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The Enigmatic Shroud
| Article
# : |
16206 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
4,402 Words |
| Author
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John D. Frodsham
John D. Fradsham holds the Foundation chair of English and
Comparative Literature at Murdoch University in Perth, Western
Australia. He is also president of the Australian Society for
Psychical Research. |
Controversy has raged for centuries over the question of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. The dispute has naively centered around two questions: Was it, in fact, the shroud in which Jesus Christ was buried? Or was it merely a brilliantly executed forgery? The controversy over these mistakenly formulated issues goes back to the late fourteenth century, when the bishop of Troyes attempted unsuccessfully to have exhibitions of the Shroud suppressed on the grounds that it was but "a certain cloth, cunningly painted." But it was not until late in this century that scientific tests could be applied to the reputed relic, in the hope of ascertaining whether it was genuine or not.
In 1898, the Shroud was photographed for the first time, revealing to a startled world that the image on the cloth was actually a negative from which the photographer obtained a positive image. Further research demonstrated that the markings on the image corresponded exactly to those wounds traditionally said to have been inflicted on Jesus Christ during his Passion and Crucifixion. The head bore traces of a crown (or rather, a cap) of thorns; the back and sides of the body showed evidence of repeated scourging; and the right side of the chest displayed an elliptical wound corresponding to one that would be inflicted by a Roman lance. Most important of all, the victim had been crucified, the nails having been driven through the carpal bones of the wrists as well as through the feet. Since Christian iconography invariably depicted Christ as having been crucified through the palms of his hands, the fact that the body on the shroud had been nailed through the wrists was of great importance. For this was in reality the Roman method of crucifixion, adopted since the palms could not bear the weight of the body. As this practice had been forgotten since the discontinuation of crucifixion in the fourth century A.D., its appearance on the Shroud seemed to furnish conclusive proof that the cloth genuinely bore the imprint of a crucified man and could not have been painted by a medieval artist, however gifted. Further details, such as extensive injury to the face and damage to the shoulder and knees, served to corroborate the details of Christ's Passion given in the Gospels.
The next discovery was made by John Jackson, a scientist at the U.S. Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who demonstrated in 1976 that the image on the Shroud appeared in perfect three-dimensional relief when a photograph of it was inserted in to a VP-8 image analyzer. Theoretically this was impossible, since an ordinary photograph will not produced a relief image in an analyzer. Clearly, the image on the Shroud had been produced by extraordinary means.
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