Once again, history’s most mysterious relic is in the news. According to scientists at an Italian research facility, the Shroud of Turin is genuine: heartening its devotees, and dispiriting sceptics; puzzling those who feel they have no stake in the story either way. What are we to make of it?
Back in 1988 I interviewed the late Professor Edward “Teddy” Hall, lead scientist in a once-and-for-all bid to date the shroud with a standard carbon-14 test. Hall was an internationally respected figure in the world of archaeology and in 1953 he had declared Piltdown Man a fake.
The remains were not the “missing link” but an archaeological forgery composed of a medieval human skull, the jaw of an orangutan and teeth of a chimpanzee. By the 1980s Hall was director and founder of a world-famous research laboratory at Oxford. “Let science speak on this Shroud business,” he said. “But if it turns out not to be his nibs, the believers will be back to the drawing board!”
Later that year Hall’s Oxford group, in liaison with teams at the University of Arizona and a scientific institute in Zurich, dated the Shroud to between AD 1290 and 1390 with “a confidence of 95 per cent”. Their findings were published in Nature. Parallel research revealed that in theory the relic was made in Europe: the Shroud was almost certainly a fake. And yet, as all true scientists know, a theory is only as good as the current evidence supporting it; fresh research might yet falsify a confident result.
Now comes news that an independent laboratory specializing in applied crystallography in Bari, southern Italy, has overturned that earlier confidence. Researchers inspected a single flaxen thread from the Shroud, measuring 0.5 mm by 1.0 mm seeking alterations in the atomic structures that might reveal degradation over time thus indicating age. The result was fully compatible, they asserted, with measurements obtained on a linen control sample provenly dated between AD 55–74.
Previous and separate research, moreover, had confirmed the presence of pollen exclusive to Palestine. Palpable evidence of scourging, crucifixion and the wounded side, thus indicated the relic to be most likely the true Shroud of Christ. A final tell-tale sign was evidence of the crowning of thorns, the penalty for His claim to be King of the Jews.
Will the 1988 carbon-daters admit defeat? I have consulted scientists knowledgeable in both the Bari experiment and the carbon techniques employed in 1988. They are loath to put their names to a statement until they know more. In the interim, a top scientist in the field of archaeological age-testing in Oxford offers this word of caution: “To suggest with any kind of confidence that the Bari test overturns the 1988 result would need a huge amount of work – multiple method papers, case study papers, and an explanation as to why the original radio carbon tests were incorrect… This one Bari test case could be seen as just a coincidence!” In other words, a fluke.
Dr Liberato de Caro, the lead scientist in the Bari test, concurs up to a point. He says that the process should be repeated by other teams of scientists: “It would be more than desirable to have a collection of X-ray measurements carried out by several laboratories, on several samples.”
The story of the scientific and technological quest for the Man of the Shroud began on the night of 28 May 1898. Perched on a twelve-foot high scaffold in the sanctuary of Turin Cathedral, amateur photographer Secondo Pia attempted to take the first photographs of the relic. Owned by the royal family of Savoy, the fourteen by four feet fragile flaxen weave cloth revealed a series of ochre smudges faintly delineating the five-foot-seven figure’s front and back.
Pia operated a massive “bellows” camera, equipped with Voigtlander lens. Electric lightbulbs, powered by a generator, provided lighting. Several plates were employed with exposure times between eight and twenty minutes. Only one, with an exposure of fourteen minutes, was successful.
“Alone, locked up in my dark room, totally lost in my work,” Pia recorded later, “I witnessed a very strong sensation, when I saw, for the first time, during the development of my plates, the Holy Face.”
The image on the Shroud is a natural negative; the negative plate thus reveals a positive image. The Passion and Death of Christ had intruded with shocking physical realism on an emergent era of secularism, religious scepticism and reductionist science. Could it be genuine?
It took no time for nay-sayers to target the provenance. Leading early sceptics included the distinguished Catholic scholar Fr Herbert Thurston SJ. In the multi-volume, monumental Catholic Encyclopaedia of 1913 he declared the Shroud a fraud. Fr Thurston explained that he sought to combat “a premature and ill-grounded credulity” that harms the Church in the long run. Citing a memorandum sent by the Bishop of Troyes, Pierre d’Arcis, to Clement VII in 1389, Thurston declared that it was a money-raking medieval fake. The forger himself had confessed as much to the bishop. Meanwhile the photographic “experts” were accusing Pia of deliberately touching up the image.
In time, more thorough scholars than Thurston revealed that d’Arcis’s damning memorandum was contrived and “doctored”. Pia’s critics, moreover, were silenced in 1931 when Giuseppe Enrie became the second person to photograph the Shroud, producing an identical effect.
From the 1970s the Shroud became an object of heated historical and scientific dispute, scrutinised by a barrage of tests – from haematology to genetics, biochemistry to archaeology, radiography to physiology. The theories careered back and forth. An American microscopist working on sticky tape-lift samples insisted that the Shroud marks were made with a kind of paint available only from the 14th century. In 1980 he put the relic’s date at 1356. Yet some thirty scientists affiliated to the <em>Shroud of Turin Research Project </em>(STURP) asserted in 1982 the discovery of human haemoglobin and serum albumin – indicating severe physical trauma.
News accumulated of extraordinary claims: not least the presence of three-dimensional properties, as if formed by an X-ray process. “Did Christ rise from the dead in a burst of radiation?” For many, the notion added lustre to the mystery of the Resurrection, albeit that the image was not Christ resurrected but Christ in death. For others it smacked of what Professor Eamon Duffy terms “Beam-me-up-Scotty Mysticism.” Those early skirmishes between sceptics and believers exemplified what the philosopher of science Karl Popper termed “falsifiability”. Theories are endlessly temporary, subject to new data and evidence. The same goes for the 1988 carbon-dating group, and for the current group in Bari.
But what is there in all this for an individual’s Christian life? Has the mystery of the Shroud taken its devotees down a scientistic rabbit hole with no pastoral and spiritual dimension in view?
At St Wilfrid’s junior seminary, where I boarded in the 1950s, we kept pictures of the face of the Shroud in our daily Missals – invariably accompanied by a “holy pic” of St Thérèse of Lisieux. St Thérèse bore an image of the Holy Face based on the centuries-old devotion to Saint Veronica; her full name in religion was “Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face”.
The combined devotions of the face of the Shroud and St Thérèse’s Holy Face were strong in our parish and within our family, as they were in parishes and families across the world. My copy of Thérèse’s autobiography, <em>Story of a Soul</em>, contained a prayer to the Face of Jesus by St Pius X, accompanied by an indulgence of 300 days for each recital. The Shroud face enabled a sense of Christ’s real presence, while Thérèse’s “Little Way” was a holiness of simplicity attainable by all. These devotions of accessible spirituality became massive through the first half of the twentieth century. <em>Story of a Soul</em> sold more than half a billion copies, making it one of the biggest-selling books in history after the Bible, the Koran and the thoughts of Chairman Mao. The number of reproductions of the image of the Shroud is incalculable.
Pius X, who became pope in 1903, saw the Shroud image as a crucial tool in the battle against Modernism: attempts by scholars to critique faith reductively in the light of history and science. Here was an object as tangible as the wound in Christ’s side for Doubting Thomases. The Shroud, Pius believed, turned the Modernists’ weapons against themselves. Many decades later, a friend of Thurston – Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, Chaplain of Fisher House during my time at Cambridge, confided in hushed tones that “Father Thurston was of course a secret Modernist.”
At the same time, Pius espoused the cause for Thérèse’s canonisation. Her spirituality was no “petite fleur” sentimentality; she had encountered stark challenges: “like a mountain blotting out the stars”. French historian Henri Daniel-Rops declared her to be the Church’s answer to Nietzsche’s dead-God atheism and the rise of Communism.
Thérèse and the Shroud image powered each other through the first half of the 20th century, before declining in the 1960s. Thérèse’s spirituality, increasingly seen as acquiescent and cloistered, was an uncomfortable fit with even milder forms of second-wave feminism. The ghostly, photographic image of Christ’s face, eyes closed in death, gave way to the popularity of Eastern Orthodox icons, such as the Pantocrator: eyes wide open looking out at you and at the world. The French philosopher-critic Roland Barthes wrote in his book Camera Lucida of the photograph as essentially dead. The Byzantine icon, whatever its age, has a living vibrancy. Yet interest in the Shroud as a focus of scientific fascination continued.
In the 1980s opinions abounded. Leonard Cheshire, the famous RAF pilot and Catholic charity founder, asserted that definitive scientific proof of authenticity was impossible. Fr Gerald O’Collins SJ described the Shroud as “both/and rather than an either/or”; true or false, it prompted meditation on Christ’s passion and death. I interviewed Graham Greene, who speculated that the Shroud was true because it had no belly button – I suspect he was kidding me.
Then came an appeal to the miraculous. Latin American devotees pointed to the sixteenth-century apparition of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, which appeared miraculously on an Indian peasant’s garment to become the celebrated icon at the shrine of Our Lady of the Americas outside Mexico City. Among a circuit of ingenious hypothesisers I found art historian Thomas de Wesselow. While Christ’s body corrupted in the tomb, he hazarded, the disciples, impelled by animist beliefs, endowed the burial cloth with a sense of Christ’s living presence on which the Church was founded. The Shroud was the risen Christ!
Following the 1988 carbon test I reached my own conclusion, which was published in The Tablet. If the shroud was indeed medieval, such was the awful sense of physical authenticity that we were forced to speculate that a human victim was involved in the making. According to experts the facial characteristics corresponded with the Sephardic Jew or noble-Arab type. The image was thus an unspeakable, barbaric anti-Semitic product in the interests of ecclesiastical commerce. Cardinal Basil Hume accordingly ticked off John Wilkins, <em>The Tablet</em>’s then-editor, for running the item.
Today I have cautious optimism that the Bari tests are accurate and that they can be soundly replicated by unassailable scientific protocols; although one remains conscious of the “provenance trap”. A shrewd Shroud forger would surely attempt to find a piece of ancient linen for his artefact. Yet while I continue to hold out the possibility that the Shroud is genuine, I am ready to be surprised by new sets of falsifying evidence. In the meantime, whether true or false, what is at stake for its devotional and spiritual future?
The Holy See has held back from judgment on the Shroud, even while each pope since Pius X has endorsed its efficacy as a “sacred” object. Among the pastoral reflections on the relic, true or false, a meditation of St John Paul II strikes me as crucial. He wrote that the Shroud “is an image of God's love as well as of human sin... The imprint left by the tortured body of the Crucified One, which attests to the tremendous human capacity for causing pain and death to one’s fellow man, stands as an icon of the suffering of the innocent every age has endured.” He stops short of naming the figure as that of Jesus. In this sense the image, true or false, embraces the tortured and persecuted in every age.
Scientific preoccupation with the object, fascinating as it is, necessarily evokes comfort or disappointment with each new item of empirical evidence. Yet the Shroud offers unexpressed sustenance for religious imagination. If it could speak, what would it say to us beyond the technical jargon? In the realms of Anglo-Saxon mystical literature one extraordinary poem offers a potential touchstone: “The Dream of the Rood”. The tree that becomes the cross, imprinted as it is with nails and suffering of Christ in his agony, speaks to the Dreamer and to the reader.
The wood of the cross tells of its closeness to Christ’s wounds and agony, of sorrow, of forgiveness, and a journey from paganism to Christian belief. Instead of “radiation”, it speaks of the Saviour-Victim’s “radiance”; the tree of the cross is laden with the “treasure” of Christ’s blood rather than haemoglobin, of the “jewels” of His wounds rather than serum albumin. The dreamer does not seek to test and scrutinize the Rood, but to pray and to take courage. The lesson of the Dream of the Rood encourages us to journey beyond the Crucified One’s torture and death and on to the Resurrection and the Life beyond.
<em>John Cornwell is a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where he directs the Science and Human Dimension Project</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the October 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
