Crossan, John Dominic
The Germ of the Photograph Idea
Because the picture was a negative, some speculated that the Shroud of Turin might be a medieval proto-photograph. At first glance this seemed reasonable. But then common sense prevailed. How likely was it that photography was invented in the Middle Ages, used once to make a single fourteen-foot long fraud, never to be exploited, never to have been mentioned or used again until it was reinvented in an age of science. Such speculation seemed moot. I couldn’t imagine such speculation was realistic.
So entrenched was my skepticism, it would take me a year to become open minded and longer still to change my mind. I learned that McCrone’s identification of paint was a subjective and never verified. In fact, attempts to verify his observations showed that what he thought he saw could not be what he thought it was. This was especially true of tests conducted by one of McCrone’s own staff. Heproved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that McCrone was wrong. Moreover, I would learn that it was impossible that the images were photographs. I came to recognize what Ball would later write for Nature: “It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made.”
Our minds don't easily see details in negatives. But with photographic negatives of the shroud, which were in fact positive, new extraordinary details had been noticed for the first time. Then with newer pictures taken in 1931 and then, literally, with thousands of photographs taken 1978, it became obvious to some that then anatomical details along with contusions and lacerations were so precisely detailed that only a modern pathologist could properly understand them. While, I had taken notice of this, I had not comprehended how significant this was until I came across a relevant comment by the brilliant (though very controversial) historian and biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan on a major website called Beliefnet.
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?
John Dominic Crossan
No one perhaps more than John Dominic Crossan has come to represent the liberal view. Crossan, a former Catholic priest, is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, the largest Catholic university in the United States. He is a bestselling author of several books about Jesus. He is well known as a founder and fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of Biblical and religious scholars famous for their method of voting with colored beads on the likelihood that Jesus said this or that or that certain events in the gospels really happened, a method similar to the blackballing voting methods used by college fraternities and sororities to secretly reject people into their organizations.
For the most part the Jesus Seminar has concluded that Jesus was born in Nazareth (not Bethlehem) of Mary and a human father who was not Joseph, he was an itinerant guru of sorts who healed the psychosomatically ill but never performed any miracles. He was executed by the Romans only because he was a “public nuisance” and for no other reason whatsoever. The empty tomb is pure fiction as is the resurrection, which is based on visionary experiences by some of his followers.
Crossan on a Mission
Crossan gained notoriety through his books and many appearances on television and interviews on National Public Radio (NPR) in which he challenges traditional understanding about Jesus and early Christianity. He is a man on a mission:
Christianity often asserts that its faith is based on fact not interpretation, history not myth, actual event not supreme fiction. I find that assertion internally corrosive and externally offensive. And because I am myself a Christian, I have a responsibility to do something about it.
Crossan’s Big Claim
He is perhaps most famous for his contention that Jesus may not have been buried following the crucifixion but tossed into a charnel pit or left on the cross to be devoured by wild dogs and vultures. It was pure sensationalism mixed with legitimate historical assessment. Christians, whether inclined towards or away from literal interpretations of the Gospels are still fond of the old stories: the nativity, the wedding at Cana, miracle healings, the Last Supper. The accounts of the passion combined with burial in a borrowed tomb, the discovery that it was empty and the confusing encounters with the risen Christ is a particularly evocative scenario that goes to the root of Christian faith. Crossan offends those sensibilities like a house guest who not only announces that he has had a colonoscopy but describes the procedure at dinner.
What Crossan is saying is that belief in the Resurrection, which need not be miraculous or physical, does not depend on a particular scenario. A significant number of scholars in the Jesus Seminar agree even if they shy away from Crossan’s non-burial hypothesis. But a significant number of scholars disagree and they do so from an objective analysis of the same historical situation that Crossan employs and not because the Bible says this or that. William R. Herzog in Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God provides an excellent review of the quests as well as a balanced perspective on the resurrection debate. He summarizes neatly:
One of the questions that continues to divide scholars is the significance of empty tomb. Was Jesus’ body lost, tossed into the garbage dump in the Hinnom Valley, eaten by dogs and vultures, or transformed by the power of God? (13)
Crossan on the Shroud of Turin
Most of the questions to Crossan were about his many books and his theories about Jesus. And given his views about Jesus’ burial, it was no surprise that someone asked his opinion on the Shroud of Turin. He responded:
My best understanding is that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval relic-forgery. I wonder whether it was done from a crucified dead body or from a crucified living body. That is the rather horrible question once you accept it as a forgery. (14)
My first reaction was amazement. I might have thought that he answered carelessly was it not for one thing. I have read many of his books, and I have come to realize that his analyses and historical reconstructions are always meticulously researched, complex and well organized—even if I disagree with his conclusions. The Beliefnet interview was in 2002 and so it was no surprise that he recognized the prima facie case against authenticity; the carbon dating which had not yet been refuted. But he clearly understood the realism of the horrific and chilling images. He understood these forensically correct images of a naked, much wounded, crucified man in burial repose were more than art.
The Medically Accurate Images
The ever so medically accurate images have convinced many people that the shroud cannot be a forgery. There are just too many details to reasonably imagine that a medieval forger, without a modern knowledge of forensic pathology could have created the shroud images including the bloodstains, unless, as Crossan supposes, he had an actual victim. But it had to be more than a victim to use as a model because some of the details are invisible without modern technology. Fred Zugibe tells us:
Under ultraviolet fluorescent photography, all of the wounds show a serum retraction ring of albumin around them that would have been completely unknown to an artist forger. It is very important to note that no image is present wherever blood is present, indicating that the image formation occurred after the blood staining and that the presence of blood prevented image formation in those areas. Although this is not discernable with. the naked eye, this was demonstrated by Adler [Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University and one of the world’s leading authorities on the chemistry of blood] who removed blood from several fibers in image areas by subjecting them to proteolytic enzymatic hydrolysis (which removes blood). No image was present on the fibers that contained blood. If this were done by human hands, the artist would have had to paint all of the bloodstains with the albumin halos in all of the wounds and blood flows, including the blood of the scourge marks, using human blood and then paint the body image around them in their precise locations and eliminate images wherever there was blood. A complicated process, indeed.
Several forensic pathologists have examined the details of the images and the peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. The conclusions are always the same. This is the image of a man who died of crucifixion, who is in a medically accurate state of rigor mortis, with medically precise wounds. The images are far too accurate to have been the product of anyone with only a medieval knowledge of anatomy or medicine. The blood is real human blood and it could only have come to be on the cloth by contact with real wounds.
Mind Numbing Realism
It is hard to imagine how a forger achieved such realism as we see was in light of what was known about human anatomy and forensic pathology by the Middle Ages. Many skeptics of the shroud’s authenticity focus their and our attention only on the arguments that support medieval origin and shy from the mind-numbing realism found in the shroud images, realism that was almost imperceptible in a negative image. Some, such a John Dominic Crossan, seem to be more realistic and recognize the near to sheer impossibility of this.
Part of the realism is in the bloodstains. As forensic scientists and chemists now know, the stains are from real human or at least primate blood. Immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests reveal this. ABO typing of blood antigens suggests that the blood is type AB. However, there is considerable doubt that blood typing is accurate for old blood for various reasons. The stains are from real bleeding from real wounds on a real human body that came into direct contact with the cloth. There is no doubt about that. When the stains formed, the man was lying on his back with his feet near one end of the fourteen-foot long, banner shaped piece of cloth. The cloth was drawn over the top of his head and loosely draped over his face and the full length of his body down to his feet. Many of the stains have the distinctive forensic signature of clotting with red corpuscles about the edge of the clot and a clear yellowish serum retraction ring.
Hard to Imagine Art in the Realism
The clots, the serum separations, the mingling of body fluids, the directionality of the flows, and all other medically expected attributes would have been nearly impossible to create by brushing or daubing or pouring human blood onto the cloth. The blood, rich in the bilirubin, a bile pigment that the body produces under extreme trauma, is unquestionably the blood of the man whose lifeless, crucified body was enshrouded in the cloth; even if only for the purpose of crafting a relic-forgery in medieval times as Crossan suggests.
The Most Studied Artifact in History
The shroud is very probably the most studied artifact in all of history. Those who study it are not, as some skeptics charge, religious fanatics or overzealous Christian apologists. Many of them believe in miracles and many of them do not. Many of them are not Christian. A fair number of them are Jewish. Some are agnostics. Those that are Christian span the full spectrum of progressive-liberal to conservative theological and Christological thought. They include Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Evangelical Christians.
They include archeologists, historians, chemists, physicists, botanists, palynologists, forensic pathologists, image analysts, art historians, textile experts, and technical photographers. Most of them are from leading academic institutions or from prestigious scientific establishments including the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Sandia Labs, the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. Their work, which is well documented, formidable in detail, and much of it carefully peer reviewed, warrants consideration. Most of the researchers who have studied the shroud extensively, conclude, that at some level of understanding, it is authentic.
Yet the myth persists that the shroud has been proven to be medieval. Crossan said that it was his best understanding that it was a medieval relic-forgery. Some skeptics will say that it has not been proven that the carbon 14 tests are false. That is true. They may not be scientifically definitive and are suspiciously inaccurate, but they have not been proven wrong. Skeptics will argue that Pierre d’Arcis has not been proven a liar. That is also true. But what are we to make of all the contradictions, the preponderance of other evidence?
Why it is so Hard to Believe the Shroud is Real
I suspect that much of the reason we don’t accept the possibility that the shroud is real is because of its footprint in medieval Europe. Just as Crossan posits that Jesus was not buried because men like him who were crucified were usually not buried, even left on their crosses to be devoured by dogs, we can reconstruct a history of the shroud from likely plausibility. Should we not, however, try to stretch the envelope of our worldview, just as Aquinas did when he wondered if angels can go from one point to another without going through the in between? Should we not wonder that, if the shroud is really 2000 years old and that it is now in Turin, that it had to pass through the in between, which was medieval Europe. History that is far more credible than much of the history understood about Columbus seems to bear this out. If that is so, then Constantinople from 944 to 1204 was between Edessa and Europe. Perhaps Edessa was in between Jerusalem and Constantinople.
Unless we know that our worldview of history is absolutely correct, we should not let it rule what we will consider. And the same must be said for science, particularly science used by history. Most of us, when hearing that something has been dated by some scientific method assume that the results are definitive. It is the gospel truth. It is science, after all.
Jesus at 2000 Symposium
In May of 1996, in an Episcopal Teleconferencing Network broadcast follow-up to Trinity Institute’s “Jesus at 2000 Symposium” Crossan, Marcus Borg, Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright, and Deirdre Good were exploring the topic of the Resurrection. As can be expected when Crossan was present, the matter of Jesus’ burial surfaced in the discussion. Tom Wright had just finished arguing that Jesus’ was in fact buried. The conversation went as follows:
Borg: But surely the reason that didn’t happen amongst other reasons is that Jesus was a peasant and secondary burial in an ossuary simply didn’t happen for peasants.
Crossan: That’s expensive, Tom, that burial you’re talking about.
Wright: It is expensive and the Gospels explain perfectly well how it happened. This is the trouble. It’s very easy to reconstruct something if you take all the bits of evidence off the table and say, we don’t believe any them, then of course you are free to tell any other story that you like.
That may be a fair criticism of the argument that Jesus was not buried. It seems so, but I don’t know. It is illustrative, however, of the problem with the shroud. We cannot be selective with evidence and simply fall back on best understandings, then wonder about newly crucified models used to address but one of the contradictions. Of course, if the shroud is authentic, then there is little argument left about whether or not Jesus was buried.
Looking At Evidence that Contradicts Worldview
If we are to truly understand this historical artifact, we must look at the preponderance of evidence that contradicts worldview assumptions. We must consider all of it. We must weigh its significance. We must look for patterns of corroboration and examine all problems with any of the evidence. As I said at the beginning of this book, there has been a paucity of fact-embracing skepticism on the shroud. The skeptics are selective with the evidence and generally will not go beyond the carbon 14 testing, the d’Arcis memorandum and McCrone’s finding of paint pigments. They may, like Vikan, offer speculative explanations but they don’t address the contradictions. That is regrettable. The crime against Galileo was not that he was arrested or silenced. It was that his evidence, his contradictions, his conclusions were dismissed for no other reason than that they were incredulous to a prevailing worldview. Crossan took a step in the right direction in acknowledging the problem of the realism in the bloodstains and the images.
The shroud is important because it challenges worldview thinking. It challenges what we may think we know historically about the passion sequence, Jesus’ crucifixion and his burial. It potentially challenges what we may think about the resurrection. It challenges biblical scholarship and our modern day distrust of the Gospel accounts. It challenges two centuries of progress in the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus. It challenges the discourse on science and religion. And as Pope John Paul II states — a man keenly aware of intellectual dilemma — the Shroud of Turin “challenges our intelligence.”
It may turn out that the shroud is a medieval relic-forgery, as Crossan supposes. It may be that the shroud is authentic and that a perfectly natural explanation for the images eludes us for now. Absent such explanations, we may wonder: did something happen in the tomb? Did something happen within that linen shroud? Did something happen that was so powerful that an image was translated to the cloth?
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