The Shroud: New Evidence

2008 WILL BE remembered as a special year for the Shroud, the linen cloth kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. This linen is believed by many to be the cloth worn by Jesus Christ at the time of His burial, two days prior to the resurrection.



Twenty years ago, after elaborate Carbon-14 testing, the Shroud was declared ‘a forgery’. The 1988 tests indicated that the cloth really only originated from the Middle Ages, more precisely between the years 1260 and 1390. For 2,000 years the vast majority of Christians had venerated this cloth as a prized relic, so quite understandably these results came as a shock and disappointment; at the same time many unbelievers were jubilant.



Now, however, 20 years after that uncompromising verdict, science has finally admitted that a mistake may have been made, and that new Carbon 14 tests should be conducted on the relic. Thus it is that all of the unsolved mysteries still surrounding this singular cloth are beginning to kindle the public’s attention again.





A scientific Gospel



According to a most ancient tradition, the Shroud is Jesus’ burial sheet. The same sheet of which the Gospels speak, which had been purchased by Joseph of Arimathea, and in which the Apostles covered His body during the burial on the evening of Good Friday, and the same cloth that was later found by the Apostles in the empty tomb at Easter. Researchers have coined the term ‘sindonology’ to describe its general study (from Greek σινδων – ‘sindon’, the word used in the Gospel of Mark to describe the type of cloth that the Apostles used).



The Shroud measures 4.36 meters by 1.10 meters. The cloth is woven in a three-to-one herringbone twill composed of flax fibrils. Its most distinctive characteristic is the faint, yellowish image of the front and back view of a traumatized naked man with his hands folded across his groin.



One of the great mysteries of the Shroud is that science is at a loss to explain how that image came to be there. It was not painted, nor was it drawn, and the image was not impressed on it through fire. At close range, the image disappears. There are no traces of coloured pigments on the cloth, but there are stains of AB type blood. Image analysis by scientists reveals that the image unexpectedly has the property of decoding into a 3 dimensional image of the man when the darker parts of the image are interpreted to be those features of the man that were closest to the Shroud, and the lighter areas of the image those features that were farthest. This is not a property that occurs in photography, and researchers could not replicate the effect when they attempted to transfer similar images using techniques of block print, engravings, a hot statue, and bas-relief.



However, the most impressive thing about the Shroud is that the man pictured in it bears all the marks of the Passion as described in the Gospels, so that some have referred to this cloth as a ‘scientific Gospel’.





The Shroud’s itinerary



The first reference to the Shroud is in the Gospels. From them we learn that when Jesus was taken down from the Cross His body was wrapped in “clean linen cloth” (Matthew 27:59). On Easter Sunday that cloth was found folded in the empty tomb.



In those times people were generally afraid of coming into contact with objects that had touched a dead body. To neutralize any such objects it was necessary to burn them. However, for Jesus’ disciples, any object that had touched His body was sacred, and would have been jealously guarded. In the first centuries of Christianity, when the Church was forced underground, we find only scant reference to the Shroud. However, after Christianity was accepted at the beginning of the 4th century, references to the holy relic become numerous and precise.



Historians have been able to trace an itinerary of the places where the relic appeared in the course of the centuries. It was first kept in Jerusalem, then it went to Edessa, in modern-day Turkey. It appears again in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), after which it was taken to Athens, and finally, around the middle of the 14th century, it arrives in France. In 1453 it became the property of the Royal House of Savoy. This House eventually brought the relic to Turin in Northern Italy in 1578, its current location. Finally, Umberto of Savoy donated the cloth to the Vatican in 1983.





Secondo Pia



Up to the end of the 19th century interest in the Shroud was limited to certain circles. In 1898, however, the Cardinal of Turin decided that it was time to take the first photographs of the venerated relic, and commissioned a lawyer, Secondo Pia, who was also an accomplished photographer, to take them.



At around midnight of May 28, 1898, Pia was in the darkroom developing the negatives, when he received the greatest surprise in his life. Pia later said that he almost dropped and broke the photographic plate in the darkroom from the shock of what appeared on it: the reverse plate showed the image of a man and a face that could not have been observed with the naked eye. The mystery of the image associated with the Holy Face of Jesus started that evening.



The Shroud had overturned all the laws that govern photography. It was discovered that the image on the cloth bears all the characteristic of a negative image, which means that Pia’s photographic negative acted as the positive image. This is unique to the Shroud, and remains a mystery to this day.



In the 70s great interest was aroused in the study of the pollens on the Shroud. Pollen seeds are extremely resistant, and remain unaltered for thousands of years. For this reason their presence can reveal all the places an object has been to in the past, and is widely used in criminal forensics. Max Frei, a Zurich criminologist, had previously identified a total of 58 different pollens on the Shroud. Frei’s work was later confirmed by Dr. Luigi Baima Bollone, an expert in Forensics and by a team of American scientists.



Their results indicate that the pollens are native to the following areas: the Dead Sea and the Negev (places close to Jerusalem); the Anatolian Steppe of central and western Turkey (the Edessa area); the immediate environs of Constantinople; Western Europe (France and Northern Italy). In other words, pollen research is consistent with historical sources and tradition.



These findings gave added weight to the authenticity of the relic. However, one final definitive proof was still missing, that of radiocarbon dating, a highly reliable method of determining the age of organic compounds.





Is it a forgery?



Carbon-14 dating tests were carried out in 1988 in three separate and highly prestigious laboratories simultaneously: Oxford, in England, Tucson in the US, and Zurich in Switzerland. The results were released in October 1988, and the response was that the Shroud originated in the years between 1260 and 1390, and that therefore the relic was a forgery, that the whole thing was a hoax concocted during the Middle Ages.



Needless to say many people were greatly disappointed, and lost interest in the relic. Apparently, science had said the last word on the Shroud, and the final chapter was closed. But not all scientists were convinced. After a scrupulous review of the tests, some began to raise doubts over the validity of the findings.





Serious flaws



A Russian scientist, Dimitri Kutznetov, proved that a piece of cloth, when subjected to high temperatures, increases its carbon content, and would therefore test younger than it actually is. Now the Shroud had indeed been in a building that had caught fire. This occurred in 1532, when it was in Chambéry, in Upper Savoy, France.



“In the last 20 years numerous tests and experiments have been carried out,” says Emanuela Marinelli, a biologist who has authored numerous books on the Shroud. “Almost all of these studies highlight serious flaws in the 1988 Carbon-14 test”.



Emanuela Marinelli travels the world delivering conferences and organising workshops on the famous relic. “I have been everywhere,” she says. “I have been to Indonesia, Canada, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and in many other places as well. I speak at universities, schools, clubs, but also in hospitals, prisons, leper colonies, etc., and everywhere people show great interest in what I have to say. In my trips I have also met the most renown sindonologists (experts on the Shroud) in the world, and practically all of them agree that the 1988 Carbon-14 test is flawed.



“For example, Alan Adler, the late Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, USA, the founder of the American Shroud of Turin Association for Research (AMSTAR), has analysed 15 fibres taken from the sample of the Shroud that was subjected to the Carbon-14 test. After comparing them with 19 fibres from other parts of the Shroud, he was able to determine that the sample used for the test had been polluted, and that it was not representative of the rest of the cloth.



“Alan Adler is certainly not alone, however. Harry E. Grove, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Rochester, USA, one of the inventors of the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) method of radiocarbon dating (the same method used in 1988 test), and Leoncio Garza Valdés, a researcher at the Institute for Microbiology at the University of San Antonio, USA, have, along with other scientists, identified the presence on the Shroud of a coat of fungii and bacteria that cannot be eliminated by ordinary methods. The presence of these agents will have significantly altered the Carbon-14 results. So a review of the 1988 test was mandatory.”





A fascinating mystery



In 1976 David Rolfe, a prominent documentary maker for the BBC, had made a thought provoking documentary on the relic called The Silent Witness; it was a stirring investigation into the Shroud of Turin. Now, 20 years after the terrible Carbon-14 verdict, David Rolfe, has made a new film on this fascinating mystery.



Using his clout, Rolfe managed to involve Professor Christopher Ramsey, who at the time of the 1988 test was one of the youngest researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU), and has since become its director. Rolfe’s documentary was aired at a most emblematic moment, on Easter Saturday at 8.30 pm, at BBC 2.



The documentary, however, was felt as too detached by those who believe the relic is authentic, as though Rolfe’s enthusiasm for the Shroud had been held in check by external forces. The film even gives the impression of having been cut and censored in some places. Be that as it may, Rolfe’s latest work on the Shroud remains well worth seeing. One of its merits is to highlight the contrast between the strong historical traces left behind by the mysterious Veil, traces which speak in favour of its authenticity, and the 1988 test. A contrast which has led Professor Ramsey to issue the following statement at the conclusion of this year’s test: “There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the Shroud is older than the radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly needed. It is important that we continue to test the accuracy of the original radiocarbon tests as we are already doing. It is equally important that experts assess and reinterpret some of the other evidence. Only by doing this will people be able to arrive at a coherent history of the Shroud which takes into account and explains all of the available scientific and historical information.”





The sack of Constantinople



Scientific testing on the Shroud continues. But historians are also busily at work. A recent meeting on the Shroud was held at Capranica, Italy, on May 17. Among the various speakers was Alessandro Piana, a 28-year-old Italian biologist. Piana’s contribution to the meeting was a most interesting lecture on the so called “dark period” in the annals of the Shroud, that is, the years between 1204, when the relic disappeared from Constantinople, to the middle of the 14th century, when it surfaced again in Lirey, France. In this time span of about 150 years we know absolutely nothing about the Shroud.



“My starting point,” Piana says, “is the same as that of other sindonologists, and that is that the cloth which reappeared in France is the same as the one which disappeared in Constantinople in 1204”.



Paina, after undertaking long painstaking research on the historic, archaeological, numismatic and iconographic sources relating to the relic, was able to single out a key individual, the Frenchman Othon de La Roche, Baron of Ray-sur-Saone. This man is the link between Constantinople and Lirey.



The Shroud had been taken to Constantinople in 944. It was therefore in the hands of the Byzantine Emperors. In 1198 Pope Innocent III proclaimed the Fourth Crusade, which was supposed to drive out the Muslims from the Holy Land.



Tragically, the Forth Crusade turned out to be a spiritual disaster for Christianity. After many complicated turn of events, the Western Christian armies and navies diverted their path from the Holy Land and, in stark contrast to the wishes of the Pope Innocent III, turned against their brothers of Eastern Christianity. In 1204 they laid siege on Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christianity, and when the city fell there followed three days of unprecedented looting, desecration and murder. The Byzantine Empire was subdivided among the various leaders of the Crusade, but it was never quite able to recover from this blow. Weakened, it was no longer capable of keeping the Muslims at bay, until it was finally was overrun by the Turks, who incorporated it into the Ottoman Empire.





Baron de La Roche



During the Crusade Baron La Roche had been a trusted advisor to Boniface of Montferrat, the leader of the Crusade. At the siege, Baron de La Roche had distinguished himself for courage and intelligence, and was granted special favours when the booty was partitioned. The Crusaders raided all the palaces and churches, and took away anything that could be of value. The most precious objects, however, were not jewels, but the relics of Christ and His saints. Baron de La Roche was rewarded with the Shroud, the most precious relic, and was given the title of Megaskyr, which means, ‘Lord of Athens’.



Baron La Roche brought the relic to his new city. And we do indeed have traces that indicate that the Shroud was in Athens in 1205. Baron La Roche remained in the Greek city until 1225, after which he set sail for his native France with his booty.



Piana was able to give documentary evidence of the return to France of the Baron, and of the discovery of his tomb. Piana was also able to indicate that a number of antiques which belonged to the Baron are still kept in the tower of the castle of Ray-sur-Saone.



The collection consists of reliquaries containing splinters of the True Cross, a banner with an effigy of the Man of the Shroud, and in particular, a wooden casket in which the Shroud was allegedly kept during the passage from Constantinople to France.



These findings are of great importance, not only because they shed light on the 150-year gap, but mainly because they suggest the existence of the Shroud in a historical date before the one indicated by the Carbon 14 test.