April 1, 2004

• Shrouded in Mystery

  
  

  Yesterday, I mentioned the Shroud of Turin as the source of Mel Gibson's pattern for the wounds of Jesus depicted in the film "The Passion of Christ."  The Shroud is one of those bits of "what if" that utterly fascinate me because of the implications and because of the mystery of it.  I must not be the only person interested in the shroud because hundreds of thousands of hours have gone into the study of the cloth making it the most studied artifact in history.  In addition, I've learned that PBS intends to air a new documentary on the Shroud on April 7.  Check your local listings for times.

  
  

  The Shroud is a single piece of linen woven on a primitive loom which bears the image of a scourged and crucified man many believe to be Jesus of Nazareth.  It was displayed at Lirey in France in the 1350s and subsequently passed into the hands of the Dukes of Savoy.  After many journeys the shroud was finally brought to Turin in 1578 where, in 1694, it was placed in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral in a specially designed shrine.  Could it be the burial cloth of Jesus, or is it a clever medieval forgery?

  
  

  To the naked eye, the image is ghostly, barely discernable in any way.  It wasn't until 1898 during an exhibition of the shroud that a remarkable discovery was made.  Secondo Pia brought a new invention called a camera and took photographs of the Shroud, hoping at best to have a paler image of the ghostly man.  What happened next sparked the intense scientific scrutiny the shroud has undergone.  The negative of Pia's photograph reveals a positive image.  I can't really describe it to my satisfaction, let me show you what I mean.  This is the face as it appears if you look at the shroud:

  
  

  

  
  

  This is the face as seen in the film negative:

  
  

  

  
  

  There is no question that the cloth is at least 700 years old.  In order for it to be a forgery, the artist would have had to possess information about negative light images 5 centuries before the invention of the camera.  Does that give you pause?  How about this, scientific scrutiny has revealed that the image wasn't painted onto the cloth, and it isn't the result of the impression of a body against the cloth, the image was created with radiation. 

  
  

  In a well-publicized experiment in 1988 a bit of the cloth was subjected to Radiocarbon Dating and it was proclaimed that it did not appear to be sufficiently old to date from the first century.  However, subsequent discoveries through the dating process into question when Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes discovered that bacteria produce an organic coating (what he calls a bioplastic coating ) over time on ancient textiles, textiles including the Shroud itself.  This coating, which the author first discovered on Mayan artifacts, so distorts the carbon dating process that objects on which it is found (such as the Shroud) are actually significantly older than the data show.

  
  

  Even more recently 3-dimensional computer enhancements have revealed over the right eye and left eyebrow of the Man of the Shroud traces of two small coins, placed there perhaps to keep the eyelids closed. One is a lituus with the figure of a curved staff-coined by Pilate in 29 A.D. On the coin over the right eyelid signs identify with a Tiberius Caesar coin.

  
  

  Other interesting details have emerged.  Early Christians did not depict the crucified Christ except in words.  Only in the fifth century, nearly a century after the Roman state had discontinued the practice of crucifixion and no one living had witnessed such a procedure, did Christians forget the shame and horror of the event sufficiently to begin making pictures of it.  By the time they began making such pictures, many of the gruesome details of actual crucifixion had been forgotten; and jesus is painted on the cross not as a man in agony but as the artist supposed he must have appeared at his resurrection.  One detail in particular was completely forgotten.  The gospels imly that Jesus was nailed to the cross through his hands and feet, fulfilling the description on Psalm 22 ("They pierced my hands and my feet.") and this serves well enough as a general description.  All artists from the fifth century on took this to mean that Jesus was nailed to the cross through his hands.  But if a man were to be crucified through his palms, he would quickly slide off his cross because the cones of hte hands are insufficiently strong and stable to hold the weight of a body.  Jesus was crucified through the bones of his wrists.  We can be very certain of this fact because Israeli archeologists have discovered crucified bodies from the first century all bearing the nails through the wrists.  (This is a detail that Gibson got wrong, but I understand why he chose to show it the way he did for special effects purposes.)  The Shroud of Turin, reveals the image of a man crucified through his wrists.

  
  

  The shroud contains pollen of flowers that bloom at Passover time in Israel, as well as pollens from flowers that bloom in France and Turkey.  The bloodstains on the fabric are human blood, type AB.  The blood stains are exactly correct as modern medicine would expect to see from a crucified victim, with high bilirubin content in blood from the torture.
  Scourge marks (approximately 120) have UV response around them, as blood serum would have.

  
  

  Of course, there's more.  I've presented the most dramatic information here because I wanted to show why it is that I continue to follow the studies and the reports on the Shroud.  Scientific measures, no matter how accurate, can never prove with 100% certainty that the man whose image is captured on the cloth is Jesus of Nazareth.  But so far, the results are a far cry from disproving it either. 

  
  

  "Frankly, I am still Jewish, yet I believe the Shroud of Turin is the cloth that wrapped the man Jesus after he was crucified. That is not meant as a religious statement, but one based on my privileged position of direct involvement with many of the serious Shroud researchers in the world, and a knowledge of the scientific data, unclouded by media exaggeration and hype. The only reason I am still involved with the Shroud of Turin is because knowing the unbiased facts continues to convince me of its authenticity".   Barrie M. Schwortz:
     The Official Documenting Photographer for the Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc., (STURP)

  
  

  Some of the material in this blog I have taken from Thomas Cahill's Desire of the Everlasting Hills.  Some came from John McRay's Archaeology and the New Testament.  The images I borrowed from the Shroud of Turin website at http://biblia.com/jesusart/turin.htm.  The bloodtype and pollen information also came from a website at http://www.religion-cults.com/cloning/shroud.htm.

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