Shroud of Turin

From Wikinfo

A negative rendering of the face portion of the shroud.

The Shroud of Turin is a centuries-old linen cloth with the image of an apparently crucified man. Many people believe it to be the cloth that covered Jesus of Nazareth when he was placed in his tomb; others contend it is a medieval hoax, or something else altogether. Its true origin remains uncertain.

The shroud is kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin.

History

Early reports

Reports of Jesus's burial shroud have been circulating since the 14th century, and attempts have been made since then to connect the "Shroud of Turin" with the "Image of Edessa" though no connection can be substantiated.

The "Image of Edessa"

According to a legend recorded by Eusebius of Caesarea, King Abgarus of Edessa wrote to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Instead, the apostle Thaddaeus is said to have come, bearing a cloth with the image of Jesus (the "Image of Edessa", or Mandylion), by the virtues of which the king was miraculously healed. Since Jesus was living, according to the legend, this image has no connection with his burial shroud.

The later vicissitudes of the Edessa image are not reported by Eusebius. After the king's death, the cloth might have been hidden in the city walls for protection as early as the reign of Manu VI, Abgar�s second son, who is thought to have reverted to paganism.

The image is said to have surfaced in 525, during a flood of the Daisan, a tributary stream of the Euphrates, flooding the city of Edessa. This flood is mentioned in the writings of Procopius of Caesarea. In the course of the reconstruction work at Edessa, a cloth is discovered which had been hidden above one of the gates of the town. It shows the face of a man. Evagrius Scholasticus mentioned in his Ecclesiastical History the image of Edessa as "created by God, and not produced by the hands of man". He dates this discovery at 544. The Persian King Chosrau I Anuschirwan (the large one) besieges the Roman Edessa. Other documents from the 6th century - it is said - are in the Vatican Library and the University of Leiden, Netherlands. These documents quote a man called Smera in Constantinople in 950: "King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body" (Faciei figuram sed totius corporis figuram cernere poteris). The Mandylion disappeared again after the Persians conquered Edessa in 609 and the Arabs in 639. In 944 - for the liberation of Muslim prisoners - it was taken from Edessa to Constantinople under the direction of the Byzantine emperor Romanus I, remaining there until the Crusaders sacked the city in 1204 and carried some of its treasures to western Europe, though the "Image of Edessa" is not mentioned in this context in any contemporary document.

14th century

The first documented appearance of the cloth now stored in Turin was in 1357, when the widow of French knight Geoffroy de Charny had it displayed in a church in Lirey. Both coats of arms are to be seen in a pilgrim medallion (Museum Cluny, Paris) which shows accurately the Shroud of Turin.

During these years, the Shroud was publicly exposed, even if not continuously, given that the bishop of Troyes prohibited this cult. But after 32 years the cult started again. Its property was contested by King Charles VI of France, who vainly ordered his sheriffs to obtain it and bring it to Troyes. By the end of 1389, the bishop of Troyes asked for silence on the matter, in order to placate the faithfuls' excitement. But in the following month, antipope Clement VII prescribed indulgences for those who celebrated the Shroud, and the cult continued.

15th century

In 1418, Humbert of Villersexel, Count de la Roche, Lord of Saint-Hippolyte-sur-Doubs, who had married the grand-daughter of Geoffroy de Charny, moved the Shroud to his castle at Montfort, officially to protect it from criminal bands.

It was later moved again, to Saint-Hippolyte-sur-Doubs. After the death of Humbert, a judicial battle was fought by Lirey canons, who wanted the widow to return the cloth, but the parlement of Dole, and later the Court of [[Besan�on]], both left it to the widow. She travelled with the Shroud, for several expositions (like in Liege and in Geneva).

In 1453 the widow sold it (for a castle in Varambon) to Ludwig Duke of Savoy, who stored it in the castle of Chambery (capital town of the Duchy), in a new-built Sainte-Chapelle, which pope Paul II soon after elevated to the dignity of collegiate church. In 1464, the duke had to recognize an annual rent to the Lirey canons, and on their side these formally recognized his property on the cloth.

In 1471 the Shroud was moved to Vercelli, and in the following years it was in Turin, Ivrea, Susa, Chambery, Avigliano, Rivoli, and Pinerolo. In 1483 the cloth was described by two sacrists of the Sainte-Chapelle as "enveloped in a red silk drape, and kept in a case covered with crimson velours, decorated with silver-gilt nails, and locked with a golden key".

16th century to present

In 1532, a fire broke out in the chapel. The folded shroud was damaged by a drop of molten silver from the reliquary it was stored in, and by water used to douse the fire. It was rewoven and patched by the Poor Clare Nuns.

The shroud was moved in 1578 to Turin, where it remains to this day. It remained the property of the House of Savoy until it was bequeathed to the Holy See in 1983.

In 1988, a sliver was cut from the shroud for analysis.

In 1997, the shroud was again threatened by fire, perhaps due to arson. Fireman Mario Trematore smashed its display case and saved it from harm.

The shroud was restored in 2002, repairing the fire damage of 1532. Thirty patches were removed.

Observations and analysis

The study of the Shroud is called Sindonology (from Greek sind�n, the word used for the Shroud and also for a cloth worn by someone in the Gospel of Mark).

Criticism by historical text

Many Protestants contend that evidence the shroud is a hoax may be found in the Gospel of John in which the Christian biblical narrative identifies the wrappings of Jesus as two separate objects: "Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself" (John 20:6, 7; King James Version).

General observations

The shroud is a rectangle measuring 4.4 m by 1.1 m. The material is woven in a herringbone twill, composed of flax fibrils entwisted with cotton fibrils.

It bears a double image of a man, a front and back view that meet at the top of the head in the middle of the cloth. What appear to be bloodstains are found on the cloth, indicating that the man was wounded:

on his wrists, apparently by piercing
on his side
around his forehead
on his back and legs, apparently from whipping

The physical stature of the man is quite large�both for the time it is purported to be from and for the Middle Ages, the time of its purported fabrication.

On May 28, 1898 an amateur Italian photographer, Secondo Pia, photographed the shroud and was startled by the resulting undeveloped negative. The negative gave the appearance of a positive image, seemingly indicating that the shroud image itself is a negative (perhaps, wondered the faithful, produced upon the cloth by some form of radiation event at the moment of resurrection?). The detail and heft of the man on the shroud was greatly enhanced in the photographic negative, leading to renewed speculation on its miraculous origin. The realistically rendered three-dimensionality of the man as well as his anatomically perfect depiction have inspired believers and fascinated critics, for no known artist of ancient or medieval times approached this degree of fidelity to life, with the possible exception of a few ancient Greek and Italian renaissance sculptors. Even then, the transference of the image of a masterwork sculpture onto a flat surface while retaining its three-dimensional characteristics seems beyond any pre-20th-century process.

The age of the Shroud

In 1988 the Shroud was independently examined by Oxford University, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Using the technique of radiocarbon dating, they all agreed that the cloth dated from the 14th century.

However, some argue that the results may have been distorted by such factors as the fire of 1532, bacteria and bacterial residue that would not have been cleaned by the testing team's methods, or even neutrons released at the time of the Resurrection. The bacterial "bioplastic coating" argument is the strongest, as there have been cases in which ancient textiles have yielded radiocarbon dates much younger than other artifacts in the same sites-- most notably in the instance of mummy 1770 in the British Museum, whose bones dated 800 to 1,000 years older, according to the radiocarbon tests, than the textile in which they were wrapped. The portion of the shroud used for the radiocarbon dating was from a corner, which would have been handled often, increasing the likelihood of contamination. Bacteria and bacterial residue carry additional carbon and would skew the radiocarbon date toward the present. This theory gained considerable force when Harry E. Gove, the nuclear physicist at the University of Rochester who designed the carbon-dating technique used on the shroud, stated, �There is a bioplastic coating on some threads, maybe most.� If the coating is of a great enough thickness, according to Gove, it "would make the fabric sample seem younger than it should be" to the radiocarbon method.

The latest research has investigated the implications of the burn holes and water marks. The shroud was damaged in 1532 by a fire in the Chapel of Chambery Castle, in France, where it was kept before being brought to Turin. The burn marks date from that time and it was believed that this was also when it was damaged by being dowsed with water.

A fabrics historian has now suggested that the water damage occurred earlier, since the pattern indicates that the cloth would have been folded in the same way as treasured fabrics that were kept in clay jars, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. These date from the 1st century AD, around the time of Jesus ? which may indicate that the shroud is of a similar age.

Another piece of evidence fits this theory. A seam in the cloth is of a particular type that has only ever been seen in fabric from the fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea, which dated from the same period. Does all this add up to definite answers on the origins of the Shroud of Turin? The question remains open until the authorities allow further carbon dating tests to be done, but for Christians, this is largely irrelevant, since most would maintain that their belief is not dependent on the piece of cloth. Moreover, whatever the scientists say, many believe the marks on this piece of linen to be a miraculous image of Jesus Christ.

Is it blood?

Reports are contradictory. Chemist Walter McCrone identified the substance as vermilion paint; others have specifically identified it as type AB blood, with no evidence of any artificial pigments. Only fibrils lifted from the shroud on sticky tape were tested for blood.

Other indications

A recent BBC documentary proposed that the shroud is perhaps the first ever example of photography, showing the portrait of its maker Leonardo da Vinci. According to this theory, he produced the image with the aid of a Laterna Magica, a simple projecting apparatus, and light-sensitive silver compounds which were available at the time. However, Leonardo da Vinci was born one hundred years after the first documented appearance of the cloth.

Avinoam Danin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem claimed to have identified pollen grains originating from around Jerusalem. Danin also compared the Shroud with the Sudarium of Oviedo, which has a detailed provenance to the 1st century, determining from the pattern of bloodstains that they could have both covered the same head.

The piercing of the wrists, rather than the palms, is not consistent most medieval depictions of the crucifixion. However, it has been conjectured by Dr. Frederick Zugibe, a noted shroud researcher, that the nails may have been hammered in on an angle, entering in the palm, and exiting in the wrist. This would have tended to better support the body, and would explain the apparent contradiction with the traditional conception that the nails were "in the palm".

The weaving pattern and size of the cloth are consistent with 1st century Syrian design.

Even more remarkable features are said to be noticeable when the image is digitally processed (although such claims are highly criticized):

Coins placed on both eyes, the right one identified as a type of Roman copper coins produced in 29 and 30 AD in Jerusalem.
In 1997, Andr� Marion and Anne-Laure Courage claimed to be able to make out Greek and Latin letters near the face:
- on the right side: ΨΣ ΚΙΑ ("Ψ" supposedly with mistake from "ΟΨ" opsi = face; "ΣΚΙΑ" = shadow)
- on the left side: INSCE (supposedly from INSCENDAT, he may have climbed) and NAZARENUS
- down: ΗΣΟΥ (Jesou, of Jesus).

External links

References

Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Shroud_of_Turin" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin, used under the GNU Free Documentation License

Shroud of Turin

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