Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (25 page)

It is difficult to
imagine a more controversial historical
artifact than the Turin
Shroud. On one side,
there are those who
believe the shroud to
be the actual cloth that
was wrapped around
the body of Jesus after
he was taken down
from the cross. Skeptics on the other
hand, of are of the
opinion that the artifact is a medieval
hoax. The vital matters of where, when,
and how the image on
the cloth was created
are subjects of intense debate among historians, scientists, believers, and skeptics. Even the
supposedly decisive radiocarbon dating carried out on the shroud in 1988
has ultimately failed to resolve the issue, due to doubts cast on the quality
of the sample used in the tests.

Secondo Pia's 1898 negative of the
image on the Shroud of Turin.

The Shroud of Turin is a large, woven linen sheet 14.4 feet long by 3.6
feet wide. The front and back of the
cloth bear the image of a naked man
with his hands folded across the body,
who appears to have suffered injuries

consistent with crucifixion. The serene
face of the man is
bearded, the body at
around 6 feet tall, is
fairly tall, both for
the first century A.D.
or medieval times.
The cloth contains
dark red stains, resembling blood, and
on one wrist (the
other is not visible)
there is a noticeable
circular wound. Further wounds are apparent in the side,
forehead, and legs. No
representative of the
church has made any
claims about the
shroud, but many people are convinced
that the picture contained on it is an
image of the crucified Christ.

Much of the history of the object is
obscure. The first record of it as the
Shroud of Turin is not until the 16th
century. There are, however, earlier
mentions of a cloth bearing the image
of Christ. For example, the fourth century church historian Eusebius, Bishop
of Caesarea, describes the existence of
a miraculous image of Jesus, painted
from life, which was supposed to be preserved in Edessa, Syria. A legend
recorded by John of Damascus (c. A.D.
676-A.D.749), describes how King Abgar
of Edessa, afflicted with an incurable
illnes, sent a letter to Jesus asking
him to come to Edessa and cure him.
Jesus was unable to go, but instead
miraculously impressed an image of
himself on a piece of cloth and sent it
to the king via Thaddeus (also known
as Addai), one of the 72 disciples.
When Abgar beheld the miraculous
image (described by John as an oblong
cloth), he was immediately cured. This
holy relic became known as the Edessa
Image, or to Orthodox Christians the
Mandylion. Although the legend of
the Edessa Image describes a facial
image on a square or rectangular
cloth, researchers (including author
Ian Wilson) have suggested that the
Edessa Image was folded in a manner that only displayed the face. In
A.D. 944, on the arrival of the Edessa
Image at Constantinople, Gregory
Referendarius, the archdeacon of
Hagia Sophia in that city, gave a sermon discussing the artifact. His description makes it clear that the
Edessa Image was a full length burial
shroud, bearing an image of a whole
body and showing bloodstains believed
to be from the wounds in Jesus's side.
This artifact was subsequently deposited in the Palatine Chapel, where it
remained until the city was ransacked
and burned by the Crusaders in 1204.
The Crusaders brought away a number of treasures from Constantinople,
though whether the Image of Odessa
was among them is not known. Nevertheless, many researchers believe that
the cloth was brought to Europe at this
time by the Crusaders, and became
known as the Shroud of Turin.

In 1357 the shroud was exhibited
by Jeanne de Vergy, widow of the
French Knight Geoffroi of Charney, in
a church in the small village of Lirey,
northeastern France. In 1453 the cloth
came into the possession of Duke Louis
of Savoy, who kept it in his chapel in
Chambery, the capital of the Duchy of
Savoy, in the modern Rhone-Alpes region of France. In 1532 the shroud was
damaged in a fire in the chapel where
it was stored. (It may also have suffered water damage at this time from
attempts to extinguish the fire.) Poor
Clare nuns attempted to repair this
damage by weaving patches into the
cloth. In 1578 the shroud arrived in its
present home in Turin, and in 1983 it
became the property of the Holy See
(Vatican City), after Umberto II, the
last of the House of Savoy dynasty, left
it to the pope in his will. The shroud
remains today in Turin, in the round
chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John
the Baptist.

In 1988, among much publicity, the
Holy See allowed the relic to be independently radiocarbon dated by three
separate research institutions: Oxford
University, the University of Arizona,
and the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology. The laboratories all used
parts from the same sample, a piece of
cloth just 1 centimeter by 5.7 centimeter, taken from the corner of the
shroud, for testing. The conclusion
from the tests was that the object dated
from sometime between A.D. 1260 and
1390, the era when the shroud was first
exhibited, and was therefore not the
burial cloth of Christ, but a medieval
forgery.

Another piece of evidence which
appears to support the theory that the
shroud is a medieval forgery comes in the form of a letter from Bishop Pierre
D'Arcis of Troyes, in northeastern
France. This letter, written in 1389
(ostensibly to the Avignon pope, Clement VII, in southern France) claims that
an investigation into the nature of
the cloth by his predecessor Bishop
Henri of Poitiers had exposed the artist responsible for painting it, and he
requested that the relic be removed
from display. The letter goes on to say
that the cloth could not be the actual
burial cloth of Jesus Christ because
"the holy Gospel made no mention of
any such imprint; while, if it had been
true, it was quite unlikely that the holy
evangelist would have omitted to
record it, or that the fact should have
remained hidden until the present
time." However, this document appears to be a rough draft of a letter
that was never actually sent, and some
researchers have questioned the motives of Bishop D'Arcis, suggesting that
he coveted the cloth for his own gain.

But if the cloth was a fake, who was
responsible and how had they carried
it out? In their book The Second Messiah, Christopher Knight and Robert
Lomas claim that the face on the
shroud belongs to Jacques de Molay,
the last Grand Master of the Order of
the Knights Templar. De Molay was
arrested on the orders of Philip IV of
France for heresy and burnt at the
stake on an island in the river Seine
in Paris on March 18, 1314. According
to the authors, de Molay was tortured
and his arms and legs nailed to a
wooden door to parody the sufferings
of Jesus. After this, they hypothesize,
de Molay was laid on a length of cloth
on a soft bed and part of the cloth was
draped over his head covering the
front of his body. Apparently he was
then left, perhaps partly comatised, for

a period of 30 hours, during which time
the sweat and blood from de Molay's
body imprinted an image on the sheet.

Further evidence, which apparently backs up the de Molay theory, is
that the Grand Master was executed
together with Geoffroy de Charney,
the Templar preceptor of Normandy,
whose grandson was Geoffroi de
Charney. After the death of Geoffroi
de Charney in 1356 at the battle of
Poitiers, his widow, Jeanne de Vergy,
allegedly discovered the shroud in his
possession and put it on display at the
church in Lirey. The Knight-Lomas
theory relies heavily on the reliability
of the radiocarbon dates from the
shroud obtained in 1988, and the hypotheses of the authors about the torture methods used on de Molay.
Nevertheless, the image on the shroud
does bear a resemblance to depictions
of de Molay in medieval woodcuts, and
to a 19th century color lithograph of
him by Chevauchet.

Another candidate for the face on
the shroud is the Italian polymath
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince
have proposed that the shroud actually represents a self-portrait of da
Vinci, and is possibly the first example
of photography in history. The photograph theory, which has also been proposed by other researchers, suggests
that the image on the cloth was constructed with the aid of camera
obscura (a dark room or box with a hole
in one side, through which an inverted
image of the scene outside is projected
onto an opposite wall, screen, or mirror, and then traced by the artists to
make the image). The main objections
to this theory is that da Vinci was born
almost a century after the appearance of the cloth in historical records, and
also that he lived outside the time
frame of A.D. 1260 to 1390 given by the
radiocarbon dates.

However, recent research has
thrown considerable doubt on the validity of the 1988 radiocarbon dates. A
paper by chemist Raymond N. Rogers
(published in the January 2005 issue of
the scientific journal Thermochimica
Acta) indicates that the original sample
of cloth used for radiocarbon dating was
invalid. Chemical testing found that the
radiocarbon sample had completely
different chemical properties than the
rest of the shroud, persuading many
researchers to believe that the sample
used for radiocarbon dating must have
been cut from one of the patches used
to repair the cloth after the 1532 fire.
Rogers concluded from his chemical
analyses of the cloth that it was at least
1,300 years old.

In June 2002, a major restoration
of the shroud was undertaken, which
involved the removal of all the medival
repair patches. During this process,
expert textile restorer Mechthild
Flury-Lemberg found that the fabric
of the shroud had been woven in a
three-to-one herringbone pattern, a
type of weave used for high quality
cloths in the ancient world. FluryLemberg also pointed out the presence
of this same weave pattern on a 12th
century illustration depicting Christ's
burial cloth, which would suggest that
the artist possessed enough knowledge
of the shroud to recognize the specific
weave pattern of the cloth. She also
noted the similarities between an unusual stitching pattern on the seam
of one long side of the shroud and that
on the hem of a cloth discovered in
the tombs of the Jewish fortress of

Masada, overlooking the Dead Sea.
The Masada cloth dates to between
40 B.c. and A.D. 73, and Flury-Lemberg
believes that the Turin Shroud is of
roughly the same age, dating to somewhere in the first century A.D.

It was also during the 2002 restorations that the back of the controversial cloth was photographed and
scanned for the first time. In 2004, the
Institute of Physics in London published an article in the Journal of Optics A, revealing the results of the
analysis of the photographs. Using
image processing techniques, Italian
scientists Giulio Fanti and Roberto
Maggiolio of Padova University identified a faint, ghostly image on the reverse of the cloth, showing mainly the
face and hands. This second image corresponds with that on the front of the
cloth, and is entirely superficial, thus
ruling out the possibility of paint seeping through from the front. It would
also appear to rule out the theory that
the image on the shroud was created
using early photographic methods.

So does this recent reversal of fortune for the Turin Shroud mean that
it really is the burial cloth of Christ?
Although many believers are convinced
that this new evidence is the final
proof of the cloth's authenticity, skeptics refuse to admit to the possibilty
of the artifact being the real thing.
Many researchers now hope that the
Vatican will allow more samples to be
taken from the shroud for retesting,
though the church at present seems
reluctant to do so. Perhaps there will
never be any scientific proof that the
Turin Shroud is beyond doubt the
cloth in which Joseph of Arimathaea
wrapped the body of Christ. To believe
so may always be a question of faith.