{"id":17203,"date":"2017-05-19T13:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-05-19T17:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/?p=17203"},"modified":"2017-05-18T13:44:22","modified_gmt":"2017-05-18T17:44:22","slug":"todesbanden-shroud-turin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/2017\/05\/19\/todesbanden-shroud-turin\/","title":{"rendered":"Todesbanden: On the Shroud of Turin"},"content":{"rendered":"

A talk given as part of the Musical Oratory on May 10.\u00a0 The various hyperlinks provide illustrations.\u00a0 They are not necessarily an endorsement of the material found on the pages linked. For the recording of the music part of this Oratory go to <\/i>https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/2017May10BWV4<\/a><\/p>\n

The musical focus for today is Bach’s \u201cChrist lag in Todesbanden\u201d, which has been variously translated as \u201cChrist lay in death’s bonds\u201d or \u201cin the throes of death\u201d or even \u201cin death’s dark prison\u201d.\u00a0 But these Banden \u2013 these bonds \u2013 are related, at least etymologically, to bands or strips of cloth, as in \u201cbandage\u201d.\u00a0 We find the German \u201cbanden\u201d again in a verse from the Gospel according to John:\u00a0 \u201cThey took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.\u201d\u00a0 So tonight I would like to focus on these linen cloths, and especially on the largest one, which is known as the Shroud of Turin, after the city where it has been kept since the 16th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 It is a cloth that speaks both of the death and resurrection of Christ.<\/p>\n

Many of you are familiar with the Shroud.\u00a0 If there is one scientific fact that everyone seems to know it is that the cloth has been carbon dated to 1325 plus or minus a few decades, and thus found to be a medieval forgery.\u00a0 On the other hand, you may also be aware that Saint John Paul II referred to the cloth as a \u201crelic\u201d and that he, Benedict XVI, and Francis have all taken the time to venerate it during the all too brief and infrequent public expositions that literally draw millions of the faithful to Turin.\u00a0 Clearly there must be much evidence in favour of the authenticity of the Shroud.\u00a0 Could it be that the high-tech carbon dating is wrong?<\/p>\n

The Shroud is a highly controversial artifact and much has been written both for and against its authenticity.\u00a0 I cannot hope to address all the scientific and historical evidence that has been brought up in the debate.\u00a0 Instead, I want to present you with some interesting facts that clearly have a significant bearing on whether the cloth was there in the tomb with Christ.<\/p>\n

The Shroud (click here for picture<\/a>) is a piece of linen 4.4 meters long by 1.1 meters wide.\u00a0 It usually takes some time for first time viewers of the Shroud to figure out what they are looking at because the most salient features are just distractions.\u00a0 The repeating triangles, the long dark creases, and the repeating pattern of four holes that resembles the letter L were not part of the original cloth.\u00a0 During most of its existence, the Shroud was folded up in various reliquaries.\u00a0 So\u00a0 if some damage occurred \u2013 say if a hot iron were poked through the cloth \u2013 the ensuing holes would be repeated several times as a geometrical pattern across the whole Shroud.<\/p>\n

We can only surmise that the L shaped pattern of holes was caused by a hot poker.\u00a0 It is the most ancient damage for there are pictures of the Shroud going back to 1516 and perhaps earlier<\/a> with this pattern clearly visible.\u00a0 And we know that the repeating triangles are pieces of cloth sown on to the Shroud to give it structural integrity after it was severely damaged by a fire in 1532 during its sojourn in Chambery, France.\u00a0 But while these salient features catch the eye, their only message is that some dark power has been trying to destroy the cloth.<\/p>\n

If we look more closely at the Shroud, the main image comes into view.\u00a0 If it does not, then looking at the black and white negative<\/a> will be a big help.\u00a0 This is one of the mysteries of the Shroud.\u00a0 The image as we see it is really a photographic negative.\u00a0 It is the negative of the Shroud that is the really the positive image.\u00a0 This was the discovery of Secondo Pia, who was permitted to take the first photograph of the Shroud when it was exhibited in 1898.\u00a0 When he pulled the negative out of the chemical bath, he was stunned by the clarity of the human face<\/a> staring at him.\u00a0 It is hard to believe that a forger trying to impress a medieval audience would draw the picture as a negative!<\/p>\n

But not all is negative on the Shroud.\u00a0 The blood stains around the head, near the wrists, in the chest area, at the feet, and all over the body from the scourging are all dark on the original and light \u2013 clearly reversed \u2013 on the negative.\u00a0 They are not such a mystery and we can easily see how they would transfer to a linen sheet if the body of Christ were to placed as in the picture by Della Rovere<\/a>.\u00a0 This painting also explains the orientation of the body on the Shroud: the front and back; and the front of the head being next to the back of the head.<\/p>\n

The blood turns out to be real blood and not some pigment.\u00a0 At first, the deep red colour of the bloodstains made some people skeptical that it was real, but it turns out that the intense red is precisely what one would expect on account of the chemical changes to blood through a long drawn-out traumatic death.\u00a0 The blood type is AB, which is rare.\u00a0 And it matches the blood type on the Sudarion of Oviedo, to which I will return briefly later on.<\/p>\n

The blood stains match all the descriptions of the sufferings of Christ as described in the Bible.\u00a0 And they provide two very important details that would have been just about impossible for a medieval forger to portray accurately.\u00a0 The first is the location of the wound in the hand.<\/a>\u00a0 Just about every crucifix shows the nails going into the palm.\u00a0 Certainly a medieval audience would expect this location.\u00a0 But it turns out that flesh in the palm would never be able to sustain the weight of the crucified victim.\u00a0 The Roman executioners, of course, knew this through experience and would have driven the nails through the wrist.<\/p>\n

The second historical detail is the pattern of the scourging.\u00a0 The Shroud shows many welts.\u00a0 Excavations in Herculaneum, near Pompey, have provided us with an example of a Roman flagrum, which would have caused much the same kind of damage.\u00a0 Certainly, it was not the kind of whip that was used in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ<\/i>.<\/p>\n

As revealing as the blood stains are of the sufferings and death of Christ, the deep mystery of the Shroud is the image depicting the body.\u00a0 It is clear that it is not painted.\u00a0 Some people insist that there are traces of pigment on the Shroud and that is true, because the Shroud has been in various artists’ studios where reproductions of it have been made.\u00a0 It is also very likely that the paintings were touched to the Shroud to give them the status of relics.\u00a0 But these are minute amounts of pigment, that can in no way explain the image.\u00a0 The image is caused by some modification of the fibrils making up the thread of the linen.<\/p>\n

Each of the threads is composed of about a hundred fibrils<\/a>.\u00a0 In a newly-woven cloth, all the fibrils are uniformly smooth.\u00a0 They are equally good at reflecting light.\u00a0 In the case of the Shroud, the darker areas are caused by fibrils that are rough and which seem to be corroded.\u00a0 These fibrils do not reflect as much light as the smooth ones.\u00a0 The really strange thing is that sometimes in the same thread, there are both smooth and rough fibers.\u00a0 The greater the ratio of rough fibers to smooth fibers, the darker the thread.<\/p>\n

There is more to the mystery.\u00a0 First, whenever a thread is covered in blood, its fibrils are smooth as though protected from whatever caused the corrosion.\u00a0 This indicates that the blood went on first and then the image.\u00a0 We have this same kind of shielding effect whenever a thread crosses over another.\u00a0 The \u201chidden\u201d fibrils are uniformly smooth.\u00a0 Second, the image is superficial; it does not penetrate deep into the thread.\u00a0 In 2000, scientists were able to scan the back of the image.\u00a0 Whereas the blood has soaked through the cloth and is clearly visible on the reverse side, the image is not \u2013 at least not readily.\u00a0 In 2004, some scientists claim that there is an ever-so-faint image on the back, but that there is nothing in the intervening layer, that is to say in the bulk of the thread.\u00a0 Even with modern nanotechnology, we have not been able to reproduce these details of the Shroud.<\/p>\n

There is one more high-tech effect worth mentioning: the image contains three-D information<\/a>.\u00a0 When one of the physicists in the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) put a photograph of the Shroud into an image analyzer that was originally designed to analyze x-rays by turning image density into relief information, he found that there was three-D information packed into the two-dimensional Shroud.\u00a0 No other photograph, unless specifically doctored to produce the effect, contains this information.\u00a0 Once again, the question comes to mind: why — and how — would a medieval forger put this kind of effect into the artifact if none of his contemporaries had any means of detecting it?<\/p>\n

I have mentioned a hypothetical medieval forger, because almost no one disputes that the Shroud was shown in the village of Lirey, France, in 1353.\u00a0 And this date, of course, is perfectly consonant with the year 1325 given by the carbon-14 tests.\u00a0 But several scholars have contributed to tracing the history of the Shroud right back to the time of Christ<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Shroud was in Jerusalem in around 30 A.D. \u00a0 Experts in textiles have confirmed that the cloth is of the type that was found in the area at the time, and what is more, the dimension is an exact multiple of Jewish cubits.<\/p>\n

From Jerusalem, the cloth made its way to Edessa.\u00a0 It is difficult to be precise as to how the Shroud got here, because there are conflicting accounts, but all of them have something to do with the first-century King Abgar V, who received an image of our Lord.<\/a>\u00a0 This was hidden for some time \u2013 probably to protect it.\u00a0 When it came to light in the early 6th<\/sup> century it must have caused quite a sensation.<\/p>\n

Up until that time, there was no consensus about the appearance of Christ in art.\u00a0 Saint Augustine, for one, lamented that Christians had no idea what Jesus looked like.\u00a0 But starting in the 6th<\/sup> century, the iconography quickly converged on an image that clearly resembles the face on the Shroud.\u00a0 The 6th<\/sup> century icon from St Catherine\u2019s monastery on Mount Sinai<\/a> and a coin from the 7th<\/sup> century<\/a> are probably the best known images with many points of resemblance to what the artists at the time would have known as the Image of Edessa or the Mandylion, a Greek word meaning \u201chand-towel\u201d.\u00a0 Most intriguingly the image was also referred to as the \u201ctetradiplon\u201d.<\/p>\n

The word \u201ctetradiplon\u201d is uniquely applied to the Mandylion.\u00a0 It means \u201cdoubled in four\u201d an the linked pictures<\/a> contain a schematic diagram showing the folds and the resulting image, which was a gilt frame with just the face showing through.\u00a0 The word \u201ctetradiplon\u201d and the fact that the Mandylion is in \u201clandscape\u201d rather than \u201cportrait\u201d orientation, typical of icons, suggests that there was more to the icon that met the eye.\u00a0 The surmise is that the Mandylion was the Shroud folded up.\u00a0 And yes there are reports of faint crease marks on the Shroud to corroborate this conclusion.<\/p>\n

It is known that the Mandylion was taken to Constantinople in 944 by the Byzantine Emperor.\u00a0 In 1204, one of the crusaders besieging the city wrote of rumours of a devotion which involved a contraption that raised a life-sized image of Christ from the horizontal sleep of death to an upright resurrection.\u00a0 This contraption disappeared the wide scale looting.\u00a0 But shortly afterwards, the Knights Templars were accused of venerating an image on linen cloth of a bearded man.\u00a0 This order, which took part in the fourth crusade, was suppressed at the beginning of the 14th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 When the Shroud finally made its appearance in the undisputed historical record, it was in the hands of Geoffroi de Charny, who was probably a nephew of one of the knights who were burned at the stake by Philip the Fair.<\/p>\n

The Shroud’s voyage through history is further corroborated by more scientific observations.\u00a0 First, the dust on the Shroud around the feet and the knees of our Lord, very closely matches the chemical composition of the dust in the limestone burial places near Jerusalem.\u00a0 Second, there are pollen grains on the Shroud.\u00a0 These prove that the cloth was in Jerusalem, Edessa, Constantinople, and the various places in Europe, for the pollen comes from plants that are indigenous to all those places and in some cases no where else.<\/p>\n

But what about the carbon-14 dating?\u00a0 Does that not throw a bucket of cold-water on all these other scientific and historical details that all point to the authenticity of the Shroud?\u00a0 The answer is no.\u00a0 At about the time that the tests were done in 1988, the British government body that funds science sent a sample of Egyptian mummy wrapping to over thirty carbon-dating laboratories, just to see whether such labs were worthy of public money.\u00a0 Only eight of the labs returned dates that agreed with one another and with what the archeologists who devised the test were fairly certain were the real dates.\u00a0 At the time, several archeologists indicated that they never put their complete faith in carbon-14.\u00a0 They appreciate the results as another angle on a puzzle, but they do not look upon them as infallible arbiters of historical dating.<\/p>\n

Since then, in 2005, Ray Rogers, the leader of the STURP Chemistry Group, published a detailed analysis of the 1988 tests in Thermochimica Acta, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal.\u00a0 The conclusion of the article read:\u00a0 \u201cThe combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis \/ mass spectrometry proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth.\u201d\u00a0 Succinctly put, the dated was not part of the original Shroud.<\/a><\/p>\n

Carbon dating is destructive, so the labs in 1988 were allowed to take only a small piece of cloth about 1.2 by 8 cm from near the corner of the Shroud.\u00a0 Half of that was destroyed in the testing.\u00a0 The other half was saved for other possible tests, such as those carried out by Ray Rogers.\u00a0 The edges of any cloth are stressed by handling and often get frayed, so it is not surprising that the medieval owners of the Shroud should have employed skilled artisans to repair the edges and match them as exactly as possible.\u00a0 It turns out that the medieval artisans were so good that it was mainly their patchwork that was dated \u2013 quite accurately \u2013 by the labs in 1988.<\/p>\n

Apart from destroying more of the Shroud \u2013\u00a0 and this time more of a central part \u2013 to redo the carbon dating, is there anything else that can tell us that the Shroud dates from much earlier than the middle ages?\u00a0 Yes, there is the Sudarion of Oviedo<\/a>.\u00a0 The cloth is 84 by 53 cm.\u00a0 It contains stains from blood, sweat, and other bodily fluids that would have come from our Lord’s head and face after he died.\u00a0 It was probably put on him right after He died and buried along with Him.\u00a0 It the \u201cnapkin\u201d, mentioned in John’s Gospel, \u201cwhich had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself\u201d.<\/p>\n

I already mentioned that the blood type matches the Shroud.\u00a0 What is not obvious at first sight \u2013 and in fact is obvious only to those who spend all their waking hours studying the Shroud and the Sudarion \u2013 is that the stains on the Sudarion closely match the stains on the Shroud.\u00a0 But best of all, the Sudarion comes with a historically uncontested pedigree back to the 7th<\/sup> Century, clearly beyond the dates given by the carbon-14 tests.<\/p>\n

Is the Shroud important to our faith?\u00a0 Clearly it is not part of the deposit of faith.\u00a0 Many Saints had never heard of it; and some faithful Catholics who were very aware of it thought that it was a forgery.\u00a0 John Paul II is the only recent Pope who called it a \u201crelic\u201d.\u00a0 Both Benedict and Francis, although positive about its religious importance, are more reserved.<\/p>\n

Yet history is of central importance to our faith.\u00a0 And historical claims are buttressed by material objects.\u00a0 We need to be cautious, because history has provided many examples of forgeries.\u00a0 But that does not mean that we should dismiss every material object as unworthy of belief.<\/p>\n

Perhaps one indication of the potential of the Shroud to help people to come to faith in Christ or to strengthen their faith in Christ are the many hostile reactions to it.\u00a0 The Shroud bears the marks of attempted destruction \u2013 the poker holes and the patches from the fire in Chambery.\u00a0 It was only thanks to the heroic firemen of Turin that we still have the Shroud, because an arsonist set the Cathedral on fire before the 1998 exhibition.\u00a0 The resulting blaze did extensive damage to the building.\u00a0 There are the myriad attempts to replicate the Shroud, trumpeted in the news media as \u201cMystery Solved\u201d, which come nowhere close to solving the mystery.\u00a0 And there is the carbon-dating result, which is portrayed as the definitive word.\u00a0 Science has spoken, the matter is closed.<\/p>\n

Should a new carbon dating test be done?\u00a0 Should we use science against science?\u00a0 Apart from destroying more of the cloth, such tests would not prove anything.\u00a0 Already there are theories that the Shroud will always test younger because the resurrection might have involved some sort of a high energy particle interaction that would have created some radio-active carbon in the process and scorched the cloth to create the mysterious negative image.\u00a0 Science is not equipped to deal with such theories.\u00a0 But apart from the carbon dating, science has provided many important arguments for the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as the burial cloth of Christ.<\/p>\n

It is not difficult to transfer blood to a linen cloth.\u00a0 The Shroud is not a unique cloth in that respect, just as the death of Christ can be seen as a sharing in the common historical reality in the life of every man \u2013 death.\u00a0 But the resurrection of Christ, although it happened in history, is a unique event that is transhistorical.\u00a0 As John Paul II put it:\u00a0 \u201cIt is an event pertaining to the transhistorical sphere, and therefore eludes the criteria of simple human empirical observation. It is true that Jesus, after the resurrection, appeared to his disciples. He spoke to them, had dealings with them, and even ate with them. He invited Thomas to touch him in order to be sure of his identity. However, this real dimension of his entire humanity concealed another life which was now his, and which withdrew him from the normality of ordinary earthly life and plunged him in mystery.\u201d\u00a0 So it should not be too surprising that there is one mysterious image in the world that cannot be explained by scientific means.\u00a0 It is a silent but eloquent witness to something much greater.<\/p>\n

By Fr Martin Hilbert, Cong. Orat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A talk given as part of the Musical Oratory on May 10.\u00a0 The various hyperlinks provide illustrations.\u00a0 They are not necessarily an endorsement of the material found on the pages…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/shroud-e1495129372370.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8brX6-4tt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17204,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17203\/revisions\/17204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}