A storm had been brewing for days. You
could bite the air it was so thick. Sleep was impossible. Sweat was constant. Black,
muscular clouds, bruised, crazed, ready to blow, beat down on us as if we were
the head of a drum. My toes were sunk in the sand on the bank of the Wanaque
River.
It came from the west, right over the
river, emerging from thick and twisting thunderheads. It wasn't more
substantial than air; it was the embodiment of air; it was animate sky; more
air than air, more sky than sky. White and black, gleaming as a sunstruck
cloud, sharp as a slicing wind. Swinging from left to right, seeking and
gobbling its dragonfly prey. And that fast it was lost to my eyes downriver.
That was a swallow-tailed kite!
This Florida bird did not belong in New
Jersey! Its exotic home was a thousand miles south, casting its shadow on earthbound
alligators and colorful flowers.
Birders keep something called a
"life list." We record every bird we've ever seen. For the past fifty
years, alone in my room, no witnesses, I cannot bring myself to check the box
opposite the words "swallow-tailed kite." I am stopped by the barrier
between perceiving and accepting.
The part of my brain that instantaneously
assembles disparate details into a coherent whole and reports, "This is a
chair; this is a table;" told me "This is a swallow-tailed
kite." But bird-watching requires firing up the part of the brain that disassembles
details and analyzes each. That part of my brain that would have consciously
ticked off each detail – the snow white breast, the dipped-in-ink wings, a
storm that may have tossed the bird off course – that part of my brain was not
in gear. I was too awed by the whole to inspect the parts.
And it's more than that. Now that I'm an
adult and I've lived away more years than I lived there, I can recognize that
my hometown was special. We never locked the door; we were surrounded by
neighbors we knew and woods full of deer and berries and spooky stories. But
when I was a kid, my hometown felt like prison. Even as we kids enjoyed the
woods, the sleepovers, the close, warm kitchens full of kielbasa and lasagna
and paella, we yearned for anywhere else where everything, we were
certain, was better. Such an elegant bird simply did not belong in the turbulent
sky over the humble Wanaque River.
In the 1986 horror film The Fly, a
mad scientist tries to explain to his girlfriend that, thanks to an experiment
gone wrong, he is turning into a fly. She says, "I don't get it."
He replies, "You get it. You just
can't handle it."
A swallow-tailed kite in my factory-pocked
hometown? I got it. I just couldn't handle it.
Over seventy years earlier, a world-class
French scientist occupied that same rickety bridge between perceiving and
accepting. Anatomist Yves Delage wrote of his "obsession" with a
"disconcerting contradiction between" a mind-blowing artifact and the
"impossibility to find a natural explanation" for that artifact.
Moi aussi, Yves. Like you, that's how I have long felt about the Shroud of Turin.
This essay is not a review of the evidence
that supports the Shroud's authenticity. Scholar Joseph G. Marino lists the
number of academic disciplines employed in study of the cloth. There are
over one hundred. Marino also maintains a bibliography
of peer-reviewed publications; that bibliography is 19 pages long.
This essay explores geography. A rickety
bridge spans the distance between our perceiving something we feel too fabulous
to be real, and the destination we reach if we exercise willingness to overcome
our reservations and finally invest in the reality of our perceptions. Some are
never brave or curious enough to traverse that divide.
Let's return to New Jersey in the 1970s.
It's a day like any other day. There's a newspaper on the kitchen table. We are
a house full of readers; there are novels, textbooks, magazines, in every room.
But amidst our domestic library, I spy this particular article in my mind's
eye. It was an article about something called the Shroud of Turin that some
said was the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
Some say the Shroud made them believe.
Some say that "proof" that the
Shroud is a hoax reinforces their atheism.
Some say they believe in the Shroud, but
not in God.
None of these trajectories were mine
that day. I was a cradle Catholic and Catholic school graduate. Before that
secular newspaper article about the science of Shroud research, I had never
heard of the Shroud. The image in the article made demands on me that it could
never make on a non-believer. I experienced cognitive vertigo – "That
can't be real" – and spiritual panic – "If it is real, my whole life
must change."
It's one thing to accept Jesus' Passion
as true, almost as cognitive wallpaper – something that's always there, so you
never pay focused attention to it. It's another thing to have, splayed out in
front of you, graphic details that support that the God of the universe
incarnated, underwent torture, died on a cross, and rose from the dead, all to
save your grubby little New Jersey butt. I occupied the same position I had
when I saw the swallow-tailed kite. Something simply too beautiful and exotic
could not have visited my humble hometown.
If I let this image affect me, I will
have to stop teasing the girl I don't like at school. I will have to conclude
that life is so much bigger and more mysterious than I know, and I will have to
stop indulging in my favorite sin, despair over my own fate and the fate of the
world.
I think we all go through a similar
process. Life's blows encase us in lizard skin to protect us from ugliness. We
forget what we knew when we were wide-eyed babies. Life is a miracle. Each one
of us is special. The place where we stand is holy ground – Exodus 3:5.
Death can bring us close to this
awareness. When a loved one dies, we suddenly realize how precious, indeed how
magic, was each moment we shared. Receiving a fatal diagnosis can do this.
Confronting our own departure from this flawed world, its beauty jumps out at
us.
Life goes on. After that article, no one
mentioned the Shroud to me. Over twenty years later, in 2001, Don Freidkin, a friend,
gave me a tape-recording of a History channel documentary on the Shroud. Don
was Jewish, but he knew I was Catholic, and he knew I didn't have access to
cable TV.
I was a grad student working on my PhD on
Polish-Jewish relations. I didn't want to devote any brain cells to a
sensational TV program that wouldn't contribute to my dissertation. I watched
the VHS tape Don gave me. And then I watched it again. And then I watched it again.
And again.
I wanted the definitive answer. How
could an image that was very much not from the fourteenth century have appeared
in the fourteenth century? I put aside what my brain was telling me I was
seeing; I disassembled the image into its constituent parts, and analyzed each,
so I could come up with an answer that coincided with what I thought must be possible.
I couldn’t find trustworthy sources who had the raw data to prove the Shroud a
hoax. I was obsessed. I was frustrated. I didn't need this controversy in my
life. My dissertation topic of Polish-Jewish relations was controversy enough.
I purposely erased the VHS tape.
Years later, after I finished my
dissertation, I read my first book about the Shroud, Mark Antonacci's Resurrection
of the Shroud. Antonacci is an attorney, not a scientist, but his review of
scientific research intrigued me. For example, Antonacci
lists a couple dozen of the medical professionals who conclude that the
Shroud is an anatomically accurate product of some as-yet-unexplained
interaction between a crucified body and a piece of cloth. These experts
include men who have performed tens of thousands of autopsies, and who have extensively
experimented to better understand crucifixion, among them Dr. Pierre
Barbet, Dr. Robert
Bucklin, and Dr.
Frederick Zugibe.
Another decade passed before I read two
more books. The Shroud by Ian Wilson cited folklore, artworks, historical
documents, and numismatics that suggest a history for the Shroud stretching
back two millennia.
Thomas de Wesselow is a PhD art
historian expert in fourteenth-century European art. The Sign details
how, in every respect, the Shroud defies what any fourteenth-century artist or
hoaxer could or would create, and, indeed, contradicts what any
fourteenth-century relic market would expect. De Wesselow demonstrates beyond
reasonable doubt that the blood stains on the Shroud behave as real bloodstains
from a real crucified corpse, handled as per the strict demands of Jewish law,
would behave when in contact with linen cloth.
In spite of over a century of study, no
one knows how the Shroud image was created. No one has been able to replicate it.
Some Shroud opponents say the Shroud is a fourteenth-century photograph; others
say it's a smudge; others say it's a scorch; others say it's a painting.
Evidence disproves all of these. "Staunch atheist" David Rolfe
received an honors diploma in Film Technique from The London International Film
School. He became a director and producer for, inter alia, the BBC. The Shroud
astounded his trained eye. He tried to debunk it, made an award-winning film
about it, and then Rolfe crossed the bridge. He is now a Christian. He offers
$1 million to anyone who can recreate the Shroud. His money is safe.
A famous 1988 news photo depicts three
supercilious men insisting that the Shroud dates from, as chalked on the
blackboard behind them, "1260 to 1390!" They proved this, the men
said, through radiocarbon dating. Journalist William West reports that
"the most outspoken carbon dater was Professor Edward Hall … Hall was a
veteran of promoting atheism. He used to give
talks at the British Museum. He was an early Richard Dawkins."
Hall, no expert in Medieval Christian art, declared, "Someone just got a bit of linen, faked
it up and flogged it." Anyone who believes is a "flat-earther." Hall
insisted that the Shroud was a scorch, something science proved it not to be.
He exploited his Shroud "debunking" "to raise one million pounds
to found the Edward Hall Chair in Archaeological Science, a post shortly after
taken up by the British Museum's Dr. Michael Tite" – another man seated in
that famous photo. Ironically, Hall said that "Archaeologists should never
find themselves in a position where a key argument or interpretation is based
on a single measuring technique." That's exactly what he did when he
insisted that radiocarbon dating erased all the contradictory data gathered
from other methods. Since 1988, peer-reviewed
publications advance plausible theories as to why the 1988 study could have
been incorrect.
In a 2008 BBC documentary, Christopher
Bronk Ramsey, former director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit – the
very lab that tested the Shroud – delivered a statement that was truly
exemplary of the scientific method. Ramsey acknowledged that many disciplines
had produced much data that supported the Shroud's authenticity, and he stated
that the 1988 test was not the last word.
Shroud opponents have been playing the
same games for the past 127 years. Let's turn back the clock to oh, say, April
1898. The Spanish-American War is big news. The British fight Mahdists in
Sudan. Two baseball no-hitters are thrown on the same day, one by Ted
Breitenstein of the Cincinnati Reds, the other by Jim Hughes of the Baltimore
Orioles.
In April, 1898, there is no reason for
anyone to be talking about the Shroud of Turin. It's just one of thousands of
Catholic relics, like Spain's Sudarium, a bloody cloth said to have once
wrapped Jesus' head, or the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, believed by some to
have been painted by Saint Luke on the Last Supper table. Many Catholics don't
believe these stories, and find them embarrassing. In 1503, Desiderius Erasmus,
a Catholic priest, published Handbook of the Militant Christian. He
criticized relic veneration. To Protestants, of course, relic veneration is
idolatry. Protestant John Calvin was merciless in his 1543 Treatise on
Relics.
The Shroud of Turin, in April, 1898, is merely
a long linen cloth with a faint smudge resembling the life-size, ventral and
dorsal images of a man. There's nothing in this image to make anyone think
twice. Turn the calendar page to June, 1898, and people around the world are talking
about the Shroud of Turin. What changed?
Secondo Pia was a slightly built,
heavily mustachioed Italian lawyer and amateur photographer. In late May, 1898,
the Italian city of Turin commissioned him to provide photographs for a quadricentennial
celebration of the city's cathedral. The city housed a relic, a shroud. That
shroud would be included in an exhibition of "Arte Sacre" or
"sacred art" – note that word, "art," which seems to
indicate that the Catholic organizers categorized their relic as a manmade
artwork. Pia decided to photograph what would come to be known as the Shroud of
Turin. The event seems to have been pretty chaotically organized. It seems that
Pia's participation and the Shroud photo were both merely afterthoughts; in the
end, his photographs were not included in promotion of the anniversary
celebration.
King Umberto I of Italy—not the Catholic
Church – owned the relic. The king gave permission for his relic to be
photographed. Photography was relatively new; Pia's camera and tripod were
bulky and almost as big as he was. Pia had to operate his own darkroom. Pia was
an innovator, and possibly the first photographer to take photographs indoors
using commercially available electric light bulbs. Edison had made light bulbs
commercially available only nineteen years earlier. Pia had to set up a
scaffold, as well as a portable generator. A frame was prepared for the Shroud;
it was too small. No one seemed to know the Shroud's measurements. And the
Shroud was eventually rejected from the "Arte Sacra" exhibition. Again,
the Shroud, at this point, was very much not the big deal it would become in
June, 1898.
Pia's first attempt to photograph the
Shroud was unsuccessful. Light reflected off of the protective glass. His lamps
generated heat so intense that glass cracked. Pia and colleagues experimented
with a variety of cameras, lenses, exposure times, and handling of the
protective glass. One gets the sense that for Pia, photographing the Shroud was
an adventure in technical innovation and the perfecting of photography.
After initial failure, on the night of
May 28, Pia returned. He tweaked exposure time, lighting, and equipment. He
finished up at midnight, the witching hour, the time for the supernatural to
break through. When Pia saw his work, he almost dropped the large glass plates
that contained the now world-famous image. "Alone, locked up in my dark
room, totally lost in my work, I witnessed a very strong sensation, when I saw,
for the first time, during the development of my plates, the Holy Face. I was
astonished and happy" see here.
Years later, Carlo Capriata, the
grandson of one of Pia's assistants, vividly
described what happened next, as told by the man's grandfather. "Pia
was on the threshold of the darkroom. With his hands he held the large plate
still dripping the fixative. Looking at him, my grandfather was struck by the
strange expression on [Pia's] face … Standing and facing each other, the two
could not take their eyes off that wonderful image ... It was Pia who first
broke the silence: 'Look, Carlino, if this is not a miracle!'"
You can see what Pia saw by comparing the naked-eye appearance
of the Shroud and the photographer's negative. The first is a vague blur. The
second is a detailed depiction of a crucified man.
In 1902, a journalist would write that
Pia's photographs were "the most mysterious, the most improbable, the most
impressive pictures that one could possibly imagine. How can I tell, how can I
express to others the emotion they arouse in me?"
As night follows day, the species of
"Shroud opponent" emerged. These opponents, using science-y-sounding
mumbo jumbo – It's "refraction"! It's "transparency"! It's
"over-exposure"! It's a "yellow filter!" – accused Pia of
fraud. These newly hatched Shroud opponents got it. They just couldn't handle
it.
Yves Delage was an agnostic and a world-class
anatomist. He recognized that as a scientist it was his assignment to uncover
the "how" behind the "what." Through experimentation, Delage
and his scientific colleagues hypothesized that a chemical reaction had created
the image. Delage wrote,
"For
weeks and months, we were obsessed by the disconcerting contradiction between a
material fact … and the apparent impossibility to find a natural explanation; a
situation that would play into the hands of those who accept miracles, that my
philosophical opinions cannot accept at any price. And suddenly, here was the
natural explanation, luminous in its simplicity, chasing out the miracle ....
When Mr. Vignon, with the help of Mr. Colson, found the scientific explanation
of the formation of the image on the shroud, you remember the profound joy we
felt to possess, at last, the clue to the enigma."
Delage's theory of how the image was
formed is no longer accepted, but his determination to, through
experimentation, find an explanation is an admirable example of real science.
The Lancet hailed Delage's work, "Any idea of
fraud need not be considered," and no medieval painter "had the skill"
to produce the image on the Shroud.
In 1902, Delage would present his
research at a session of the Academy of Sciences held at the Institut de
France. Marcelin Berthelot was a French chemist, politician, and "militant
atheist." He exercised power over Delage. Berthelot would not allow
"the dome of the Institute" to "resound with the name of Christ
and the applause of the audience."
Dr. Andre Van
Cauwenberghe describes
what happened when Delage attempted to present his research.
"Traditionally, the speaker submits the text of his communication to the
Secretariat so that it be published in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des
Sciences. But that evening, against all precedent, Berthelot notified
Delage to take back his text, telling him to rewrite his paper treating only of
the vaporography of zinc, without making the least allusion to the Holy Shroud,
certainly none to Christ."
After even this heavily censored presentation,
Shroud opponents set upon Delage and his colleagues. Delage's scientific team
were accused of "intellectual ineptitude," "conspiracy,"
and being "seminarians disguised as scientists" engaging in "debauchery"
that "justified reprisals."
Delage pointed out that it was Shroud
opponents "who impose upon a question purely scientific a religious
question. If it was a matter of Sargon, Achilles, or a pharaoh, nobody would be
found to oppose it." He wrote,
"I
have been faithful to the true scientific spirit, treating this argument with
the sole intention to find the truth, without worrying whether I have served
the interests of this or that other religious sector. Those, instead, who
allowed themselves to be influenced by such concerns are the ones who have
betrayed the scientific method. I have not made a clerical work, because
clericalism and anti-clericalism have nothing to do in this affair. I consider
the Christ to be an historical personage and I do not see why anyone should be
scandalized that there exists a material trace of his existence."
Harassment caused Delage to retreat from
Shroud research. Pia and Delage's experience would be repeated again and again.
Men with scientific and technical skill would bring the challenging nature of
the Shroud to the public's attention. And Shroud opponents would harass,
threaten, and defame them.
In 2001, after I watched, over and over,
that VHS tape that Don sent me, I wasn't looking for proof that the Shroud was
authentic. I was looking for the trick that would explain how someone in
fourteenth-century France could have produced an image that was plainly not a
product of the fourteenth century. I had no answers. All I had were questions.
I typed up the questions and sent them to a talking head that had appeared on
the documentary, a guy named Barrie Schwortz.
Barrie Schwortz was the documenting
photographer for the 1978 STURP research team. The STURP team consisted of
thirty-three scientists and technicians from institutions including the Los
Alamos National Scientific Laboratories, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and
Sandia National Laboratory. Members' expertise included physics, chemistry,
medicine, anatomy, and image formation.
Exactly because I was so intrigued by
the Shroud, and because I didn't want that intrigue to interfere with my
leading a normal life, I disciplined myself. I would read Shroud books or watch
Shroud documentaries only during Lent. For twenty-three years, I would, at
those times, get back in touch with Barrie Schwortz.
"Dust thou art and unto dust thou
shalt return," Father Augustino intoned as he smeared ashes on my forehead
on Ash Wednesday, 2025. Lent had just begun. Once again, I began my annual
delve into Shroud material. Of course my first stop was to listen to a podcast
featuring Barrie Schwortz.
I don't know why, but listening to this
podcast this time was distinctly different from any other time. Something
strange happened. As I listened, I began "talking" to Barrie inside
my head. I was saying things like, "Barrie, I have heard you speak so many
times that I know, by heart, all your laugh lines:
'Bilirubin is a not a Jewish guy in
Brooklyn!'
'I could tell you what I did for Los
Alamos, but then I'd have to kill you!'
'I'm Jewish. No interest in the Shroud.
But it was a free trip to Italy!'
'They say Leonardo created the Shroud.
The Shroud was around before Leonardo was born. He was a good artist, but he
wasn't that good!'
"But you know what, Barrie?" I
continued the internal conversation. "You do it so damn well. I'm a
teacher and I've had to deliver the same lecture dozens of times. I do it by
looking at a student as I speak. I realize that that student is hearing the
point, that is old to me, for the first time. I experience the material through
my student's mind, and it's all fresh. Do you do the same thing? Because you
always sound fresh, present, and connected with your interlocutor.
"From your 'old hippie' pony tail
to your nerdy science guy voice and tech-guy excitement over gizmos like Los
Alamos' liquid-cooled Cray computers, everything about you is perfect as a
educator, debater, and, yes, entertainer. You open your heart and mind and
allow your audience access to everything you've got."
I suddenly realized that I had never
said this to Barrie. I decided that after I finished watching this podcast, I
would do something I had never done before. I would send him a proper fan
letter. I would say, "Barrie, of course I asked why you believed in the
authenticity of the Shroud, but did not become a Christian. You told me about
growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home. You became bar mitzvah and then left
organized religion forever. The hypocrisy bugged you. People saying one thing
and doing another. That same commitment to truth informed your science.
"'This wasn't my idea,' you said.
You were dragged 'kicking and screaming' to Turin. After poring over your
colleagues' work for seventeen years, you finally concluded that the Shroud is
authentic. You began Shroud.com and your worldwide speaking and teaching career
because you were privileged to have the data. You wanted to share it with Christians
for whom it could mean something that it didn't mean to you.
"And you honored your colleagues,
the scientists whose professional credentials surpassed your own. In a podcast,
you said, 'They taught me the meaning of empiricism. Even though I'd worked in
the sciences before, I'd never worked with a group that was as meticulous and
careful as these men … I'm proud to still be around to be able to document that
… Skeptics continue to claim that our work was the "ranting of
believers" … that we were a bunch of "pseudo-scientific nutters"
… If I take an instrument and I point it at a piece of cloth … that instrument
doesn't care if I'm a Christian or Jew a Muslim or a Pagan. It records the data.
[Our work] is published in peer-reviewed journals … The skeptics aren't smart
enough to be critical of the science, so it's much easier to be critical of the
scientists. But they don't address the scientific issues that were raised by
our work, and that's where the truth lies.'
"That's you, Barrie, in a nutshell.
Generous to Christians, honorable to your colleagues; committed to kindness and
truth. Even as you rip Walter McCrone a new one, you sound like you are fixing
him a nice sandwich, on rye, of course.
"You care, too, because, as you point
out, the man on the Shroud 'is one of our boys.' You speak some tough truths to your
fans. 'What has frustrated me is anti-Semitism coming from supposed Christians
that worship a Jewish man. Explain that one to me … I think the biggest problem
with organized religion is that it got organized. If Jesus comes back I think
he's going to say, "What have we done?" because institutional
religions as they grow larger and more powerful and maybe wealthier seem to
have lost site of the tenets upon which they were founded. The primary message
of Jesus is love … Jesus said the kingdom of God is within us … I did look into my heart and to my shock I
found that God had been there all along just waiting for me to look and
acknowledge Him.'
"Barrie," I confessed, "I'm
phone-phobic, but talking to you is a breeze. Your parents came from Poland.
When we talk, I feel like we are sitting around that kitchen table in my
hometown. I'm nobody and you talk to me as if I were somebody. We have never
met and you talk to me as if I were your sister. Your Jewish mom taught you to
respect priests and nuns. My Catholic parents taught me to respect our black
and Jewish neighbors. You were sure to tell me about your mom's fond memories
of the Catholic church in her Polish village. My mom told me about her beloved
Jewish neighbor in her Slovak village. Barrie, our moms would have loved each
other."
I had my first fan letter to Barrie all
written up, inside my head. And then I read the comments under the podcast.
Barrie Schwortz died June 21, the summer
solstice, 2024, two months after his last email to me. I had just written him
that I was finally ready to meet him in person. He wrote back, with his
perpetual combination of kindness and honesty, that that would never happen. I
had not understood.
The tears were just like that
swallow-tailed kite. They were physical artifacts. I could see and feel them. I
could taste them. I got them. I just couldn't handle them. The tears were
telling me that I loved this person, something of which I had been completely
unaware before I began crying. I recognized the whole: grief. My analytical
mind pulled apart the pieces. It said, you can't be feeling grief; you never
met him. He was a celebrity and you were just one of the thousands of people
whose queries he answered. You belonged to irreconcilable belief systems:
Barrie was a cat person; you are a dog person. This analysis, accurate as it
was, could not eliminate the tears.
In the same way that I wish I had
recognized my love for my hometown while I still lived there, I wish I had
known that I loved Barrie before he died. We all have those moments, when our
lizard skin slips, when we suddenly confront something that tells us that life
is more than eating, competing, excreting. Moments that tell us that life is a
miracle, that each one of us is special, that God is.
***
THE FULL TEXT OF MY 2001 EMAIL TO BARRIE
SCHWORTZ.
The shroud has been subjected to imaging
analysis by NASA scientists, to carbon dating, and to analysis, performed by
criminologists and botanists, of the pollen particles found on its surface.
Forensic pathologists have analyzed the death depicted on the shroud. At least
since Descartes, the West has come to regard religion and hard science as polar
opposite disciplines. It is this very intersection of religion and hard science
that intrigues, delights, and perhaps even threatens many, and attracts many to
the Shroud story.
In truth, though, and perhaps
counterintuitively, the hard sciences are limited in their ability to crack the
mystery of the shroud. This sounds contrary – science has come to be understood
as the source of definitive truth. In this case, though, hard science has
failed to provide an answer that satisfies the demands of Ockham's razor.
William of Ockham (1285-1347/49),
posited that, "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate;"
that is, "Plurality should not be posited without necessity." In
other words, Ockham's razor demands that, of two competing theories, the
simplest explanation is preferred.
The shroud compels exactly because there
is no simple or easy explanation. None of science's tests, including carbon
dating, has changed that. None have produced a simple explanation that meets
the demands of Ockham's razor.
One might argue, based on carbon dating,
that the shroud is a simple forgery, dating from the middle ages. That theory
is not best tested exclusively by hard science. Rather, insights from the
social sciences and the humanities are necessary in cracking this mystery.
I am not a hard scientist. I am a Ph.D.
candidate in the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Folklore, like its
fellow social sciences, has demonstrated that human expressive culture follows
rules, just as surely as carbon decay follows rules. One does not need to be a
social scientist to understand this.
Suppose an archaeologist were to
discover, in an Egyptian tomb, a work of art that followed the aesthetic
prescriptions of Andy Warhol's 20th century American portrait of Marilyn
Monroe. Certainly, hard science would argue that ancient Egyptians possessed
all the technology necessary to produce such items of expressive culture.
Ancient Egyptians had pigments; they had surfaces on which to draw. Hard
scientists might see no mystery in a pharaonic Warhol Marilyn.
A non-scientist would have every reason
to find such a blase' attitude bizarre. Of course the ancient Egyptians could
produce Warhol-like art. The fact is, though, that they simply never did.
Ancient Egyptians, like all artists everywhere, followed the artistic mandates
of their time and place.
True, art does change, but it changes
organically, slowly, and after leaving vast bodies of evidence of change in
intermediary forms. For example, as different as it is, art from Greece's
Golden Age can be seen to have grown from Egyptian art, in intermediary forms
like Kouroi figures.
The shroud is as much an object of
wonder and worthy investigation, in spite of carbon dating, as would be an
isolated pharaonic Warhol, or a rock song that had been composed during the
period of Gregorian Chant, or a Hopi vase that someone somehow came to made
during the high point of peasant embroidery in Czechoslovakia. Yes, in each
case, technology was available to create these anomalous forms; however, as any
layman might well point out, humans did not choose to use available technology
in order to create anomalous forms.
There are two consistently unaddressed
flaws in the arguments of those who contend that the shroud must be of medieval
origin, created by contemporaneously available technology. The first flaw is
that even if technology had been available to create an image with all the
remarkable features of the shroud, there is no way to explain why an artist
would have done so.
This question must be explored not via
carbon dating, NASA imaging, or pollen tests, but, rather, by comparison with
other relics from the medieval era. I have not seen research by experts in
medieval relics that attempts to compare and contrast the shroud with
comparable artifacts from the medieval era. Does the shroud look like other
relics, or does it not? If, as I suspect is true, it does not look like other
relics from that era, then it behooves anyone who argues for a medieval date to
explain exactly why. Those who argue this position must tell us why the
equivalent of a Warhol portrait has been found among Egyptian artwork where the
laws of human expressive culture dictate that it plainly does not belong.
In the writings of church reformers like
Erasmus and Martin Luther, one can read descriptions of medieval relics. In
fact, many relics once popular in the medieval era can be visited even today.
Reformers like Erasmus and Luther expressed open contempt at the gullibility of
the Christian masses. Bones that were obviously animal in origin were treated
as if the bones of some dead saint. Random chips of wood were marketed as
pieces of the true cross; random swatches of fabric were saints' attire.
Why, in such a lucrative and undemanding
marketplace, would any forger resort to anything as detailed and complex as the
shroud? Why would a forger resort to an image that would so weirdly mimic
photography, a technology that did not exist in the Middle Ages?
Well, one might argue, the forger
created the highly detailed, anomalous shroud in order to thoroughly trick his
audience. This argument does not withstand analysis. The relic market is
profoundly undemanding. It was profoundly undemanding in the Middle Ages; it is
barely more demanding today.
The Ka'bah of Islam, the millions of
Shiva lingams found throughout the Hindu world, the venerated sites of Buddha's
footfall or Buddha's tooth, the packages of "Mary's Milk" on sale to
Christian pilgrims in Bethlehem, are all contemporary relics that attest to the
willingness of believers to believe in items that might look, to others, like
simple rocks or standard, store-bought powdered milk.
The faith in relics is not limited to
the large, world religions; New Age is similarly flush with relics of a
provenance, that, to non-believers, may seem comical at best. For example, a
speech well beloved by New Agers, titled "Chief Seattle's speech,"
has long been known to have been written by a white Christian man living in
Texas. This knowledge has not stopped many New Agers from believing that the
speech issued, miraculously, from Chief Seattle.
The shroud does more than not follow the
simple rules of relic hawkers. The shroud not only does not follow the laws of
the expressive culture of medieval relics, it defies them. For example, blood
is shown flowing from the man's wrist, not his hands. It is standard in
Christian iconography to depict Jesus' hands as having been pierced by nails.
This was true not only of the medieval era, but also today. What reason would a
forging artist have for defying the hegemonic iconography of the crucified
Jesus? Anyone who wishes to prove a medieval origin for the shroud must answer
that question, and others, for example:
Items of expressive culture are not
found in isolation. They are not found without evidence of practice. If one
excavates an ancient site and finds one pot, one finds other pots like it, and
the remains of failed or broken pots in middens.
If the shroud is a forgery, where are
its precedents? Where are the other forged shrouds like it? Where is there
evidence of practice shrouds of this type? If the technology to create the
shroud was available in medieval Europe, where are other products of this
technology? Humankind is an exhaustively exploitative species. We make full use
of any technology we discover, and leave ample evidence of that use. Given the
lucrative nature of the forgery market, why didn't the forger create a similar
Shroud of Mary, Shroud of St. Peter, Shroud of St. Paul, etc.? And why didn't
followers do the same?
I'm not attempting here to prove the
shroud to be genuine. I am insisting that hard science alone cannot tell us the
full truth about the shroud, and that ignoring the obvious questions posed by
the humanities and the social sciences leaves us as much in the dark about the
shroud as ever.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
No comments:
Post a Comment