A Christian book review, but first, a dirty joke:
A man goes to a psychologist, and they decide to start with a Rorschach test. He’s shown the first picture and sees a man and a woman making love at the beach. In the second, a man and a woman making love in a hottub. The third has a man and a woman making love in a park. In all of the pictures, the man sees a couple making love. After the test, the psychologist looks over her notes and says, “You seem to have a preoccupation with sex.” The man replies, “You’re the one with all the dirty pictures.”
And so it is with the Shroud of Turin. Whether you look at the Shroud of Turin and see the face of the tortured, crucified and risen Lord, or if you see a cunning and deceitful forgery from an oppressive culture of liars, I’d think that either of these says more about you than it does about the length of old linen in question, since what we know with absolute certainty about the Shroud is easily eclipsed by what we presume, what we think, what we feel, what we want to know, and what we want to be true.
To some, the Shroud is the holiest of relics, the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, the cloth container for the Resurrection. To them The Shroud is proof positive of the Incarnation and Resurrection where no proof is necessary.
Here is the text of a 1998 address Pope John Paul II gave at Turin. I get the impression that his personal feelings were that the relic is authentic.
Others are quite ready to put more faith into things like C-14 radiocarbon dating. Some people are more comfortable believing that a 17 year old Leonardo DaVinci invented photography three hundred years before anyone else, made a single historically accurate fourteen foot long front and back photograph of a naked crucified man, and then never made another photograph in his life.
face detail image of the Shroud in negative
Are cynics like the psychiatrist’s patient who sees sex in every inkblot, seeing reasons to doubt because they do doubt? Maybe the good Doctor would tell believers “You seem to have a preoccupation with the Resurrection.” To which I would hope to reply “You’re the one with all the pictures of the crucified Christ!”
image from Identifont, preview of the font called Rorschach
Author Ian Wilson has made a careful study of the Shroud and presents an authenticist’s case in The Blood and The Shroud. Or, rather, he does not present a case for the Shroud being the actual burial cloth which held a particular Jesus Christ during a particular resurrection event. He simply refutes the various assertions which call that an impossibility and leaves the ultimate conclusion in the realm of faith.
What is science to do? It is not as though the rising from the dead of a God-man is something that can be experimentally reproduced by a physicist or medical doctor in a laboratory environment to positively identify the scorched photo-like image. Science can only observe the observable and comprehend the comprehensible. This does tend to lead people towards natural explanations. If the cloth image is in fact the result of a supernatural event like the once-in-history fission reaction that was God-made-man coming back from the dead it is to be expected that a few scientists would propose explanations that fall short.
half-length image of the Shroud in positive
If the Shroud is a hoax, by the way, it is still a marvelous thing to consider.
Wilson does not arrogantly presume authenticity and he is rather respectful towards the better developed of the various “cunning forgery” theories. Much of the text is devoted to explaining how various fakery claims are tenuous with frail supports with an image and artifact this complex.
If a forger wanted to decieve the medieval public, he would not have needed to go to such lengths, less convincing forgeries of many kinds were put over on people. If a hoaxer wanted to portray the body of the crucified Christ, wouldn’t he have put nail-holes in the hands, where the art of the time shows them instead of getting this detail “wrong” by showing them in the wrists?
Would a faker have known to put little metal dumbbells at the tips of the whipcords?
The tone is conversational, never more technical than necessary and always clear. There are 244 pages and nearly 50 pages of illustrated plates.
The Sweet Spot: If you’re curious about the Shroud, if you’re open to thinking about it’s potential history and you’re willing to work through some modestly technical discussions then this book could be a real pleasure for you. You might come away more prepared to believe the story it tells.
I read Wilson’s 1978 book (Amazon.com) back before 1988 radiocarbon dating called it a ‘fraud from the middle ages’. I remember being moved by the story the cloth tells more than I cared for the particulars of the cloth. Be it a hoax, a miracle or something in-between, it still tells the story of a horribly battered and bloodied man, crucified, with something on his head that made his scalp bleed at points.
More:
A recent BBC article on science revisiting the Shroud. There are a few stories there.
The Wikipedia article. (a difficult article for anyone to edit, and a strain on the self-regulation and impartiality of the Wiki community, but not unfairly done, at the moment.)
