Century
Objective History
Science is not the only field of study in which we find this type of problem in the classroom. Objective history challenges scripture as history. It raises serious questions about early church history and cherished beliefs about our religious traditions. My sympathy lies with the teacher. His job is not easy in a secular school system populated with students from a rich cultural mix of religious beliefs. But the difficulty that Molly was having with her teacher was not of this sort. The shroud may have figured into her religious beliefs—I honestly don’t know for she didn’t tell me. But that was not the issue she was raising. She was arguing that new scientific evidence challenged an earlier scientific conclusion. “Science,” wrote biochemist Émile Duclaux (1840-1904), over a century ago, is “a series of judgments, revised without ceasing.” History bears that out. Molly knew that.
Richard Dawkins on the Shroud
In September of 2009, Richard Dawkins, in his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, seemed to trip over many of these points, directly or by implication:
[Carbon dating] has revolutionized archaeological dating. The most celebrated example is the Shroud of Turin. Since this notorious piece of cloth seems mysteriously to have imprinted on it the image of a bearded crucified man, many people hoped it might hail from the time of Jesus. It turns up in the historical record in the mid-fourteenth century in France, and nobody knows where it was before that. It has been housed in Turin since 1578, under the custody of the Vatican since 1983. When mass spectrometry made it possible to date a tine sample of the shroud, rather than the substantial swathes that would have been needed before, the Vatican allowed a small strip to be cut off. The strip was divided in three parts and sent to three leading laboratories specializing in carbon dating, in Oxford, Arizona and Zurich. Working under conditions of scrupulous independence—not comparing notes—the three laboratories reported their verdicts on the date when the flax from which the cloth had been woven died. Oxford said ad 1200, Arizona 1304 and Zurich 1274. These dates are all—within normal margins of error—compatible with each other and with the date in the 1350s at which the shroud is first mentioned in history. The dating of the shroud remains controversial, but not for reasons that cast doubt on the carbon-dating technique itself. For example, the carbon in the shroud might have been contaminated by a fire, which is known to have occurred in 1532. I won’t pursue the matter further, because the shroud is of historical, not evolutionary, interest. It is a nice example, however, to illustrate the method, and the fact that, unlike dendrochronology, it is not accurate to the nearest year, only to the nearest century or so. [Emphasis mine]
Dawkins is either clueless or selective. One wonders if he even checked Wikipedia. On the matter of the historical record he implies that the absence of evidence is itself evidence or as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” He was trying to justify his belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Historians and the Lack of Evidence
Even so, historians can consider the lack of evidence as meaningful, but only with judicious analysis. For instance, if documents from before 1350, that could be expected to mention the shroud if it existed, do not do so, that is important. But an absence of such documents does not mean the same thing. And if there are ample reasons to suspect that there might have been documents that no longer exist, particularly if there are good reasons why such documents might not exist, then historians must be particularly careful. Some historians now think the shroud may have been in France, in the town of Besançon, in the Castle de Ray manor house, for well over a century before 1350. According to this theory it was brought to France from Constantinople, where it had been for many centuries, by way of Athens. There is ample evidence for this, as we will see. When we open our view wider, we discover only that we have a gap in the historical record.
The French Bishop of Troyes
Perhaps you read about a copy of a letter from a fourteenth century French bishop to the pope telling him that a cunning artist had confessed to painting the images. A copy of the letter may be found at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Is that not proof that the shroud is a fake relic? Well, no, as we’ll see.
Much of what has been said, written or presented on television about the shroud is wrong, astonishingly wrong, and peppered with extraordinary conspiracy theories. The more it is hyped—“shocking truths now revealed”—the more it seems to be anything but truth, at least with scientific and historical validity. It is a matter of finding harmonious truth within the cacophony of myth.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin (1809-1902), more than anyone before him and since, has shaped what has become, particularly in the first decade of the 21st century, a significant debate about the existence of God. His two works, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man seemed to many people to remove the need for God in the creation of the world, mankind and all living things. Evolution completely contradicted a severely-literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation. How can you accept that God was responsible for the "creation of every living creature that moves, of every kind . . ." and man and woman distinctly as such in his image, by the sixth day no less. “Darwin made it possible,” said Dawkins, “to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
Reaction to Darwin
It may strike some as ironic that both of these men are buried in the nave of London’s Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, informally know as Westminster Abbey. They are there, especially honored for their accomplishments in science. It is fitting also, for they have had as much influence on modern Christian thinking as on modern science. Recently, Nature, in an editorial (October, 2009), commented on reactions to Darwin.
In England, for example, the Church reacted badly to Darwin’s theory, going so far as to say that to believe it was to imperil your soul. But the notion that Darwin’s ideas ‘killed’ God and were a threat to religion was by no means the universal response in the nineteenth century. . . . [F]rom Egypt to India, China and Japan, many religious scholars embraced Darwin's ideas, often showing how their own schools of thought had anticipated the notion of evolution. -Editorial from Nature, Volume 461 Number 7268
Yes, some in the Church reacted badly. This was particularly so in the Church of England, part of the Anglican Communion, the “Church” in particular to which the editors of Nature were certainly referring. But they overstated what happened. Darwin’s theory was more of a culture shock than a religious shock. It was more about resistance to change than an inability to accommodate evolution within Christianity. Darwin, after a choral funeral service in the Abbey, was buried in a prominent place in the church’s nave at the request of William Spottiswoode, the president of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of science. The suggestion was warmly welcomed.
Darwin, truly a humble agnostic, was very much admired, and his theory accepted by many in the church including, Harvey Goodwin, the bishop of Carlisle, who on the Sunday following Darwin’s funeral in a sermon preached in the abbey, said:
It would have been unfortunate if anything had occurred to give weight and currency to the foolish notion which some have diligently propagated, but for which Mr Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of Nature and a belief in God….
Richard Feynman Chimed In
Caltech’s Nobel Prize winning Richard Feynman, the “Great Explainer” as he was called by students, one of the greatest theoretical physicist of the 20th century, one of the very few “foreign” members of the Royal Society put it this way:
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
There are other explanations. One is that there is an underlying principle that we just don’t know about yet. When we do, it will explain fine-tuning. Another is that we have made a gigantic mistake somewhere along the line and we don’t really understand science. There are some who argue that universe exists only because we think it does.
Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor! We encounter it frequently in scientific discussions. We encounter it when we study the Shroud of Turin. It is a simple dictum that suggests that when you have two or more competing hypotheses or explanations, the simpler one is preferable, the hypothesis that is more likely to be true, more likely to provide the best explanation. Less is more. Keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is usually the best. The 14th century monk, William of Ockham, is often quoted has having said, “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” We don’t find those words in any of his known writings. We don’t know if some of his writings are lost. But he must of have said something to this effect because some of his contemporaries ridiculed him.
Walter of Chatton (1287–1347) took exception to Occam's Razor. “If three things are not enough to verify an affirmative proposition,” he wrote, “a fourth must be added, and so on.” Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was concerned that solutions to problems might be too simple. Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” And then there is Crabtree’s Bludgeon:
No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated.
Russell the Atheist
In 1890 he won a scholarship to Trinity College at Cambridge where he distinguished himself in both mathematics and philosophy. By the time he graduated he had decided that he was an atheist. By 1908 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Four years later he published Problems of Philosophy, which has since become a classic but nowhere on a par with his monumental, A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, published in 1945. For this last work, in particular, but also for his condemnation of Communism and Nazism he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. During the presentation, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy said:
With his superior intellect, Russell has, throughout half a century, been at the centre of public debate, watchful and always ready for battle, as active as ever to this very day, having behind him a life of writing of most imposing scope. His works in the sciences concerned with human knowledge and mathematical logic are epoch-making and have been compared to Newton's fundamental results in mechanics.
Karl Popper
Logical positivism, just like Occam’s parsimony, had its detractors. And none was more influential in this regard than the London School of Economics’ Karl Popper (1902-1994). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy opines that he “is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century.” Popper argued that for a theory or hypothesis to be scientific it must be stated in a way that is open to the possibility that it can demonstrated to be false. Popper went so far as to suggest that evolution was not testable and hence not scientific. Nonetheless, he considered it correct. Others have noted that the same is true of a multiverse, almost as if suggesting that the theory of multiple universes is on a par with evolution. But if that is so, then so too perhaps is God’s existence or non-existence, for that cannot be verified or falsified by science—at least not as far as we know.
To state it simply—perhaps too simply—logical postivism or verificationism holds that science should proceed from observation to theory to laws of science. Falsificationism, on the other hand, suggests that science should proceed backwards from conjectures and then by observation or experimentation strive to eliminate anything that proves to be false.
Beliefnet
The site bills itself as the largest unaffiliated spiritual web site on the Internet. Spiritual perhaps, but definitely a business. Beliefnet now is part of the News Corporation that includes Fox Television; over 100 newspapers such as The Times (of London), the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post; the website MySpace and the television show American Idol. Beliefnet has created itself into vast multi-overlapping magestias for cyber warriors from various traditions, beliefs and peculiarities, all having to do in some way with faith. Visit the site and you will find thousands upon thousands of people debating, questioning and explaining. They are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Wiccans and Atheists and Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soulers. Everything is organized into groups and subgroups and fragments within each because there are so many varieties and beliefs. There are conservatives and liberals. There are rigid adherents to denominational intricacies and live-and-let-live and what-ever-makes-sense-to-you proponents. Dig deep enough and you will find arguments akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and does the tune change the results.
There are plenty of celebrity participants on Beliefnet. Michael J. Fox did an interview about his battle with Parkinson's disease and how it increased his sense of spiritually and gratitude. Michael Jackson wrote a moving essay for Beliefnet. “What I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary,” he wrote. “The Sabbath was when I could be.” Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have appeared in interviews with Laura Sheahen, Beliefnet’s senior religion editor.
There are countless interactive public interviews with many of the leading theologians and Biblical scholars. An interactive public interview is similar to a radio talk show in which telephone callers ask questions of guests. On Beliefnet, the callers type in questions and the guest replies by typing a response. One such interview was with John Dominic Crossan.
As one might expect, there is plentiful discussion about the scientific quest for God on Beliefnet, and much of it can be very interesting until a extremist fundamentalist, be he a Christian or an Atheist, imposes himself into a discussion and saturates the dialog with proclamations. “The Bible says. . .”
One of the more interesting areas of discussion that has spilled out from academia and the all so commonly disquieting Eastertide season of television specials. It is the quest for the historical Jesus. Who was this man, Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians proclaim is the Son of God? Is there more to the story than what we know from the three synoptic gospels, the theologically rich Gospel of John, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul and others evangelists? In the context of what we know about 1st century Palestine and its people, is it believable? And in the context of a scientific worldview, is it believable? And nothing is more central to the story than the subject of the resurrection? Did it happen?
N. T. Wright
N. T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham in England is a significant historian and theologian. He has taught at Oxford, Cambridge and McGill University in Montreal. In a gigantic, 800 page, small typeface book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, he explores the entire spectrum of challenges to resurrection from pagan mythology to issues emanating between conflicting 1st century and modern worldviews. He concludes that:
The challenge for any historian, when faced with the question of the rise of Christianity, is much more sharply focused than is often supposed. It is not simply a matter of whether one believes in 'miracles', or in the supernatural, in general, in which case (it is supposed) the resurrection will be no problem. If anyone ever reaches the stage where the resurrection is in that sense no problem, we can be sure that they have made a mistake somewhere, that they have constructed a world in which this most explosive and subversive of events - supposing it to have occurred - can be domesticated and put on show, like a circus elephant or clever typing monkey, as a key exhibit in the church's collection of supernatural trophies. The resurrection of Jesus then becomes either 'a trip to a garden and a lovely surprise', a happy ending to a fairy story', or a way of legitimating different types of Christianity or different leaders within it. No: the challenge comes down to a much narrower point, not simply to do with worldviews in general, or with 'the supernatural' in particular, but with the direct question of death and life, of the world of space, time and matter and its relation to whatever being there may be for whom the word 'god', or even 'God', might be appropriate. Here there is, of course, no neutrality. Any who pretend to it are merely showing that they have not understood the question.
In other words the rise of Christianity would not have happened as it did if the resurrection wasn’t very real for Jesus’ followers and the early Christian communities. It is the historian’s equivalent of Polkinghorne’s quantum physics analogy: it may not make perfect sense but it makes sense of many things that otherwise have no explanation.
Edessa of the Fertile Crescent
Edessa was a city in the Fertile Crescent of upper Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. It was long an important city on the Silk Road between China and India and Europe. I was also a very early Christian community. If you traveled from Jerusalem to Antioch as St. Paul the evangelist did, you were two-thirds of the way to Edessa. At Antioch you could turn left and travel along the Roman roads to Tarsus, Paul’s home town. Or you could turn right and by travelling about the same distance along the Silk Road to arrive at Edessa.
Today, the city is called Şanlıurfa or simply Urfa. It is situated in south-eastern Turkey near the border with Iraq. As is the case with northern Iraq, most of the population is Kurdish, though there are many Arabs and Turks in the city as well. The predominant religion is Muslim but there are Christian and Jewish minorities, some who claim lineage back to the 3rd century and 1st centuries respectively, and perhaps earlier.
The Legend of Abgar
Legend has it that a cloth with an image of Jesus was brought to King Abgar V Ouchama of Edessa who reigned over the city state off and on between A.D. 13 and 50. We know of this legend from Eusebius of Caesarea’s early 4th century Ecclesiastical History. Therein, we learn of a now lost document (if it ever existed) that had been in Edessa’s archives. It was purportedly written by King Abgar V and delivered to Jesus by an envoy named Ananias. Abgar supposedly asked Jesus to come to Edessa to cure him of a malady. Eusebius’ history reports that the Apostle Thomas did send Thaddeus sometime after Jesus’ death and that he founded a church in Edessa.
Historians are highly critical of this account since Eusebius’s history includes, as elements of the letter, references from the Gospels, which were written later than the legendary account, as well as theological concepts, which probably developed many years after the reign of Abgar.
Doctrine of Addai
Another Syrian manuscript, the Doctrine of Addai, fills in some gaps. According to this document, which also mentions Abgar’s letter, Ananias painted a portrait of Jesus “with choice pigments.” A later document, the Acts of the Holy Apostle Thaddeus, written in the early part of the 6th century, adds more detail. It suggests that the image was formed when Jesus wiped his face on the linen cloth and it refers to the cloth as a tetradiplon, meaning it was folded into eight equal sections. Daniel Scavone writes:
In the 6th c. the Greek apocryphal book called the Acts of Thaddeus (=Greek for Addai) retold the Abgar legend with two important alterations. First, the image was heralded as miraculously imprinted on a cloth by Jesus himself (acheiropoietos) but still during his ministry. Second, the cloth is described as much larger than needed for a cheiromaktron or a face-towel. In this version, Abgar’s agent, in Greek named Ananias, could not capture the likeness of the Lord because of its dazzling brilliance, so Jesus compliantly washed his face and wiped off on a cloth which was oddly called a tetradiplon, (“four-doubled” = eight layered). Then, “having imprinted his image on the sindon he gave it to Ananias.” The operative word sindon is the N.T. synoptics’ word for large burial shroud. A sindon folded in eight layers, a single exposed panel of which could present a life-sized face, is large indeed. (18)
We can only safely assume that the story of Abgar is legendary. Taking such a position given the absence of evidence that stands up to scrutiny is the only historically responsible thing to do. However, we should recognize that legends often develop as attempts to give a historical explanation when one is needed. Two very famous German linguists and collectors of folklore, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, better known to us as the Brothers Grimm, pointed out that legends, unlike other forms of folklore and fiction were historically grounded to a particular place. A “legend cannot, like a fairy tale, find its home anywhere.” (19)
Historians and Legends
The historian can use legend, by ascertaining its need, to construct clues. From the story told of Abgar we can gather three very important clues: 1) A cloth with an image thought to be of Jesus somehow turned up in Edessa. 2) The image is understood to be unique in that it was described as painted with choice pigments or formed when Jesus wiped his face on the linen cloth. 3) The cloth is large and described as folded in eight layers.
In the middle of the 6th century, a cloth with an image believed to be that of Jesus turned up in Edessa. Historians have believed that this happened during repairs of the city walls in A.D. 525, or more likely, during the Persian invasion of the city in 544. Reportedly, it was concealed behind some stones above one of the city gates. It was a practice—or so it seems—in ancient cities of this area to mount a stone tile with a picture of some favored deity above the city’s main gate. It may be that the Image of Edessa was simply stored behind such a tile, as suggested by an ancient Byzantine painting. It could well have been that because of severe floods, to which Edessa was prone, that the cloth was placed high in the city’s walls for protection. There is also the possibility that it was hidden to conceal it from invaders or to protect it during times of Christian persecutions. We know that during the many persecutions of the first three centuries, valuable relics, writings, and ceremonial items of the church were routinely destroyed. If the cloth was taken to Edessa in the earlier part of the 1st century or even later, it might have been hidden for protection.
The cloth, when it was found, was placed in a church built especially for it. It was, to the people of Edessa, the lost cloth of the legend. The image, we find from the historical narrative, was thought to be a true and miraculous facial image of Jesus—described as a divinely wrought image and an image not made by hand.
Plausible Alternative to the Abgar Legend
Historian Jack Markwardt has developed a plausible alternative to the Abgar legend to the account of cloth’s discovery in Edessa. From early documents he has inferred that the best explanation was that the shroud was taken, not to Edessa, but to Antioch during apostolic times. There it remained until late in the 2nd century when it was taken to Edessa for the baptism of King Abgar the Great—Abgar the VIII, not to be confused with Abgar V of the legendary account. Markwardt writes:
. . . Avircius Marcellus, the Bishop of Hieropolis, was summoned to Rome, where he was introduced to Abgar’s wife, Queen Shalmath, that he then travelled to Antioch, where he was joined by Palut and provided with the Shroud, identifiable as the historically-documented sacred Christ-icon which had been taken from Palestine to Syria, and that he then proceeded to Edessa, where he displayed the imaged relic to the king and baptized him into the Christian faith, thereby resulting in the Shroud’s commemoration, in legend, as the Portrait of Edessa.
This makes sense. It fits with a general scholarly consensus that Edessa was evangelized at about this time and probably not before. And it gives us a plausible scenario for seeing how the legend of Abgar might have developed.
Gate of the Cherubim
The shroud, according to Markwardt’s theory, was then returned to Antioch where it remained until the 6th century. It was concealed in a niche above the city’s Gate of the Cherubim in 362 where it remained until about 540. The Gate of the Cherubim was so named because, reportedly, according to the biographer of St. Saint Symeon Stylites, the column sitter, the Roman Titus placed the Cherubim he took from the Temple in Jerusalem above this gate. In 540, the Christ icon was again moved to Edessa, this time to safeguard it from Persian armies. This may not have been a good idea given that Edessa was attacked by the Persians four years later. Then again, it may have been prescient, for Edessa survived the attack. Antioch, on the other hand was nearly destroyed by the Persians under Khosrau I.
Credence for Markwardt’s theory comes from the account of Sister Egeria’s travels to Edessa in 384. Egeria was possibly a nun, a detail that historians stay up at night debating. A nun, some argue would never have taken such a pilgrimage. It was too far from her home in Gaul or Spain, and certainly it would have been expensive. But she did address her letters to her sisters. But then again, it was common in those days to address fellow Christian lay people as sister or brother. But then again would she write only to sisters in the plural. But then again maybe they were familial sisters. And does it matter.
Ecclesiastical History
In the late 6th century, Evagrius Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History mentions that Edessa was protected by a “divinely wrought portrait” (acheiropoieton) sent by Jesus to Abgar. Not yet enough for a decent inference, but at least a beginning: There was in Edessa a piece of cloth with an image thought to be of Jesus. It was not an ordinary image. The clue is that it is variously described as painted with choice pigment, of formed by sweat and not made by human hands.
There are no descriptions of Jesus’ appearance in the New Testament. Nor are there any reputable descriptions in any known early church sources. St. Augustine of Hippo made a point of this when he wrote his monumental works in the 5th century. Yet, starting in the 6th century a new common appearance for Jesus emerged in art. We see it today in hundreds of icons, paintings, mosaics, and Byzantine coins. This common quality seems to have started in Christian Byzantium about the same time that the Image of Edessa was discovered. Prior to this time, images of Jesus were mostly of a young, beardless man, often with short hair, often in story-like settings in which he was depicted as a shepherd.
Christ Pantocrator
One icon that clearly might have been sourced from the image found on the Shroud of Turin is the Christ Pantocrator, an icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai.
The Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai, more commonly called The Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, sits at the base of Mount Sinai, a mountain in the southern-most region of the Sinai dessert. Many believe that it was at this spot where Moses saw the Burning Bush and on this mountain that he received the Ten Commandments. The Monastery, now Greek Orthodox, dates back to the 4th century and is claimed to be the oldest, continuously active Christian monastery in the world. Today, the monastery includes a 6th century church and fortifications built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great, a Muslim Mosque, buildings and gardens beyond the old fortifications and a scattering of nearby hermitages.
Exceptions in the St. Catherine Icon
There are exceptions and they demand we be cautious. Though there are similar gaps in the beards, the beard on the icon is not forked as it is on the shroud. The hair is black or nearly so while on a positive image of the shroud it appears white or light colored. The icon is a positive image and the shroud is a negative one. If the artist did in fact base the icon on the face now found on Turin’s cloth and he perceived the shroud’s negativity then that may explain the black hair. Another explanation, of course, is that Jesus was Jewish and it would be highly probable but not certain that Jesus’ hair would be dark.
There are reasons for caution as well. Many facial features are simply so common that congruence can be found with many other faces. But some features are simply too unusual. And artistic representations of faces at this time in history was simply not as realistic as it would eventually become among European artists in the 15th and 16th century.
Justinian II and His Troubles
The image on the coin caused a great deal of trouble for Justinian. It may have contributed to his downfall. Noted art historian John Beckwith tells us:
At the same time, even after the first two centuries of the Christian era there had always been the seeds of opposition to images. When the Empress Constantia, stepsister of Constantine I and wife of the Emperor Licinius, asked Eusebius of Caesarea for an image of Christ, she was sharply snubbed. From the 4th century onwards there had always been a minority among the intellectuals and the upper classes who disapproved of the cult of icons and the superstitious practices so often attached to them. Moreover in the Byzantine Empire near the eastern frontiers strong iconoclastic tendencies had been fairly constant. There is no period between the fourth and the eighth centuries in which there is not some evidence of opposition to images within the Church. (21)
The Visigoths in Spain
In the late 6th century, Visigoths driven south of the Pyreneans began converting from Arianism to Latin-Catholicism developed a form of Eucharistic liturgy. In form and content it is very close to ancient Celtic and Gallican rites. It also seems to have been heavily influenced by Syriac rites of the early Byzantine Empire. It would later come to be known as the Mozarabic Rite, so named for the Christians who did not flee from the Muslims to the northern part of the Spain with the remnants of Christian Visogothic kingdom. These Christians who adopted Arab dress, customs and language became known as the Mozarabs. Historians have also called this rite the Visogothic Rite, the Toledan Rite, the Old Hispanic Rite and Isidorian Rite because some scholars think its form was influenced by St. Isidore of Seville.
Hymn of the Pearl
But the most intriguing piece of very early evidence may be a few lines of poetry from some apocryphal early church literature. These lines, referred to as the two images segment are from an epic Syriac poem, the "Hymn of the Pearl."
We find this hymn, today, within a 3rd century text called the Acts of Thomas (not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas). Many scholars argue it is Gnostic text and the Catholic Church has called it heretical. But vilification does not diminish significance for historians. It is the legendary story—true, partly true or false—of the apostle Thomas’ (Judas Thomas or Thomas Judas Didymus) mission to India and his martyrdom. Authorship is often attributed to the Gnostic poet Bardesane of Edessa, perhaps as early as A.D. 216).
The hymn, itself, is thought to be older than the Acts of Thomas. It is found in different places in different Greek and Syriac versions of Acts found.
Man of Sorrows
At about this time, or certainly within a century, a new genre of icons developed: the Man of Sorrows. Jesus is shown often with a bloody side wound, often with his hands folded, often with his head tilted to one side. He was shown rising from a coffin, an ossuary, a reliquary, a box. His face was sad, not victorious.
The imagery is a stark departure from the Pantocrator—Christ the King—icons and mosaics so prevalent in the Byzantine world and beyond. The imagery is a stark departure from the sublime, victorious portrayals of the risen Christ in the gospels. Art historians tell us, haltingly, that the Man of Sorrows may have it origins in another Byzantine art form, the Epitaphios, a large cloth with a full length image of Jesus, most usually in burial repose that is used today in Eastern Orthodox churches with roots in the Byzantine rites for Good Friday. Perhaps. But the Epitaphios, which in Greek mean lamentations on the grave, might have been inspired by the Image of Edessa. And was the iconographic genre of the Man of Sorrows perhaps not a remembrance of a mechanical, ritual raising of Jesus’ shroud, when “on every Friday that shroud did raise itself upright, so that the form of Our Lord could clearly be seen.” A remembrance after, as Robert de Clari stated, “none knows - neither Greek nor Frank - what became of that shroud when the city was taken.”
St. Panteleimon Fresco
While Manuel was emperor the church in the St. Panteleimon monastery was built and a grand fresco was painted in 1164. The fresco, like many others of the era, showed Jesus after the crucifixion but before entombment. What catches our attention is the burial shroud with a crisscross pattern of diagonal lines or Xs on the burial cloth. Scavone notes:
As early as 1164 a threnos mural was painted and a liturgical epitaphios was woven in Nerezi, Serbia, both which showed the body of Jesus lying upon a symbolic burial sheet. The mural, however, is important as it shows a shroud designed with a series of Xs very much like the Xs that decorate several artists' copies of the Mandylion that begin to appear in the 10th century . . . It is not precisely a herring-bone weave, but does hint at it. Another interpretation of the Xs, of course, is that they represent Chi, the first Greek character in the name Xpistos. It seems that this X design was common in the Kosovo (Eastern European) region since the Edessa cloth was depicted in a mural at Studenica in 1235 with precisely the same design. (30)
Dan Scavone goes on to say:
Hans Belting is one of the few who have perceived the Shroud as at least one factor among many in the rise of the larger cloth epitaphioi and the new mural art, but sadly he did not follow it up as we might have wished. Belting noticed what he called a new empathetic realism in liturgical representation during the 11th-12th c. (30)
The Real Sudarium?
We can imagine that there may have been several cloths: the shroud, the face cloth or sudarium, a chin band, a strip of cloth to tie the wrists together and perhaps a similar strip for the feet. It was, however, the sudarium, the towel that was being mentioned in Constantinople. Was it real, as well?
There is a contender for the real deal, one that has an uncanny and astonishing relationship to the shroud that is in Turin. It is the Sudarium of Oviedo. This piece of cloth was never in Edessa or Constantinople. But if the historical record is correct, it was in Jerusalem. If the shroud is genuine, it was in Jerusalem at the same time as the shroud.
In the city of Oviedo, in northern Spain, in a small chapel attached to the city’s cathedral, there is a small bloodstained dishcloth size piece of linen that some believe is one of the burial cloths mentioned in John’s Gospel. Tradition has it that this cloth was used to cover Jesus’ bloodied face following his death on the cross. Forensic analysis of the bloodstains suggests strongly that both the Sudarium and the shroud covered the same human head at closely different times. Bloodstain patterns show that the Sudarium was placed about a man’s head while he was in a vertical position. If we assume that the man was a crucifixion victim then we can presume that this was while he was still on the cross. It was then removed before the shroud was placed over the man’s face.
The Sudarium, unquestionably, has been in Oviedo since the eighth century and in Spain since the seventh century.
Documents in the late Roman period and the early middle ages are often sketchy and prone to chronological mistakes, and those pertaining to the Sudarium are no exception. But from a multiplicity of sources, scholars have extracted core elements of historical certainty and plausibility sufficient for a fair degree of historical reconstruction. We can be confident that the Sudarium came to Oviedo from Jerusalem.
Mark Guscin
In 1999, Mark Guscin, a member of a multidisciplinary team of scholars who studied the cloth, issued a forensic and historical report entitled, “Recent Historical Investigations on the Sudarium of Oviedo.” Guscin’s report detailed recent findings of the history, forensic pathology and stain patterns on the Sudarium. In a summary, rich with interpretation and a clear tie-in to the Shroud, Guscin wrote:
There are many points of coincidence between all these points and the Shroud of Turin - the blood group, the way the corpse was tortured and died, and the macroscopic overlay of the stains on each cloth. This is especially notable in that the blood on the Sudarium, shed in life as opposed to postmortem, corresponds exactly in blood group, blood type and surface area to those stains on the shroud on the nape of the neck. If it is clear that the two cloths must have covered the same corpse, and this conclusion is inevitable from all the studies carried out up to date, and if the history of the Sudarium can be trustworthily extended back beyond the fourteenth century, which is often referred to as the shroud’s first documented historical appearance, then this would take the shroud back to at least the earliest dates of the Sudarium’s known history. The ark of relics and the Sudarium have without any doubt at all been in Spain since the beginning of the seventh century, and the history recorded in various manuscripts from various times and geographical areas take it all the way back to Jerusalem in the first century. The importance of this for shroud history cannot be overstressed.
Testing History
Part of the task of the historian can be likened to a prospector panning for gold and being able to distinguish between the real stuff and fool’s gold, little bits of pyrite that glitter and shine, that look like gold but are all but worthless.
We started our journey through the Edessa to Constantinople history by looking at the shroud that is in Turin, in an obvious sort of way, so that we might test the nuggets of history we found and see if they were gold. We have a long ways to go. We need to find a plausible way for the cloth to get from Constantinople to Turin. We need to then look at the history of astonishing discoveries that happened in the 20th and early part of the 21st century. The journey gets very exciting.
The divided images looking out of and into the cloth of the shroud and the burial garment of the Hymn of the Pearl, the tetradiplon fold marks, the unusual images that seemed like sweat or fine pigments, seemingly not made by human hands, the poker holes. We took a detour through Spain to look at the Oviedo cloth. At first it looked like we might in this cloth have extraordinary confirmation. Then we were not so sure. How significant is the carbon dating of the Oviedo Sudarium? Not much, as we will see.
Photons by the Millions
Scientists who study the problem of visual perception talk about information derived from light entering the eye. The 11th century scholar, Alhazen who first figured this out. The information can be just about anything: a dot, a squiggle, a line, a blob of color. It consists of shapes and textures. It consists of complex relationship between one bit of information and another. At its most primitive level it is a photon here and photon there by the millions.
But the eye doesn’t figure out anything. It only takes in the signals it receives, focusing and scanning mechanically, and passes the information on to the brain as a series of neuronal signals. It is left to the brain to make sense of it, to interpret what we are looking at. And the brain can be easily fooled as anyone who has looked at optical illusions can attest. And we suspect that the brain can be fooled by a sort of cognitive bias. It is perhaps why so many of us see faces in rock formations and wood grains and on pieces of toast. It isn’t that the information isn’t there for us to interpret and misinterpret, it’s just that our brains see things differently. Given enough information we’ll all see things rightly or wrongly. And the shroud has a great deal of information on it.
Barrie Schwortz on the Coins
Barrie Schwortz, a technical photographers who photographed the Shroud, questions the coin identification. Having studied numerous high quality negatives of the Shroud taken in 1978, he concludes:
My personal opinion, based on my photographic experience and my close examination of the Shroud itself, is that the weave of the cloth is far too coarse to resolve the rather subtle and very tiny inscription on a dime sized ancient coin...What he [Filas] saw as inscriptions, I saw as random shapes and noise. Such is the subjective nature of image analysis. For these reasons however, I cannot accept these coin "inscriptions" as viable evidence of a first century Shroud "date"...I do not argue that there appears to be something on the eyes of the man of the Shroud, and it may well be coins or potshards, since they were used in some first century burial rituals, but I do not believe we can resolve coin inscriptions.
There is no question that background noise is a severe problem for coin identification. Banding, both vertical and horizontal, encroaches on the area of the eyes, certainly adding anomalous data. Much of the fine detail claimed to be features of the coins probably comes from background noise.
Limestone Dust
Limestone dust has been found on the Shroud of Turin in the vicinity of the image which contains the feet as well as on the backside of the cloth. We might suppose that if the cloth actually contained the body of Jesus or a Roman-style crucifixion victim and if we assume that the victim walked to his crucifixion than we might infer that limestone dust was picked up on his feet and subsequently deposited on the cloth and that over time it became embedded. And if the cloth was used as a burial shroud in a tomb or cave in Jerusalem’s chalky, porous limestone outcroppings, then too, the embedded dust might have come from here.
Joseph Kohlbeck, a scientist at the Hercules Aerospace Center in Salt Lake, Utah, and Richard Levi-Setti of the famed Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, examined some of those dirt particles taken from the foot region of the shroud. Using a high-resolution microprobe, Levi-Setti and Kolbeck compared the spectra of dirt samples taken from the shroud with samples of a rare travertine aragonite found near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem.
With a microprobe, scientists direct a beam of charged particles at a sample to obtain a reading of the precise elements in a mineral sample. By comparing two samples they can determine how similar they are.
The chemical signatures, the elemental composition of the shroud samples and the dust found near Golgotha, were identical except for some minute fragments of organic cellulous linen fiber that could not be separated from the shroud samples.
Kolbeck acknowledges that this is not absolute proof that the shroud was in Jerusalem and that there might be other places in the world--though none are known--where travertine aragonite has the identical trace chemical composition.
This was good. It said something about geography. Short of a conspiracy theory, of which there are many in the world of shroud literature and television productions, or a highly imaginative scenario, it seems likely but not absolutely certain that the Turin Shroud had been in Jerusalem at one time. That is, unless, of course, some pilgrim, let us say between about 1355 and 1978, had returned from Jerusalem and trampled on the shroud with the dirty boots he had been wearing while sightseeing. Or because some imaginative forger of fake relics had anticipated forensic science and ordered some limestone from Jerusalem, just to make sure we remained fooled in the 21st century.
The Making of Linen
Here is roughly what we know: After harvesting flax plants, the long stems are threshed to remove seeds, leaves and roots so that only a stalk remains. In a step called retting, the stalks are then placed in pools of water or streams to rot away most of the stems while leaving the cellulose fibers intact. The remaining material was then scotched, which means simply that it was scraped to remove remaining woody material from the stalk. Then it was hackled or combed to separate various grades of fibers. The finest, longest strands are used for what Pliny called bysus, a word derived from the biblical words bus and shesh, meaning fine linen. (Linen is also called peshet and pishta in the Old Testament and kittan in the 2nd century Mishnah.)
Only two steps remain before weaving. The first is to twist or spin dozens of the fibers together into thread. The next is to bleach the thread, which is often tan or gray.
San Nicola of Casole
But, and as Scavone and other historians note, Nicholas d’Orrante may have also suggested that the burial cloth was in Constantinople. He was the abbot of San Nicola of Casole monastery at the bottom of the heel of the boot of southern Italy. Tradition has it that the monastery was founded by the Norman Robert Guiscard, who had defeated the Byzantine forces of Alexios I in the years leading up to the First Crusade. (San Nicola of Casole may be older).
The monastery was a center of learning where manuscripts were copied, translated between Greek and Latin and archived in a vast library. Though not a university, like the first university created in Constantinople in 425 or the Jami'ah universities founded throughout the Muslim world starting in the 9th century or the universities of Salerno, Paris, Bologna and Oxford, which all were founded before the sacking of Constantinople, it was nonetheless a center of scholarship and learning.
Athens
The shroud may have been taken to Athens, then under French control. About a year after Constantinople was plundered, Theodore Ducas Anglelos wrote in a letter to Pope Innocent III:
The Venetians partitioned the treasure of gold, silver and ivory, while the French did the same with the relics of saints and the most sacred of all, the linen in which our Lord Jesus Christ was wrapped after His death and before the resurrection. We know that the sacred objects are preserved by their predators in Venice and France and in other places.
Quite possibly it was taken to the Acropolis, the most famous outcropping of rock in the world. Atop its flat top sits the Parthenon, once the temple of the Greek patron goddess of Athens, the Virgin Athena. In the 6th century, the Parthenon was converted to a Christian church. Parthenos meant virgin. The Parthenos Athena was easily renamed the Parthenos Maria. The Acropolis, at the time of the Fourth Crusades, was a French citadel. The Parthenon Maria became Notre Dame (Our Lady). On the hilltop, the French built fortifications and converted various buildings into chapels, strongholds and treasuries. Well defended, it was an ideal place to safeguard valuable relics and treasures until they could be moved to France.
Historian Dan Scavone, emeritus professor of history at the University of Indiana-Evansville, is a world renowned scholar of medieval history. He has constructed a convincing argument that the shroud was brought from Athens to Besançon in the Burgundy region of France, and there it remained until it was moved to Lirey, France, from whence its history is meticulously traceable to Turin.
Luminiferous Aether
In 1898, many if not most scientists believed in something called a luminiferous aether. It was something that permeated all of space. And something was about as precise a word as there was for it. It was something like a substance that was probably not a substance. It was something like a gas that was certainly not a gas. The last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of the 19th century, published in 1878, explained it in detail. The famous 1911 edition did, too:
It thus appears that the doctrine of atomic material constitution and the doctrine of a universal aether stand to each other in a relation of mutual support; if the scheme of physical laws is to be as precise as observation and measurement appear to make it, both doctrines are required in our efforts towards synthesis.
It wasn’t that anyone had detected it. It was thought to be undetectable yet there were ongoing attempts to detect it. It was, after all, a necessity, or so it seemed. There was no other way to explain the propagation of light. We would need Albert Einstein to show that it was not a necessity.
In 1898, Einstein was still a student at the Polytechnic in Zurich. Even after he published his papers on General Relativity and Special Relativity, it would take scientists, in the face of the evidence, years to abandon the idea of aether.
Mathew Brady
During the American Civil War, using a process very much like one proposed by Herschel, Mathew Brady became the most famous photographer of the 19th century. He amassed a collection of photographic glass plates that numbered 10,000. Often unrealized is the fact that most of Brady’s photographs were not taken by Brady. He employed many photographers and purchased negatives from others. But when displayed or printed they all contained the obligatory caption, “Photograph by Brady.” It was a slight-of-hand. He provided the pictures. He was misunderstood.
It should not be thought that the invention of photography that brought it to its current state of development in 1898 rested mainly on the shoulders of Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot and Herschel. They stood on the shoulders of others who learned many things about chemistry. Wilhelm Homberg, is an example. In 1694 he explained how some chemicals darkened when exposed to light.
By 1898 photography was on the boundary between the old and the new. The old was large cameras with a front that held a lens, a back that held glass plates to be exposed, a bellows in between. The new was celluloid film developed in the 1880s and hand held cameras in the 1890s. In 1898, Kodak introduced a folding pocket camera.
Just Before the Twentieth Century
By the time Pia took his picture the political picture of the world was changing dramatically. Italy and Ethiopia had just ended a devastating war with Ethiopia gaining independence after the battle of Adowa was the worst defeat of the century by a European nation. Italy lost about half of all of its African forces. The Ottoman Empire was in decline having lost control of primarily Christian regions throughout its empire, particularly among Armenian Christians in the East part of the Anatolia. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin mandated protection for Armenian Christians but this was ignored. Between 1894 and 1896, Turkish forces slaughtered tens if not hundreds of thousands of Armenians. A year later, civil unrest in Crete by the Greek majority who sought alignment with the Kingdom of Greece led to warfare. Though the Turks technically won the war, it put the weakened Ottoman Empire into financial difficulty. In 1898, Spain would surrender the Philippians, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico to the United States. Europe was poised for warfare. Historians have sometimes characterized Europe at this time as a tinderbox awaiting a spark. It was more like an overgrown, dry forest awaiting a lighting strike.
The Chasm Between Science and Religion
To some historians, the turn of the century from the nineteenth to the twentieth seems to have been the nadir of a seemingly huge chasm between science and religion in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which he published in 1859. It is an exaggeration. Many of the clergy, particularly in the Church of England, found no difficulty with evolution. Many of the leading scientists, particularly geologists and biologists were also ordained clergyman or people very much involved in the church. The list of clergy who received the famed Copley Medal of the Royal Society is impressive.
Biblical literalism may have been the norm among an uncritical population at large throughout the course of Christianity, but it was not in any way universal among intellectuals and scholars. We need only look at Augustine of Hippo or Origen of Alexandria who wrote:
And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? And again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally. (De Principiis IV, 3, 1 [6])
Leonard da Vinci Fooling Us All?
In How Leonard da Vinci Fooled History we learn that he secretly invented photography and then created a gigantic camera obscura, discovered how to make film out of linen, how to develop the picture and fix it. He was a genius, after all, they remind us. He understood the camera obscura (as had many educated people in Alhazen’s day and since). He had experimented with chemistry (as had many educated people). He might have had a motive. The authors on their website tell us he was, “[a] known joker, conjuror and illusionist, and a Church-hating heretic.”
A big problem for Picknett and Prince was the fact that Leonardo was born a century after the shroud was exhibited in Lirey. It was therefore necessary that he have an opportunity to replace that shroud with the one of his own making. He might have been welcome at the Savoy family palace. After all they had one of his drawings. “he had the means, opportunity and motive to create this extraordinary work.” Not only did he do all these things, dabbing on blood in all the right places, he replaced the head of the crucifixion model with a photograph of his own head. Picknett and Prince figured this out by comparing the head to a drawing of Leonardo and found the eyes and the nose and the mouth were all in the same place.
Alhazen Better that Leonardo
I would have done better. I would have chosen Alhazen. Although not a great Italian painter like Leonardo—which we tend to forget these days as we imagine him a leader of a totally fictitious secret cult, the Priory of Sion, and a schemer who hid a picture of Mary of Magdala in his Last Supper—he was everything else that Leonardo was and much more. Born in Basra around 965, he became the greatest scientist of his era. He was a physicist, a chemist, an anatomist, a mathematician and a philosopher. He is regarded by some as the first philosopher of science and the founder of the scientific method. His Book of Optics, translated in Toledo during the 12th century in a scriptorium much like the one at the monastery of San Nicola of Casole, is a classic. His descriptions of the camera obscura rival those of Leonardo. His knowledge of the way light is reflected from surfaces, so wonderfully shown in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. If we can imagine that Leonardo invented photography, used it once, made no record of the fact—he was a prolific documenter—we can imagine that Alhazen did so. He might have travelled to Constantinople and found an opportunity to exchange the Image of Edessa with the fake relic of his own making. Might we imagine a motive. Surely: He was Muslim.
The Blood on the Shroud
Adler talks extensively about the blood in this paper. They are, he says, “exudates from clotted wounds transferred to the cloth by its being in contact with a wounded human male body.” It is his specialty. It has been confirmed that the blood is indeed human blood through numerous tests. The stains are from real bleeding from real wounds on a real human body that came into direct contact with the cloth. Adler wrote:
Enzymatic removal of the blood from a blood coated fiber reveals that the blood got on the cloth first and therefore protected the blood covered areas of the cloth from the image forming process. All the microscopic, chemical, spectroscopic, and immunological evidence is consistent with these images, not only being exudates from clotted wounds, but those of a man who suffered severe trauma prior to death, explaining the red color of the blood at the microscopic level. . . . That these are clotted wound exudates is clearly seen in the ultraviolet photographs where every single blood wound shows a distinct serum clot retraction ring. . . . Note that any attempt to explain the formation of the body images must take these properties of the blood images into account. One cannot simply say that the blood images were painted on afterwards. One would need a constant supply of fresh clot exudates from a traumatically wounded human to paint in all the forensically correct images in the proper nonstereo register and then finally paint a serum contraction ring about every wound. Logic suggests that this is not something a forger or artisan before the present century would not only know how to do, but even know that it was required. (40)
Scientists Mean Something Else
This is not what the scientists are referring to when the say the images are 3D encoded. They are speaking, instead, of a method for plotting three dimensional shapes in space. There are many ways of doing this, but we are only going to look at one, the one that applies to the shroud.
Imagine yourself sitting in Bertrand Russell’s chair at his table. Imagine looking at one of those pieces of paper on his table. Imagine that it is the same size as a sheet of ordinary copier or printer paper, once upon a time called typewriter paper. It has two dimensions, eight and a half inches across from left to right and eleven inches from bottom to top. In your mind or for real if you want to find a point two inches from the left and three inches from the bottom. Put a simple pencil dot. You have just plotted a point in two-dimensional (2D) space. Now draw a curvy line on the paper, anywhere on the paper will do. That curvy line can be thought of as a series of many dots, even if they all run together. Each of those dots represents two numbers, the distance from the left edge, which we will call X, and the distance from the bottom edge, which we will call Y. If we carefully measure along the line and write the two distance numbers (X and Y) for every possible dot, we can go over to another piece of paper and create an exact copy of our curvy line by measuring and putting dots. You have, by thought alone, invented a notation system for representing points, lines and shapes in two dimensional space. Unfortunately you are not first to invent it.
René Descartes did it first. René Descartes’ nome de plume was Renatus Cartesius. In an era, the first half of the 17th century, when the scholastic world was frantically translating Latin to the vernacular, Descartes was busy writing in Latin, creating more work for translators. Hence he used that Latin form of his name. Hence the XY coordinate system is called the Cartesian Coordinate System.
Wrist Wounds
What is most interesting is that the man of the shroud was crucified with large spikes driven through his wrists and not through the palms of his hands, something which contradicts all iconography of medieval and pre-medieval periods. This is evidenced by both the image and the bloodstains. This is, of course, more historically and medically plausible. It was not before the first part of the 20th century, that medical experts first realized that nails driven through a man’s palms would not support a his weight – even if his feet were nailed or supported – and that the nails would tear out. That the Romans did crucify victims by driving nails through the wrist area of the forearm was confirmed by the 1968 archeological discovery of a crucifixion victim, named Johanan ben Ha-galgol, found near Jerusalem at Giv’at ha-Mivtar. If indeed the shroud is a medieval forged relic, the craftsman who produced it knew how to do it right even if the nailing, the scalp wounds, and the man’s nakedness defied the sensibilities of the time.
The shroud is more mind-numbing than all other depictions ever made; from the earliest carvings of the crucifixion on 5th century coffins; from the wall painting of the passion so prominent in old English parish churches; from the imaginative grandeur of paintings by Rubens, Raphael, El Greco, and Velazquez; and from the spiritual visualizations of Salvador Dali. It stirs our imagination more than the drama of medieval mystery plays still performed in York or modern Broadway musicals and movies. It evokes more emotion than the great moving hymns “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” or “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded.” It is, in the story it tells of the passion sequence, a picture not of a thousand words but a million.
Conspiracy Theory Erupted
There emerged as can be expected conspiracy theorists to explain that the sample had been switched.
1. Blame it on the atheists. The scientists doing the tests switched the samples cut from the shroud with bits of medieval cloth. No sense in risking the damage to secular humanism that would happen if the shroud proved to be from the 1st century.
2. Or blame it on church officials. They switched the sample because they were afraid of the consequences if the shroud proved to be from the 1st century since they believed that the shroud might somehow, by forensic examination, prove that Jesus survived crucifixion.
3. There were those who thought that if the shroud proved to be from the 1st century then the Catholic Church would need to return the stolen merchandise. To whom? Turkey? Israel? The Greek Orthodox Church? Saint Mary of Blachernae Church in Istanbul? It is a new church building on the site of the 5th century building which was destroyed when Constantinople fell to the Turks. A descendent of the last dynasty of the Byzantine Empire who might be able to make a claim to the throne should the empire ever rise again? The modern nation of Turkey?
Facts vs Explanations
It is important to distinguish between observed facts and likely explanations. The sample used for the radiocarbon dating is chemically unlike the shroud. That is observed fact. It invalidates the sample and thus the conclusion of the tests. Completely! The spliced thread and the dyestuff suggest disguised mending. Disguised mending caused consternation among some. Ball wondered why it was not seen. He is not alone.
Archeologist William Meacham was skeptical when Benford and Marino first proposed mending; long before Rogers examined the material. He had previously discussed this possibility with the archeological scientist Stuart Fleming who said that it was within the realm of possibility. But Meacham was not yet convinced. He challenged Benford and Marino, “to find at least one textile historian who could answer these questions [about it escaping notice] in support of their thesis.”
They did so. According to Benford and Marino, Dr. Thomas Campbell, Associate Curator, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, described the sixteenth century French weavers as ‘magicians.’ It was very difficult to identify their repairs. (2002)
Without a Trace: French Reweaving
Michael Ehrlich, the president and owner of a Chicago-based company called “Without A Trace” provides invisible mending services for clients throughout the United States. He explains that there are two types of reweaving: inweaving, which is noticeable from the back side of the cloth (as Flury-Lemberg stated) and a technique called French weaving. French weaving was practiced in Europe during the time when it is likely that the cloth would have been repaired. Benford and Marino explain:
French Weaving, now only done on small imperfections due to its extensive cost and time, results in both front and back side ‘invisibility.’ According to Mr. Ehrlich, French Weaving involves a tedious thread-by-thread restoration that is undetectable. Mr. Ehrlich further stated that if the sixteenth Century owners of the Shroud had enough material resources, weeks of time at their disposal, and expert weavers available to them, then they would have, most definitely, used the French Weave for repairs . . . the House of Savoy, which was the ruling family in parts of France and Italy, owned the Shroud in the sixteenth century, and possessed all of these assets.
McCrone and the Vinland Map
In 1972, Walter McCrone, who would later attempt to debunk the shroud, examined some particles of ink and found titanium anatase, a material scientist discovered in the 1920s. He thus concluded that the map was a recent relic-forgery.
Several people doubted McCrone’s conclusion including George Painter, the curator of ancient documents of the British Museum. In 1985, physicist Thomas Cahill, of the University of California at Davis, analyzed the map using a newly developed process, Particle Induced X-ray Emission, and found only minute traces of titanium anatase, amounts that were consistent with what would be expected in the common green vitoral ink of the fifteenth century.
As with the shroud, McCrone had found the substances that he claimed were there. They are there. But they are there in amounts too miniscule to support his conclusions. Columbus, who did not discover that the world was round, did not discover America ahead of the Norsemen.
Swoon Theory
Called the Swoon Theory, the argument that Jesus recovered from his wounds, comes up every now and then. It is an attempt to explain the post-resurrection appearances. Few biblical scholars take it seriously. The Shroud, if it is real, further refutes this theory. Medical experts who have studied the frontal and dorsal images of the man on the Shroud clearly see a man in rigor mortis. They believe, as well, that there is distinguishable evidence of postmortem blood flows. The severity of the trauma evidenced by various wounds visible on the Shroud—including the stabbing wound to the chest—is so serious that it highly unlikely that the man of the Shroud could not have survived long given the medical circumstances of the first century.
Other possibilities simply become implausible. For instance, why would the Shroud be in the wrong tomb? Or, why would the Shroud even exist if the entire story of an empty tomb is fiction?
Science is good at figuring out that with certain ingredients and certain conditions, certain processes will start and end. And it may well be that scientists will eventually figure out a complex process by which the images were seemingly so miraculously formed on the Shroud. Will scientist also be able to deal with the problem of how likely it is that all those right ingredients and conditions might have prevailed perhaps only once in history.
Continuous Tone Negative
It's possible to imagine that this appearance is what a crafter of fake relics wanted to create; perhaps to portray some imagined idea of what the Resurrection was like. But the reason they look ghostlike is that they are continuous tone negative images. When photographed, the negative of what is already a negative become the extraordinarily photographic like image we commonly see. Could the image on the Shroud, in fact, be a photograph?
Near the end of the fifteenth century, about 130 years after the Shroud's first public exhibition in Europe, Leonardo da Vinci described a camera obscura (a pinhole camera) in his notebooks. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) understood the principle and so did a tenth century Arabian scholar, Alhazen who used a tent-sized camera obscura for observing the cosmos. In Alhazen's tent images were projected onto a wall where they could be traced or copied by hand. It wasn't until 1727 when Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver mixed with nitric acid created a photosensitive compound that turned dark when exposed to light. And, it wasn't until 1816 when Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura with a sensitized paper to create an image. In 1834, Henry Fox Talbot created the first stable photographic negative on paper soaked in silver chloride.
Had someone, perhaps, invented photography several centuries earlier even though there is no written evidence or samples of photographic experiments or works? Is the Shroud the work of a scientific genius whose accomplishments are lost to history? While some people have opined that it might be, there is ample evidence the Shroud is not a photograph.
The Real Flat Earth Society
At the time of the 1988 carbon 14 tests, when an Oxford researcher commented that anyone who now believed that the shroud was real must be a member of the Flat Earth Society, there really was a Flat Earth Society.
The Flat Earth Society was, and still is, a worldwide organization with a few members, headquartered in Lancaster, California. The worldview of its members is rooted in the tenets of the Universal Zetetic Society, which flourished in England in the nineteenth century. Charles K. Johnson, its president in 1988, had, as he saw it, “reduce[d] truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable . . .” His history was right out of the King James Bible and from a collection of highly imaginative conspiracy theories, mostly in his head. “It’s the Church of England that’s taught that the world is a ball,” proclaimed Johnson. “George Washington, on the other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions.” What is true, at least, is that in the late nineteenth century, a Yorkshire Church of England vicar, the Rev. M. R. Bresher, was so horrified by the Zetetic movement that he went about England strenuously arguing that the world was certainly round like a ball.
Those Who Knew Better
Those of us who know better probably know that the Pythagoreans, as early as the 5th century B.C. recognized that the world was round. Aristotle, Euclid, and others knew it too. In the 2nd century A.D., an entire school of astronomers and mathematicians in Alexandria, led by Ptolemy, knew the earth was round and even calculated the circumference of the earth with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy.
Works Consulted and Considered
1. Rogers, Raymond N. Reply from Ray Rogers (to Joe Nickell). Skeptical Inquirer. 2005, February.
2. Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. s.l. : University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
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