The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (34 page)

The report by Vignon and Delage was read on 21 April 1902 at the Academy of Sciences, and caused a sensation, Vignon and Delage were praised and denounced. Yet, oddly enough, some influential Catholics still regarded the shroud as an imposture; the Jesuit Father Herbert Thurston, of London’s Farm Street, contributed a piece to the
Catholic Encyclopedia
in which he stated his view that the shroud was a mere “devotional aid”, painted by some fourtenth-century monk.

The controversy died down; almost thirty years passed. In May 1931 it was decided to exhibit the shroud again in belated celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Umberto. More photographs were taken, by Giuseppe Enrie. They were far better in quality than Pia’s earlier
photographs, and the sense of reality was even stronger. Moreover, close examination of the cloth showed that the paint theory was unlikely; paint would have soaked in, and the brown stain seemed to be on the surface. Even under a microscope, no fragments of paint were visible.

The photographs were shown to an eminent French anatomist, Pierre Barbet, who proceeded to study them in minute detail. The photograph showed that the nail that had penetrated the wrist had emerged in the back of the hand. Could this be a forger’s mistake? Barbet tried nailing a severed wrist; when the nail struck the bone it slipped upward, and emerged at exactly the spot shown in the photograph. The wrists showed two streaks of blood, as if the wrist had been in two different positions. Barbet showed that a man hanging by the wrists would soon suffocate; in order to breathe he would have to force himself upright, literally standing on the nails that held his feet; but he would soon become exhausted, and slump again. The bloodstains corresponded precisely to the two positions. Brooding on the apostle John’s description of the lance-thrust into the side of the dead Christ, “and immediately there came out blood and water”, Barbet tried to experiment of thrusting a knife into the side of a corpse above the heart; the result was “blood and water” – a mixture of blood and pericardial fluid.

All these investigations gave Barbet an appalling insight into the sufferings of a man dying on the cross – to such an extent that he admitted he no longer dared to think about them and his book
The Corporal Passion of Jesus Christ
became the subject of endless Easter sermons. Barbet was himself overcome with emotion when he succeeded in catching a close-up glimpse of the shroud in October 1933, and realized that some of the brown stains were bloodstains – the blood of Christ . . . He sank to his knees and bowed his head.

One thing was by now obvious: that the information contained in the shroud was so complex that the chances of it being a fake were a thousand to one against. The study of the shroud became something of a science in its own right. It was christened sindonology (the Italian for the shroud being
sindone
), and Paul Vignon became its acknowledged leader. It was Vignon who made the interesting suggestion that the shroud might be responsible for a sudden change in the representations of Jesus in the time of the emperor Constantine (
AD
274–337); in the first three centuries after the Crucifixion, Jesus is represented as a beardless youth, but after that as a bearded man with a moustache. Could it have been the discovery of the shroud that caused the change? Vignon studied hundreds of paintings, and concluded that a large
number of them seemed to have been influenced by the shroud. For example, there was a small square above the nose, due to an imperfection in the weave of the cloth, and he found this in many of the portraits of Jesus. In the so-called “holy face of Edessa” a portrait dating from a century after Constantine there is a distinct resemblance to the face on the shroud.

A later scholar, Ian Wilson, has argued convincingly that the shroud is identical with a relic known as the Mandylion, the handkerchief with which St Veronica wiped the face of Jesus when he was on his way to Calvary, and on which Jesus miraculously imprinted his image. The Mandylion (or a relic claiming to be the original handkerchief of St Veronica) was preserved in Byzantium until it was sacked by the Crusaders in 1204; it had come there from Edessa (Urfa, in modern Turkey) in August
AD
994. Wilson argues that the shroud was folded so that only the face was visible, and that this was the Mandylion. In his book
The Turin Shroud
, Wilson devotes more than a hundred pages to studying documentary sources and attempting to trace the history of the shroud-Mandylion before it appeared in Lirey in the mid-fourteenth century. His arguments are too long to detail here, but his tentative reconstruction is as follows.

After the Crucifixion (about
AD
30), the shroud was folded and disguised as a portrait, to hide its “unclean” nature as a burial cloth. It was taken to Edessa, then a thriving Christian community; but when Ma’nu VI reverted to paganism in
AD
57 and persecuted the Christians it was hidden in a niche in the wall above Edessa’s west gate. Although Christians were once again tolerated about 120 years later, the shroud’s existence remained unknown. In 525 severe floods in Edessa cost 30,000 lives and destroyed many public buildings; the shroud was rediscovered when the walls were being rebuilt. (This version, of course, contradicts Vignon’s hypothesis that it was rediscovered in the reign of Constantine three centuries earlier.) In the spring of 943 the Byzantine army besieged Edessa and offered to spare the city in exchange for the Mandylion; so the Mandylion was transferred to Constantinople. It was discovered to be a burial shroud in about
AD
1045, probably when someone unpinned the Mandylion from its frame to remount it. In 1204, when the Crusaders took Constantinople from the Greek Christians, the shroud vanished again. What happened next is unknown, but one conjecture is that it fell into the hands of the Knights Templars, who were accused of worshipping a man’s head with a red beard. In 1291, after the fall of Acre (where the Templars had their treasury), the cloth was brought to Sidon, then to Cyprus.

In 1306 the Treasury of the Templars came to France, brought by Jacques Molay. On 13 October 1307 the Templars were arrested on the orders of King Philip the Fair, who was anxious to lay his hands on their money, and in March 1314 Jacques Molay was burnt at the stake, together with Geoffrey de Charnay, the order’s Normandy master. It is not known if this Geoffrey de Charnay was related to the Geoffroy de Charny who built the Lirey church in 1353, and who seems to have exhibited the shroud there about 1355. When Geoffroy was killed at Poitiers in September 1356 the shroud became the property of his infant son, also called Geoffroy; the shroud was exhibited (perhaps to raise money) in 1357, but Bishop Henry of Poitiers ordered the exhibition (or “exposition”) to be stopped. In 1389 another exposition aroused the anger of Peter D’Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, who appealed to the king, then to the pope, to gain possession of the relic; he insisted that the shroud had been forged by an artist around 1355. The pope supported the de Charny family, and the Bishop’s attempt was a failure. In 1400, after the death of the younger Geoffroy de Charny, his daughter Margaret married Humbert of Villersexel, and the shroud was handed over to him for safe-keeping. It was kept in the chapel at St Hippolytesur-Doubs, and was exhibited yearly in a meadow on the banks of the Doubs (Known as the Saviour’s Meadow, Pré du Seigneur). The Lirey canons tried hard to recover it from about 1443, and even succeeded in having Margaret excommunicated; but they failed to regain it. When Margaret died in 1460 the shroud already seems to have been in the possession of the Duke of Savoy, who gave Margaret two French castles. In 1502 the shroud was deposited in Chambery castle, where thirty years later it was almost destroyed in a fire. And in 1578 the shroud was taken to Turin, where it has remained ever since, except for the Second World War, when it was taken to the Abbey of Monte Vergine at Avellino for safety.

In 1955 Group Captain Leonard Cheshire took a crippled Scottish girl to Turin, and she was allowed to hold the shroud in her lap; however, no cure took place. Possibly this failure decided Cardinal Pellegrino of Turin to make a determined attempt to establish the shroud’s authenticity or otherwise by scientific means. In June 1969 a scientific commission was allowed to examine the shroud, and more photographs (some in colour) were taken by Giovanni-Battista Judica-Cordiglia. For two days the commission examined the shroud, and recommended a series of tests that would involve the “removal of minimum samples”. In Portugal exiled King Umberto II gave his permission for the tests. On 23 November 1973 the shroud was shown
for the first time on television. The next day it was removed to a small room at the rear of Turin cathedral, and a total of seventeen samples were carefully removed. Part of the backing-cloth sewn on by the nuns after the fire was also removed, and this revealed the interesting fact that the image on the cloth had not “soaked through” to the other side. In fact, closer examination of a thread showed that the brown stain was restricted to the very surface of the cloth. This also seemed to rule out the possibility that there was actual blood on the shroud – we may recall the fact that Pierre Barbet had fallen on his knees when it had struck him that he was looking at a real bloodstain. In fact tests showed that there was no blood on the shroud.

Another scientist, Dr Max Frei of Zurich, had noticed that there was dust on the shroud, and he took samples by pressing adhesive tape to the surface of the linen. Back in his labouratory, a microscope revealed that there were many pollen grains among the dust and mineral particles. Frei, a criminologist, was an expert on pollens. One of his first discoveries was of pollen from a cedar of Lebanon. That looked promising – except that such trees have spread far from Lebanon, especially in public parks. Then he came upon something more revealing: pollens from plants unique to the Jordan valley, adapted to live in a soil with a high salt content. He went on to identify forty-nine varieties of pollen, many from Jerusalem, others from Istanbul (Constantinople), others from Urfa (Edessa), others from France or Italy. This constituted powerful evidence that the shroud had originated in the Holy Land, had travelled to Turkey, then to France and Italy. This was undoubtedly the most exciting discovery to emerge from the 1973 examination.

By the time of this examination, important research was also being carried on in America by a physicist, John Jackson, and his friend Dr Eric Jumper, a USAF captain. They made a “dummy” shroud by using a transparency and marking all the shroud’s main features on a similar piece of cloth. Placing the dummy over a man who was lying down, they then plotted the relative darkness of the brown markings. This revealed the curious fact that the markings were strongest where the cloth would have touched the body, and that they seemed to be in exact proportion to the distance the cloth would have been from the flesh – for example, being faintest below the chin, where the cloth would have been stretched between the chin and the chest.

But it was in 1976 that the two stumbled on their most fascinating piece of information – and perhaps the most exciting discovery since Secondo Pia’s original photograph. They decided to subject the shroud
to “image-enhancement”. This is a modern technique whose purpose is to analyze the relative brightness of areas of a photograph – for example, one taken by a space-probe – and to intensify them selectively to “bring out” underlying images. (It has been used on photographs of the Loch Ness monster.) Since the image-enhancer can also interpret information about distance, it can also turn a flat photograph into a three-dimensional image, the equivalent of turning it into a statue. The “statue” can then be turned from side to side. From a small transparency of the shroud Jackson and Jumper obtained an amazingly perfect image of the face. It proved that the brown marks on the shroud actually provided enough information for the computer to reconstruct the original and, in doing so virtually ruled out the possibility that the shroud was a painted forgery. In fact, as Jackson and Jumper pointed out, the shroud was in many respects superior to a modern photograph. A photograph may not contain enough “distance information” to produce an accurate “statue” – so an attempt to translate a photograph of Pope Pius XI into a three-dimensional image flattened the nose, distorted the mouth and made the eyes too deeply set. The image on the shroud was more accurate than that. It even revealed something never before recognized – that coins had been placed on both eyes, according to the Jewish burial custom of the time. Other researchers, Donald Lynn and Jean Lorre, were even able tentatively to identify the coins – as “leptons”, the “widow’s mite” of the New Testament.

In 1977 Dr Walter McCrone, a Chicago microanalyst, submitted a request to take samples from the shroud. McCrone had disproved the authenticity of the “Vinland map”, which was supposed to prove that Vikings discovered America, by showing that although the parchment was medieval, the ink contained a component only used after 1920. McCrone stated that with the use of the ion microscope he could identify the nature of the shroud’s image. But in 1977 his chances of laying his hands on material from the shroud seemed minimal; Turin had demanded the return of the small samples. Then a new Cardinal of Turin was appointed, Anastasio Ballestrero, former archbishop of Bari. In August 1978 Ballestrero mounted another exposition of the shroud, and it was clear that he was not averse to more scientific tests. Jackson and Jumper, Lynn and Lorre, were able to take more material; Max Frei took more dust and pollen samples. And McCrone got his test samples.

For the believers, McCrone’s results were disappointing. He announced that his microscopic examination had revealed traces of iron oxide and of paint fragments on the shroud, and concluded that this proved that it was a forgery. Other scientists pointed out that flax is
soaked in water before it is made into linen, and that this could easily be the source of the minute traces of iron oxide. Moreover, the shroud has often come into contact with artists – many copies around Europe bear an inscription certifying that they have been in actual contact with the Holy Shroud of Turin (and have thus, presumably, absorbed some of its virtue). Nothing is more likely than that it has some traces of the pigments used to make such copies.