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Like it has so many times in its long, tortured history, the Shroud of Turin is again, this Easter 2011, resurrected. I don’t use resurrected lightly. If authentic, the ancient linen cloth with mysterious images of a crucified and tortured corpse on its fibers is tangible proof to many Christians of Jesus’ rise from the dead. And while authenticity is certainly still in debate, the burden of proof now — at least on the Shroud’s inexplicableness — has shifted to the doubters.
The 14-foot-long shroud can be traced to at least 1354, when it appeared in a church in Lirey, France. The family of a Crusader began exhibiting it then, according to documents, as the Shroud of Christ brought back from the Holy Land. The images of a crucified, long-haired man on its surface were, and are, not well defined, more smudgy than lifelike. But locals, believing they were miraculously made, paid homage, as the cloth made its way by bequeath and acquisition to Turin in 1578, where it lies today, formerly owned by the Italian monarchy, now the Catholic Church.
But it wasn’t until 1898, and the first photographs of the linen were taken, that real controversy began. Details not clear on the cloth’s images were, in the negative plate, vivid and real. The face, which had looked wide-eyed and owl-like, was serene with eyes closed. It was realized that what was on the cloth’s surface was itself like a photographic negative — lights and darks were reversed.
Historians, including those in the Church — often embarrassed by phony relics — argued it was a painted fake.
One, a French prelate named Ulysee Chevalier, produced 14th century documents claiming the cloth’s creator had confessed. The forger was not named in the documents, no paint or other method of artistry could be detected, and the preserved testimony was judged hearsay. But photography was little understood at the turn of the 20th century and the negative-positive puzzle got little press while Chevalier’s arguments did. The Shroud was put away and largely forgotten until the early 1930s when, shown again in two highly publicized exhibitions, new scientists and physicians renewed the debate.
In 1978, an international group of some 30 interested scientists calling themselves the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) was given unprecedented and somewhat reluctant permission to perform non-destructive tests on the relic. The group includes Christians, agnostics and Jews. They subjected the linen cloth to X-rays, ultraviolet light, fluorescence photography, high-powered microscopes and tape-lifted specimens to chemical analysis. They found no paint or brush stroke. Unequivocally they declared the images were not painted or dyed, and blood on the cloth, which is separate from the images and which they had analyzed, was authentic human blood — AB to be exact. Most had flowed and clotted while the man was still alive.
In 1988, however, the Shroud’s believers suffered what seemed a crushing blow. Carbon-14 dating, agreed to by the Church because of STURP’s findings, dated the cloth to around the 14th century. Critics proclaimed the results as indisputable proof that the relic was a medieval fake.
The Shroud seemed buried again — but not for long. In 2005, Los Alamos National Laboratory fellow Ray Rogers argued that the 1988 test was performed on a corner of the linen that had been patched. He believed the rest of the Shroud is older; other scientists believe contaminants could have caused an error in the carbon dating. Some of the original testers, like Oxford’s Christopher Ramsy, are now calling for new carbon-14s. “There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the Shroud is older than the radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly needed,” he says on the website for his company, the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.
Beyond that test, new discoveries about the cloth only deepened its mystery.
First, researchers find the images more baffling than ever. They have been found to be so mathematically precise that Dr. John Jackson, a physicist formerly of the US Air Force Weapons Lab, and one of the founders of STURP, can use computers to read them and construct a lifelike, three-dimensional “hologram” of the body. The images are in effect a graph or “map” of where the cloth touched and didn’t touch the body. Once constructed in the computer, the corpse can be animated and viewed from all sides and angles. He’s even made molds from the hologram.
Since the 1898 controversy, various theories for the origin of the images — what combination of chemicals and environment caused them — have been offered and rejected. Heat, as might have emanated in a delicate “scorch,” has also been theorized. But attempts to duplicate the Shroud images have never measured up.
STURP scientists now believe individual linen fibers have been “carmelized” or “oxidized” only on the outside of the fibers from tip to about halfway down — as if something zapped each one. The darkest areas of the images have the most changed fibers together; the lightest have the least. For instance, the prominent bridge of the nose on the man in the shroud, which is dark, has many tiny changed fibers that are close together. But what caused this strange but precise change in certain fibers is a mystery.
However it happened, the uniform nature of the fibers begs the question: Just how could a medieval artist have created them? There are millions. What kind of brush stroke or application of dye was used in exactly the same way and doesn’t penetrate into the core of each porous fiber? How could a human hand be so precise?
And if some kind of fantastic medieval machine were used, where is it? Where are more of its fantastic products? And supposing there was this one-time, fantastic faking contraption, why make the resultant images like photographic negatives? What would be the point of making a Christ that could not be seen or believed until years later?
Finally, if the images were faked in order to make the man in the Shroud appear to be Christ, why are there so many deviations of tradition in his depiction? The man on the Shroud wears a cap of thorns, not the traditional wreath. The nails are in the wrists, not the hands, as is almost always portrayed in Christian art. The man in the Shroud is naked. Wouldn’t that have been blasphemous in medieval times?
In truth, most scientists who have actually studied the shroud — an important distinction — come away at least perplexed. But the debate continues, each side using details to back their theories. Believers, for instance, point out that the whip marks have been matched to a Roman flagrum, the dog-boned lash used at the time of Christ. There is swelling at most of the wounds, except at the gash in the side, which backs the Gospel account that this wound came after his death.
Among doubters, the late Walter McCrone, who debunked the supposed “Vinland map” depicting Norse exploration of North America, found iron oxide in a sample of the Shroud he examined. Since that’s a frequent ingredient of medieval paint, he took the Shroud to be a forgery, though members of STURP said the amount was so microscopic as to be contamination.
The lack of a documented history back to the tomb has always been an obstacle to authenticity for the Shroud. However, a strong circumstantial case can be made for the Shroud’s existence from the time of Christ until 1204, when the cloth believed to have been the Shroud disappeared in the Crusader sacking of Constantinople. The highlights are: Early Christians surely would have saved burial garments left in the tomb as described in the Gospels. A Shroud, believed to be the one now in Turin was found hidden in a wall in one of early Christianity’s settlements around 550, according to accounts. With an image of Christ on it like the one on the Turin Shroud, it was exalted and taken to Constantinople, the seat of Christiandom then, in great fanfare, where it was exhibited frequently until the 1204 sacking.
That disappearance created a troublesome gap in the Shroud’s history of some 150 years until 1354, when it surfaced in France in the possession of a relative of one of the leaders of the Knights Templar, the secretive and controversial Crusader-monks who were purged and disbanded in 1314.
Today, though, the Vatican has announced that one of their top researchers in their own restricted archives has found a lost document indicating the Templars did, in fact, have the cloth — helping to close the gap. It’s the testimony of a young French Templar, Arnaut Sabbatier, who claims to have venerated a Shroud-like cloth in a secret 1287 initiation ceremony. “He was shown a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man, and was told to kiss the feet,” Barbara Frale, the researcher, wrote in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, in 2009. The cloth described is “extremely similar to the Shroud of Turin” and “appears to solve the puzzle of the Shroud’s missing years.” Frale is writing a book, soon to be published, on her find.
Last Easter, at the latest exhibition of the Shroud, which drew more than 2 million viewers to Turin’s St. John the Baptist Church, Pope Benedict himself, after meditating before the relic, deviated from the Vatican’s usual non-committal stance and deemed the Shroud authentic. It is, he told the Christian Science Monitor, “an icon written in blood; the blood of a man who was whipped, crowned with thorns, crucified, and injured on his right side.”
Christian faith, believers says, does not depend on relics, even one as monumental as the Shroud could be. I heartily agree. Faith, by definition, does not need proofs. But if it turns out that the Shroud is authentic, there are tremendous benefits to the faithful. Christians will have tangible evidence of the story of Christ as told in the New Testament, a picture of what Jesus looked like and the horrible suffering he endured, and, for lack of any other accepted explanation, a possible proof of his resurrection.
You do not need a Shroud to believe — but it can’t hurt.
Robert K. Wilcox is the author of “The Truth About the Shroud of Turin: Solving the Mystery” (Regnery Publishing), out now.