How could I not read it? The book, Verdict on the Shroud, by Stevenson and Habermas (1981), was offered to me by the very same elderly lady who brought my attention to the faces in the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. Turn her down? Hardly. And, as I thought (really, knew), it has turned out to be the right choice, although not only for the reason that I had thought.
The Shroud: the big problem presented to us over the years has been its provenance, or history: can we trace it back to the time and place where Jesus died? Surely with modern technology we can find out its age. As it is supposed to show the image of Christ as he lay in his linen shroud (briefly) in the tomb, if it does not date back to his day, then it must be a counterfeit, just another fraud from the late medieval period. If it does, well, then it could be from Jesus, although it might also be from anyone else from that time and place, or at least that is what one would suppose. Except for one big aspect that creates a problem regardless of testing on chronology – the artifact itself.
But there is also its story. It did not become definitively known to the public until 1357, when the wife of the French knight Geoffry de Charny, one Jeanne de Vergy, put it on display for money after her husband died in the Battle of Poitiers. The local bishop called it a fake and tried to stop her; the pope intervened and let her fund-raising effort continue. Later, the widow (remarried) sold it to the House of Savoy, one of whose members eventually became King of Italy (and was, as of 1980, in exile in Portugal), who now (as of 1980, anyway) owns it. None of that is amazing, although the politics behind the veracity of the Shroud almost sent parts of Europe into war; what is amazing is its possible route to France and to de Charny.
The story of this journey begins in what is now Turkey in the city of Edessa. There, King Abgar was a resolute pagan who was stricken with leprosy. Legend has it that he had heard of Jesus and his healing power and had written him to come to his aid. He did not, but after Jesus’s death, a disciple brought the shroud or some clothe bearing the likeness of Jesus to the king, who was cured on the spot. That is legend, but history tells us that the king did become a Christian. His son, Man’nu, however, turned violently against Christians after his father’s death. In desperation, the Christians stuffed the shroud, or clothe, into a niche in the wall of the city where it was found remarkably preserved by the Byzantines several centuries later, in 525 AD. There it was preserved until the Emperor of the eastern (once Roman) Empire attacked the city to take it from the Muslims in 944. Thereafter, it was called the Mandylion, and was kept in a treasured spot in Constantinople.
It gets weirder. During the 4th Crusade in 1204, the Christian army went bonkers on their way to the Holy Land and sacked the then-Christian city in what is now considered one of the most shameful acts of Christendom. In any event, it was then that the Mandlyion, which may have been the Shroud, disappeared – only to turn up when the widow of Geoffrey de Charny put it on display to keep out of hock after his death.
The weirdest part of the story is this: In 1314, King Phillip the Fair of France went on a crusade of his own against the Knights Templar, who had been the official caretakers of the Holy Land during the Crusades, and who had gotten too rich and too powerful for the king. He accused them of all sorts of nasty things and had most of them tortured and burned at the stake, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Moley, and his deputy: Geoffrey de Charnay. Could it be that this Charnay was the grandfather or lineal ancestor of the nobleman and knight Geoffrey de Charny? Odds are that he was. And thus the almost impossible journey and provenance of the Shroud might be mapped through an odd set of circumstances befitting the creativity of the Holy Spirit.
Now, the artifact itself: with its checkered past, the Shroud was still considered by most learned people to be an interesting forgery or fraud after it became the property of the Savoy’s. Although the common folk venerated it, even the Vatican held back its appraisal (and still does, as far as I know). Then, in 1898 during an exhibition of the Shroud, a photographer named Secondo Pia was allowed to take the first -ever photo of it. When he went to develop it, he was stunned, as the world soon came to be: the image of the Shroud in negative was strikingly clear. Whereas before it was a bare outline, in the negative the face, the holes in the hands and feet, even the wounds on the head were visible. It was clearly a real man who had been crucified just as Jesus had. How could it be that a forger would have worked his art at a time when no one had the concept of negatives? Even so, how could it have been done with the technology of the time, and why, when no one would be there to appreciate it? Its time of fame had arrived.
Enter the survey of NASA engineers and other experts in 1978, from which the facts in this book were taken. Here, the team did everything BUT a carbon-14 dating (as this, for a good result, destroys too much material); they did microscopic analysis of the fibers, of spores found in the linen, of the depth of the image, and on and on. The interested reader can look it all up, but what it all amounted to was that there was no known way, either in the past or now, that it could have been done. Many tried to duplicate it; all tried to explain it in some practical way - and all failed.
A carbon 14 dating was done in 1988 with a tiny bit of material, and it was found to be from the 14th century. Too bad, except: the sample was too small for precise analysis AND the material had been taken near a patch put in after a fire had damaged it in the 1500’s. Later, in (I think) 2014, another type of process was used that dated it at 400 BC to 300 AD. A few years later, a theory was proposed that an earthquake provided radiation sufficient to send the image out onto the cloth. Of course, the Bible tells us that an earthquake did shake the city after the death of Jesus. But could it print the features so perfectly, with variations that allowed precise 3-D re-modeling? So perfectly that the tears of flesh from the flogging are clearly seen? So perfectly that the coins over the eyes can be seen – and by one expert, are clearly coins from the precise time of Jesus’s death?
The provenance, the dating – these we have always been pointed towards, but the big thing is, and always will be, that the image defies explanation. As the non-scientist of the authors said, with no contradiction from the scientist, the clearest explanation is supernatural. Some extra- natural force made the image, the image that mirrors exactly what we know of Jesus (age and physical type from carpentry, and more) and how he died. Even if it is not believed that this is the image of Christ, it is something that is from beyond our knowledge.
And still the world turns as if all is explained, or will be explained, and we live and die with no other potential. As the woman who has shown me yet another miracle might put it, “what’s wrong with you?”
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