The latest on the Shroud

MARCH IS THE MONTH of Lent and this liturgical season induces us to reflect on the Passion of Christ, on his death on the cross. Our thoughts may spontaneously go to the Shroud, the sacred sheet of linen, conserved in Turin, Italy, which is held to be an extremely precious relic, with the image of Jesus’ entombed body. Recent studies appear to finally explain the mystery of that image: there seems to have been a powerful field of energy, which was unleashed at the moment of Resurrection.

A unique relic

It is a well-known fact that, according to ancient Christian tradition, the Shroud, which is four metres and 35 centimetres long and one metre and 10 centimetres wide, is the cloth which the Gospels say was purchased by Joseph of Arimatea in order to bury Christ’s body. It was wrapped around His dead body and was found by the Apostles Saturday morning, immediately after the Resurrection, folded in the sepulchre. And the body left an imprint on the sheet, due to a phenomenon that no one has ever been able to explain.

It is a tenuous image, but it is the map of Christ’s Passion. In addition to the figure of the man who died on the cross, there are blood stains on the wrists, on the ribs, around the waist, the signs left by the Roman scourge (flagellum): there are at least 120 destructive whip marks. It is also evident that there were two men whipping him, one on the right and one on the left. They whipped his entire body, with the exception of the area around the heart, because they had evidently been ordered not to kill the prisoner with the whipping. On the forehead, head and on the back of the neck, there is bleeding and puncture wounds from pointed instruments, which brings to mind the crown of thorns held together by a brutal strap, which caused wounds and heavy bleeding when the hair was pulled. A wound can be seen on the left wrist, which was run through, as well as on the feet, and the shoulders bear the bruises from having carried a heavy wooden beam. The entire picture is faithful to the only known account where these details are simultaneously present: the account told in the four Gospels of the Passion of Jesus of Nazareth.

So this is a unique relic, venerated by Catholics throughout the world. Saints, kings, emperors, Popes and crowds of pilgrims have paid heartfelt homage to the Shroud through the centuries. But it has equally been hated, fought against and opposed by the adversaries of Christ.

A hoax?

Science began studying the Shroud after 1898, when the sacred sheet was photographed for the first time, revealing another stupefying enigma. The photo was taken by Turin lawyer Secondo Pia. During the process of developing the photo, he saw the positive figure of a man appear on the negative. The subject had overturned all of the laws that govern a photographic procedure. So it was discovered that all of the markings imprinted on the Shroud are in the negative, and that the photographic negative of the relic thus becomes a positive image; a unique and inexplicable characteristic.

Scientists’ interest has grown all along. Today there are more than thirty scientific branches which do research on the Shroud. But scientists have also been involved in this highly passionate work in different ways. Many have found inconfutable reasons to sustain that the Shroud is an entirely authentic relic, others instead have contested it, even ferociously.

Thirteen years ago, the adversaries had begun to sing victory. A fragment of the Shroud cloth had been subjected to the Carbon 14 ageing test, which would supposedly establish with infallible accuracy the historical period that the specimen belongs to. The test dated the Shroud to the Medieval Age, precisely between 1260 and 1390. It appeared to be a false relic. It was a veritable cold shower for believers. But the exam was then found to fall short on several points, which were initially murmured, then expressed by eminent scientists. So in the end the test lost any credibility that it had ever had. It was even said that the test had been artfully altered, to discredit the authenticity of the Shroud. In fact, several extravagant inexactnesses were revealed in the process, and even manipulation of statistics.

Research continues

Studies continued full circle, with the accumulation of data of every type. The amount of scientific data gathered in these last few years about the Shroud is enormous, Professor Pierluigi Baima Bollone recently stated. He is one of the major Italian scientists who study the Shroud. Every congress has seen the arrival of researchers will surprising reports. It can be said that, thanks to the sophisticated modern means available, we are close to being able to proclaim a definitive truth about the Shroud. It may also be said that this response is oriented towards the authenticity of the Shroud. There is truly a lot of evidence available that indicates that the Shroud is authentic, but there exists no concrete evidence demonstrating the opposite.

The latest astounding research concerns the formation of the image. The studies were done by Dr. August Accetta, an American physician who directs the Shroud Centre of Southern California. In part, the results were made public at the last International Sindonology Congress, which was held in Orvieto in August, 2000.

It is certain that the Shroud was used to wrap the body of a person, because the bloodstains, plus a large number of other pieces of evidence, amply testify to this. But at the same time, it is also a known fact that no cadaver has ever left an image of itself such as the one observed on the Sacred Shroud. The image is extremely superficial and does not appear on the reverse side of the linen: therefore it is due not to sweat or cadaveric liquids, which would have passed through the sheet, as did the blood. Among other things, from the level of re-dissolution of the coagulated blood, provoked by the contact of the sheet, impregnated with aromatic oils, it was calculated that the body remained wrapped in the sheet for only a few hours, approximately 30-36 hours, and decomposition did not begin during that time.

A special body

Any hypothesis of the image having been artificially manufactured (painting, printing, singeing, etc.) has been excluded by tests. The image consists of a yellowing of the linen itself, which resembles what happens with light and the passage of time. The cellulose which makes up the linen is oxydated by the sun, and dehydrated, thus changing colour. Other radiations, besides luminous ones, provoke similar effects. So the image on the Shroud appears as the effect of a radiation, which yellowed the cloth to a greater degree in the areas where it touched the body, as if the body itself projected its own image onto the fabric. But how can a cadaver do such a thing?

Impossible is the answer. Unless it were a special body. Christian tradition, confirmed by a whole series of tests and comparisons, tells us the the Man of the Shroud is Jesus. Therefore it is clear that it is a special body, a body, in fact, which is tied to the mystery of the Resurrection. And this is where Dr. August Accetta’s research begins.

For thirty years now, physicists have been asking themselves what happened to the body of Christ at the moment of the Resurrection. What energy was unleashed in the sepulchre to vivify, in an instant, billions and billions of dead cells, and make them come alive? No one can provide a certain answer. But the Shroud authorises us to think that the passage of the body of Jesus from death to glorious life was accompanied by an explosion of extremely powerful energy, unknown to us.

Courageous and genial

The hypothesis, formed by a group of famous researchers, has serious scientific foundations and Dr. Accetta has begun investigating in this direction. He attempted to perform experiments with the most powerful type of energy known to us, nuclear energy, and obtained some literally sensational results. He obtained images of a similar nature to the ones on the Shroud. So he could have chosen the right road to arrive at an explanation of that heretofore unfathomable mystery.

Dr. Accetta’s idea was a genial and courageous one. Genial because nuclear energy, thanks to its power, could resemble that mysterious energy which provoked the Resurrection. Courageous, because such research must be done on a living body, and Dr. Accetta chose himself as a human guinea pig for the experiment.

My objective, said Dr. Accetta, was to reproduce an image provoked by a radiation emitted from a human body invested with special energy. In my opinion, the energy that formed the image on the Shroud could have derived from the energy in the molecular bonds or in the nuclei present in the body, which was wrapped in the sheet at the moment of the Resurrection. How can this be demonstrated? An experiment of resurrection is outside the bounds of a scientific laboratory. So I thought I would use nuclear energy, which is the most powerful energy that we know. I used a solution of diphosphate of methylene containing Technetium-99m (Tc-99m), a radioactive isotope that decays rapidly: in fact, it reduces to half in only six hours. Each Tc-99m atom emits a single gamma ray, which can be recorded by a special photographic apparatus. I had a solution containing Tc-99m injected into my body and lay down in the detection machine, which supplied a continuous sequence of images. During the first 15 minutes of the experiment, the Tc-99m was mostly in the tissues and blood; then it increased its concentration in the bones and increasingly better images were obtained.

Similar to the Shroud

Thus, Dr. Accetta realised a sequence of photographs that were truly impressive. Some of them are published on these pages. They deal with the hands, and it is surprising to observe the similarity between these images and the hands that can be seen on the Shroud.

Dr. Accetta has been working on these experiments for four years. In addition to the images concerning the hands, he has realised images of the entire body. The researchers who followed his experiments are enthusiastic. John Jackson and Donald Lynn, two American physicists who are famous for their studies on the Shroud and who are members of the Shroud of Turin Research Project which has been studying the Shroud since the ‘70s, have defined Dr. Accetta’s experiments very important and valid. John Jackson, who worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena, California, wanted to collaborate on the research; and Donald Lynn, who worked for NASA on the analyses of images sent back from space probes, especially those from Mars sent by the Viking space probe, declared that the images obtained by Accetta are the closest to the ones on the Shroud that have ever been produced.

So a programme of research has been initiated that could lead to sensational results!

By helping us to understand how the image on the sheet was formed, stated Dr. Emanuela Marinalli, the celebrated Shroud scholar, Dr. Accetta’s research confirms once again the Shroud’s extraordinary authenticity.