The Shroud Codex (17 page)

“Weren’t there any samples for carbon-14 testing taken by STURP in 1978?” Castle asked.

“In 1978, the Church did not allow the STURP scientists to take samples for radiocarbon testing,” Middagh answered. “But Rogers applied a different test to determine the likely age of the linen in the main body of the Shroud. From the tests made on the Shroud’s linen, Rogers evaluated the rate of loss of vanillin in the linen fibers. Vanillin disappears in the thermal decomposition of lignin, a complex polymer that is in the cells of the flax plants used to make linen. The Dead Sea scroll linens, for instance, have lost all traces of vanillin. From this analysis, Rogers concluded that the linen in the main body of the Shroud also had lost vanillin. Hence the Shroud itself was much older than the carbon dating suggested, very possibly reaching back two thousand years to the time of Christ.”

“Why did Rogers wait so long after the 1988 radiocarbon tests were announced to publish his results?” Castle pressed. “I can understand why some in the Shroud research community may be having trouble with Rogers. I have to ask you again: How do you know Rogers didn’t just have a convenient change of opinion just before he died, as if he didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the bet just in case there was a God and the Shroud was authentic? Well-known atheists making similar conversions just before they die might not be as rare as you think.”

“If you knew Rogers, that is an especially good question,” Middagh said. “When Rogers was healthy, he was characteristically
outspoken. Before his change of mind, Rogers had been famous for saying he did not believe in miracles that defied the laws of nature. So, when the carbon-14 results were first published, Rogers was happy to dismiss the Shroud as a hoax. Still, Rogers was a credible scientist and he published the results of his microchemical tests in a credible peer-reviewed journal, even if he published the results posthumously. In my mind, the questions Rogers raised still stand, at least until the Church allows other, more representative samples from the main body of the Shroud to be taken and carbon-14 tested.”

Morelli decided to jump in here, to support what Middagh was saying. “When Rogers published his results posthumously, it made a huge impact on the entire scientific community studying the Shroud, including me. When an outspoken expert like Rogers, who played a lead role in the 1978 STURP chemical analysis of the Shroud, publicly changed his mind on the accuracy of the radiocarbon dating, I began to doubt whether the carbon-14 results were representative of the Shroud as a whole. If medieval reweaving tainted the sample and the carbon-dating tests were biased as a consequence, the possibility was open once again that the Shroud might date from the time of Christ. Before he died, Rogers wrote on the Internet unequivocally that, in his opinion, the sample chosen for dating was totally invalid for determining the true age of the Shroud.”

Though he listened carefully to the arguments Middagh and Morelli were making, Castle was still not 100 percent convinced. He made a mental note that Rogers’s change of heart would have been more convincing if he had done his studies immediately after the 1988 carbon tests were announced, not after he knew he had cancer and just before he died.

Considering the carbon-dating discussion over for now, Castle
looked through the notes he had taken in his telephone discussion with Gabrielli. “What about this medieval letter Bishop Pierre d’Arcis wrote to the pope in 1389, claiming the Shroud was a painting and that he knew who the artist was?”

“Scholars have argued the letter was motivated by jealousy and money more than an honest desire to state the truth about the authenticity of the Shroud,” Middagh explained. “At the time the letter was written, Pierre d’Arcis was the bishop of Troyes and the Shroud was being exhibited in the nearby town of Lirey. Pierre d’Arcis did not like the pilgrims with their bags of gold going to a neighboring town and bypassing him. I’m pretty sure the letter might never have been written if the Shroud had been shown in Troyes.”

Castle, no stranger to charging fees, appreciated the motive.

“Besides, we know the image on the Shroud was not painted,” Middagh said. “The Shroud of Turin Research Project in 1978 tested on linen every painter’s pigment known to have been used before 1532. Extensive tests were conducted on the samples to see how the pigments would have suffered the massive fire of that year. The medieval paints were chemically modified in fire and would have been washed away in the water that was used to extinguish the fire. Medieval paints were water-soluble and the 1978 STURP tests showed that no part of the image currently on the Shroud is soluble in water.”

Castle was beginning to conclude that for every argument the skeptics produced about the Shroud, the believers managed to concoct a response. He wondered if he would ever get to the bottom of the debate with definitive scientific proof, one way or the other. It amused Castle, but in a way the case for the authenticity of the Shroud was a lot like the question about God’s existence. Logic and science were not going to prove the Shroud was
authentic, but he wondered if logic and science might end up disproving the authenticity of the Shroud. That’s what so fascinated Castle about the work Gabrielli was proposing to do.

“So, you are convinced the Shroud was not painted?” Castle asked Middagh.

“Yes, I am,” Middagh answered. “The image does not penetrate into the linen fibers the way you would expect paint to penetrate the cloth. At best, the image is one fiber deep, almost as if the image lies on top of the linen fibers. No fibers are cemented together, as you would expect paint to do, and the image does not cross fibers. The image areas are very brittle, with the image on the surface like what you would expect from material that had oxidized by dehydration. All the colored fibers are evenly colored such that an exposed fiber is either colored or not colored. There is no density of coloration on the fibers. What shading is apparent comes from the number of colored fibers we observe microscopically in any given unit area of the Shroud, not from a deeper or denser coloration of the fibers. The colored fibers are very uniformly colored. None of these observations are what we would expect if an artist had painted the image on the linen. The body image rests only on the very top of the fibers. The way the image is placed on the Shroud is consistent throughout—on the full-body dorsal image that resulted from the body laid on the Shroud and the distinct full-frontal body image that resulted when the Shroud was folded lengthwise over the body’s head. Even though the body rested on the Shroud, the dorsal body image is also very lightly placed on the top of the fibers.”

“I’m not an expert on medieval painting,” Castle said, “but I’ve studied a lot of medieval paintings in Italian museums. The painter of the Renaissance who most studied anatomy was Leonardo da Vinci. I’ve spent hours examining his
Adoration of the Magi
at the Uffizi in Florence. There’s never been a question
Leonardo was a genius and he used a sfumato style of painting in which he lightly created his images. Why isn’t Leonardo a candidate for having painted the Shroud?”

“He is a candidate,” Middagh admitted. “One problem is that Leonardo wasn’t born until 1452 and the Church can date the Shroud earlier than that, certainly to the fourteenth century. The documented provenance of the Shroud that we know is the linen cloth in Turin goes back to the 1350s, when a descendant of Geoffrey de Charney, the Knight Templar who was burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay, the famous last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, had the Shroud first displayed to the public at a local church in Lirey, France. In other words, we can trace the history of the Shroud of Turin to a date before Leonardo was born.”

Even that did not deter Castle. “There is one other possibility,” he said. “Maybe the Savoy royal family who owned the Shroud in Lirey and brought it from France to Turin in Italy asked Leonardo to reproduce the Shroud to replace an earlier shroud that was an obvious forgery. Knowing Leonardo’s expertise with human anatomy and the subtlety of his painting techniques, the Savoy family might have figured Leonardo’s replacement forgery would be more convincing than their original. Why can’t we assume Leonardo obtained a piece of linen made in the time frame of 1260 to 1390
A.D.
that he thought would work? What if it turned out that Leonardo’s shroud was so superior that the Dukes of Savoy destroyed the Shroud of Lirey and replaced it with Leonardo’s duplicate? That would have allowed him to have been the artist in a theory consistent with the carbon-14-dating result.”

“I understand your point,” Middagh said, “but there are several problems, not the least of which is that we have no documentation historically that Leonardo ever worked in Turin or that he ever received a commission from the Savoy royal family.”

“But it’s an odd coincidence that the famous Leonardo self-portrait
showing him as an old man with flowing hair down to his shoulders and a long beard ends up even today in Turin, one of the prize possessions of the Savoy family royal library in Turin,” Castle added.

“I too once suspected Leonardo as the painter of the Shroud,” Father Morelli interjected. “We also know Leonardo experimented with the camera obscura.”

“How would a camera obscura be involved?” Castle asked.

“The camera obscura was a primitive light box that involved an early lens,” Morelli explained. “The light box was constructed to capture through the lens an image from life that showed up upside down, with the top of the image showing up on the bottom, projected onto the back wall of the light box. The image could also be projected onto a cloth or canvas for painting. Leonardo also experimented with a wide variety of light-sensitive materials, including many wood resins and various tinctures made from plants and leaves.”

Middagh jumped in. “But the theory is not that Leonardo painted the Shroud. I can’t stress enough that the Shroud of Turin Research Project concluded in their 1981 final report that no pigments, paints, dyes, or stains were found on the Shroud’s fibers. Over a five-day period in 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project did a definitive scientific analysis of the Shroud, using X-ray fluorescence analysis, ultraviolet fluorescence photography, and infrared photography, as well as microphotography and microchemical analysis. Their findings that there was no paint of any kind on the Shroud is still the definitive analysis.”

“So why did you consider Leonardo a candidate?” Castle asked Morelli.

“The dates of the first known exhibitions of the Shroud in Lirey do rule out Leonardo,” Morelli said. “But the most interesting
theory is that Leonardo created the first photographic image when he produced the Shroud. The idea is that Leonardo may have coated the linen with a light-sensitive chemical mixture and projected the image onto the linen using a camera obscura. Books have been written arguing that the face of the man in the Shroud resembles images we have of Leonardo—most importantly the Leonardo self-portrait that is kept at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin. There have been a few books claiming that Leonardo used himself as the face in creating the Shroud as a photographic image. In other words, the authors argued that what we have in the Shroud is not the image of Jesus Christ, but a photographic image of Leonardo da Vinci.”

“You reject that theory now?” Castle asked.

“I do,” Morelli said. “There is no evidence in any of Leonardo’s existing codex manuscripts that indicate he experimented with photography. He writes extensively about using a camera obscura, but as far as I can figure out, Leonardo used the camera obscura to assist him in his drawing and painting. None of Leonardo’s existing notebooks discuss any experimentation with plants or chemicals to produce light-sensitive formulas.”

“Aren’t some of Leonardo’s codex notebooks missing?” Castle asked.

“Yes,” Morelli said. “But there is no corroborating evidence from anything written in Leonardo’s lifetime that he came up with anything resembling photography. No image survives from the fifteenth century that even remotely resembles photography. The modern attempts to produce a Shroud-like image by photographic methods that would have possibly been known in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries look crude, nothing like the Shroud. But still, the most important problem is that the dates don’t work. No matter how you look at it, Leonardo was born after we
can document that the Shroud had been exhibited at Lirey in France, and photography wasn’t invented until about two hundred years ago.”

“There’s one more important piece of evidence,” Middagh added.

“What’s that?”

“There’s human blood hemoglobin and blood serum on the Shroud, and the blood serum is only evident in ultraviolet fluorescence,” Middagh said. “There is no way any artist in medieval times could have used ultraviolet fluorescence to paint human blood serum on the Shroud so it could be discovered centuries later, when UV fluorescence was invented. Besides, how would an artist paint blood serum that is invisible to the eye on specific places on the Shroud? Medical doctors examining the Shroud confirm the blood found on the Shroud, including the blood serum, is exactly where they would expect to find blood traces if the wounds displayed on the body of the man in the Shroud came from a crucifixion.”

Castle, a medical doctor with extensive surgical experience, wanted to know more about the blood detected on the Shroud. “How exactly does the blood appear on the Shroud? Does the blood appear only on the top fibrils, as does the image of the body? Or does the blood saturate the Shroud?”

“Most of the blood we observe on the Shroud comes from direct contact the linen had with the body,” Middagh answered. “The most prominent bloodstains appear as solid stains, for instance the blood streaming from the wrist wounds or the blood on the forehead from what would have been the crown of thorns. These bloodstains penetrate the Shroud, and so on the frontal image, the bloodstains from the crown of thorns show up on the part of the cloth resting on the body and bleed through to the top of the cloth. The same is the case with the dorsal image. Pools
of blood resulting from direct contact with the body do saturate the Shroud. Even more interesting, the Shroud of Turin Research Project found that the bloodstains on the Shroud are composed of hemoglobin with high concentrations of bilirubin, which would suggest blood flows from wounds that were clotting. In other words, the blood flows that penetrated the Shroud occurred while the crucified man was yet alive. That these blood wounds show up on the Shroud means the crucified man was placed in the Shroud almost immediately after death, without being washed or embalmed.”