1356 - Shroud of Turin Glossary
The Shroud of Turin’s known appearance in Western European history was in 1356, a time of unbridled superstition in demons, witches, magic, and miracle-working relics. It was a time of frequent famine and the Black Death plague. It was a time of extreme economic and political turbulence and of war. The same year that the Shroud was first displayed publicly in the small French village of Lirey, nearby, at the battle of Poitiers, England’s Black Prince defeated the French and captured King John II of France. Adding to the political turmoil, the pope was in Avignon, not Rome — some even believed that the plague was God’s retribution on the whole world because the pope was not in the eternal city. In this climate of superstition, naiveté and disorder a lucrative market in false relics flourished.
The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 acknowledged the problem with false relics but church authorities did little to curb the market in them; and indeed the selling and buying of fake relics flourished. Our knowledge of this history rightly conditions us to be suspicious of any medieval relic that might first appear in Europe at this time. And for many this reality was evidence.
That the Shroud does have a definite footprint in medieval Europe seemed all the more plausible because carbon 14 testing in 1988 suggested that the cloth was made from flax that grew between 1260 and 1390. Moreover, in 1389, a French Bishop claimed that a painter had confessed to having “cunningly painted” the images on the cloth. And if this wasn’t enough, Walter McCrone, a well respected microscopist, claimed that he found direct evidence that the Shroud was painted. But all this is now known to be wrong.
Mass spectrometry, some of it performed at the National Science
Foundation Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence at the University of
Nebraska, proves conclusively that the Shroud was not painted. The bishop’s
memorandum is thoroughly challenged by several contemporaneous documents.
But we don’t just know that the images were not painted. We know that they
are of a caramel-like substance that is a selective chemical change to a
layer of starch fractions and sugars that seems to coat the outermost fibers
of the entire cloth.
This
coating is as thin as the wall of a soap bubble, as thin as most bacteria,
as thin as the glare-proof coating on modern eyeglasses. How that coating
got there and how some of it was chemically changed, in bits here and there,
to an image are matters of speculation: are matters for forensic science.
And in early 2005, the carbon 14 dating was found to be invalid. What was dated by carbon 14 testing was chemically unlike the rest of the Shroud. It was not until December 2003, fifteen years after the carbon 14 dating that a reserved bit of the sample cut for carbon 14 dating was made available for testing. Another year was needed for testing, independent confirmation and the rigors of peer review: the tests were invalid. It wasn’t the fault of three carbon 14 laboratories but the fault of church officials who ignored carefully planned and documented protocols. Moreover, chemical tests for the kinetic decomposition of vanillin in the Shroud suggest that when the Shroud made its first documented appearance in Western European History in 1356, it was already several centuries old.
© 2004, 2005 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
