9. SINDONOLOGYAD 1390

THE SHROUD OF TURIN

Not everyone is religious, but religious belief is characteristic of every human society ever documented. Most of us seem to yearn to believe in something existentially larger than ourselves, and for many religion fills that need. Yet religion demands a comprehensive world view, and the world is a complicated place, full of details. In some religions those details are supplied by relics: physical symbols, both of the greater faith itself and of those who most excellently exemplified it and exhibited it in their lives—mythical or otherwise. Relics are, in many ways, the small mosaic tiles that flesh out the bigger religious picture, and to some people they have an even larger significance: they are the glue that holds it all together.

Perhaps the most famous relic of them all is the Shroud of Turin. This is a rough linen cloth, about fourteen feet long and four feet wide, that bears life-size, ghostly yellowish images of the front and back of a tall, naked, bearded, and long-haired man. The man appears to bear bloody puncture wounds on the wrist and chest, as testified by reddish-brown stains on the image as well as smaller lacerations across the forehead. It is believed by many to have been the actual burial cloth in which Jesus was interred—and the image thus is that of Jesus himself.

The Shroud is said to have been brought back from Turkey in 1346 by a French Crusader, Geoffroi de Charny, who later died in the Battle of Poitiers. The first documentary record certainly places the piece in Geoffroi’s family church at Lirey before 1390, although that proof of existence comes in the form of a letter from the local bishop to the pope declaring the Shroud to be a forgery.

A shadow has thus hovered over the Shroud from the beginning. Nonetheless, in 1453 it was deeded to the Dukes of Savoy, and in 1578 it found its way to the cathedral in the Savoyard capital of Turin, where it has remained ever since. Thousands of pilgrims continue to flock there every year to revere it. Still, despite the Shroud’s obvious potential documentary and spiritual importance, the Vatican has never expressed any official opinion on its authenticity.

The Shroud that is now in Turin is actually one of more than forty pieces of cloth of varying sizes that were touted during the Middle Ages as having been used to wrap the body of the crucified Christ. Many of these curiosities were apparently lost during the French Revolution (the French evidently having been particularly diligent collectors of such things); but in addition to Turin, ecclesiastical establishments in Rome; Genoa; Oviedo, Spain; and Cadouin, France, also currently claim to be housing at least parts of the holy winding sheet. All of these textiles are believed to have covered the face of Christ, which of course means that only one of the contenders—at most—can have been part of the true shroud.

The Image of Edessa. The sixth-century Syrian scholar Evagrius Scholasticus reported that Abgar, ruler of the kingdom of Osroene (present-day southeastern Turkey), owned a cloth on which Jesus’s face had been imprinted. It effected miraculous aid in defense of Osroene’s capital city of Edessa against the Persians in 544.

In 1988, with Vatican approval, samples from the Shroud of Turin were submitted to three independent laboratories for radiocarbon dating. The dates obtained clustered pretty closely in the period between AD 1260 and 1390, which means that the textile itself was pretty certainly made at some point between the middle of the thirteenth century and the end of the fourteenth. Indeed, in announcing their findings in 1989, the scientists who carried out the dating flatly declared that their results “provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval.” The specific date range corresponds very closely to the time at which Geoffroi acquired his souvenir, and the agreement is at the very least extremely suggestive.

The available physical evidence is thus strongly in favor of the conclusion that the biblical crucifixion was already 1,300 years in the past when the cloth was woven, most plausibly in Turkey. The images themselves are rather curious—nothing else stylistically like them is known—and, strangely, they have some of the characteristics of a photographic negative. Possibly they were made by pressing the linen on a bas-relief model smeared with pigments, although that isn’t known for sure. All that is certain is that the images must be younger than the cloth on which they are preserved.