SHROUD OF TURIN

The Shroud of Turin, an aged, patched and scorched rectangular piece of linen that has been preserved since the late 16th century in the Cathedral of St. John at Turin, is perhaps the best-known artifact in the Christian West. The entire fabric, woven in a fine three-to-one herringbone twill, measures 14.25 feet long by 3.58 feet wide, including a 3.5 inch matching linen strip that at some point was attached to one of the long sides. On one side of this cloth can be seen faint images, sepia-yellow in color, of the front and back of a naked human body, the body of a 5 foot, 11 inch bearded male Caucasian weighing about 170 pounds. Because these images are oriented on the cloth in a head-to-head fashion, the object appears to be a burial shroud. If indeed such, the body would have been placed on one half of the cloth and the other half would have been drawn over the head and upper body of the corpse and then down over the feet to enshroud the dead person completely.

Many wounds and bruises are visible on the body images, some in association with apparent bloodstains. The conformity of this evidence with the gospel accounts

of Jesus' crucifixion is striking. For example, bloodstains flow from the base of the man's left hand—his right wrist, covered by the left hand, is not visible—and from both of his feet. Furthermore, at his rib cage on the right side there is also a wound with a large blood stain around it (see Jn 19.31–37). Visible around the man's head are smaller lesions from which blood has trickled downward, a detail corresponding to Jesus's crowning with thorns (Mt 27.29 and parr.). Also visible are numerous small wounds covering the entire body, front and back, from the shoulders downward, and these accord with the account of Jesus' scourging by Roman soldiers preparatory to his crucifixion (Mt 27.26 and parr.). Given the many points of agreement between the gospel narratives and the evidence of the shroud, scholars agree that this object can only be either Jesus' actual burial shroud or a well-crafted later imitation.

History of the Shroud. The whereabouts of this object is well attested back to the mid-14th century but not earlier. While Ian Wilson and other investigators have proposed various theories about the shroud's history prior to that date, these, because of the lack of hard evidence, have not enjoyed universal scholarly support. There is clear evidence, however, that about 1357 the shroud was exhibited in Lirey, a village near Troyes in northeastern France. The Musée de Cluny in Paris still preserves a pilgrim's medallion from this exhibition, and this object attests that the shroud was then in possession of Geoffrey de Charny and his wife, Jeanne de Vergy. In 1460 its ownership passed from the de Charnys to the House of Savoy. They at first kept the shroud in a silver reliquary chest in the chapel of their castle at Chambéry, France, where it narrowly escaped destruction in a serious fire that broke out in 1532. Although the reliquary was daringly rescued from the flaming chapel, a drop of melting silver burned right through the shroud's many folds, and the entire cloth, which had also suffered extensively from scorching and water damage, required two years of patching and repair work. Despite all this, the body images on the shroud remained generally intact. In 1578 the Savoy family decided to move the shroud from Chambéry to the Royal Chapel in the Cathedral at Turin, and there it is still preserved. Only in 1983, however, did actual legal title to the shroud pass from the House of Savoy to the Holy See.

Authenticity. Church authorities have been generally reserved, or even quite negative, about the shroud's authenticity. When the de Charny family displayed the shroud at Lirey in 1357, the bishop of Troyes, Henry of Poitiers, objected strongly, claiming that the shroud was a fraudulent invention. In 1389 a later bishop of Troyes, Pierre d'Arcis, wrote a letter to Pope Clement VII at Avignon in which he expressed strong agreement with his predecessor's concerns. Because the shroud, said Bishop D'Arcis, is "a product of human handicraft" (manufactus ) and "an artificial painting or depiction" (artificialiter depictus ), the pope should act to put an end to its public display. While the pope in his response chose a more cautious route, he did insist that when the shroud was displayed, there should be no liturgical ceremony or pomp. Furthermore, he ordered that on each occasion a priest was to announce to those present "in a loud and intelligible voice, without any trickery, that the aforesaid representation [the shroud] is not the true burial cloth (sudarium ) of our Lord Jesus Christ but only a kind of painting or picture made as a form or representation (in figuram seu representationem ) of the burial cloth." While later Church leaders were more receptive to the shroud—in 1578, for example, Charles Borromeo, then the archbishop of Milan, journeyed on foot to Turin in order to venerate the shroud—they avoided making any affirmation of the shroud's authenticity. Although in 1670 a papal congregation granted an indulgence to those who would come and pray before the Shroud, it carefully specified that those who did so would receive the indulgence "not for venerating the cloth as the true Shroud of Christ but rather for meditating on the Passion," a neat sidestepping of the question of authenticity.

During the whole of the 20th century, and particularly after 1969 when it became possible for scientists and other researchers to study the shroud in greater detail, debate has raged about its authenticity as Jesus' actual burial cloth. While at this point the preponderance of evidence would seem to suggest a medieval date for the origin of this object, there are still scholars who would strenuously argue for its authenticity. The matter is made all the more complicated because there is no agreement whatsoever as to how the body images came to exist on the cloth.

Particularly damaging to any theory of authenticity were the Carbon-14 tests separately conducted in 1988 by laboratories in Tucson, Oxford, and Zurich on small fragments taken from a single portion of the shroud clear of any patching or charring. Although each laboratory utilized its own methods for eliminating possible contaminants from its sample and checked its results against control samples of known origin and date, their results with respect to the shroud accorded closely. The Research Laboratory of the British Museum did a statistical analysis of these results and reported that, within 95 percent confidence limits, the date for the linen of the shroud had to range somewhere between 1260 and 1390 AD, not earlier. These findings have been vigorously contested by the defenders of the shroud's authenticity. They argue, for example, that the fire of 1532 may well have added carbon isotopes to the linen and that the shroud's fibers over time became coated with bacteria and fungi, a factor which also could have added C-14 to the cloth and so have produced an inaccurate later dating. While debate continues about such issues, C-14 dating is hardly a new technology and scientists at this point have extensive familiarity with the problem of contaminants and methods for dealing properly with them in this sort of analysis.

There are other problems as well, particularly with the bloodstains. Questions remain, first of all, as to whether these stains were produced by actual human blood or even by blood at all. The team of scientists who examined the shroud in October 1978 at the close of its public display found albumin, porphyrinic material and iron associated with these stains and concluded that they had to have been produced by genuine human blood rather than by paint or some other substance. W. McCrone and others have questioned these findings. They link the iron discovered to the iron-oxide of artist's paint and raise difficulties about the red color of the stains, very odd for such ancient blood. On the other hand, the scientists involved in the 1978 study found no evidence whatever of brush strokes or other "directional" markings that would indicate that either the blood stains or the body images as a whole had been painted on the cloth.

Whatever is to be said about the medium that caused these bloodstains, there is a further and much more serious difficulty. These stains, clear in outline and unsmudged, show a downward trend in their flow. Such would have been the direction taken by blood flowing from Jesus' various wounds while he hung vertically on the cross but not while his body lay prone in the tomb, if such flows could still have occurred at that point. Assuming the authenticity of the shroud, this state of affairs required that when Jesus' friends drew the nails from his hands and feet, took his body from the cross, carried it for some unknown distance to the tomb, and then laid it on the cloth of the shroud, they did all these things without smearing or disturbing the bloodstains on his body, an impossible supposition. F. Zugibe, who supports the authenticity of the shroud, has argued that Jesus' body was washed before being placed upon his burial shroud and that the shroud preserves a post-mortem oozing of blood from the various wounds. But in saying this, he fails to address the directionality of the blood flows seen on the shroud.

The hand of an artist may also be betrayed by the way in which the body of Jesus appears on the shroud. If Jesus' dead body actually produced the images seen on the shroud, those bodily areas closer to or touching the cloth should be delineated very clearly while those further away should be less distinct. In fact, however, Jesus' hands and face, including even the recessed areas around his eyes, are quite distinct (as one would expect in portrait art) while other areas of his body such as his buttocks and his navel are faintly outlined or even invisible. A pious concern for modesty may well account for this discrepancy. Very likely such a consideration also explains why the right arm and hand of the figure on the shroud are abnormally elongated. This permitted Jesus' genital area to be covered in modest fashion by his hands, an arrangement physically impossible for an ordinary dead body lying relaxed and prone. A further oddity is that no wrinkles or other irregularities distort the shroud's images, an improbability if this cloth had actually covered the irregular form of Jesus' body. Finally, the very fact that the man of the shroud looks just like our typical devotional images of Jesus raises questions since this so familiar iconographic convention can only be traced with certainty back to the Byzantine period. Earlier representations of Jesus in the catacombs of Rome, for example, depict him as beardless, and the canonical Gospels provide no description whatever of Jesus' physical appearance.

In terms of chronology, all efforts to situate this cloth in 1st century Palestine have so far proven inconclusive. Both its three-to-one herringbone weave and the presence of cotton fragments amid its linen threads as easily point to medieval Europe as to the Greco-Roman world. Pollen from Palestinian flora found trapped in the weave could well be contaminants carried by the wind or deposited by other means. Some think that they can discern a coin from the administration of Pontius Pilate covering Jesus' right eye. Yet the photographs of this "coin" are very blurred, and the use of coins to cover the eyes of the dead is not attested for 1st century Palestine.

In short, while many unanswered questions still remain, not least that of how the images came to appear on the cloth in the first place, it is most unlikely that this object is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus. Instead, while possibly a forgery deliberately intended to deceive the faithful, it very well could have been produced to serve as a devotional object, a pious reminder of how Jesus gave up even his own life for the salvation of humanity.

Bibliography: n. caldararo, "The Status of Research into the Authenticity of the Shroud," Approfondimento Sindone 1.1 (1997) 51–66. p. e. damon et al., "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature 337, 6208 (1989) 611–15. j. h. heller, Report on the Shroud of Turin (Boston 1983). j. iannone, The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence (New York 1998). r. wild, s.j., "The Shroud of Turin—Probably the Work of a 14th-Century Artist or Forger," (Biblical Archaeology Review) 10, 2 (March–April 1984) 30–46. i. wilson, The Shroud of Turin (New York 1978); The Mysterious Shroud (Garden City, N.Y.1986); The Blood and the Shroud (New York 1998).

[r. a. wild]