– A blind test? –asked Luigi Gonella, of the Turin Polytechnic, the man responsible for the scientific studies of the Holy Shroud.
– A blind test! –emphatically confirmed the representatives of three laboratories located in Great Britain (the Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology, of the Hall Institute), Switzerland (the Federal Institute of Technology) and the United States (the laboratory of the University of Arizona at Tucson).
Luigi Gonella agreed. “Blind,” it was understood –as they agreed– meant that, in order for each of the laboratories to carry out the Carbon-14 test, they would be sent three “unidentified” samples: one corresponding to a first-century fabric, another to a fourteenth-century cloth, and the third belonging to the Shroud of Turin; that is to say, they were given one sample of the Holy Shroud and two control samples (a fourth was surprisingly added), anonymously, without their knowing the identification codes of each sample, so that they could not tell which was the one corresponding to the Shroud (this last precaution proved useless for several reasons — among others, because, since the samples were not shredded, the one from the Shroud’s fabric is very easy to identify, given that the texture and thread weight of its weave have been widely publicized).
“I believe it is the first time,” declared Luigi Gonella, “that laboratories have offered their services to the owner of an object and not the other way around. I regret that they have ruled out the possibility offered to them of a joint investigation with other specialists.”
Soon, however, the great “sarcasm” involved in the offer made by these laboratories and their request to work “blind” became known. It had in fact been agreed that the identification codes of the samples would be opened only in the presence of the custodian of the Holy Shroud, Cardinal Ballestrero. But, as Gianni Sangalli, editor of the journal “Torino,” wrote: “It is astonishing that serious scientific institutes such as these three laboratories should have leaked news so specific that it allowed journalists to speak of a ‘medieval forgery’ months before the investigations were brought to completion.” And he continues: “It is worth highlighting the fact that the three laboratories which, on the one hand, tolerated no oversight of their work by experts in sindonology and in the vicissitudes of the Shroud’s history, nor by the representative of the custodian of the Shroud or of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and which, on the other, had committed themselves to working independently of one another and, moreover, to doing so ‘blind,’ apparently felt the need to meet in Switzerland a few months before making the results of their investigations public.”
The newspaper “ABC” echoed a lengthy piece in which “the French scholar Bruno Bonnet-Eymard accused the scientist Michael Tite, curator of the British Museum in London, of having replaced the piece of cloth cut from the Holy Shroud, which was analyzed by the Carbon-14 method, with another made in the Middle Ages. Bruno Bonnet asserted that Jacques Evin, director of the Radiocarbon Laboratory of the French University of Lyon, gave Tite a piece of medieval cloth dating from between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, very similar to the fabric of the ‘Shroud,’ which had belonged to a cope of Saint Louis of Anjou, who died in 1297. In the opinion of the French scholar, it is very likely that Tite exchanged the genuine piece of cloth for the medieval one, and the whole operation therefore turned out to be a farce.”
Likewise, an English newspaper reported the news, picked up by the magazine “Epoca,” that one of the scientists who performed the Carbon-14 test was paid, instead of the fifty thousand pesetas due to him for his work, two hundred million pesetas! (Loring, video “La Sábana Santa”)
In any case, the pressure that the great majority of television networks, radio stations, newspapers and magazines exerted on public opinion, asserting that the Carbon-14 test had definitively demonstrated the falsity of the Holy Shroud, grew intense enough that Cardinal Ballestrero felt obliged to summon the media and give an account of the “falsity” of the Holy Shroud, on the basis of a simple telegram in which the results were communicated to him. Such was the international campaign accusing the Shroud of being a mere “medieval forgery” that the most studied archaeological object of all time, about which dozens upon dozens of investigations indicated with almost one hundred percent probability that the Shroud was authentic, stood refuted by means of a simple telegram (the report was published half a year later, on February 16, 1989, in the journal “Nature”).
Naturally, the scientists who carried out the Carbon-14 dating have been invited to the various international congresses and symposia, but they have never attended, except for the congress held in Paris in September 1989. Hounded by the criticisms of the scientists and without valid answers to give (Loring, video cited), Tite, the general coordinator, wrote the following letter on September 14: “Dear Professor Gonella. After the recent Paris congress, I am writing to remind you that I, too, do not regard the result of the dating of the Turin Shroud as a demonstration that it is a fake. As you rightly stressed, calling it a fake implies a deliberate intention to deceive, whereas the date of the radiocarbon examination clearly offers no evidence in favor of that thesis. I myself wished to avoid using the word fake, but I fear that references to the Shroud in those terms may have originated in the numerous newspaper articles written in the wake of the interviews I gave. I can only ask you to excuse me once again for all the problems that those articles have caused you and the others in Turin.”
In short, there is no doubt that, since the discovery of the Carbon-14 method, no scientist has been charged with as many specific breaches of professional ethics as those of these three laboratories, without their having given any answer, published a single article, or made any statement in defense of their “scientific” conduct. And likewise, rarely in the course of this century has almost the entire body of the media shown a greater interest in announcing that “the Holy Shroud is a fake,” in the sense that this raises serious doubts against the Faith or against the honesty of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
This fact confirms once more the hypothesis maintained throughout the present book: the Holy Shroud constitutes a motive of credibility of such force that it confronts whoever comes to know it with the truthfulness of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, confirming the authenticity of the Gospels and of the Christian doctrine, which are shown to be true.
This is said because the reader can imagine what the media would have said had it been a question of the burial cloth of, say, Tutankhamun (with the legend that surrounds him).
The media would have highlighted the inappropriateness of applying the Carbon-14 method to a cloth which, like the Shroud, has undergone over the centuries so many and such varied vicissitudes that scientists consider it highly probable that they could have altered the chemical composition of the carbon contained in it.
Apart from the fire at Chambéry already mentioned, the Shroud has endured at least one other fire, which left its marks in the form of small scorches. But considering the Chambéry fire alone, let it not be forgotten that the cloth withstood temperatures so high that they melted the silver of the casket containing it, burning a good part of it. To put out the fire, almost the whole of it was soaked in water, water which carried carbonaceous particles along with it (to say nothing of what a sixteenth-century chronicler relates, if it is true: “In order to verify whether it was the authentic Holy Shroud, it was boiled in oil, passed through fire, washed and rubbed several times, but the figure could not be erased”).
Moreover, the Shroud has remained exposed to the open air for hundreds of hours, perhaps to the direct rays of the sun, and everyone knows the strong effect that sunlight, even diffuse, has on linen. On many other occasions it has been spread out for hours and even days in damp, cold churches, in enclosed premises packed with crowds of the faithful (hence in atmospheres laden with carbon dioxide) and close to rows of lighted candles, with the consequent production of smoke. It has been touched by hundreds of hands that have folded and unfolded it…hands that may well, at times, have been somewhat sweaty. It has been placed in contact with the sick to obtain their cure, and caressed and kissed, possibly thousands of times…In a few words, it is estimated that the foreign matter incorporated into the fabric of the Shroud amounts to 10 to 15 percent of its weight. (P. Solé, “La Sábana Santa de Turín”).
Furthermore, the media would have backed up the foregoing reports with the statements of Libby himself, the discoverer of the Carbon-14 method, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Libby declared in his day: “The Carbon-14 test cannot be applied to the Shroud of Turin. The results would necessarily be false.”
And not only this. The media would have ridiculed the results of the C-14 method: they would have recalled, for example, the dating of those living trees, standing along one of the motorways leading to Rome, which C-14 determined had died hundreds of years earlier; or they would have reproduced the news item published in the journal “SCIENCE” in December 1988, according to which C-14 had dated some living snails at 26,000 years old — that is, as if those snails had died 260 centuries ago.
Likewise, the media would have thrown in the face of the Tucson laboratory, which took part in the process of dating the Shroud, that it had pronounced a present-day tablecloth to be hundreds of years old — that is, that the linen with which the tablecloth was woven had been cut several centuries earlier. And of the Zurich laboratory, which was likewise one of the three that dated the Shroud, that in its analysis of a Viking horn it determined that the animal from which that horn came would die in the year 2006 after Christ. For good measure, they would have highlighted how strongly archaeologists relativize the results of C-14.
The media, however, would have been mistaken to a great extent, because since Libby’s day the procedures for cleaning the objects to be subjected to the C-14 test have improved enormously; and although errors do exist, the truth is that the C-14 method is well proven, and even though archaeologists relativize its results, C-14 frequently constitutes one of the significant data in the dating of an object.
Perhaps the reader does not share in the exercise in hypotheticals just carried out. Its purpose is to highlight that the discovery of imprints on the burial cloth of Tutankhamun, since it would not compromise people’s interior conduct, would indeed constitute a fascinating piece of news. In the case of the Holy Shroud the news is also interesting, but since it implies the necessary admission of the reality of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who said that He was the Son of God, the commitment it entails for the orientation of one’s own life according to the Christian message has a radical character.
Manuel Ordeig, Doctor of Agricultural Engineering and Doctor of Theology, published in issue 299, of April 1990, of the magazine “Palabra” the most measured and thought-provoking article on the C-14 test applied to the Holy Shroud. Here are some of its paragraphs.
THE INTERPRETATION OF THE CARBON-14 ANALYSES
An assessment of those analyses and of their results is in order: of the analyses taken in themselves, and of their relation to the other data known about the Holy Shroud.
Let it be said from the outset that the Carbon-14 analysis, in an archaeological study, is one datum among others; by no means apodictic. In a serious scientific study all the data are important. No result is ever rejected, nor another accepted, without a critical examination of its validity. In the case of the Holy Shroud, many have uncritically accepted the Carbon-14 result, forgetting the other data — likewise scientific — that are available for checking it. Unfortunately, there are also people who dismiss the Carbon-14 result a priori, simply because they do not like it; and that is not legitimate either.
According to the argument of one specialist (Michael Winter, “Fiabilité de datations par le C-14,” in “Les Nouvelles du Ceshe,” Feb. 84), “in practice, the (C-14) results are so scattered that many of them are never made public. If a date resulting from C-14 confirms our theories, we introduce it into the text of our thesis. If it is only partially contradictory, we relegate it to a footnote. If it differs entirely from the thesis defended, we set it aside altogether.”
This means that, in addition to C-14, every archaeological project needs other chronological references against which to check its results. “A dating isolated from the archaeological context is not sufficient to define the age of an object” (Marie-Claire van Oosterwyck-Gastuche: Paris congress, September 1989). No serious archaeologist, then, accepts the results of C-14 as an article of faith, especially if they contradict other datings to which he may subject his research. Naturally, neither does he ignore them because they conflict: they pose a problem for him and urge him to go on investigating, until he arrives at an explanation of the reason for that apparent divergence.
One of the most surprising things about the article in “Nature” is the ignorance it displays regarding all the other investigations carried out on the Shroud. It is as though no one had said anything about that cloth before 1988. In the bibliography they cite there is only one work on the Holy Shroud — a rather incomplete one, at that. What is more, they went to the extreme of not allowing any other researcher versed in sindonological questions to attend their analyses and tests; and they flatly refused an interdisciplinary study of the results.
This attitude has understandably left many researchers of the Shroud hurt and somewhat resentful. And it is also understandable that such an attitude should carry with it a certain distrust, at least toward the intentions of those who performed the analyses.
A-CRITICAL RESULTS
The most serious objection that can be raised against accepting what the aforementioned “Nature” article says is perhaps that it is an a-critical exposition of the Carbon-14 results. Dr. Tite, in fact, confines himself to a merely statistical study of the results obtained by the three laboratories: a cataloguing of the twelve age data.
For its part, the Spanish Center of Sindonology, which has kept its members rigorously informed of the news arising since the C-14 test, released in 1992 a report that marks the beginning of the “rectification of the age of the Holy Shroud on the basis of Carbon-14 itself.” Here, with some modifications and additions, are several paragraphs of the fascinating report in issue 7 of the journal “Linteum,” published by that Center:
As is well known, in 1988 three laboratories (Oxford, Zurich and Arizona) analyzed respective fragments of linen from the Holy Shroud; the results for the proportion of C-14 found in its fibers made it possible to deduce that the Shroud was about 700 years old, which placed the date of its manufacture around the year 1300.
From the very first moment, the scientists familiar with the Shroud, who had previously subjected it to other analyses, doubted the validity of the dating performed with the C-14 method. Their objections were based on the data published in various scientific journals concerning the baffling nature of the Shroud’s imprint, absolutely incompatible with any medieval forgery. Now Jean-Baptiste Rinaudo, a researcher in nuclear medicine at Montpellier, has developed a theory according to which the mechanism by which the image was formed could have distorted the results of the C-14 tests.
The greatest enigma of the Holy Shroud is undoubtedly the origin of the imprints it bears. “Portrayed” on the Shroud is the image of a crucified man, crowned with thorns and pierced by a lance, whose analysis matches the descriptions of the Passion of Jesus Christ given in the Gospels. Yet no one has been able to discover how those impressions were produced. The studies carried out in the late 1970s by members of the STURP team (Shroud of Turin Research Project), published in various scientific journals, determined that these imprints are not a drawing; they are not paint, nor printing, nor engraving; they are not produced by impregnation or vaporography; they are not — as some claim — thermo-oxidizing marks produced by an overheated bronze relief; in short, no one knows what they are, and up to now the whole immense scientific capacity of the twentieth century has proved insufficient to reproduce a similar effect on another linen cloth. More than one researcher has in all seriousness described these imprints as ONE OF THE MOST ASTONISHING ENIGMAS IN HISTORY.
Very recently, however, J.B. Rinaudo has succeeded in producing on a linen cloth an imprint in some ways similar to the image of the Holy Shroud. The Shroud’s imprints are formed by an extremely slight oxidation and dehydration of the outermost microfibrils of the thread that makes up the fabric of the Holy Shroud. Each linen thread, similar in appearance to an ordinary thread, is actually made up of several hundred linen fibrils, interlaced with the following ones to give the thread continuity. The Shroud’s imprints affect exclusively the outermost microfibrils of each thread: only one hundredth of the thickness of the linen thread is altered; and not because it “has” anything on it (paint, etc.), but because a little water has been “taken away” from it and some of the cellular components of the linen have oxidized. This imprint, so characteristic and so unusual — no other like it is known in the world — has been reproduced in its essential characteristics by the aforementioned French researcher.
Rinaudo, starting from the fact that, under the effects of a source of energy, heavy hydrogen (deuterium) releases a proton and a neutron, has established that this highly energetic proton is capable of degrading linen, producing an imprint to a certain extent analogous to that of the Holy Shroud.
Besides this imprint, there is a second effect of tremendous importance for dating the Shroud. The neutron released together with the proton collides with atomic nuclei of carbon, transforming them into Carbon-14 and thus enriching the percentage of C-14 in the linen as a whole. As the proportion of C-14 in the cloth increases, the cloth appears “younger” (that is, richer in C-14) than it ought to be if it were from the first century. In fact, once this C-14 enrichment effect is discounted from the results given by the laboratories that analyzed the Shroud, it could be — with relative approximation — somewhat earlier than the first century.
The action of protons on linen to form the image has been verified in a particle accelerator at Grenoble (France). At the same time, in Lyon (France), the enrichment in C-14 produced by that nuclear bombardment has been demonstrated and measured.
Rinaudo managed to reproduce, on some thread fibrils, oxidations similar to those that form the imprints of the Holy Shroud, by bombarding a linen cloth with alpha rays from the disintegration of deuterium. At the same time, those protons (alpha rays) were accompanied by low-energy neutrons (thermal neutrons) from the same deuterium; these produced an enrichment of the linen in Carbon 14. If this hypothesis about the formation of the Shroud’s imprints were true, then, along with the oxidation stain, it would explain the apparent distortion of the cloth’s age; for, being enriched in C-14, the linen would appear “younger” than it really is…
According to J.B. Rinaudo, when he explains his research and applies it to the Shroud of Turin, “everything happens as if that radiation had been finely dosed. Indeed, had there been too much energy and, consequently, too many protons, the image would have turned out excessively dark. If, on the contrary, the energy had been scant, the image would have shown little contrast and would therefore have been illegible. It is exactly as if someone had had the precise intention of producing the image.”
Rinaudo compared this phenomenon with the origin of the universe (the famous Big Bang), where it is likewise necessary to admit an enormous and unknown source of energy — likewise extremely finely dosed. In both cases one arrives at a question mark.
The C-14 analyses performed on May 1 of that same year on Rinaudo’s linen fragments proved him right as to the enrichment in C-14: a 102% increase in the level of C-14. Precisely what is needed to turn a first-century cloth into a fabric apparently of the thirteenth century. This does not settle everything, but it confirms Rinaudo’s intuition that we are on the right track.
Naturally, there remains no scientific explanation of what the source of NUCLEAR energy was that, twenty centuries ago, could have bombarded the linen Shroud and imprinted those changes upon it.
What will always remain a mystery, however, is the identity of that dead body which was able to EMIT AN ENERGY OF A NUCLEAR KIND, EXTREMELY BRIEF, EXTREMELY INTENSE AND PERFECTLY ADJUSTED TO THE EFFECT OF LEAVING US ON THE CLOTH THE IMPRINTS OF ITS BODY
THE MATERIAL IMPRINT OF A RESURRECTION?
– Doctor, you are in danger. Leave quickly through the back door- whispered one of his devoted assistants.
Doctor Yves Delage, a physician of international renown, director of the Roscoff laboratory, an active militant in the atheist-rationalist ranks, broke off his lecture and stared in astonishment at the aggressive, flushed and vociferous crowd of his fellow believers in the atheist ideal and in scientific progressivism. They accused him of treason, and numerous fists began to rise threateningly.
– Please, doctor, I will gather everything up myself. You must leave as soon as possible- his collaborator urged again, imploringly.
Yves Delage realized that he was right and began his retreat from the platform toward the back door. He was intercepted by the Secretary of the Academy, his face contorted, his voice strained and shrill:
– Monsieur Delage, I take personal responsibility for ensuring that in the Proceedings of this Most Illustrious Academy no record remains of the name you have pronounced in connection with the cloth of Turin.
Delage could not believe what he was hearing and seeing. Among most of the members of the Académie des Sciences there existed a very special bond, as usually happens among all who share the same ideal, above all when it is a minority one. And the truth was that, even in 1902, the ideal of an active and militant atheism, regarded as an inexhaustible source of constant material, scientific and liberating progress, was shared only by certain highly qualified minorities in Europe and America. Indeed, the belief that, to the extent that the people freed themselves from their religious faith, an unstoppable scientific development, material well-being and civic freedom would follow, was shared and fought for only by small groups of intellectuals, artists and businessmen.
But what Delage could not fathom was the reaction of his fellow militants to what he had just set forth in his lecture; for he had often discussed with them the difference between their atheist and rationalist mentality — tolerant, understanding, open to any idea or progress of whatever stripe — and the Catholic mentality, dogmatic, intolerant, clinging to inquisitorial and reactionary forms. And yet now here they were, his own companions in the struggle for that sublime ideal which liberating, anti-dogmatic, rationalist atheism meant for him, insulting him, threatening him, accusing him of being a traitor, because in presenting the results of one of the most exhaustive investigations carried out in his life as a scientist, he had placed on record the authenticity of the cloth of Turin, and likewise that the characteristics appearing in the figure on this cloth coincided with those of the historical personage called JESUS OF NAZARETH.
What a difference! Scarcely two hours earlier, on entering the Academy, he had heard the Secretary himself say with overflowing enthusiasm: “Doctor, this is a success; the hall is packed — there is no room for even a pin.” And indeed, when he began to speak an expectant silence fell. It was when he pronounced the name of Jesus of Nazareth for the first time that the murmuring began. Then came the shouting and the stamping of feet, and now he had to leave quickly to avoid some personal assault.
He recalled the expectation aroused when public opinion learned that Yves Delage had taken charge of the investigation of the Shroud of Turin. Many thought that at last this latest imposture of the Catholic Church would be unmasked — one designed to deceive, yet again, the plain and simple people, so prone to believe extraordinary and marvelous fantasies. Surprisingly, the opposite happened. Yves Delage, with the professional and personal honesty that characterized him throughout his life, set forth with simplicity and compelling scientific rigor the results of his long and laborious investigation. In short, his conclusions could be summed up in the assertion that the Shroud of Turin was not a forgery, and that the characteristics of the figure of the crucified man, as they appeared on the cloth, corresponded to those of JESUS OF NAZARETH.
Yves Delage decided to go over once more what he had set forth at the Academy. Before he began to review it, a thought forced its way powerfully into his lucid mind: ‘there was a great majority of people for whom the assertion that the so-called Holy Shroud was authentic entailed, whether one wished it or not, a religious question, the truthfulness of the Christian religion, and that was what they could not accept.’
He looked avidly at the photographs of the figure of the crucified man and observed, first of all, the bleeding head. There was no doubt that what had been driven into that man was not a ring-shaped crown of thorns but a veritable cap or helmet of thorns covering his head. The nape of the neck, above all, was especially damaged, exactly as was bound to happen to a man who died on a cross with a kind of helmet of thorny branches jammed onto his head. The crucified man dies of asphyxia. He cannot exhale, expel the air from his lungs and breathe in a little fresh air. To manage it, he must brace himself on the nail that fastens his feet to the wood and try to raise himself by the strength of the stiffened, cramped muscles of his legs, at the same time throwing his head compulsively backward, in order to expel a mouthful of the foul air in his lungs. And in this raising himself and letting himself fall while throwing his head backward, the thorns dig in deeper and deeper, the muscular cramps increase, a tetanization sets in, and, his strength exhausted, amid atrocious pain, the crucified man dies.
At this point Delage’s sensibility was stirred. In the course of his investigation of the Holy Shroud he had read everything on Roman executions that came into his hands, and he acknowledged that the writers of that age, from Cicero to Seneca, did not exaggerate when they described, with a feeling mingling horror and pity, how the crucified man “…dies with every breath, drop by drop, limb by limb…”
Moreover, the manner in which the Roman soldiers customarily led the cruciarius or patibulatus to his death also explained why the crown of thorny branches had wounded the nape of the neck more deeply. The man sentenced to death on the cross carried to the place of execution only the patibulum, that is, the transverse beam.
This way in which the cruciarius was bound left him defenseless against possible falls, which he could cushion only with his knees or with his face. In any case, every time he fell to the ground, the transverse beam bound to his arms and shoulders struck the back of the condemned man’s head.
Yves Delage verified once more, in accordance with what the Roman regulations established regarding the way the cruciarius was to carry the transverse beam to the place of execution, that the knees of the man of the Holy Shroud were horribly flayed and his face swollen and wounded, as a consequence of several falls in which, naturally, with the hands and arms bound crosswise to a heavy beam, it was the knees and the very face of the condemned man that bore the blows against the ground.
THE BEARD caught his attention, appearing partially PLUCKED OUT, and he recalled again the prophecy of Isaiah that he had read, like so many other passages of the Bible, while carrying out his investigation. Isaiah, many centuries before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, speaking of the Messiah, the Son of God, prophesied in verse 6 of chapter 50 of his book: “I have given my body to the strikers, and my cheeks to them that PLUCKED THEM: I have not turned away my face from them that rebuked me, and spit upon me.”
Of all the dozens upon dozens of wounds, sores and bruises that covered the body of the man of the Shroud, the most striking was undoubtedly the one on the right side. The enormous mass of blood that had flowed out presented a surprising characteristic: white stains alternated with the dark-reddish stains of the blood. Delage picked up the magnifying glass again and applied it once more to the wound. It was evident that the incision had been made after the man’s death, between the fifth and sixth intercostal spaces, and had torn the heart, whose right auricle, as happens in recent corpses, was full of blood.
Delage paused in suspense as he contemplated the blood covering both wrists of the man of the Shroud, apparently the product of their perforation. He remembered that during his investigation many people had argued to him that the body of the Shroud could not be Jesus Christ, because Jesus was pierced through the hands, not the wrists. The insistence with which these people pressed this point upon him, in their desire that he should banish from his consideration any reference to Jesus of Nazareth, struck him, because physicians of all times have included in the hand the carpus or wrist, the metacarpus or palm of the hand, and the fingers with their three bones or phalanges. The truth is that it was far more logical, from the anatomical point of view, for the nails to have been driven into the crucified man between the metacarpal bones rather than into the palms of the hands, where a tearing of the tissues could very easily have occurred, so that the condemned man would have come loose from the cross.
Delage leaned back in his armchair and looked at the photograph as a whole. He took up the Bible he had handled so much during his investigation, and some of its passages were familiar to him. The man of the Holy Shroud, horribly tortured from head to foot, constituted an almost exact reproduction of the “man of sorrows,” of the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah almost a thousand years before Jesus of Nazareth died. He read the end of chapter 52, referring to the Servant of Yahweh: “…many have been astonished at thee, / so shall his visage be inglorious among men, / and his form among the sons of men /…” He continued with the beginning of chapter 53, likewise referring to the Servant of Yahweh, the Messiah: “…There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: / and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, / that we should be desirous of him: / Despised, and the most abject of men, / a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity: / and his look was as it were hidden and despised, / whereupon we esteemed him not.”
The rest of that chapter of the book of Isaiah seemed to capture what the face on the Shroud expressed: no desire for vengeance, no feeling of hatred or rancor on the part of the crucified man, but on the contrary the expression of peace and love; the manifestation of triumph, of mastery and lordship over pain and death.
A CHALLENGE TO SCIENCE?
The Holy Shroud is not a matter of faith, simply because God has revealed nothing about it. The believer, therefore, is entirely free to believe or not to believe in the Holy Shroud. The Holy Shroud is a relic, a historical document, a scientific object, and faith is not founded on objects but on the word of God.
What happens is that science says impressive things about this object; but it is science that says them, not the Gospel.
And so science says: The Cloth of Turin is the only one, so far, that bears imprinted the figure of a first-century crucified man who was, moreover, crowned with thorns, beaten, scourged, pierced by a lance after death, and buried in haste.
And the believer opens the Gospel and says: good heavens, all of that happened to Jesus! What are the odds that it was Jesus? And the mathematicians assure him: 5,000 trillion in favor and one against. (This figure, reproduced by Dr. Molina, corresponds to the calculations of Professor Filas and, as the reader may verify, is far higher than that of Zeuli and Barberis cited in chapter V, “Is it Jesus of Nazareth or another man?”)
And science goes on to say: at the moment the imprint was recorded, the body disappeared, the cloth was horizontal and motionless, and there was a small cloth around the head.
And the believer opens the Gospel and says: good heavens, that is exactly what Saint Luke and Saint John also said — and they had no VP8 at their disposal.
And science goes on to say: that dead body, before decomposition began, at a given instant, emitted a radiation, an energy unknown, which lasted thousandths of a second, like a flash. For an instant, the body ceased to have weight and disappeared, without disturbing the Shroud that covered it, which remained horizontal and motionless! In other words, for that body the law of gravity did not exist (since it had no weight), nor the law of impenetrability (since it passed through the cloths). It had therefore changed its nature: from that instant onward it was no longer what it had been.
And the believer opens the Gospel and says: good heavens, it says here that Jesus, on six different occasions, and at the height of his apostolic triumph, announced that he would have to suffer a terrible Passion, but that on the third day he would rise again.
And the Gospel also says that, after rising, he appeared several times, being himself, but with a different body.
The believer’s question falls, like Newton’s apple, under its own weight: might not these strange facts that science finds in this dead body signify the glorious transformation of that body upon rising?
Naturally, to think this way is undeniably bold, because science speaks neither of resurrection nor of a glorious body. But note well: science does not speak of the Holy Shroud, it says Shroud of Turin, without going into whether it is holy or sinful; science does not speak of resurrection, it says that the body of a dead man, in an infinitesimal instant, disappeared; science does not speak of a glorious body, it says that this body became radiant, ceased to have weight and escaped through the cloths, like something insubstantial, without going into whether the change of nature of that body was glorious or worldly; science does not say that the dead man was Jesus (he might not be), but the mathematicians affirm that there are 5,000 trillion probabilities to one that he is.
As for an ethereal, insubstantial body that escapes the physical laws of gravity and impenetrability, I do not know what scientists will call it: we believers call it glorious; but in any case, scientists and believers, with different expressions, may well be defining the very same thing.
The three-dimensional negative imprints due to the radiation would be imprints of the Glorious Resurrection of Christ.
It is worth reviewing here what has already been said about the number of probabilities that the Man of the Shroud was Jesus.
All the calculations were made taking into account that the man covered with the cloth of Turin:
- was crowned with thorns…like Jesus
- was atrociously scourged…like Jesus
- was struck in the face…like Jesus
- was crucified with nails…like Jesus
- His legs were not broken…as in the case of Jesus
- His side was opened…like Jesus
- was shrouded in a linen cloth…like Jesus
- this cloth showed no stain of decomposition or putrefaction…like that of Jesus
- was buried provisionally…like Jesus
- etc…
In each of these cases we ask ourselves: how many crucified men would have been given a crown? How many would have been buried in a linen cloth?
Well then, using these data alone, we already saw the astronomical number that resulted. But now, to these numbers, a new factor must be added: these three-dimensional imprints indicate that the Man of the Shroud rose from the dead. How many crucified men rose from the dead? Put in whatever number you like and multiply it by the figures we were handling before, and you will realize that the number of probabilities now amounts to such a certainty that I doubt there is any other personage in history better typified.
And so it must have been, because, if Christ had not risen, those images would not be on the Holy Shroud: they could not be. There could be stains of blood, or sweat, or saliva; but images in relief, so uniform, those of the body imprinted in negative and photographs of the blood in positive — that could never have been achieved.
Well, all this is so astonishing that it leaves one open-mouthed; but although extraordinary, it is not science fiction, nor imaginative speculation. These are logical deductions from fully demonstrated scientific facts, interpreted in the light of faith, by believers.
Great respect is due to all those who, adopting an honest attitude toward life and toward science, do not believe in the supernatural — for whatever reason — but who strive to seek the truth.
When, in seeking that truth, they set the Gospel aside and turn to science so that it may explain to them the scientific phenomena present in the Cloth of Turin, they feel rather uneasy, because science tells them:
The Cloth of Turin is a strange case, unique in the world, for it bears figures that we have so far been unable to explain by natural causes. And today we can give no logical answer when we are asked:
– Why were photographic images recorded on a cloth 18 centuries before photography was invented?
– Why was that impression made in negative, when it is known that negatives cannot be of human making?
– Why is it the only cloth in the world with the negative image of the whole of a human body?
– Why has no dead body ever been made to produce similar imprints, in thousands of experiments with all the means of present-day science? (the imprints obtained by Rinaudo in 1993 are of objects, in the laboratory and using an external source of energy).
– Why do those images coincide exactly with the Passion of Jesus?
– Why do they coincide exactly with the provisional burial of Jesus?
– Why does a cloth bearing the imprinted figure of a corpse not have the slightest stain of cadaverous decomposition?
– Why is it the only human photograph on a cloth with perfect three-dimensional images?
– Why, when the body escaped, did it not alter the position of the Shroud or of the sudarium?
– Why were the bloodstains not destroyed as it escaped?
– Why is the whole image recorded so uniformly, when logic would demand that the imprints of the back be more strongly marked?
– Why were the bloodstains imprinted in a different form from the imprints of the body?
– Why were the inscriptions of some Roman coins imprinted on a cloth?
– Why are the imprints of the body, of the blood and of the coins intact, after undergoing a bath of boiling water and a fire that melts silver?
– Why did the dead body covered with the Cloth of Turin emit, in an instant, an energy capable of scorching it?
– Why, during that incandescence, did the body cease to have weight?
– Why, at that instant, did the body disappear at the very moment it imprinted the image?
These are seventeen scientific whys that the Holy Shroud sets before us, and not one of them explicable by natural causes.
These seventeen whys, inexplicable by natural causes, can all be explained by one supernatural cause: the Resurrection of Christ.
Let us put it to the test:
– Those photographic images were recorded on a cloth before photography was invented, because the photograph was not taken with a modern camera, but by the radiation emitted by the Resurrection.
– That impression was made in negative because such are the images recorded by radiation.
– It is the only cloth with the negative image of an entire body, because it is the only resurrection effected in the world in those circumstances.
– No dead body has ever produced imprints like these, because a resurrection can never be reproduced experimentally.
– They coincide with the Passion of Jesus, because the man portrayed and risen is JESUS.
– They coincide with a provisional burial, because there is no doubt that such was the burial of Jesus
– It is the only human image that appears three-dimensional on the screen of the VP8 because this cloth received the radiation of the only known Glorious Resurrection. To make it easier to understand: any ORDINARY PHOTOGRAPH OF A MAN, of a statue or of a landscape, IS FLAT AND TWO-DIMENSIONAL, and will therefore turn into a distorted, grotesque image on the screen of the VP8. Only when the depth is genuine, when beneath the camera of the VP8 lies the real object, the statue, the vessel, the stone, the face, can it then be seen with absolute exactness in its three dimensions.
– When the body escaped, it did not alter the position of the Shroud or of the Sudarium, because the Resurrection took place with a glorious body, and such a body can pass through bodies without modifying them. Thus did he present himself in the Upper Room, the doors being shut. Without forcing them, without violence.
– The bloodstains were not destroyed when the body escaped, because the glorious body does not adhere to the crusts of blood.
– The whole image is recorded so uniformly because the Resurrection took place in levitation, and in these circumstances the imprints of the back are marked just as much as those of the front, since the weight of the body plays no part.
– These inscriptions were imprinted by the radiation of the Resurrection.
– The imprints are intact, despite fire and water, because they are not painted but recorded by the power of the Resurrection.
– That dead body emitted energy because the Resurrection may have been just that: an explosion of energy.
– The body ceased to have weight through the transformation of the human body into a glorious body.
In other words, the seventeen whys that found no explanation by natural causes are all explained by one supernatural cause: the Resurrection of Christ. This is where the extraordinary character of the Holy Shroud lies.
For seventeen non-natural facts are seventeen problems that science has to explain, without having managed to do so up to now in spite of its efforts.
Author: Francisco Ansón
Source: The book “La Sábana Santa – últimos hallazgos” (The Holy Shroud – Latest Findings), 1994
