The Shroud of Turin: scientists explore secrets of one of the world’s most enigmatic objects
Holy Week is the obvious time to consider what we know so far about one of the most enigmatic objects in the world, the Holy Shroud of Turin, alleged by some to be the burial cloth of Christ. Modern scholarship has increasingly opted to examine it in conjunction with the other claimed sepulchral object associated with Christ, the Sudarium of Oviedo. The sudarium was the cloth that covered the face and head of the deceased in biblical burials, being removed when the shroud was passed over the head and face in its place.
As their names suggest, the Holy Shroud is preserved in Turin Cathedral, the Sudarium in the cathedral of Oviedo, in Spain. By far the more famous object is the shroud, because of the life-size image of a man detectable on the surface of the linen. Since 1978, shroud studies have proliferated, attracting scientists from varied disciplines, until it has become an academic industry.
This is a review of the most significant studies to date. There is no intention to promote any particular theory and it will be restricted to scientific material, except that reference will be made to scriptural passages in instances where they relate to phenomena discovered by researchers.
The Holy Shroud has a relatively obscure provenance until the 14th century, when it became the object of disputes. A French bishop wrote to Anti-Pope Clement (VII) in 1390, denouncing the shroud as a forgery and claiming that its author had confessed to fabricating it by “a clever sleight of hand”. In fact, Bishop d’Arcis was incensed that devout pilgrims were flocking to view the shroud in the church at Lirey, instead of visiting his own cathedral of Troyes.
It is not accurate to claim that the Holy Shroud was never heard of before 1355. Historical research has made a credible case for its existence at Edessa, from where it was transferred to Constantinople in 944. It was long believed the Edessa cloth could not be the shroud because it only showed the face of a man.
In 2004, however, the text was discovered in the Vatican Archives of the long-lost sermon preached by Gregory Referendarius, archdeacon of St Sophia in Constantinople, on the reception there of the Edessa cloth, in which he specifically states that not just the face but the entire body is visible on the cloth and refers to bloodstains from a wound in the side. Subsequent documents found at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, confirmed this. A crusader in Constantinople in 1204 reported seeing the cloth with the full body image.
However, the widespread belief that the shroud’s origin dated back no earlier than 1355 received a massive boost in 1988 when a carbon dating test on the shroud, conducted by the British Museum and Oxford University, with cloth samples distributed among three universities – Tucson in Arizona, Zurich and Oxford – found that the shroud dated from between 1260 and 1390. That seemed fairly conclusive, until later investigations showed the experiment had been badly flawed, as denounced in many peer-reviewed studies.
Today, it is generally admitted, even by people involved in the process, that proper scientific protocols were not maintained and that the cloth analysed was from a repaired edge of the shroud, introducing many anomalies, while testing material from the same part of the cloth three times would not have given an overall reading. Since carbon dating is a destructive process, it will not be allowed again. There is still today a minor industry of refuting the 1988 c14 tests, which is somewhat redundant, since even their authors became disinclined to defend them.
By 1990, however, a combination of mediaeval scuttlebutt and imperfect carbon testing had established a popular consensus that the shroud was a mediaeval forgery. Since then, scientific advances have dramatically changed perceptions of the shroud. The cloth itself is slightly over 14 feet long, by almost four feet wide. It is woven in a herringbone pattern and an additional strip of linen sewn onto it is attached by a unique style of stitching, almost identical to a stitch found at Masada, destroyed in 74 AD. That suggests a first-century origin.
Fabric experts have studied the shroud in depth. Giulio Fanti, of Padua University, developed three different tests to discover how flax fibres change with age and applied them to the shroud. A Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) test produced a date range of 300 BC, plus or minus 400 years; a Raman Spectroscopy test gave a range of 200 BC, plus or minus 500 years; and the tensile strength of the flax produced a range of 400 AD, plus or minus 400 years. So, the average of the three tests was 33 BC, plus or minus 250 years, all compatible with a first-century origin.
But the chief interest in the shroud is the image it preserves, which is of a crucified man who had undergone a severe flogging, had his scalp pierced by a number of pointed objects and been wounded in his left side. The image is a photographic negative, not a painting. As early as 1978, a five-day investigation by the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), employing photomicrography, spectrophotometry, X-ray radiography, fluorescence, infrared and ultraviolet photography, demonstrated that the front and back images of the man on the shroud contained no pigment, no carrier, no brush strokes and no cracking of the image along fold lines.
More recently, modern technology has discovered how extremely superficial the image is: it descends only to depths of two or three fibres into the thread; at fabric level it is restricted to chemical changes in the approximately 200 nanometres-thick external cell layer (one nanometre equals one billionth of a metre), as described in a paper published in 2010 by Giulio Fanti and the Shroud Science Group.
The many investigations involving different scientific disciplines – fabric specialists, botanists studying pollen on the cloth, and especially 3-D computer analysis, which has produced a three-dimensional reconstruction of a human body, have supplied much information. The only satisfactory scientific explanation, according to the current consensus, is that the image was formed by a brief burst of radiation, emanating from within the body and projected vertically.
One of the most authentic features, which also discredits the notion of mediaeval forgery, is that the nail wounds are not in the palms of the hands, as commonly depicted but which would not support the weight of a body, but in the wrists, in the area known as “Destot’s space”. The damage that causes to the nerve causes the thumb to turn in under the palm, which researchers say is shown on the shroud. No one in the Middle Ages would have had any knowledge of that and even today crucifixes routinely depict the palms of the hands transfixed.
Among the discoveries have been scourge marks of between 100 and 120 weals, consistent with flogging with a Roman flagrum, a multi-tailed whip with small metal spheres on the thongs. The wound in the side is the same shape and size as the head of a Roman hasta, or thrusting spear. The scalp was perforated with wounds made by some kind of spiky objects, e.g. thorns. The bloodstains are of blood group AB, not an exceptionally rare group, but shared by only 5 per cent of the global population, and the blood on the Sudarium of Oviedo is also AB.
The wound in the side appears to be surrounded by a bloodstain and clear blood serum, which would mostly have been composed of water (cf. St John 19:34: “But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water.”) The blood on the shroud is claimed to have a high bilirubin content and nanoparticles of creatinine bound to ferritin, which is unique to persons who have been severely tortured. One paper written in 2017 on this topic was later retracted due to concerns about the robustness of the research, but the claim is still supported by some scientists.
At this point, the task of the supposed mediaeval forger, performing “a clever sleight of hand”, begins to look rather daunting. There are still academics who denounce the shroud as a hoax. In 2018, Dr Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli published a paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, reporting an experiment in which they had used a volunteer and both real and synthetic blood to calculate the direction of blood flow in a case of crucifixion. Their conclusion was that the bloodstains on the shroud were in the wrong places, so it was not authentic.
The question arises not only whether, in so violent and erratic an event as a crucifixion, blood would always flow the same way, but more pertinently it seems the pro-shroud researchers attribute the blood on the cloth not to the crucifixion, but to seepage when the nails were loosened after the body was taken down from the cross.
Another, less conventional experiment, was carried out by Garlaschelli who placed a linen sheet over a volunteer, rubbed it with pigment containing acid traces, heated it in an oven and then washed it, leaving a fuzzy, half-tone image. He claimed a mediaeval forger could have done that. The obvious question is whether Professor Garlaschelli’s “shroud” would meet the 200 nanometre test, or any of the other phenomena peculiar to the Turin Shroud. His experiment was funded by an Italian association of atheists and agnostics.
The observed congruencies between the Shroud and the Sudarium of Oviedo are of particular importance, since the Sudarium has a well-documented history: it was in Jerusalem in 570 AD, left Palestine in 614 and was in Spain a few years later, moved to northern Spain in 718 and has been in Oviedo since 840. Some researchers are convinced that bloodstains and pollen on both garments prove they covered the same body. (St John, 20:6-7: “Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulchre, and saw the linen cloths lying, And the napkin that had been about his head, not lying with the linen cloths, but apart, wrapped up into one place.”)
However, the most startling thesis to date was contained in a paper published in 2018 by Giuseppe Maria Catalano, of the International Institute for Advanced Studies of Space Representation Sciences, based in Palermo, entitled “The New Astonishing Phenomenon Detected on the Shroud”.
This research employed projective geometry, descriptive geometry and photogrammetric survey to investigate the cloth. Its claimed revelations are so dramatic as to invite scepticism, but the science is beyond a layman’s understanding, making it equally unreasonable to accept or reject it. The researchers claim, among other things, to have detected that the body is clothed in a traditional Jewish caleçon, or kilt-like garment, supported at the waist by a snakeskin belt with a circular buckle.
They also detected tefillin, straps wrapped around the left arm and forehead, holding a small cube-shaped box containing scriptural texts, and the nails still loosely within the wounds, including two in the feet, square-headed and 125mm long. They also claimed that the crown of thorns was still on the head, composed of the thorny plant Sarcopoterium spinosum, which blooms in the spring.
Strangely, they also suggested the body was buried face down – a sign of disgrace and forbidden by Jewish burial laws – but explicable if the interment was superintended by Roman soldiers intent on insulting the deceased, which might also explain why the thorns and nails were still with the body. The researchers claimed the Sudarium was folded over 80 times to provide a sort of pillow.
But most astonishingly of all, the researchers claimed to have detected minutely different positions of parts of the body, recording movement. In other words, the image is not a snapshot, but a moving picture, suggesting that the intense burst of energy that generated the image lasted not for nanoseconds, as generally supposed, but for two or three full seconds.
Will any of this stand up, in the light of scientific developments? That remains to be seen. The Catholic Church, custodian of the Shroud of Turin, does not take a position on its authenticity or otherwise: it describes it as an “icon”, contemplation of which can furnish the faithful with an edifying image of Christ’s Passion. For believers this Easter, the tantalising question regarding the image on the shroud remains: is this the face of God? And if researchers have correctly identified initial movement of the body in the tomb, is this a quasi-cinematographic record of the most important moment in human history?
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