In a chapel of the cathedral at Turin in northern Italy lies a piece of cloth about 14 feet long and three feet six inches wide. The cloth shows, in a faint and shadowy way, the front and rear images of a man. These images are sepia-coloured with reddish marks suggesting blood-stains at the wrists, feet and side of the man, the whole seemingly recording the impressions made when the body of a man executed in the most barbarous of manners was laid upon one half of the cloth and the other half was folded over him. The face shows the compelling features of a bearded man so like the commonly accepted face of Christ. The supposed blood-stains basically conform to the accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus given in the Gospels. This is the shroud that millions of Christians revere as the burial cloth in which the crucified body of Christ was wrapped. If genuine, the cloth is the most impressive and moving relic to have come down to us from the time of Christ. But is it genuine?
In France in 1902 Professor Yves Delage, a self professed agnostic, scandalized the French Academy by telling them that the Shroud was the true burial cloth of Jesus. The biologist Paul Vignon conducted researches which appeared to show that the images on the Shroud conformed exactly to the procedures of an actual crucifixion, and demonstrated that the image was significantly similar to the images of Jesus accepted as such by the Church since earliest times. At the same time, the Frenchman Ulysses Chevalier and the English Jesuit Herbert Thurston, both of them Catholic priests who based their work on medieval documentation of the Shroud, roundly condemned it as a forgery, the work of some medieval artist.
Controversy still rages - but 20th-century science has, surprisingly, made the voice of the sceptics less strident than it used to be. Tests by impartial scientists are producing increasingly firm evidence that what is revered by so many is in fact the shroud of someone who was crucified in Palestine around the time that Jesus died. Whether the body was that of Christ can probably never be finally ascertained.
One end of the cloth bears the marks of the front of a man around 35 to 40 years old and about five feet six inches tall. The other end bears the marks of the back of the man. There is evidence of a wound in the ribs and of bleeding from the forearms; and something sharp enough to cut the skin - a crown of thorns? - seems to have been bound around the head. One of the most controversial issues, of course, is the unanswerable question of how the shroud came to bear such clear imprints of the body it covered. Another equally vexing problem arises from the fact that there is no authenticated record of its existence before 1357, when it was publicly exhibited at the small French town of Lirey. At that time the cloth belonged to a noble French family, the de Charnys, who never explained how it had come into their possession. Among the many people both inside and outside the Church who had faith in its authenticity were the powerful Dukes of Savoy, to whom the controversial relic was bequeathed in 1453. At first they kept it in their capital city of Chambery, where it was slightly damaged by fire in 1532. Then, in 1578, they moved their capital to Turin, where the shroud was enshrined in a cathedral chapel built expressly for it. It has lain there ever since, venerated by many, although the Roman Catholic Church itself has never firmly declared it as authentic.
In 1898 a photograph of the Shroud was taken by an Italian named Secondo Pia, who was astonished to discover that the features of the body could be seen far more distinctly on the negative than on the positive photograph. Subsequent examinations involving increasingly accurate techniques culminated in 1978 with the arrival at Turin of a team of specialists from a number of countries. They were permitted to use every possible modern method for validating ancient objects except one - the carbon-l4 process - which is the best-known technique for dating certain objects with a fair degree of accuracy. Unfortunately this test destroys small portions of the object being examined, and the authorities understandably balked at the thought of any such damage.
One theory generally advanced by sceptics is that the figure imprinted on the shroud was simply painted sometime in the 14th century, and an American expert on forgeries, Walter McCrone, has produced a clever imitation of the shroud using a paint composed of a mixture of iron-oxide pigment and rose madder (a pigment much used by medieval artists). Unlike the original, however, his paint penetrates the linen, showing through on both sides; and many highly respected scientists since 1978 have proved that the image on the Turin cloth could not have been made by paint. On the contrary, what looks like blood has been found to contain the same mixture of calcium, protein, and iron as blood. And analyses of all parts of the cloth not marked by bloodstains find them to be simply linen yellowed with extreme age. What is more, the analysis of pollen grains found in the cloth indicates that the linen comes from the Middle East, which is the only area where most of the different species of spore in the cloth grow. Textile experts have also concluded that the weave of the linen is of the type common in Palestine 2,000 years ago and that its fibres contain traces of cotton, which does not grow in Europe. If the shroud was forged in the Middle Ages, the forgers must have gone to the trouble of procuring cotton as well as certain kinds of plant pollen in order to delude 20th-century scientists. On top of all this, the Shroud has a striking 3-D effect that can be obtained by looking at the image through an instrument called a "3-dimensional scanner." No known painting produces this effect. How it could have been achieved by even the most brilliant of forgers has baffled all the experts. They agree that the likeliest explanation of the 3-D phenomenon is that it was produced either by a combination of embalming spices and the bitter sweat of a tortured body or by "scorch" of the linen resulting from the chemical effects of an unusually high body temperature. And that was the way things were until 1988, when the Church agreed to allow the Shroud to be subjected to the carbon-l4 test. What happened then will be revealed in the next instalment.
Bill Hutchings
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