The Turin Shroud Mystery
A couple of years ago I visited Turin, mainly for the purpose of going through its excellent Egyptian Museum. I crossed the bridge into the town, admiring the splendid architecture of its squares, puzzled by the massive fortress in the centre of one square, and frustrated by the recklessness of Italian drivers. Still they were nothing new, so I just drove slowly and concentrated on following the directions given to me by Pandora, my GPS with a soft female voice. (Pandora, you may recall, was the character in Greek mythology who opened a box and let loose all the evils of the world. The hapless GPS device was dubbed with her name by my wife, who distrusts anything based on computers.)
Still, Pandora does a good job most of the time and on this occasion she led me faultlessly to the museum, ignoring the fact that the entrance is down a narrow alley in a pedestrian area of the town. Fortunately it was late in the evening and in any case Italians are fairly relaxed about cars roaring through crowds of pedestrians. I hastily made my way out of the restricted area, ignoring Pandora's demands that I "Please do a U-turn now". Still, the purpose of the expedition had been fulfilled: there was nowhere near the museum where I could park, unless I wished to explore the underground and expensive car park back in the main square.
In the morning I found a residential street a mile away where I could park all day for free. I slung my camera over my shoulder and strode briskly into town - only to discover that the museum was closed and would not open until an hour or so later. As the day was quite chilly and the alley deep in shadow I was not inclined to sit on the cold stone steps for an hour, so went off to explore around the town. Taking turns at random I eventually found myself in front of the Roman wall and other Roman buildings which were in process of excavation. I took photographs and made what I could of the Italian signs, then set off back up the street towards the Museum.
About halfway along I discovered the Duomo, the Turin cathedral, and as I still had twenty minutes to spare, I wandered in to see what wonders it contained. Stained glass, marble tombs, tawdry statues of saints, but then, on the left at the far end of the cathedral was a chapel where photography was forbidden, but on the heavy iron fence the closed the chapel was a huge photograph that stopped me in my tracks: it was the famous Shroud of Turin.
For those who have never come across it before (you can get fuller information from Wikipedia if you are interested) the Shroud is a piece of linen some 3'8" wide and 14'4" long. On it are faint yellow stains, plus patches where the ravages of time have been repaired. The yellow stains are supposed to show the body of Christ as it lay in the tomb - a typical bit of popish fraud on a par with the two (or three) heads of John the Baptist, the feather from the angel Gabriel's wing, and similar relics.
At least, that was what people thought until May 28, 1898, when an amateur photographer obtained permission from the bemused cathedral authorities to take a photograph of the shroud. Secundo Pia duly set up his infernal apparatus, disappeared under the black cloth, adjusted the focus and then inserted a glass plate and squeezed the bulb which triggered the shutter. He thanked the authorities, then went back to his dark room, warmed up his chemicals and set to work to develop the picture.
In these days of digital photography I don't suppose that many young people have ever heard the term "positive" and "negative" in relation to pictures, so let me make a short excursus to describe how things were done in the early days of photography.
It is a peculiarity of certain silver compounds that, when exposed to light, they turn black. The brighter the light, the blacker the result or the more of the compound that turns black. Photographic film is basically silver, ground very finely and then mixed with a jelly that makes it adhere to a strip of plastic or a plate of glass.
Imagine that you use this film to take a photograph in which you have the sun in the blue sky, a grass-covered hillside, in which is the entrance to a tunnel or cave. The sun will, of course, be extremely bright, the cave extremely black, and the sky and grass will be shades in between those two extremes. However when you look at your piece of film, you discover that the sun is dark black, the cave mouth is pure white, the sky is dark grey and the hillside is light grey - it is exactly the reverse of what you saw with your naked eye. It is, in fact, a negative image.
In order to produce a black and white picture of what you saw you have to go through the process a second time, shining a light through the negative onto a second piece of film, in order to produce a positive. This time the sun, blocked by its black image on the negative, comes out as white and the cave mouth, which let lots of light through, comes out as black.
When Secundo Pia developed his glass plate he was startled to discover that he was looking at a positive image of a bearded man, his hands modestly crossed over his groin. The implication was that the image on the Shroud - those faint yellow marks - was itself a negative! As no one before the invention of photography had ever considered producing a monochrome negative, it further implied that no human painter would have produced such an image.
Needless to say, the conclusion - that the image had been produced by supernatural means and was therefore undoubtedly the genuine image of the crucified Son of God - was received with scepticism by those who preferred a rational, scientific view of the world, and numerous attempts have been made to solve the mystery of the Shroud. I do not have space here - or, indeed, inclination - to attempt to sum up all the arguments on both sides of the question. The Wikipedia article, "Shroud of Turin", will give you all the information you could possibly want. The only thing that seems certain is that no one can agree on how the image was produced: all sorts of ingenious hypotheses have been proposed, dismissed, tried out, disparaged and rejected, without reaching any firm conclusion.
There is, however, one aspect of the matter that is capable of archaeological vindication. The Shroud of Turin is woven in a particular manner known as "3:1 herringbone twill". (If you want to know what that means, look up "Twill" in Wikipedia where you will even find a diagram of the weave!) Is this typical of Palestinian cloth from the first century AD? In particular, is it typical of shrouds from that era?
A discovery made this month appears to indicate that the answer is No. A team of archaeologists working in the Hinnom Valley, next to the tomb where an ossuary bearing the name "Caiaphas" was discovered, have uncovered a sealed burial. First century AD Jewish tombs were constructed as coffin-sized tunnels opening off a larger room. Bodies placed in these tunnels were left there for a year until the flesh had rotted away, after which the bones were retrieved and reburied in an ossuary. In this case the "tunnel" had never been opened and the team, led by Dr Shimon Gibson, called for DNA analysis of the skeleton which was remarkably well preserved.
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| A microscope photograph of the weave in the newly discovered shroud. |
The result was a possible reason for the untouched tomb: the discovery that the owner of the bones had been suffering from leprosy! Lepers were regarded as unclean and although the poor man actually died of TB and may not have been disfigured from the leprosy, it is still highly probable that no one was keen to handle his bones, even a year after his death.
What is to the point, however, is the fact that enough fabric from the man's shroud survived to show that it was made using a simple two-way weave, nothing like the twill of the Turin Shroud. Sceptics have gleefully seized on this fact to claim that it "proves" that the Shroud is a fake. This is, of course, not so. The fact that one single shroud was not twill does not show that the hastily procured shroud placed on Jesus might not have been. It makes it a little more unlikely, perhaps, but that is all.
The mystery remains.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
