30 March: The Turin Shroud

On Holy Saturday, 30 March 2013, images of the Turin Shroud were streamed on various websites and on television. 10 things you might not know about the shroud of Turin:

1. It measures approximately 4.4 by 1.1 metres (14 ft 5 in × 3 ft 7 in). It bears a faint image of a naked man with his hands folded across his groin. He has a Beard, moustache, and shoulder-length Hair parted in the middle. He is muscular and tall (approx 1.70 to 1.88 m or 5 ft 7 in to 6 ft 2 in). Reddish brown stains on the cloth are consistent with the wounds Christ would have suffered during crucifixion. It’s also consistent with the way bodies would have been wrapped for burial in Christ’s time. Although bodies would normally have been washed before being wrapped, this may have been a task delayed until after Passover.

2. The first historical record of the shroud was in Lirey, France during the 1350s. The story goes that a knight called Geoffroi de Charny showed up at a local church with it, and presented it to the Dean as Jesus’ authentic burial shroud. How Geoffroi got his hands on it, or where it had been for the previous 1300 years was not recorded.

3. The Catholic church declared it was a forgery just 30 years later. In about 1389, Pierre d’Arcis, bishop of Troyes, sent a report to Pope Clement VII claiming an artist had confessed to forging the shroud. D’Arcis accused the dean in Lirey of knowing it was a fake and using it to raise Money anyway. In response, the pope declared the shroud wasn’t authentic, but the Lirey church could still display it provided it was acknowledged as a man-made religious “icon,” not a historic “relic.” It was very common at the time for people to forge relics and sell them to make a quick buck.

4. The de Charnay family’s involvement wasn’t quite over. In 1418, with the Hundred Years War getting dangerously close to Lirey, Geoffroi’s granddaughter Margaret offered to hide the shroud in her castle for safe keeping. She then broke her promise to return it, and took it on tour, displaying it as authentic. In 1453, she sold the shroud for two castles to the royal house of Savoy. As punishment for selling the shroud, she was excommunicated.

5. It has narrowly escaped being destroyed by Fire twice. The first time was in 1532 in the Sainte-Chapelle in Chambéry, where the Savoy family had put it. The silver container it was kept in partially melted during the fire and drops of molten silver fell on the shroud. The burn marks and the water stains from where the fire was extinguished are still visible today. The second time was in 1997 when a fire broke out in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, where the shroud has been kept since 1578. Firefighters had to hammer through four layers of bulletproof Glass to save the shroud.

6. The first photograph of the shroud was taken in 1899. What became clear then was that the image on the shroud was a negative. The photographic negative showed a positive image in which more details not previously visible could be observed. Which raises questions, since a medieval forger wouldn’t have had any concept of negative images.

7. Direct access to the shroud for scientific study was granted in 1978. There was extensive testing carried out on the material and the pigments forming the image. Carbon dating was carried out and determined with 95% accuracy that it dated to 1260-1390. Later on Italian scientists analysed the dust collected when the shroud and its backing cloth were vacuumed. They found traces of 19 different plants, originating from all over the world.

8. The bloodstains are actually human Blood. The blood is type AB and further tests revealed that some of the blood had come from a living person and some had come from a corpse. This showed that if it’s a forgery, the forger paid incredible attention to detail for the time. One theory is that the forger was an embalmer, who used one of the bodies he was working on to create the image. However, to create the image as it is they would have to press the material onto the corpse which would have distorted the image.

9. There is a word for the formal study of the shroud: Sindonology. It’s derived from the Greek word the Gospel of Mark uses for the burial shroud.

10. Real or fake, there is evidence that the shroud influenced the way people visualise Jesus. Images of Jesus before the shroud image was widely known depicted him as clean-shaven and baby-faced with short hair. Those images changed over time to match that of the face on the shroud.