1 of 15
I am not an expert on the Shroud of Turin. But then what would it mean to be an expert on the Shroud? Spending months firing gamma rays at linen? Attempting the discoloration of linen through a controlled release of gases? I have not done these things, nor have I paid too much mind to those who have. I am not a scientist at all. I am not even an expert in hagiography and relics. I have not received a single grant or spent a dime on Shroud research that wasn't taken directly out of my wife's shopping budget. What I am, is an outlier. And, as luck would have it, I was reading the right collection of short stories at the right time. I am as unqualified to work on such a mysterious cloth as any medieval forger. And yet, like that unknown, unwashed villain of the past, I can place an image on linen using such sophisticated tools as glass and sunlight.
Sometime in 2000 I sat in a graduate school classroom at Liberty University and watched an amazing slide show on the Shroud. Dr. Gary Habermas presented what he knew about the sacred cloth—which was a lot. I would have liked to simply brush the issue of the Shroud aside, laugh and wonder why time was being wasted on the subject, but that was impossible. The Shroud was too complex, and there was too much weirdness surrounding it to be casually dismissed.
Habermas was careful to point out that he had not landed on one side or the other of the authenticity debate (nor did he think that he could). No one had ever shown how an image like this could be produced, and yet science had weighed in with carbon dating placing the Shroud firmly in the twelve to thirteen hundreds, a date overwhelmingly considered legitimate until very recently.
The image on the Shroud is of a man of moderate height. He is neither small nor large. The entirety of the man's front and back are shown on the same side of the cloth. The cloth is of a fine herringbone weave and is about 14 ft. 3 in. long by 3 ft. 7 in. wide. The man on the cloth has been crucified and the locations of his wounds are shown with a liberal use of human blood. He bears the stigmata, though the nail holes are not located in his iconic palms, but in his more anatomically correct wrists. His brow bears the blood resultant from the placement of a crown of thorns, there is a spear wound in his side, his face has been beaten, his nose broken (cartilage separated from the bone for Bible-believing Shroud proponents [John 19:36]), and his back has been mercilessly torn and beaten with a flail. The wounds from his whipping run all the way from his heels to the back of his scalp. He is bearded; his countenance is noble and looks much like many medieval icons of Christ.
These are all the details needed to convince some of the faithful. But scientists, never willing to take religion lying down, needed more than this to impress them.
In 1898 the House of Savoy of Italy put the Shroud on Exposition. They were then the owners of the relic, and they granted a lawyer named Secondo Pia permission to photograph it for the first time. What followed could only be called a buzz. It was found that the image on the Shroud was actually a photographic negative. Pia's negatives displayed the positive image of the man in the Shroud lying in death, a spooky white on a dark background. Of course, we were only just learning of the existence of photo negativity—surely no medieval forger would have been aware of such images, let alone been able to produce one on cloth. The existence of the Shroud officially became an affront to Science and has annoyed her ever since.
Pia had only been able to photograph the entire Shroud while it was framed beneath glass and hanging high on a wall. His plates were soon thought to be insufficient and a second photographer was allowed to work much more freely. But this did not happen until 1931.
share this page
RSS Feed
