Jesus
The Flat Earth Society
“We have shown the shroud to be a fake,” Teddy Hall, the director of Oxford’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art said following carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin in 1988. “Anyone who disagrees with us ought to belong to the Flat Earth Society.”
That should have been the end of it. The big piece of cloth with two life-size images, front and back, of an apparently crucified man was not—could not be—the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth. Science had just proven that. It originated, so the scientists said, in the Middle Ages sometime between 1260 and 1390, or thereabouts. We must say thereabouts because in such scientific measurements, there are margins of error. But the margin of error was small. We might really say it was irrelevant. The work was done at three different prestigious laboratories by thoroughly qualified, highly respected scientists. The carbon dating should have been the end of it. For most people, it was. It was until it wasn’t. Serious mistakes had been made.
The Shroud is a religious object
The shroud is a religious object, believed by many to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus and hence a relic. We should not be surprised that after the carbon dating, many people attempted to challenge the results, often inventing highly imaginative, creative explanations. One was that the images of Jesus, seen on the cloth, were created when Jesus dematerialized and rematerialized during the Resurrection and this may have (somehow) rejuvenated the cloth and made it appear newer than it was. Dematerialize: the very word, was an invitation to mockery. We have all seen Hollywood’s version of dematerialization. “Beam me up, Scotty,” says Captain Kirk asking to be dematerialized from the planet on which he is standing and rematerialized on the starship Enterprise.
Russell Kirk
A real Kirk, the conservative and brilliant philosopher-scholar Russell Kirk (1918-1994), a late-in-life convert from Atheism to Christianity and a strong believer in the Shroud's authenticity, caught the sense of it. While speaking about the Shroud, he described the notion of dematerialization in somewhat strange yet lucid terms:
But the Resurrection in the flesh—which some now hint was bound up with nuclear disintegration and reintegration, our solid flesh being known now to consist of innumerable electrical particles held in coherence by means of which we know nothing—proved that Jesus the son had transcended matter and was divine.
John A. T. Robinson
The ultra-liberal Anglican bishop and biblical scholar, John A. T. Robinson, author of the bestseller, Honest to God, famous for wanting to change the conventional language of the church so it would better accord with a scientific worldview; famous too for reappraising common wisdom about when various books of the New Testament were written; believed that the Shroud was not the work of a medieval forger. In contemplating the notion that the author of John, the fourth gospel, may have meant for us to interpret that Jesus passed through his burial cloths, he addressed dematerialization in the context of the Shroud of Turin. He seemed to want to redefine it:
Dematerialization is I suspect a modern way of envisaging the relationship between flesh and spirit, matter and energy, of being 'changed' or 'clothed upon' with a body of 'glory'. How a first-century Jew would naturally have envisaged resurrection (though this does not of course mean that this is how it actually happened) would surely have been as a corpse waking up from sleep, like Tabitha in Acts (9:40), as indeed Jesus predicts of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then like Lazarus walking out of the tomb. The difference in the case of Jesus was that the grave-clothes did not need to be taken off him nor the stones removed: he did it himself. For, unlike Lazarus, he was not simply being restored to the weakness of a flesh-body. In the power of the Spirit he broke the bonds of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.
Joe and Lenny
Father Joe is a Jesuit priest. Lenny, his brother, is an Atheist. Joe, the Catholic priest, did not think the shroud was genuine, though he readily admitted that proof that it is fake is illusive. Lenny, the atheist, thought it was the real deal, the actual burial cloth of the historical Jesus. “Obviously,” he said, “I don’t think the images are miraculous. They are probably some natural phenomenon that we don’t understand. Clearly, they are not manmade. You simply can’t ignore the scientific and historical evidence like my brother does.”
Struck by what seemed an absurdity, as I stood with these two men in the undercroft of the church munching on lemon squares, I turned to Father Joe. “Why do you think it is fake?” I asked.
“It doesn’t work in my soup,” he replied. “Lenny might be right. It might be genuine. But he thinks it is irrelevant. I would be okay with that, if I could really see it that way. I just can’t”
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.
Benford and Marino Onto Something
As it turned out, Benford and Marino seemed to be onto something. In 2002, after considerable research, Rogers, along with Anna Arnoldi, a chemistry professor at the University of Milan, wrote a paper that strongly suggested that Benford and Marino were right. More work needed to be done, however, and Rogers continued to study the matter with material that had been saved from the actual cuttings from which the carbon dating samples were taken. In January, 2005, following a lengthy peer-review process, Thermochimica Acta, an international journal from Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, published a paper by Rogers entitled, “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin.” In it Rogers wrote:
The combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud.
This wasn’t religious opinion. In fact, it wasn’t that much of a scientific opinion of the sort that newspapers and television like. If Rogers could have proven that the shroud was the genuine article or at least that it came from the time of Christ, this would have been exciting news. As it was he was only saying, that for all practical purposes, the 1988 carbon dating was meaningless. It was pure science. It was also a personal admission that he had been wrong in thinking that the carbon dating was the end of the story; that the shroud was certainly a medieval fake.
Joe Nickell: Sour Grapes
With the 1988 carbon dating in shambles, the last convincing scientific argument that the shroud was a fake had gone up in smoke. This didn’t mean that the shroud was real. That is yet to be determined. But with the collapse of the last bit of what was thought to be a scientifically sustainable argument, a sense a palpable frustration seemed to be emerging among better informed shroud skeptics. This is perhaps no more evident than in Nickell’s 2007 book, Relics of the Christ:
Actually, their numerous criticisms of the carbon dating are little more than sour grapes . . . As we have seen, however, there is corroborative evidence that supports the radiocarbon date of 1260 to 1390. This includes the lack of any history before the 1350s. (2)
There we go again: lack of any history before the 1350s. But it gets more interesting.
Joe Nickell is the world’s single most unceasing critic of the shroud’s authenticity. He is an eloquent writer and during his long career as a book author and columnist for the Skeptical Inquirer he has done an admirable job of debunking all manner of dubious artifacts, hoaxes and outlandish beliefs in such things as the Loch Ness Monster. We get an interesting picture of Nickell, who describes himself as a paranormal investigator, from an article entitled, “An Interview with Joe Nickell.” It was written by Eric Krieg of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking. “Joe impressed on me the difference between being a scientist and an investigator,” Krieg wrote. “Joe seems to have no significant credentials . . . Joe remarks that a scientist tends to approach an investigation from the narrow view of his own specialty - where as a ‘jack of all trades’ would come up with more avenues of investigation.” (3)
Skeptics Dictionary More Closely
It helps to look a bit more closely at what Carroll writes in the Skeptics Dictionary:
Of course, the cloth might be 3,000 or 2,000 years old, as Rogers speculates, but the image on the cloth could date from a much later period. No matter what date is correct for either the cloth or the image, the date cannot prove to any degree of reasonable probability that the cloth is the shroud Jesus was wrapped in and that the image is somehow miraculous. To believe that will always be a matter of faith, not scientific proof. (4)
First of all, Rogers did not speculate that it was 3,000 or 2,000 years old. What Rogers argued was that the lack of vanillin in the fabric of the shroud was a serious challenge to the carbon dating. Flax, like the vanilla bean, contains vanillin. Over time, a very long time, it decomposes. How long it takes, depends on temperature. Given a plausible range of average ambient temperatures during the life of the cloth, chemical kinetics demonstrates that the cloth is somewhere between 1,300 and 3,000 years old and not about 700 years old as the carbon dating suggested. Rogers carefully demonstrated that.
Second of all, we need not ascribe miraculous causation to the image, as Carroll suggests, to infer at some level of certainty that it might be the shroud Jesus was wrapped in. There might be, as Rogers and other think, a perfectly natural chemical explanation for the images. The suggestion that the image might be from a much later period is interesting but improbable. This is what Wilson thought. We will address this possibility, but not yet. We have some work to do in understanding the science and the history, none of it very difficult and all of it entertaining, before we tackle this.
Graven Images and Such
I sometimes receive more than a hundred of emails about the shroud in a single week. Some are from atheists who insist it is fake because—don’t I get it—God does not exist, or something to that effect. Some are from biblical literalists (creationists and fundamentalists) who insist it contradicts scripture in this particular way or that, so it is obviously fake. Some argue that the shroud is a “graven image” and God would never have created a graven image, so it must be manmade. If I think otherwise, my soul is in mortal danger. I get emails from people who say that secret Bible codes prove it is real. Others tell me that if I magnify the right eye of the man of the shroud, I will see all the proof I need. Apparently, though I cannot see it, there is another image of Jesus, visible much the same way I suppose as I might see a the face on a piece of burned toast. Some of the emails repeat all manner of conspiracy theories and flimsy logic from a multitude of web sites and blogs. Some argue that the shroud proves the Resurrection. Conversely, it proves that Jesus survived the crucifixion, thus explaining the post-Resurrection appearances (swoon theory). It is a sweat image of the torture of Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Painting, photograph, relief-rubbing, dust painting, images of coins, carbon dating, no history before 1350, dematerialization and on and on: there are so many explanations and stories that a veritable cacophony of myth—modern myth—abounds.
Ruth Gledhill
Ruth Gledhill, Britain’s most famous and outspoken religion journalist has a sense of this. Gledhill, who writes for The Times (of London), was discussing two stories that were breaking around Eastertide of 2009. The first was about a television documentary airing in the U.K that detailed Rogers’ findings. The other story was about documented evidence just recently found in the Vatican archives that explained that medieval Templar knights had venerated the shroud for more than a hundred years before the 1350s and before the earliest possible date determined by the now refuted carbon dating. She wrote:
Year after year, we get stories on the Turin Shroud. It is medieval fake, it isn't a fake. It is Jesus, it isn't Jesus. Now to top them all, we get archives from the Holy See itself supporting the involvement of the Knights Templar. This is Dan Brown-meets-the-Pope territory. But what is great about this particular story is that it is based on verifiable fact. When was the last time that happened with the Turin Shroud? (5)
Actually, verifiable facts are frequently reported. But they go largely unnoticed, indistinguishable from the din of the mythical. Gledhill’s point is nonetheless valid.
Let There Be Evolution
Because of what it could mean if the shroud is real, because the image are so mysterious and potentially miraculous, the shroud, like it or not, rightly so or not, has become part of the never ending, unavoidable and possibly unjustified scientific quest for God. Balls choice of the word microcosm may not be the best choice. It is not a miniature of the greater quest in the same sense that baseball is a microcosm of team sports. It is its own quest that may lead nowhere even if the shroud is real.
It is wrong, however, to think that this is all that drives the study of the shroud. Ball’s comment should not receive uncritical acceptance. The shroud is a kaleidoscope of mysteries, many perhaps that can be answered by science. But should the goal be to prove by science a religious belief or should it be to seek a clear understanding of the cloth and let the chips fall where they may. John Paul II very wisely puts this in perspective:
The Shroud is a challenge to our intelligence. . . . The mysterious fascination of the Shroud forces questions to be raised about the sacred Linen and the historical life of Jesus. Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions. She entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate, so that satisfactory answers may be found to the questions connected with this Sheet, which, according to tradition, wrapped the body of our Redeemer after he had been taken down from the cross. The Church urges that the Shroud be studied without pre-established positions that take for granted results that are not such; she invites them to act with interior freedom and attentive respect for both scientific methodology and the sensibilities of believers.
The Astonishing Claim
It is an astounding claim that seems not only against modern scientific sensibilities but against the sensibilities of people who, according to New Testament writings witnessed the risen Christ and all those who heard the story told. Jesus of Nazareth, a peasant itinerant preacher rose from dead following his execution by crucifixion. It is what make Richard Dawkins wonder about Christians. He singles out Polkinghorne:
[He is one of a number of] good scientists who are sincerely religious . . . I remain baffled by their belief in the details of Christian religion.
The Four Image Options
But what do we mean? There is no denying that if this was a physical, bodily resurrection, as many Christians believe, it is to a modern understanding of science absolutely and unquestionably scientifically impossible. But it was always considered impossible from the first moment that followers of Jesus finally understood what had happened as resurrection. The tomb was empty and as the story goes Jesus had reappeared to some of them. It was either a miracle or there was some other explanation. that he was resurrected. There was only one word for it. It was a miracle. It was an action of God. Can the shroud demonstrate this? There is no question that many are motivated by this. But how? Consider four options:
1. Manmade: The images are manmade by some still unexplained method.
2. Completely natural: The images are the product of a natural phenomenon. For instance, amine vapors emitted by a body after death might have reacted with the cloth.
3. Partly miraculous: The images are formed by some natural phenomenon in conjunction with a miracle, for instance radiation emitted by the body of Christ during the physical act of resurrection.
4. Completely miraculous: The images are produced miraculously as though God had said, “Let there be an image,” and there was.
Terry Eagleton
The quarrel between science and theology, then, is not a matter of how the universe came about, or which approach can provide the best "explanation" for it. It is a disagreement about how far back one has to go, though not in the chronological sense. For theology, science does not start far back enough-not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams [the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury] has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible. Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from? How do we explain rationality and intelligibility themselves, or is this question either superfluous or too hard to answer? Can we not account for rationality because to do so is to presuppose it? (Terry Eagleton)
The study of the shroud, if it is a microcosm of the quest for God, must comply with the rules for as much as they are the best rules we have: the scientific method and the means for drawing the best explanations from the information at hand. We must avoid the pitfalls of pseudoscience. We must insist that everything is reasonably verifiable.
In the scientific quest for God, both sides of the fine-tuned universe are well represented by highly regarded scientists—cosmologist, astrophysicists, mathematicians, quantum physicists—and philosophers. There is or there isn’t a multiverse or there is some other explanation not yet understood. This quest will continue. The narrower quest for the historical Jesus is likely to continue unabated. So, too, the even narrower-still quest to understand the resurrection. There is a wide diversity of opinion and countless scholars. Wright lists more than 500 contemporary scholars in his book, The Resurrection.
One would hope that in the very granular study, the shroud, there would be the same give and take of scientists and historians. That just isn’t so. The last time it was so seems to have been in 1988 when dozens of scientists participated in the carbon dating of the shroud. The paper in Nature included 21 authors. Perhaps that was enough. It seemed so decisive. They are now almost universally silent. Perhaps that is justified by the new findings.
Scientists and historians long ago discovered that contending ideas is important when seeking the best possible understanding of anything even if we sometimes resist the impulse to do so. That was what Galileo was doing. It took a long time for the church to come around to his way of thinking. Darwin did the same. It took a long time for many people to accept evolution. The majority within Christian traditions—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Mainline Protestant—have accepted evolution. Unfortunately, there is little debate about the shroud’s authenticity based on new evidence. There is one outstanding exception.
Quest for the Historical Jesus
My first thought provoking encounter with the shroud happened while on a flight from New York to Miami. On the plane I was reading Thomas Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills, a history of the apostolic era of early Christianity. I thought it might be interesting and a good way to pass the time in the air and indeed it was. There was nothing funny in the book, nothing ridiculous, nothing to laugh at. It was simply well told historical narrative. Well, seemingly so.
Suddenly, with little logical reason that I could see, Cahill started to discuss the burial shroud of Jesus. It might have been a treasure of the early church in the East, he surmised. That same shroud, he clearly thought, is now in Turin.
That’s funny I remember thinking. Funny? Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer and sometimes professor of biochemistry at Boston University said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …” That is not the way I found Cahill’s assertion funny, then. It would become the way I would come to think about it.
The Ridiculous Shroud
That’s ridiculous! Could anyone really think the shroud was real? In fact, I found the whole idea so hilarious that I broke out laughing. There I was, travelling alone, laughing out loud so uncontrollably that people several rows forward were turning around to see who the laughing fool was. The fact that the shroud has an image on it, believed to be a true picture of Christ, made it seem all the more preposterous. I do remember, however, being surprised that I knew so little about this purported relic. Then in my mid-fifties, I had always been an avid reader of history, particularly early church history. I could not recall ever reading anything about the shroud. It was so far from being something I cared about that I never paid it any attention.
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?
Resurrection is Scientifically Impossible
The resurrection claim is a miracle claim and a claim from history. If there is any one thing that scientist-atheist and believing Christians can agree on, it is the belief that resurrection is scientifically impossible at least so if we think the resurrection was a physical, bodily occurrence. At least it is according to what we know about the laws of nature. But that is what makes it so special, the Christian exclaims. But the influence of modern science is strong. In a book he coauthored with N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, historian Marcus Borg describes this prevailing worldview as the “worldview of mass culture in the West” and he explains – I think very correctly – how it works:
Like all worldviews, it functions in our minds almost unconsciously, affecting what we think possible and what we pay attention to. It is especially corrosive to religion. It reduces reality to the space-time world of matter and energy, thereby making the notion of God problematic and doubtful. It reduces truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable facts. It raises serious doubts about anything that cannot be accommodated within its framework, including religious phenomena such as prayer, visions, mystical experiences, extraordinary events, and unusual healings.
Challenging the Resurrection
Armed with a modern, scientific worldview, it was philosophers, historians and Biblical scholars, more than anyone, who would challenge the story of the resurrection as well as just about anything else in the New Testament. As a scholarly movement it started about the same time that science and the philosophy of science began its modern struggle over the existence of God.
Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) is generally regarded as the father of a movement that sought to better understand just who Jesus was in a historical sense, open to the possibility that the gospel writers were not objective historians. As a philosopher he had concluded against any form of miracles by God except for the initial act of creation. Nor was there any revelation from God. That God existed, he was quite certain; he and his plan were obvious in nature. But to interject himself into history was contrary to the greatness of his plan and that included any notion of a messiah or savior. Jesus, as far as Reimarus was concerned, was a fraud. And so were his followers following his crucifixion. Albert Schweitzer presents us with a summary of Reimarus’ point of view:
His disciples, however, had become used to making a living by "preaching of the Kingdom of God" and "forgotten how to work". They were not prepared to renounce "this mode of life". They felt sure that they could "find a sufficient number of faithful souls who would join them in directing their hopes towards a second coming of the Messiah" and "share their possessions with them" in expectation of future glory. "So they stole the body of Jesus and hid it, and proclaimed to all the world that he would soon return. They prudently waited, however, for fifty days before making this announcement, in order that the body, if it should be found, might be unrecognisable.
Thomas Paine
Within decades of Reimarus’ death, Thomas Paine, perhaps best known for his advocacy of American independence in Common Sense, wrote The Age of Reason. Christianity was an invention. There were no such things as miracles. Resurrection—and indeed the whole story—was an absurdity:
Christian mythologists . . . represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and Man, and also the Son of God, celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson wrote The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, more commonly known as the Jefferson Bible (it was not published until after his death). It is a common misconception that he took the four gospels and cut out anything supernatural. It is a reorganized collections of parts from the gospels that omits miracles, angels and prophesy, three things he did not believe in. The book ends:
Now, in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.
End of story! That was Jefferson’s view. But was it? And if it was the end if the story, how and why did the story of the resurrection become part of the larger story? Was it as Reimarus proposed? The quest was on. Scholars generally ignore Paine because, as with fundamentalist-biblical literalism, it is not considered very scholarly.
A Mature Quest for the Historical Jesus
Today, the quest has greatly matured and expanded and it is possible to divide the scholarship along a spectrum that at one end understands the resurrection as a physical, material event in history and at the other end sees the resurrection as a proclamation that the mission of Jesus continues on after his death. It is a mistake to think that the proponents of physical resurrection are merely acceding to biblical literalism or that those who reject physicality reject Christian doctrine. It is, something they tend to agree on, a matter of interpretation. What separates them is historical methods, techniques for analyzing scripture and questions about whether or not miracles can be accommodated to a scientific worldview.
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)
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.
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.
An Unbroken Chain of Evidence
There are no existing records that constitute an unbroken chain of evidence among all the records of the Shroud of Turin that go back beyond the 1350s. This does not rule out earlier evidence if such records might later be found. Might there also be evidence of a cloth that might be the shroud, if a way can be found to identify it as one and the same.
There is now substantial and convincing evidence that a cloth with an image believed to be that of Jesus, moreover believed at times in its history to be the actual burial shroud of Jesus, might have been a treasure of the early church, as Cahill had suggested. It might have been in the ancient city of Antioch for awhile. It was certainly in Edessa for many years. The same cloth that was in Edessa was later in Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire and the center of Greek Christianity.
The historian cannot avoid this and he must therefore concede that there is a possible gap in the records. To simply state that there is no history before the 1350s reveals a lack of knowledge, a contempt for historical integrity and a failure of imagination. It is akin to saying, as some creationists do, that evolution is not real because there are gaps in fossil records.
Edessa, a City of Conflict
Edessa, a high walled town along a major trade route seemed to be on the contested frontier of every empire that ruled it and thus it saw centuries of conflict in which it was sometimes conquered, sometimes successfully defended and sometimes ceded to victorious armies as part of a negotiated deal. As such it developed a varied culture of different peoples from many lands. When it became a Christian city is not clear, but it was so by the time it became part of the Byzantine. By 944, a date that will be very important in our analysis, it was under the jurisdiction of a Muslim Caliph but it retained significant communities of Greek Orthodox and Assyrians Christians as well as a number of Roman Catholics and possibly some Nestorians.
There was, throughout the city’s history, a strong tradition that the apostle Thomas and a disciple named Thaddeus Jude (Thaddeus of the 72, also called Addai) went to Edessa shortly after the death of Jesus.
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.
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.
Sister Egeria
Sister Egeria was given a three-day tour of the city by the Bishop of Edessa. We learn from her account of many miracles that saved Edessa from the Persians. And we learn that she was introduced to the legend of Abgar, even shown a copy of Abgar’s letter to Jesus. She wrote lengthy detailed accounts of her visit and we might think that had there been an image bearing cloth, she would have mentioned it. (and put into her hands transcripts of the correspondence of Abgarus and Jesus, with embellishments.
Part of her accounts of her travels, in letters to her sisterhood, survive. "She naïvely supposed that this version was more complete than the shorter letter which she had read in a translation at home, presumably one brought back to the Far West by an earlier pilgrim" (Palmer 1998). Her escorted tour, accompanied by a translator, was thorough; the bishop is quoted: "Now let us go to the gate where the messenger Ananias came in with the letter of which I have been telling you." (Palmer). There was however, no mention of any image reported by Egeria, who spent three days inspecting every corner of Edessa and the environs.
Regardless of how the cloth arrived in Edessa, by 544 the cloth was an important part of Edessa’s history.
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.
Change in Art Forms
Abruptly, throughout the Middle East, and eventually throughout Mediterranean Europe, depictions of Jesus became full frontal portraits with distinctive facial characteristics. Jesus was depicted with shoulder length hair, an elongated thin nose, and a forked beard. Numerous other characteristics appeared in these portraits and some of them were seemingly strange and of no particular artistic merit. Many portraits had two wisps of hair that dropped at an angle from a central parting of the hair. Many works showed Jesus with large “owlish” eyes. Paul Vignon, a French scholar, who first categorized these facial attributes in 1930, also described a square cornered U shape between the eyebrows, a downward pointing triangle on the bridge of the nose, a raised right eyebrow, accents on both cheeks with the accent on the right cheek being somewhat lower, an enlarged left nostril, an accent line below the nose, a gap in the beard below the lower lip and hair on one side of the head that was shorter than on the other side.
Jennifer Speake
Jennifer Speake who wrote a chapter, “Jesus in Art,” in J. R. Porter’s Jesus Christ: the Jesus of History, the Christ of Faith, observed:
Famous relics that claim to bear the true imprint of Christ’s features include the controversial Shroud of Turin and the Holy Mandylion of Edessa; the iconography of both of these promoted the now conventional image of Jesus as a bearded man.
While this does support the opinion that a “promoted” conventional image emerged from these relics, it introduces two issues. First is a claim of a true imprint, whatever that means. Beyond legendary accounts, we are not ready to explore this possibility yet. We will, from those who think the image is miraculous (whatever that means) to those who think it is a natural phenomenon to those who think it is a manmade fake image. But we must first finish a survey of the history. The other issue is the idea of another image-bearing relic, one specifically tied to Edessa. Many scholars have suggested that there are two or more images: the shroud and the Image of Edessa or “Holy Mandylion of Edessa” and possibly others. Other scholars think that it is one and the same. Mandylion is a Byzantine Greek word meaning a piece of cloth with a miraculous image of Jesus, though in more modern usage the word has come to mean an icon of Jesus.
The Veronicas
There are, in addition to these two icons, four more that have the similar cut-out frames that are claimed to be the true image made when Veronica wiped Jesus brow during his walk to Calgary: 1) The Veronica kept at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. 2) The Holy Face at the The Hofburg Palace in Vienna. 3) The Holy Face at the Monastery of the Holy Face in Alicante, Spain. 4) The Holy Face at the cathedral of Jaén in southern Spain. Just to add to the confusion, there is another famous image that some claim is the authentic Veronica, a facial portrait of a man at a Capuchin monastery in Manoppello, Italy. Unlike the other claimants, it does not have a cut-out frame. Unlike the other images, it seems most like an early Renaissance painting.
Most significantly all of the vera icons, the Veronicas and the cut-out framed images of Edessa are small pieces of cloth just big enough to hold a facial portrait. Our concern is with the tetradiplon image of Edessa.
Early records and the legendary accounts speak only of facial image in Edessa. And the shroud is certainly a cloth large enough to a burial cloth and full body images. But the references to a tetradiplon suggest that the facial image could be the visible part of something more. And, as we will see, the evidence that an image bearing cloth from Edessa that was moved to Constantinople 400 years after the emergence in Edessa of the tetradiplon bearing a facial image is suggestive.
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.
The Flower Images and the Icon
There is another aspect to this icon that is fascinating and perhaps more convincing, the appearance petal-shaped flowers on the shroud. The St. Catherine Christ Pantocrator icon also has distinctive flower images in precisely the same relative positions. If the Shroud was the facial source for this icon as it seems to have been, then it is highly probable that the flower motif was also picked up from the shroud.
As we have noted, it is important to remember that the flower images on the Shroud of Turin may not be actual flower images. But for this argument that question is immaterial. If there are images that look like flowers, even if they are coincidental anomalies caused by background noise or weave irregularities, and they are in the same relative place as there are on the Pantocrator icon, then it does strengthen the argument that the icon was sourced from shroud.
We find this flower motif repeated elsewhere and frequently in pictures of Jesus from this time forward. We find it, commonly, in Byzantine epitaphioi a cloth with a full-length image of Jesus, frequently in burial repose used in Greek Orthodox liturgies for Good Friday.
Justinian II and the Golden Pavilion
In 685, Justinian II, at the age of sixteen took the throne. He was the first Byzantine emperor to introduce a likeness of Christ on coinage of the realm. His image was on one side and Christ’s was on the reverse. Some have argued, and it seems quite possible, that the image on the coin was sourced from the Edessa image. It does seem to have many similarities. But the Philip Grierson writing in the Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and Whittemore Collection argued that was derived from an image of Christ in the Chrysotriclinos, The Golden Pavilion in Constantinople. The Golden Pavilion served as a church and a throne room for the emperor. The problem is that don’t know exactly when this was built or when a Christ image was installed. The original image was replaced later and we don’t know anything about the original image. It is possible that original pavilion image was created about the time that the St. Catherine icon was painted and we might speculate that it might have been inspired by the Image of Edessa. The basic historical problem is that we don’t have enough information.
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)
Leontius
Justinian II was only on the throne for ten years when he was overthrown by Leontius. How much the image of Christ on his coin had to do with it is only speculation. He was sent to a monastery in the Crimea, but only after his nose had been slit. The importance of this cannot be overlooked for one of the rules of succession to emperor was that an emperor had to be attractive looking. Justinian appealed to Tervel, the king of Bulgaria for help. He offered him lavish gifts, the title of Caesar of the empire (there were several) and the hand of his daughter Anastasia (meaning she who is perfect in every way) in marriage. Tervel agreed and sent an army of 15,000 horsemen. But this massive force was not enough to prevail against the walls of Constantinople and so Justinian resorted to sneaking into the city through a water conduit following the example of King David almost 2000 years earlier when he conquered Jerusalem. He then gathered his supporters within the city and captured the palace. Justinian Rhinotmetus (the Slit-nosed) was emperor again. He wasn’t succeeding to the thrown this time so the nose was not a problem.
Leontius was already in prison having been overthrown by Tiberius III. So Justinian had both of them executed. He also blinded and exiled Callinicus I, the Patriarch Archbishop of Constantinople, then considered second only to the pope in Rome, for his complicity in Leontius’ coup d’état.
Justinian’s Ecumenical Council
During Justinian’s first reign he had called an ecumenical council together to promote certain religious policies that were not popular with the papacy. Justinian did not like restriction on the saying "Alleluia" in Lent, depicting Christ as a lamb, and a growing trend towards celibacy for priests. When Pope Sergius I refused to consent to the council’s findings, Justinian ordered him arrested. But the militia, mostly from Rome, Ravenna and elsewhere on the Italian peninsula sided with the pope. Now, the Rhinotmetus was back in power and he demanded that the new pope, John VII, consent. He refused. This time Justinian sent his own troops to Italy to squash the militia loyal to the pope. A new pope , Constantine (not to be confused with all the emperors who had that name) travelled to Constantinople and consented to some of the emperor's demands in order to improve relations between the church and the state.
Philippicus led a popular revolt against the tyrannical unpopular Justinian and seized the city. Justinian fled but was captured and beheaded. Fearing for his son’s life, being that he was the rightful heir, Justinian’s mother sought sanctuary for him in the church of St. Mary's of Blachernae. Nonetheless the boy was dragged from the church and also beheaded. Thus ended a dynasty.
Leo III
Leo III, who had served Justinian II as a diplomat, ascended to the throne in 717. Then sometime between 726 and 729 he launched an iconoclastic campaign to prohibit the veneration of icons. He had an image of Jesus removed from the ceremonial entrance to the palace and replaced it with a cross. He destroyed the image of Christ in The Golden Pavilion, which is why we have no idea what it looked like. He issued an edict against the use of icons. But this was not well received among clerics in the eastern part of the empire or by pretty much anyone in the West. Pope Gregory III condemned his actions as heretical and in 730 excommunicated the supporters of iconoclasm.
John of Damascus and the Himation
John of Damascus, a priest and monk who served as an advisor to the Muslim Caliph of Damascus, was able from the relative safety of the Caliph’s court, to criticize the Leo III and iconoclasm. He wrote Apologetic Treatises against those Decrying the Holy Images, in 730, the same year that the pope excommunicated Leo.
Though it wasn’t the main thrust of his work, the Edessa Image was mentioned. He retells the legend of Abgar. The king, he tells us, sent envoys to obtain a likeness of Christ, a painting if necessary. Christ, who is “all knowing and all powerful took” a himation and pressed it to his face that his likeness might be on the cloth. The Greek word himation was a long rectangular cloth worn as sleeveless garment in ancient Greece and well into the middle Byzantine era. Similar to a toga, but shorter, it was often used as a garment in iconography of Christ or other biblical persons. This may be the first mention, among extant documents, of the Image of Edessa being such a large cloth.
The Size of a Burial Cloth?
We get a sense that the Image of Edessa—or at least that an image of Jesus in Edessa—is large, perhaps the size of a burial cloth. The words tetradiplon and himation are important clues. The face we are told is unusual. And the face, in some ways, certainly resembles the face on the shroud. It will not be until the cloth arrives in Constantinople in 944 that we get a clear indication that it indeed has a full body image. It won’t be until the advent of modern science that we learn how extraordinary that image of a face and the entire body is or until we discover new evidence that links the Turin shroud to Edessa and even the environs of Jerusalem.
But before we leave the Edessa era and look at these things we need to examine three other accounts that, if not provably linked, tend to strengthen the case that the Shroud of Turin is the Image of Edessa and possibly the burial shroud of Christ.
Pope Stephen II
Another early reference comes by way of historian Ian Wilson. Pope Stephen II (reigned 752 to 757) stated that Christ had . .
spread out his entire body on a linen cloth that was white as snow. On this cloth, marvelous as it is to see . . . the glorious image of the Lord's face, and the length of his entire and most noble body, has been divinely transferred. (22)
Words of the Hymn of the Pearl
As a matter of first person literary style, the risen Christ is describing his burial garment:
Suddenly, I saw my image on my garment like in a mirror
Myself and myself through myself [or myself facing outward and inward]
As though divided, yet one likeness
Two images: but one likeness of the King [of kings in some translations]
If you look at a photograph of the shroud you see two full size images of a man, one in which the image is facing outward and one inward. In more modern terms we describe these as front-side and back-side images, or ventral and dorsal images. They are, indeed, as in a mirror as they are full size and seemingly perpendicular to the surface. Those words, “as though divided, yet one likeness,” resonate with the two separate image that meet at the top of the head.
Interpretations of the Hymn of the Pearl
Scholars have different ideas about how to interpret the “Hymn of the Pearl,” sometimes also called the “Hymn of the Soul” or the “Hymn of the Robe of Glory.” There is no direct evidence that the first-person speaker is Jesus. The speaker is “the son of the king of kings.” It is rich with the Gnostic idea that mankind can be saved from the tragedy of the human conditions by a secret message delivered by Jesus. But, arguably, since this hymn was supposedly sung or spoken by the Apostle Thomas as he awaited his martyrdom in a prison in India, it can be argued that these are Thomas’ words.
The point, however, is that the two images segment of the “Hymn of the Pearl” seems to describe the shroud that is now in Turin. It is hard to imagine what else, even in a metaphorical sense, these words describe.
What is lacking in the poetic description is any mention of the photographic-like negativity. Perhaps, given that such a concept was not realized during this era, it wasn’t addressed. Or perhaps it was.
Alexios Komnenos to Robert of Flanders
There are many references to it after 944, some more reliable than others. For instance, when you read about the shroud you will sometimes encounter references to a written appeal by the emperor Alexios Komnenos to Robert of Flanders asking for help to protect Constantinople’s valuable relics including the cloth found in the sepulcher after the resurrection. This letter is suspect.
In 1081, Constantinople found itself threatened by Seljuk Turks in the east and the Normans in the west led by Robert Guiscard who had already conquered Palermo in Sicily. Faced with these threats and the political problems of an empire in decline, the army declared one of its own, Alexios Komnenos, the new emperor. While he did have some successes in reducing threats to the empire, the threats remained very real and he made appeals to Pope Urban II and others in Europe for help. These appeals are generally seen as significant cause for the Crusades.
So, for the love of God and piety of all Greek Christians, we beg you to bring here whatever warriors true to Christ you can find in your lands, the powerful, the less powerful and the insignificant, to help me and the Greek Christians; just as you largely free Galicia and the other kingdoms of the West from pagan rule last year, now let your warriors try to free the kingdom of the Greeks for the salvation of their souls. Although I am Emperor I still do not know how to find any recourse or suitable way forward; I constantly flee the Turks and Petchenegs and stay in each city in turn until I know they are on their way. I would much rather bow down to your Latin shrines that those of pagans.
Therefore, you should make every effort to stop them capturing Constantinople, thus ensuring that you will gain the joy of glorious and ineffable mercy in Heaven. Given the immensely precious relics of the Lord to be found in Constantinople, better that you should have it than the pagans. (24)
“Here is a list,” he then wrote in the letter. The list was long. “The cloth found in the sepulcher after the resurrection,” was one of the items in the letter.
The List the Boggles the Mind
For one thing, the mention of the linen wrappings is among a list of items that boggles the mind of those with a modern worldview: the head of John the Baptist complete with hair and beard, fragments left over from the five loaves and two fishes, a large piece of the true cross, the pillar to which Jesus was tied during his scourging and the whip that was used. Either we have a whole bunch of relics with some of them being fake or somebody is making all this up. It doesn’t matter if it was Alexios who did so, if it was an enhancement to a real letter, or if it was in its entirely a drummed up advertising piece. If reference to linens is real, its repute is tarnished by association.
Saint Mary of Blachernae
Two issues emanate from this account—so much for clarity. The first of these is the reference to Saint Mary of Blachernae. The shroud (the sindon, syndoine) was, by earlier accounts not at this church but at the relic treasury in the Pharos Church at the palace. Edgar Holmes McNeal, in his translation of Robert’s work suggests:
Robert seems to have confused the sudarium (the sweat cloth or napkin, the True Image of St. Veronica) with the sindon (the grave cloth in which the body of Jesus was wrapped for entombment). (27)
However, is it not just as possible that Robert confused the Pharos Church with St. Mary’s in the same way that any of us might confuse tourist sites we have visited years ago? Robert did not write his history until after he returned from the Crusades, probably between 1206 and 1209. Or he might have confused what he saw at one place with what he saw somewhere else. There is another possibility.
Two Cloths?
Others had mentioned seeing two cloths and not without some attendant confusion. Around 1150, an English pilgrim tells of seeing a gold container in which the mantile (long robe) which having been touched to Christ’s face had an image of it. He also mentions a sudarium that had been over his head. Nicholas Soemundarson, an Icelandic cleric wrote in his native tongue of seeing two cloths with blood. In 1171, Archbishop William of Tyre saw the sindon of Christ. In 1200, Antonius of Novgorod speaks of seeing two cloths. In 1201, Nicholas Mesarites, the overseer of the treasures in the Pharos Chapel describes two cloths.
the Burial sindones of Christ: these are of linen. They are of cheap and easy to find material, and defying destruction since they wrapped the uncircumscribed, fragrant‑with‑myrrh, naked body after the Passion. . . . In this place He rises again and the sudarium and the burial sindons can prove it . . .
It is hard to tell which is which. Skeptics tend to throw their hands up in confusion and use the confusion itself as evidence. It is hard not to blame them. True believers in its authenticity—and you can see it in web site after web site—get selective. We shouldn’t do either of these things. But what we can see, in the full conspectus, through the fog, is evidence of full-length cloth, a tetradiplon, a himation, image bearing, seemingly a full body.
In this place He rises again
What, possibly, could Nicholas have meant when he wrote, “In this place He rises again”? Is this mere metaphor? Perhaps. But recall that Robert of Clari said that at St. Mary’s, “And on every Friday that shroud did raise itself upright so that the form of Our Lord could clearly be seen.”
John Jackson, who in 1978 found the fold marks showing that the shroud had been folded as a tetradiplon, proposed that the shroud might have been pulled up out of a box from the centermost fold like an upside down Roman shade. Jesus would appears to be rising from his tomb. It is by no means a farfetched idea. Byzantine emperors had thrones that were raised by secret mechanical devices intended to awe visitors. We can imagine similar devices for relics.
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)
Hungarian Pray Manuscript
In the Budapest National Library there is an ancient codex, known commonly as the Hungarian Pray Manuscript or Pray Codex, named for György Pray (1723-1801), a Jesuit scholar and important historian who made the first detailed study of it, although we can reasonably suspect, with no realization that it might someday have some bearing on the shroud. The codex is the earliest known text in the ancient Finno-Ugric tribal languages of the people that occupied that region.
This codex was written between 1192 and 1195, within about 30 years of the Nerezi mural. An illustration, one of five in the manuscript, shows Jesus being placed on a burial shroud, a shroud with the identical pattern of burn holes found on the shroud. The artist has drawn the very unusual herringbone weave on the shroud and a number of other graphic characteristics consistent with the shroud. Jesus is shown naked with his arms modestly folded at the wrists, the fingers are unusually long in appearance as they are on the shroud, and there are no visible thumbs. There are no thumbs visible in the images of the man of the shroud either. This seems artistically strange. But forensic pathologists tell us that this makes sense. Why? It was once stated that nails driven through the wrist would likely cause the thumbs to fold into the palms. But Fred Zugibe disagrees.
In the drawing, there is also a clear mark on Jesus’ forehead where the most prominent 3-shaped bloodstain is found on the forehead of the man of the shroud. There can be little question that this illustrator of the Pray Codex, far removed from France—working at a time before the sacking of Constantinople by French knights, before the earliest date assigned to the shroud by carbon 14 testing—knew something of the details about the shroud, the Holy Mandylion, the Image of Edessa.
Portrait of an Empty Shroud
It might have been more satisfying if the artist had actually drawn the image on the shroud. But that seems to be a secondary objective. In two panels, comic book style, he is portraying first a burial preparation scene and second an empty tomb—indeed graphically, an empty shroud. He portrays the dead Jesus but not the risen Christ and seems to be adhering to biblical narratives. Or is he?
In the first panel Jesus is shown in burial repose being attended to by Joseph of Arimathia and Nichodemus and a third figure. Jesus’ is naked, his arms are crossed at his wrists. There seems to be a mark on his forehead that is not unlike a forehead bloodstain on the Shroud of Turin.
The second panel shows witnesses to an empty tomb, or more precisely to an empty shroud. The shroud is shown folded along its length. On the upper half the artist has clearly attempted to depict the texture of the cloth, and it seems to be stylized herringbone pattern. Here, within the pattern we find one set of the distinctive L-shaped pattern of poker holes. Some critics have suggested that the weave pattern is not that but merely hatching, a technique artists use to show shading or shadows. But the drawing makes no use of hatched or patterned shading. Lines are used to represent hair texture and there is one instance where a brocaded or ornamental neckline to a garment is drawn with a series of circles. The artist simply does not use any technique to show the play of light on faces or bodies or other surfaces. The artist only uses position and angles to depict a sense of three-dimensionality to the scene.
The lower half of the cloth does not depict the texture that we see in the top half. Instead, the artist has drawn a series of outlined crosses, or plus signs or Xs? Is this an attempt to symbolically represent empty space where the Christ had been? Is the X a Chi, the Greek character used to symbolize Xpistos, the Christ? Is it perhaps a way of trying to show that there is something, a ghostlike image perhaps?
Is the Sudarium There?
There is, in the top layer of the cloth, an irregular raised spot, suggesting that there is something there between the lop layer and the bottom layer of the shroud. Is it the sudarium, the other cloth mentioned in John’s gospel wherein we read that Simon Peter “saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself”? (NRSV John 20:6-7)
Biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown, a Roman Catholic Priest and professor emeritus at the Union Theological Seminary, a Protestant seminary in New York where he taught for 23 years, suggested that . . .
John is very careful about the state of the linen cloths (bands?) used to wrap the corpse, and the separate piece for the head. Their position may have outlined the original position of Jesus’ body which passed through them, leaving them where they were. (31)
It is, for the modern reader, perhaps a strange idea more apropos for Hollywood special effects. But what else do we expect if we are the sort of Christian who believes in a bodily, physical resurrection (many Christians do and many do not)? Did Jesus instead get up and remove his burial cloths. If his jaw had been bound closed with a chin band to keep the mouth closed, as has been common in burials throughout history, would he have untied it? Or did he pass through it? The question is only important because the raised shape in the drawing looking very much like it could be a knotted chin band, in just the right place for such an item. This is certainly consistent with Anglican scholar John A. T. Robinson’s view that the other cloth, the second cloth, was a chin band.
Baruch was Guarded
But Baruch was guarded in his reporting. He confirmed what Frei had observed but at the genus level and not a species level. That wasn’t very helpful for it greatly expanded the geographic area. A flower particular to a specific area in Frei’s interpretation might be found elsewhere in the world in places that even the greatest conspiracy theorists never thought to imagine that the shroud might have ever been. Sadly, these concerns were ignored by many people who poured out web page after web page trying to prove that the shroud was real. Finally, in 1991, Danin clarified his position on the pollen evidence. It could not be used to show that the shroud had been in the Middle East. He did, however, argue that his identification of plant images on the shroud was sufficient. Was it?
I have yet to personally meet anyone who denies that there is an image of a man on the shroud. However, in cyberspace I have. One day I received an email from someone who claimed that what we think is an image is merely the happenstance accumulation of smudges and stains on the cloth. It was, he wrote, no different than an imaginary image of Jesus on a burned slice of toast or the Virgin Mary in the grain of a plank of wood. But, I wrote back, the image is too detailed, too realistic and too complex to be that. It is obviously an image of a man, whether real or fake. But he persisted. His mind was made up. “You can’t prove it,” he wrote back. It could be pure coincidence. It raised an interesting question. Is there a threshold for perceiving an image?
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.
Vanillin as a Validation of Carbon Dating
It is not as good a way of dating a piece of linen as carbon dating. But the carbon dating was flubbed. And so for the time being this as good as it gets, scientifically. It really doesn’t tell how old the cloth is, only that it is at least 1300 years old and quite possibly older. It certainly existed when someone illustrated a burial shroud in the Hungarian Pray Manuscript with holes that resemble the poker holes on the Turin cloth. It certainly existed when the Image of Edessa was brought from Edessa to Constantinople. It certainly existed when Leo III was attempting to banish images of Christ and John of Damascus was objecting.
And if all this is so, the shroud that is now in Turin may well have existed when the words, “Peter ran with John to the tomb and saw the recent imprints of the dead and risen man on the linens” were made part of the Mozarabic Rite in Spain. Vanillin testing can’t tell us that. Inference can. It may well have existed when Abgar the Great was baptized. It may have existed at the time that the body of Jesus was buried in a tomb.
Nicholas Mesarites
In 1207, Nicholas Mesarites, not too long ago the overseer treasures in the Pharos Chapel, who will always be remembered for saying “In this place He rises again,” was in the city. He was there to eulogize his deceased brother. Scavone describes it well:
In the midst of this speech, Nicholas conjured up for the Greeks then present in Hagia Sophia a reminiscence of the greatness of their city which his brother had served so loyally, and of the atrocities of the looting by the crusaders, which he himself had witnessed. In this eulogy Mesarites again refers to Constantinople as possessing the burial wrappings of Jesus, and this reference has been used as evidence that the Shroud was still present in the city in 1207.
Was it? Scavone is not convinced. Nicholas Mesarites had been sidelined after Latins took control of the city, as indeed had all Greeks of status in the church. He might not know anything. It is possible that he may have believed it was still there. And, as we will see, there is other evidence, other than the words of Robert de Clari, to suggest that it indeed was not there.
Nicholas of Otranto
It should come as no surprise that the abbot of Casole should have been appointed the Papal Legate at this catastrophic time when, in effect, the western church had captured the eastern church. He was a learned man who knew both Greek and Latin. Scavone relates:
One of the interpreters at these meetings, a man fluent in both Latin and Greek, was Nicholas of Otranto, abbot of Casole monastery in southern Italy. In 1205 he greeted the new papal legate, Benedict of St. Susanna, then on his way to Constantinople via Brindisi, and accompanied him through Greece to the capital. There he served as Benedict’s personal interpreter and translator. The literary legacy of this little‑known scholar includes some poetry and at least three reports of the disputations in which he served as interpreter. These were written both in Greek and in his own Latin translations.
His reference to the shroud of Jesus comes in the midst of his discussion in 1207 of the use of yeast in the Eucharistic meal of the Last Supper. A portion of that very bread had been present, the Byzantines had asserted, in the imperial relic collection. Among the relics of the Passion, which he now enumerated, were a portion of that bread and Jesus’ spargana, Greek for “linens.” This word normally renders infant’s swaddling clothes, and the fascia of his Nicholas’ Latin translation does not help. Since, however, Nicholas was listing relics of the Passion, he must mean burial linens. . . .
Nicholas of Otranto writes of the shroud that he “saw with our own eyes.” But where? He had not been in Constantinople in 1204. Was it still there, now in 1207? Or had he seen it elsewhere?
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.
Later History
From there, the cloth’s history is well documented as it passed from the de Vergy family to the House of Savoy and was moved to Chambéry and then Turin.
In 1983 it was bequeathed to the pope and his successors when Umberto II, the last king of Italy and the last regent of the 980 year-old House of Savoy died in exile. Umberto had only reigned for only 33 days when the monarchy was abolished.
The question we are compelled to evaluate is this: Is the cloth that is today in Turin, the same cloth that was in Athens and before that in Constantinople and before that in Edessa? Did it ultimately come from Jerusalem and is it possibly the burial cloth of Jesus?
Yves Delage
Sorbonne professor of anatomy, Yves Delage, known for he detailed knowledge of human physiology, thought by his colleagues to be an agnostic, presented a paper on the shroud to the prestigious French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The shroud’s anatomical and other scientific qualities, he argued, convinced him that the shroud had really wrapped the "body of Christ" and that the image was probably a natural phenomenon caused by chemical vapors. Delage said:
Let us add to this, that, in order for the image to have formed itself without being ultimately destroyed, it was necessary that the corpse remain in the shroud at least twenty-four hours, the amount of time needed for the formation of the image, and at the most several days, after which a putrefaction sets in which destroys the image and finally the shroud . . . this is precisely what happened to Christ; dead on Friday and-disappeared-on Sunday. (39)
Modern Biblical Literalism in Pia’s Day
In 1898, modern biblical literalism, particularly as it is seen in North America, had not yet emerged. That would happen in the next decade, in the years leading up to World War I, as a response to the liberal interpretations emerging from the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Darwinism and modernity in general.
The situation was different in France, particularly in the Académie des Sciences. It was perceived to be, if not the high temple of Atheism and Agnosticism, at least a precinct where the mention of God or Christ was off limits. This is probably not surprising given France’s strong secular attitudes born of the French Revolution.
Delage, amongst his French colleagues, had committed a heresy. Marcelin Berthelot, the secretary of the physics section of the Academy, the renowned discoverer of thermo-chemistry principles, and a militant atheist, ordered Delage to rewrite his paper so that it dealt only on the chemistry and made no mention of Christ. One can’t help but think of Galileo being told to retract his conclusions. His conclusion was omitted from official published proceedings. It was silly. It was akin to an ostrich hiding its head in the sand—which we all know they don’t do as we realize it wouldn’t work well. Newspaper reporters had the story and the Paris edition of New York Herald trumpeted the headline, "Photographs of Christ's Body found by science."
Picknett and Prince
Nonetheless, from the computer keyboards of two enterprising and highly skilled conspiracy theorists, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, comes a tale that turns logic on its head. In a defense against a copyright infringement charge, Dan Brown states that works by Picknett and Prince were an important inspiration for The DaVinci Code. There works include:
· The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Life of Jesus
· The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
· The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ's Sacred Bloodline
· The Stargate Conspiracy
· Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History
Among the last two, it is hard to tell which conspiracy theory is easier to swallow. In Stargate we learn that the CIA and MI5 are manipulating a secret cult of powerful and rich leaders, including leading scientists who believe that they are in direct contact with extraterrestrial intelligent beings from the star Sirius. These extraterrestrial beings are claiming to be the gods of ancient Egypt, the very gods responsible for the image of a face on Mars. Why are secret American and British agents, with help from NASA, doing this? To create a new insidious mind-control religion. As icing on the cake:
We reveal the ground-breaking research that provides a plausible answer to the most enduring questions about the ancient Egyptians' achievements and beliefs - and, explosively, uncover the true nature of the gods themselves . . .
Cyberspace Speculation
Cyberspace is filled with conjecture about the height-field observation. Proponents of the shroud’s authenticity use this information to say that it proves that a body lay under the cloth, that the image was created when the body of Christ dematerialized during the resurrection releasing energy that somehow did the imaging. It shows no such thing. The only thing it shows is that the image acts like a height-field.
Picknett and Prince have a point when they say that the scale was unknown, but it is a pointless point. When NASA uses radar and lasers to measure the relative height of features on the moon and the earth, when meteorologists similarly measure the height of the swirls in a hurricane, they know the scale. But they know the scale because they have benchmark values that they have estimated in the past. Hence the computer programs know how high a crater is, approximately. It knows how high the bands of hurricane are, approximately. Thus when NASA or meteorologists build a three-dimension representation in two-dimensional space, they create approximately accurate pictures.
Superficial
Because both images are superficial (meaning there is no image or colorant of any kind between the two image layers on the extreme outer faces of the cloth) and because the images are in registry with each other, all so-far-proposed fakery proposals are moot. The images are not paintings and not some form of medieval proto-photography.
When the Shroud was examined in 1978, the backside of the cloth was not accessible. At that time, the Shroud was sewn to a backing cloth. Quoting from the IoP press release of April 14, 2004:
Because the images are extremely faint, the duo [Fanti and Maggiolo] has used an array of image-processing techniques -- including Gaussian filters, Fourier transforms and template matching -- to highlight human features.
They found that the face of the man that can be seen on the reverse of the Shroud matches that observed on the front. The image shows faint details of a nose, eyes, hair, beard and moustache . . . The Italian duo was also able to make out weak images of the man's hands, but could not produce images of his shoulders or back.
These new findings could help to shed light on the origins of the cloth but are more likely to fuel further debate over it. In 1989 (sic 1988), carbon-dating techniques revealed that the Shroud dated from medieval times and therefore could not have been used to bury Christ. However, many scientists have argued that the carbon-dating techniques used to study the Shroud were flawed.
Fanti and Maggiolo are now saying that the Shroud is unlikely to be a fraud because the image of the face is superficial on both sides of the cloth and only involves the topmost fibres of the material. "It is extremely difficult to make a fake with these features," says Fanti.
While this discover of imaging on the backside of the cloth makes artistic and photographic methods significantly more implausible, it does lend credence to the possibilities that gaseous amines released by the body reacted with the carbohydrate layers. Some gases would have penetrated through the weave of the cloth and reacted with the backside carbohydrate layer. (And it does not rule out miraculous cause or effect).
Twenty-One Scientists
Consider that no less than twenty-one scientists from the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, the Institut für Mittelenergiephysik in Zurich, Columbia University, and the British Museum wrote in a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature in 1989:
The results of radiocarbon measurements at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich yield a calibrated calendar age range with at least 95% confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of AD 1260 - 1390 (rounded down/up to nearest 10 yr). These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.
How can anyone argue with this? The radiocarbon measurements were done, not at one laboratory, but at three highly regarded institutions. The authors are emphatic. The results provide not just evidence but conclusive evidence. Does this not suffice to answer the students’ questions?
No, not if we wonder what prompted the questions. The Shroud of Turin is a religious relic. Many people believe it was the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth and history. Were the questions prompted by religious beliefs that run contrary to science? Or is there new information that suggests that, indeed, mistakes were made?
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?
Miracle or not
|
I |
n many ways a naturalistic explanation for the images is most satisfying. Like the stained patterns of leaf on a stone, like a fossil in clay of a prehistoric creature and like jagged tracing of lightening on the trunk of a tree, these sort of images can be explained scientifically. They are perfectly natural. We could then certainly say the images on the Shroud are images of a real man. And because of the wounds and the accompanying bloodstains forensic pathologists can see that the images are of a man who was scourged and crucified.
Is it Jesus? The wounds are consistent with the biblical narratives. Some wounds, like the whip marks, are consistent with a Roman flagrum, a whip with bits of iron or bone attached to thongs of leather. Crucifixion victims were regularly scourged. But the puncture wound to one side of the chest and the numerous small puncture wounds about the man's head—suggestive of a crown of thorns—are probably uncommon but consistent with the gospels.
The Image and the Gospels
There is nothing about the image that contradicts the gospels. For instance the man's legs appear not to have been broken. Breaking a victim's legs was a common practice of the Romans when there was a reason to expedite death. This was done so the victim could not raise himself up on his feet, something he needed to do to relieve the pressure on his chest so he could breath. This isn't proof but these are nonetheless compelling arguments that the images on the cloth belong to Jesus.
All significant investigation into how the images might have been formed by some perfectly natural means so far suggests that a simple process is all but impossible. Chemical reactions (or stains) caused by contact with the body would produce a grossly distorted image. Gaseous products from a body or funerary spices would seem to produce a diffused image lacking in detail. Radiant energy such as bodily heat lacks essential directional qualities.
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.
In the Wake of a Miracle
In recent years, some scientists have tried to link the enigma of the Shroud's images to a resurrection event. In the wake of a miraculous occurrence, they reason, some energetic stimulus brought forth a visible chemical change at the surface of the cloth?
To many people this is utter read-no-further nuttiness. Indeed that may be the case. But it must be considered because such thinking articulates certain qualities of the images. Both the frontal and dorsal images, for instance, seem to be a vertically collimated representation of a body. And they do seem to be terrain graphs that can be plotted as 3D isometric objects. Miraculous causation must also be considered because it is so widely discussed in numerous texts, on websites, and in the media.
The quasi-scientific conjecture that allows some to surmise a supernatural image drawing process depends on some energetic radiation emitting from the body as the body dematerializes or becomes mechanically transparent. It presumes much about how a resurrection event might have occurred. Perhaps it presumes too much. Could we not, with just as much validity, envision that Jesus simply awakened, stood up, and walked out of the tomb?
John A. T. Robinson, famous for creatively challenging conventional wisdom about New Testament interpretations and provenance, very much doubted that the Shroud was the work of a forger. In contemplating the notion that the author of the fourth gospel may have meant for us to interpret that Jesus passed through his burial cloths, he addressed dematerialization:
Dematerialization is I suspect a modern way of envisaging the relationship between flesh and spirit, matter and energy, of being 'changed' or 'clothed upon' with a body of 'glory'. How a first-century Jew would naturally have envisaged resurrection (though this does not of course mean that this is how it actually happened) would surely have been as a corpse waking up from sleep, like Tabitha in Acts (9:40), as indeed Jesus predicts of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then like Lazarus walking out of the tomb. The difference in the case of Jesus was that the grave-clothes did not need to be taken off him nor the stones removed: he did it himself. For, unlike Lazarus, he was not simply being restored to the weakness of a flesh-body. In the power of the Spirit he broke the bonds of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Far from being viewed as helpless and naked, he would probably have been envisaged in robes of light like the angels at the tomb, as in the vision of the risen Christ in the Apocalypse (cf. especially Matt. 28:3 with Rev. 1:14).
Jesus simply arising, like getting out of bed, is not satisfying for those who suppose the image was drawn on the cloth by the Resurrection. Nor will a non-corporeal, spiritual-only resurrection do. No, these researchers imagine, as no medieval forger would have imagined, elementary particles or radiation emitted from a dissolving body. It might be something like a "Beam me up, Scotty" scene from Star Trek with sparkling energy.
Wormholes?
It is interesting to note how dematerialization has been characterized. Mark Antonacci, author of The Resurrection of the Shroud, suggests that Jesus might have passed through a traversable Lorentzian wormhole in spacetime and that the Shroud's image may have been produced by loose particles resulting from the process. It is a baseless hypothesis. It is pure science fiction. Tulane University theoretical physicist and mathematician Frank Tipler, armed with elegant mathematical algorithms, suggests that the process of resurrection might have been dematerialization in the form of electroweak quantum tunneling and the images on the Shroud a consequence of a Sphaleron field. That it might be mathematically possible certainly doesn't make it so. Are we to wonder, is heaven on the other side of wormholes or quantum tunnels? Is this how God performs his miracles?
Worldview By Borg
In a book he coauthored with N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, historian Marcus Borg describes this prevailing worldview as the “worldview of mass culture in the West” and he explains – I think very correctly – how it works:
Like all worldviews, it functions in our minds almost unconsciously, affecting what we think possible and what we pay attention to. It is especially corrosive to religion. It reduces reality to the space-time world of matter and energy, thereby making the notion of God problematic and doubtful. It reduces truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable facts. It raises serious doubts about anything that cannot be accommodated within its framework, including religious phenomena such as prayer, visions, mystical experiences, extraordinary events, and unusual healings.
For many people, to think that the shroud is real is simply incredulous. We don’t need proof; we just know it. We don’t need information; our worldview is all the information we need. We don’t need to think about it because worldview prejudges. We are, all of us, well practiced in the art of worldview nullification. Borg points out that religious phenomena are not easily accommodated to the modern view of reality. C. S. Lewis said something similar in his book Miracles. He wrote: “Nothing arbitrary, nothing simply ‘stuck on’ and left unreconciled with the texture of total reality, can be admitted.”
Biblical Archeological Review
It is interesting to note that in a preface to the Vikan article, the editors of Biblical Archeological Review acknowledged the problem with the mysterious images and some of the forensic pathology. They wrote:
. . . although radiocarbon tests have dated the shroud to 1260-1390 A. D., no one has been able to account for the shadowy image of a naked 6-foot-tall man that appears on the shroud. With bloodstains on the back, wrists, feet, side and head the image appears to be that of a crucified man. The details - the direction of the flow of blood from the wounds, the placement of the nails through the wrists rather than the palms - displays a knowledge of crucifixion that seems too accurate to have been that of a medieval artist.
The real keystone of Vikan’s argument was a simple appeal to common sense. And because it may resonate with our worldview, we intuitively trust his polemics. He imaginatively and fictively quotes students of the shroud and then interprets what they think:
‘It doesn’t look like any known work of art,’ they say. The implication is that its creation was somehow miraculous, perhaps caused by a sudden burst of cosmic energy as the cloth came into contact with the dead body of Jesus.
We intuitively trust him though there is no truth in this statement. In fact, most shroud researchers, to their credit, avoid metaphysical or supernatural interpretations and stress the point that science and objective history cannot provide such explanations. Most students of the shroud are highly critical of those few who posit unfounded hypotheses to support a miracle.
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?
Thomas Cahill
Historian Thomas Cahill, perhaps best known for his book, The Gifts of the Jews – (not to be confused with the physicist Thomas Cahill of Cal-Davis who disproved McCrone’s conclusions about the Vinland map) wrote in Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:
Was this image impressed upon the cloth by the heat or light of new life? No laboratory will ever tell us, nor can any scientists give such questions a scientific answer. The questions are important, not because we can ever hope to answer them with human knowledge, but because they lead us to the ultimate question about Jesus: does his story make sense?
“The bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world,” said the Johannine Jesus. We do not have to adopt the theology of substitution – the theory that God required a spotless victim to make up for human sin – to make sense of the crucifixion … But Jesus’ suffering body is surely his ultimate gift, for it is his final act of sympathy with us…
When they come to Jesus, he seems already dead, so they do not break the bones of this Pascal Lamb without flaw. Just to be sure, however, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance, and at once blood and water flowed out” – witnessed, writes John, “by the one who saw it,” the Beloved Disciple. This blood and water, the last drops of Jesus’ wracked body, seem to have flowed copiously, if we accept the visual testimony of that strange Fifth Gospel, the shroud, which may have been a treasure of the church of the Beloved Disciple, the same church that treasured the evolving Fourth Gospel
To be convinced, skeptical, or merely intrigued are all fair responses to becoming well informed about the Shroud of Turin. To not become well informed is to ignore one of Christianity's greatest mysteries and chance history to the whims of our worldview.
.
Adler, Al 83, 185, 186, 188, 253, 254, 255, 306
Banding............................................... 153
Nature................... 11, 185, 228, 267, 284
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.
3. —. An Interview With Joe Nickel . [interv.] Eric Krieg. 2001.
4. To know a veil. Ball, Philip. New York : s.n., January 28, 2005, Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science: News. doi:10.1038/news050124-17.
5. Gledhill, Ruth. The Holy See and the secrets of the Turin Shroud. Times Online. [Online] April 6, 2009. [Cited: April 6, 2009.] http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/04/the-holy-see-and-the-secrets-of-the-turin-shroud.html.
6. Gould, Stephen Jay. Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge. Scientific American. July 1992, pp. 118-121.
7. Johnson, Phillip E. Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy? (at Stanford University). Access Research Network. [Online] April 30, 1994. [Cited: July 1, 2009.] http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or161/161main.htm.
8. Begley, Sharon. Sceince finds God. Newsweek. July 20, 1998.
9. Guth, Alan. Parallet Universes. [interv.] BBC Dilly Barlow. Science and Nature. s.l. : BBC Two, February 14, 2002.
10. Godart, O. and M. Heller. Cosmology of Lemaître. Tuscon : Pachart, 1985.
11. Russell, Bertand. The Problems of Philosophy. s.l. : Prometheus Books (September 1988), Kindle by Amazon (2008), 1912.
12. Halicarnassus, Herodotus of. Inquiries by Herodotus. [trans.] Shlomo Felberbaum 2003. s.l. : Lost Trails, Late 5th Century B.C..
13. Herzog, William R., II. Jesus, Justice and the Reign of God: A Ministry of Liberation . s.l. : Westminster John Knox Press, 2000.
14. Crossan, John Dominic. Faiths/Christianity/Your Questions to John Dominic Crossan. Beliefnet. s.l. : Beliefnet, July 2002.
15. Wilson, Kax. A History of Textiles. Boulder : Westview Press, 1979.
16. Cole, George S. A complete dictionary of dry goods and history of silk, cotton, linen, wool and other fibrous substances. s.l. : W.B. Conkey Co, W.B. Conkey Co.
17. Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. s.l. : Princeton University Press, 1992.
18. Scavone, Daniel C. Acheiropoietos Jesus Images in Constantinople: the Documentary Evidence. Bronxville, NY : Shroud Story Web Site, 2006. Chapter of Book in Progress.
19. Krapf, Norbert, John DePol. Under Open Skys. New York : Fordam University Press, 1986.
20. AZahoor, Akram. Muslim History: 570 – 1950 C.E. Gaithersburg, MD : ZMD Corporation, 2000. translation by the author.
21. Beckwith, John. The Art of Constantinople: An Introduction to Byzantine Art 330-1453. London : Phaidon Publishers , 1961.
22. Wilson, Ian. Holy Faces, Secret Places: An Amazing Quest for the Face of Jesus. New York : Doubleday, 1991.
23. Treadgold, Warren T. A history of the Byzantine state and society. s.l. : Stanford University Press, 1997.
24. Sweetenham, Carol. Robert the Monk's History of the First Crusade: Historia Iherosolimitana. Paperback. Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Translation and Commentary.
25. Shopkow, Leah. Robert de Clari. Book Rags. [Online] [Cited: April 23, 2009.] http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/robert-de-clari-tf/.
26. Stone, Edward N (translator) Robert de Clari (author). Three Old French Chronicles of the Crusades. Seatlle : University of Washington publications in the social sciences, 1939 update to 1870 translation.
27. McNeal, Edgar Holmes. The Conquest of Constantinople. New York : Columbia University Press, 2005.
28. Janin, Raymond. La Géographie ecclésiastique de l'Empire byzantin. 1953.
29. Carson, D. A. The Gospel According to John. Grand Rapids, MI : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1991.
30. Scavone, Daniel C. Greek Epitaphioi and Other Evidence for the Shroud In Constantinople Up To 1204. Shroud of Turin Web Site Paper from the 1999 Richmond Conference. [Online] June 1999. [Cited: April 26, 2009.] http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/scavone.pdf.
31. Brown, John E. The Gospel and Epistles of John: a concise commentary. s.l. : Liturgical Press, 1988.
32. Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. s.l. : University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
33. Wilson, Ian. The Turin Shroud. London : Book Club Associates, 1978. (Wilson, I., "The Turin Shroud," Book Club Associates: London, 1978, pp.61-62).
34. Nickell, Joe. The Joe Nickell Files: The Shroud of Turin. [interv.] John C. Snider. 2000, revised 2004.
35. Harvard Law School Staff. Seeing Faces. The Situationist - Harvard Law School. [Online] Feb 23, 2008. [Cited: May 14, 2009.] http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/seeing-faces/.
36. Flury-Lemberg, Mechthild. Secrets of the Dead: The Shroud of Christ. [interv.] PBS Television. 2002.
37. Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin. Rogers, Raymond N. 2005, Thermochimica Acta, Vol. 425, pp. 189-194. - Raymond N. Rogers, Thermochimica Acta Volume 425, Issues 1-2, 20 January 2005, Pages 189-194 .
38. Runciman, Steven. History of the Crusades. Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1965.
39. Walsh, J. E. The Shroud. New York : Random House, 1963.
40. Adler, Alan D. The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin. Shroud of Turin Web Site. [Online] 1999. [Cited: May 3, 2009.] http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/adler.pdf.
41. Photogrammetric Responses from the Shroud of Turin. Schumacher, Peter M. Richmond : Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, 1999. Shroud of Turin International Research Conference.
42. Picknett, Lynn and Prince, Clive. The Turin Shroud: How Da Vinci Fooled History. New York : Simon and Schuster, 2007.
43. On the invisible rays emitted by phosphorescent bodies. Becquerel, Henri. Paris : French Academy of Science, March 2, 1896, Comptes Rendus 122, 501 (1896)), Vol. 122, p. 501. translated by Carmen Giunta.
44. Carr, Peter. Dating and Formation of the Shroud. s.l. : Shroud of Turin Web Site, 1999.
45. The amazing Dr Kouznetsov. Meacham, William. 313, York : Department of Archaeology at the University of York, September 1, 2007, Antiquity: A Quartly Review of the World of Archaeology, Vol. 81, pp. 779-783.
46. Major Carbon-14 Deficiency in Modern Snail Shells from Southern Nevada Springs. Riggs, Alan C. s.l. : The American Association for the Advancement of Science, April 6, 1984, Science, Vol. 224, pp. 58-61.
47. Ikram, Salima. Egyptologist, American University in Cairo. [interv.] editor of NOVA online. PBS Nova Television Series Susan K. Lewis. November 17, 2005.
48. Hodge, K. C., G. W. A. Newton. Radiocarbon Dating. [book auth.] Ann Rosalie David. The Manchester Museum mummy project: multidisciplinary research on ancient Egyptian mummified remains. s.l. : Manchester University Press, 1979, pp. 137-148.
49. A problematic source of organic contamination of linen. Gove, H. E., S. J. Mattingly, A. R. David, L. A. Garza-Valdes. s.l. : Elsevier, 1997, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, pp. 504-507.
50. Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. Damon, P. E., et al. 1989, Nature, Vol. 337, pp. 611-615.
51. Rogers, Raymond N., Anna Arnoldi. Scientific Method Applied to the Shroud of Turin: A Review. Shroud of Turin Website. [Online] July 2002. http://www.shroud.com.
52. Knight, Edmund. Bleaching. [book auth.] Hugh Chisholm. The Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition. New Yorl : The Encyclopedia Britannica Company, 1911, pp. 49-55. Professor of Technological Chemistry, University of Manchester.