The Man of the Shroud has a name!

After its miraculous ‘escape’ from a fire in Turin Cathedral last April, the Shroud, venerated as a relic of Jesus, has started to reveal its mysteries – and they don’t fail to astonish. Are you convinced that the image is only a forgery? Do you doubt the identity of the man portrayed? Do you think that the carbon-dating tests conducted in 1988 proved conclusively that the Shroud was an elaborate forgery dating from the 14th century?

Then sit comfortably in your armchair, take a deep breath, and read carefully what Dr. Maria Grazia Siliato, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Shroud, had to tell us. There are many things which will astound you, and much evidence which you have never heard mentioned which may make you want to think again.

As a scientific researcher specialising in early Christian archaeology, Dr. Siliato recently published a book, Shroud, which makes a thorough examination of all the archaeological, historical and scientific research which has to date been conducted into the world’s most famous burial cloth. I believe, she says, that this extraordinary archaeological document can be understood and accepted by believers and non-believers alike. But it needs to be studied with the necessary impartiality, as if one were studying the toga worn by Julius Caesar on the day of his assassination. Playing the part of the ‘Devil’s advocate’, we confronted Dr. Siliato with the most common objections against the authenticity of the Shroud.

Messenger: How can we be sure that the photograph which shows a negative image of Christ’s face isn’t just a fake?

Dr. Siliato: This is absolutely out of the question. No self-respecting scientist would even call the authenticity of this photograph into question any longer. The first photo was taken exactly a hundred years ago, in 1898, by the lawyer, Secondo Pia. On the negative could be seen the image of a man, with shoulder-length hair and a beard. He was in a prone position, with his hands crossed over his chest. Although covered with wounds and bruises, his expression in death is that of one who is spiritually calm and composed.

At the time, some people insinuated that Pia’s photographs had been ‘doctored’, suggestions which caused this man a great deal of suffering. Scientific recognition of the photographs’ authenticity only arrived in 1931, when another photographer, Giuseppe Enrie, was authorised to take a second series of photographs. This time, the photo session was official, and all the necessary checks made. On Enrie’s negatives, which were developed and printed on the same night they were taken, there appears the same image of the ‘Man of the Shroud’, thus conferring poor Mr. Pia with the recognition he deserved.

The Shroud was subsequently photographed many times, right up to the first colour shots taken by Judica-Cordiglia and the three-dimensional images obtained with the Interpretation System VP8 Image Analyser. We are now completely sure of the image’s authenticity.

How can we be sure that this image hadn’t been drawn onto the Shroud?

In 1978, some American scientists from the S.T.U.R.P. (Shroud of Turin Research Project) examined the Shroud in Turin with all the most modern and sophisticated equipment available, but they found no evidence whatsoever that the image had been drawn on. The very faint outline of the face and body could not possibly have been drawn – there are no traces of any kind of colouring. The imprint was left there through physical contact. Furthermore, traces of human blood were found on the Shroud...

In the past, some people have even suggested that the Shroud was the work of Leonardo da Vinci. This is completely ludicrous. It is well documented that the Shroud was brought to Turin by the House of Savoy in 1453, whereas Leonardo was born only a year earlier... In truth, no medieval painter would have understood the concept of a photographic negative. As I have already stated, the Shroud only revealed its secret in 1898, with Secondo Pia’s negative.

Could the traces of blood on the Shroud which you mentioned not have come from an animal?

No. The tests carried out by the scientists John Heller and Alan Adler have shown that it is blood from a human body in its death throes, which was already coagulating on the skin. This is how it came to leave traces on the Shroud. Only the wound on the thorax, which is 4 centimetres long and seems to have been caused by a spear-thrust, could have come from an already-dead body, since the blood is not coagulated. If the blood’s serum and red corpuscles separate, then the blood is that of a person who is already dead. It left a stain which seems like blood and water, as Saint John the Evangelist himself reported: One of the soldiers thrust a lance into His side, and immediately blood and water flowed out, (John, 19:34).

How can you explain the existence of other revered shrouds aside from the one in Turin?

They are, basically, self-confessed copies of the true Shroud. The House of Savoy used to send them as gifts to churches and monasteries, in the same way as we send postcards or photographs today. Often, they even wrote on these copies extractum ab originali, that is, ‘taken from the original’. They are all hand-painted, and very rough copies, showing how difficult it is to paint something which really looks like the Shroud.

But on the imprints of the heels, one knee and the nose, traces of iron-ore oxide have been found. Is this not proof that at least the imprints of the wounds have been retouched with colouring?

It was disproved by science itself, specifically by a Russian scientist, Dimitri Kuznetsov, a Lenin prize-winner. He had no idea what the Shroud represented, but he is one of the world’s foremost experts in the dating of cloth. His starting-point was the precept that, at just 300° Centigrade, there is isotopic exchange between materials in close proximity. And in 1532, the Shroud was only just saved from a fire in the chapel in Chambéry, in the Savoy region. There was some damage; the triangular burns which can be seen clearly on the Shroud, caused by the silver casket which contained it. But during the fire, the molecules of the cloth were affected by isotopic discharges from the silver, wood, silk and other materials of the casket. This increased the quantity of radiocarbon in the cloth, thereby ‘rejuvenating’ it.

To reinforce his theory, Kuznetsov took a piece of Jewish cloth, carbon dated to two thousand years ago, and subjected it to the same ‘heat treatment’: in subsequent C14 tests, it appeared to have come from a much more recent period.

So the scientists from the three laboratories mentioned made a mistake in their dating. But the margin of error was even greater because the piece of the Shroud which they examined was from the top left-hand corner, a portion which has been much-mended and heavily worn by the elements over the centuries. The average weight of the Shroud is 25 milligrams per square centimetre, but that of the sample examined was 43 milligrams. Basically, they examined a piece of cloth which had been mended many times. But in any case, even if they had chosen a better sample, the quantity of radiocarbon in the cloth had already been increased because of the fire, and so it would have been impossible to date the cloth correctly using this method. Who knows how much younger the Shroud will appear now, as a result of the third fire last year in Turin Cathedral?

A third fire? We know of only two, the one last year and the one in Chambéry in 1532.

If you look carefully at the Shroud, you can see four small holes distributed in an ‘L’ shape, caused by a fire which occurred prior to the one in Chambéry and which in themselves are enough to destroy the hypothesis proposed by radio-carbon dating. This is a discovery of Jerome Lejeune, the scientist who discovered the Down’s Syndrome gene. He was an enthusiastic student of ancient codes and in Budapest, he discovered a code dating from the end of the 12th century (the Pray Code), at which time, tradition retains that the Shroud was located in Constantinople. The emperor there had shown it to a group of Hungarian dignitaries, and one of them made a sketch of it in which the four holes in the shape of an ‘L’ can clearly be seen.

Some scientists have shown that an imprint similar to that on the Shroud can be produced by placing a linen cloth on a red-hot statue. Do you think this is possible?

These scientists have not taken into consideration that the Shroud has a number of burns due to the fires it has experienced. All these burn marks appear fluorescent if subjected to ‘Wood’s light’ also known as ‘black light’, whereas the imprint of the ‘Man of the Shroud’ does not, and therefore cannot be the result of thermic effect. It is a natural imprint caused by a chemical effect similar to that involved in flower-pressing. Jewish law prohibited that the bodies of those who died a violent death be washed and perfumed. The scents aloe and myrrh, mixed with sodium bicarbonate, were therefore sprinkled on and under the cloth which wrapped Jesus. The linen thus acted as a kind of blotting-paper. The image would not have been immediately imprinted, it only appeared a few decades later when the cloth was being preserved as a relic by the first Christians in their flight from the Roman Legions, across the Dead Sea.

The first studies into this phenomenon were carried out by one Professor Volkringer, whose cloth herbals produced in the 1940s are only now beginning to develop the imprints made in those years.

How is it that the Shroud only first appeared in France in the 1300s, and that prior to that period, nothing was known about it?

The last few years have produced much evidence about the history of the Shroud before the 1300s.

For example:

In a letter which Theodore di Comneno wrote to the pope asking the Crusaders to return the Shroud which had been stolen from Constantinople in 1204 and taken to France;

• the remains of Blachernae Church, in Constantinople, where the Shroud was said to have been on display until 1204;
• the above-mentioned Pray Code, preserved in Budapest, in which an anonymous but very alert observer from around 1150 reproduced those famous four holes caused by the Shroud’s first fire;
• the writings of Gregory the Referendary who tells of the Shroud’s arrival in Constantinople in 944. The writings of some Arab historians mention a huge price paid by the Byzantine emperor to obtain it;
• a previously unknown fresco found in a mountainside church in the Cappadocia region of Turkey which depicts both the imprint made by the face of the ‘Man of the Shroud’ and the Basilica built in Edessa, Turkey, in the 6th century in order to house the Sacred Cloth;
• the ‘Laurentian Code’, today in Florence, Italy, which reproduces the ‘Crux Mensuralis’ modelled by the emperor Justinian in 550 AD and whose dimensions coincide with those of the ‘Man of the Shroud’;
• the fact that many of the early pilgrims to the Orient said they had actually seen the Shroud.

How can you prove that the Shroud comes from Palestine?

In 1970, Max Frei Sulder found on the Shroud various types of pollen from plants that are typical to those regions through which the traditional story tells us that the Shroud passed: the Dead Sea, Edessa, Constantinople, Central Europe... These studies have recently been confirmed by Avinoam Denim, the director of the Botanical Institute in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

How can we be sure that the ‘Man of the Shroud’ is Jesus?

The latest and most dramatic discoveries concern a piece of writing on the Shroud itself. For years, people had been asking why below and to the sides of the chin there are three clear and regular lines where no imprint is present. The Paris-based organisation CIERT (Centre International d’Etudes sur le Linceul de Turin, The international centre of studies on the Shroud of Turin), which I represent in Italy, has conducted studies in the most advanced institute in Europe for image analysis via computer, the Institut Optique d’Orsay, whose director is Professor André Marion. All official photographs of the Shroud were divided into tens of thousands of squares which were then given a corresponding optical density and transferred onto a visualisation programme. By means of an extremely advanced programme, some letters gradually began to emerge, in Latin and in Greek: under the chin, we find written ‘Jesus’ and on one side, ‘Nazarene’. What is the explanation for this? The ‘exactor mortis’ the centurion charged with ensuring the execution of the condemned, had drawn strips of ‘glue’ onto the cloth on which he would write the name of the deceased with a red liquid. Where these strips were drawn, the cloth was impermeable and would not, therefore, be subject to the chemical process which subsequently formed the imprint.

This is a sensational discovery!

Absolutely! I can add something else which I am sure will amaze you. The wound on the wrist appears on the Shroud as a simple blood-stain. But if you pass an optical fibre between the cloth and the protective lining which was stitched to the Shroud in Chambéry in 1532, and photograph it from behind, the wound appears to be square. Due to dehydration, Jesus’ blood was very dense. Only in the place where the nail was removed was the blood sufficiently liquid to leave a trace, on the back of the cloth. There is a church in Rome, the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, where some objects of the Passion were donated by Saint Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine. She had found them at Golgotha, where her son had conducted the first archaeological dig in history, thereby discovering Jesus’ tomb, over which the emperor Hadrian had built a huge pagan temple. Only centuries later was doubt first cast upon these relics which, up to then, had always been considered authentic. One of these relics was a nail said to have held Jesus to the cross.