows, from the head, the wrist, feet, and particularly from the side, from which the blood flows apparently from an incision between the fifth and sixth rib. His back, from the shoulders down to the ankles, is liberally spattered with more than a hundred dumb-bell shaped cuts where the skin has apparently been broken by blows with a leaded whip such as the Romans used. His right cheek is swollen as if from a blow. Contrary to Roman custom, his legs are not broken. But there is no trace of actual blood on the cloth, nor has scientific analysis been able to discover traces of any other material which might have been used to imitate blood, or of pigment which might have been used to paint the marks on the cloth.
So much for what the shroud actually looks like. Let us take a look at its history. It can be traced back by documentary evidence to the village of Lirey in France where, in 1354, it was in the possession of a knight, Geoffrey de Charny. A century later, in 1453 it came into the possession of the Duke of Savoy and was placed in Chambery, the capital of Savoy, where it sustained the damage mentioned above. The Duke of Savoy later became ruler of part of the north of Italy and moved the Shroud to Turin where he planned to move his capital. A special chapel was built for it and until recently it was kept rolled up around a pole, inside a silvered wooden reliquary behind a grill above the altar. Recently, because of several attempts to destroy it by people breaking in and setting fire to the chapel, it has been removed to a place of greater security. However, an exact replica is on public display at all times in the chapel. The late ex-king of Italy, Umberto II, who lived in Portugal, willed it to the Church, so that it is now the property of the Vatican.
As de Wesselow is quick to admit, this idea is only a hypothesis. No one has tested whether a decomposing body could leave an imprint on shroud-style cloth like the one seen on the shroud. A 2003 paper published in the journal Melanoidins in Food and Health, however, posited that chemicals from the body could react with carbohydrates on the cloth, resulting in a browning reaction similar to the one seen on baked bread. (De Wesselow said he knows of no plans to conduct an experiment to discover if this idea really works.)
Perhaps more problematic is the authenticity of the shroud itself. Radiocarbon dating conducted in 1988 estimated the shroud to medieval times, between approximately A.D. 1260 and 1390. This is also the same time period when records of the shroud begin to appear, suggesting a forgery.
Critics have charged that the researchers who dated the shroud accidentally chose a sample of fabric added to the shroud during repairs in the medieval era, skewing the results. That controversy still rages, but de Wesselow is convinced of the shroud's authenticity from an art history approach.
"It's nothing like any other medieval work of art," de Wesselow said. "There's just nothing like it." [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]
Among the anachronisms, de Wesselow said, is the realistic nature of the body outline. No one was painting that realistically in the 14th century, he said. Similarly, the body image is in negative (light areas are dark and vice versa), a style not seen until the advent of photography centuries later, he said.
"From an art historian's point of view, it's completely inexplicable as a work of art of this period," de Wesselow said.
Resurrection: spiritual or physical?
While the continued controversy over the Shroud serves the useful purpose of keeping it in the public eye, it is unfortunate in one respect. Assuming that the Shroud is genuine, here we have the closest possible relic of Christ that it is possible to obtain, since his body ascended into heaven and left no trace behind; one related, moreover, to the crucial point of his life, his death on the cross. Here we having a living witness to the terrible sufferings he endured for us, his whole body cut to ribbons by the lashes of the scourges; the varying paths of the blood stains revealing his writhing on the cross in his struggles to alleviate the agony caused by the nails. And then there is his face endowed with a majesty that shines through his disfigurement. The innocent one has taken upon himself our sins. It is a scene which deserves to be contemplated with all our attention and in the depths of our soul without having part of our mind wondering whether it is genuine or not. Pope John Paul II when visiting Turin in 1998, while stating that the Church makes no official pronouncement on such phenomena, made no secret of his own belief when he spoke of the Shroud thus:
“Before the Shroud, the intense and agonizing image of an unspeakable torment, I wish to thank the Lord for this unique gift, which asks for the believer’s loving attention and complete willingness to follow the Lord. For the believer, what counts above all is that the Shroud is a mirror of the Gospel ,we cannot escape the idea that the image it presents has such a profound relationship with what the Gospels tell of Jesus’ passion and death, that every sensitive person feels inwardly touched and moved at beholding it.The Shroud is thus a truly unique sign that points to Jesus, the true Word of the Father, and invites us to pattern our lives on the life of the One who gave Himself for us.”Pope Benedict XVI went even further when, while visiting Turin on May 3, 2010, he declared that the Shroud“once wrapped the remains of a crucified man in full correspondence with what the Gospels tell us of Jesus… an icon written in blood, the blood of a man who was whipped, crowned with thorns, crucified, and injured on the right side.”Scientists have suggested that the marks on the Shroud might have been caused by some sort of an atomic explosion.
If this be indeed the case, in our imagination we can picture Jesus returning to the tomb after his resurrection to re-vivify and glorify his body and doing so with such an explosion of divine energy as to cause this body as it arose from the dead to leave behind the marks of his passion imbedded on his burial Shroud to leave to his future followers a lasting remembrance of how great were the sufferings with which he wrought our salvation. A recent investigator states, “Only this much is certain. The Shroud of Turin is either the most awesome and instructive relic of Jesus Christ in existence—or it is one of the most ingenious, most unbelievably clever products of the human mind and hand on record. It is one or the other; there is no middle ground.”If de Wesselow's belief in the shroud's legitimacy is likely to rub skeptics the wrong way, his mundane explanation of how the image of Jesus came to be is likely to ruffle religious feathers. According to de Wesselow, there's no need to invoke a miracle when simple chemistry could explain the imprint. It's likely, he says, that Jesus' female followers returned to his tomb to finish anointing his body for burial three days after his death. When they lifted the shroud to complete their work, they would have seen the outline of the body and interpreted it as a sign of Jesus' spiritual revival.
"The original conception of the resurrection was that Jesus was resurrected in a spiritual body, not in his physical body," de Wesselow said.
These ideas are already receiving pushback, though de Wesselow says he's yet to get responses from people who have read his entire book. Noted skeptic Joe Nickell told MSNBC's Alan Boyle that de Wesselow's ideas were "breathtakingly astonishing," and not in a good way; Nickell has argued on multiple occasions that the shroud's spotty historical record and too-perfect image strongly suggest a counterfeit.
On the other end of the religious spectrum, former high-school teacher and Catholic religious speaker David Roemer believes in Jesus' resurrection, but not the shroud's authenticity. The image is too clear and the markings said to be blood aren't smeared as they would be if the cloth had covered a corpse, Roemer told LiveScience.
Unlike many "shroudies," as believers are deprecatingly called, Roemer suspects the shroud was deliberately created by Gnostic sects in the first or second century. A common religious explanation for the markings is that a flash of energy or radiation accompanied Christ's resurrection, "burning" his image onto the cloth. [Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena]
If anything is certain about de Wesselow's hypothesis, it's that it is not likely to settle the shroud controversy. Scientific examinations of the delicate cloth are few and far between — and so are disinterested parties. ..................
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