Geoffrey de Charny

Geoffrey de Charney

Around 1350, a French knight, Geoffrey de Charney, from nearby Lirey, married Jeanne de Vergy, a great-great granddaughter of Othon De La Roche. Because the cloth had always remained civil property and not property of the church, we can imagine that the shroud might have been part of Jeanne’s dowry; or something like that, for in 1355, the shroud was exhibited in a church that Geoffrey built in Lirey. We can imaging but we don’t know. There is considerable confusion about just what happened. Geoffrey was reluctant to say just how he came to have the shroud. Skeptics have jumped on this to suggest that he didn’t have an explanation. Who can blame them. But absence of evidence is not evidence.

Knights Templar

There have been other theories to explain how the cloth arrived in Lirey. But they fail close scrutiny. One, however, advanced by historian Ian Wilson suggests that the shroud was in the hands of the Knights Templar. Much of this theory is based on the purported practice of the Templars of worshipping a head or image of a head, and the suggestion that the head was the image on the shroud. Adding to this possibility was the discovery of a painted face found in Templecombe, England, on the site of a Templar preceptor that resembles the face on the shroud. There is also the suggestion of a family tie between Geoffrey de Charny, a Templar knight who was burned at the stake during the suppression of the order by King Phillip IV of France and the Geoffrey de Charny of Lirey. Wilson is cautious. In his seminal book on the shroud, The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World's Most Sacred Relic Is Real, he writes:

But it is only a theory, which has its critics as well as its supporters, and despite the intriguing Templecombe panel painting—for which no more satisfactory explanation has yet been advanced—substance-wise it gets us little further than delving into family trees.

Because it was so intriguing, because the Templars fascinate us, because it was suggested in a best seller by a well known historian, because it preceded other theories such as Besançon, the theory has had extraordinary staying power. And it just received a breath of new life.