The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (22 page)

In 1235 there was a notorious case in the German city of Fulda. The Jews were charged with the murder of a miller’s five sons, and were subjected to torture so horrendous as to force them to “confess” that the unleavened Easter bread was really made by using human blood. The result was another mass murder. The episode resonated so widely that it reached, and concerned, the Emperor
Frederick II. A man of immense learning, and amazingly broad-minded for his age,
Frederick was very familiar with Oriental customs. Having been brought up in Sicily, where Muslims still lived, he had spent time incognito as a child with a Muslim family who took him and hid him to protect him from his enemies. The Emperor was very skeptical on the matter; since however the legend had such a firm hold of the mind of the commons, he decided to nominate an expert commission made up of Jews who had converted to Catholicism to make an accurate and in-depth study of the problem. Obviously the experts proved that the Old Testament forbids absolutely the eating of blood, even that of animals killed for food.
Frederick II thought he would solve the problem for good by associating the persecutors of Jews with those guilty of lese-majesty, the most serious and most terribly punished of all crimes. And yet in the same year the communities of Lauda and Pforzheim had carried out more slaughters; Pope
Gregory IX had to issue a new version of the Bull
Sicut Iudaeis
in which he ordered the Bishops of France to severely punish Christians who made themselves guilty of violence against the Jewish population or their property.

Just in those years, one of the most violent persecutions burst out, and it is thought that as many as 2,500-3,000 Jewish persons were murdered by the crusaders who were taking part in the
Sixth Crusade, including women and children, while hundreds more were baptized by force. This may have been the moment of highest tension: exacerbated by the spread of heresy and religious contestation, the Church started to condemn traditional Jewish books such as the
Talmud
, which was not properly a sacred text but contained some disrespectful passages about Jesus which had come from popular literature. Hate of Jews fed on the notion that Jews deliberately profaned the Eucharist. The rumour had spread that Christian wet-nurses hired by rich Jews to feed their babies, who took Communion on Easter day, were forced to throw their milk into the toilet for three days afterward to stop the Eucharist contaminating the little new-born Jew through the milk. There were more than 50 accounts of profaning Jews who had taken consecrated hosts by deceit and had suddenly seen them turn to flesh and blood in their hands.

By the mid-twelve hundreds, Pope
Innocent IV allowed himself to be conditioned enough by these notions to approve the decree of expulsion passed by the archbishop of Vienne against the Jews in his diocese; this was in fact a very rare case, since the Popes kept publishing Bulls in defence of the Jewish population, which the public regularly ignored, because the prejudice was so rooted in the popular mind as to be invincible. By the end of the century, expulsions became mass phenomena: in 1290 it was the turn of the Jews of England, then in 1306 those of France, by order of
Philip the Fair. Between 1298 and 1337, Germany saw a simply monstrous wave of anti-Jewish mania: 150 local communities were destroyed because of this chit-chat about desecrated Hosts, and historians calculate that these horrors resulted in the murder of between 20,000 and 100,000 Jews.
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This was the climate in which the Templars, in all likelihood, gained possession of the Shroud. Most Templar monks were rather on the ignorant side, but some of the leaders were well educated. Traces of writing surely could not be noticed by pilgrims rushing by in front of the relic and kept at a safe distance, but maybe a careful, precise and prolonged exam could still perceive them. If any of the brothers had realised that the sheet carried Jewish writing, as is not at all impossible, we would have an even better reason why the Temple leadership chose to keep utterly silent about the relic. And the order simply could not afford to lose it; for certain reasons, it regarded it as a necessary bulwark against an evil that was affecting the whole of Christianity. An evil with most ancient roots, that had been finding a few victims even in the Temple.

Keep the path of Peter

In 1143 abbot Erwin of Steinfeld informed St.
Bernard of Clairvaux that members of a peculiar heretical sect had been arrested in the neighbourhood of Cologne: they declared themselves member of an ancient Church which had remained hidden since the days of the martyrs, which had survived in Greece and other countries under the leadership of some “Apostles” and bishops. From the second half of the 12th century to the end of the 13th, Christian society was shaken to its foundations by the unprecedented proliferation of a movement of religious dissent which not only challenged a number of fundamental dogmas and the Church’s tradition, but associated theological protest with forceful accusations against the corruption of the clergy and vigorous political demands.
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In this shaky climate, the relics and objects to do with Jesus’ earthly life were to the Church something like a saving anchor, something that could help Christians not to drift off after the latest faddish doctrine. It was a matter of staying within the beaten track, the track that had once been opened by the Apostles.

Shortly before his death, the old fisherman from Bethsaida in Galilee, Shimon a.k.a. Peter, had dictated to his disciples a letter which they then composed and dispatched to every Christian community that could be reached, like an actual encyclical. The letter expressed certain serious concerns of his and recommended that Christians should stay away from some recent theories that gave a merely intellectual and spiritual portrayal of Jesus, as if here were no more than the symbol of the complete renewal of mankind at large. Modern historians call this religious current
docetism
, from Greek
dokèin
(“to seem”), because their teaching was based on the idea that Jesus had no more than the external appearance of a man. Their fault was placing too much emphasis on personal interpretation. Peter was not widely read, but those novels and sophisticated interpretations that were becoming so fashionable in Christian thought, no, he did not like them at all. For a start, they had their root not in Jewish religion but in neo-Platonic philosophy, that is the thought of pagan Greeks; what is more, they left the impression of extolling the spiritual face of Jesus to try to hide away the human face, as though being human were a weakness, something to be ashamed of. Above all, they were myths. Having followed him for three years, having seen in person the trial, the death, and the events that had followed, he kept a very concrete memory of him, and would not let the new generations imagine him as something like an abstract concept. His reaction against these new directions, so far as we know, was immediate and unreserved condemnation: Christianity meant to recognise that the Messiah of Israel was one and the same with the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, and since the
Docetists refused the human being Jesus, in Peter’s eyes, they were simply not Christian. f we want to place a modern label on it, the religion of Peter, like that of Paul and John, was a historical religion, in the sense that everything was born from certain fundamental facts precisely located in time and space. There had been one strong man who had done certain things, and the soles of his feet had left their prints on the earth of Jerusalem.

In the writing that Christian tradition handed down as the Second Epistle of Peter, the old fisherman warned against the dangers that could arise when the claim was made to interpret the Gospels in too free and personal a manner. Against all personal constructs in the matter of Jesus, Peter raised a simple and immediate truth, that is, what he had seen:

For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty [...]. knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of private interpretation.
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Eighty years after his death, things had gone far beyond, and many independent churches had spread, to which the human part of Jesus, the body, was not just secondary but negative, to be discarded. They tended to feel that it was impossible that the Spirit of God, of whom the celestial Christ had been forged, could remain caged in a human body that fell sick and died; so Christian thinking was tending to suppose that the Spirit had at some point taken possession of this mortal detritus in order purely to communicate with human beings, teach them the way of knowledge, only to then rid himself as soon as possible of this embarrassing physical carrier, before it was undone by crucifixion. These churches called themselves
Gnostic, from the Greek word
gnosis
, knowledge, because according to their religious views, the salvation of man depended not from Jesus’ sacrifice, which had never really taken place, but from his preaching alone, thanks to which men came to the knowledge of God.
Docetic and
Gnostic currents would strongly separate the earthly Jesus from the heavenly Christ, as if they were two separate and irreconcilable entities. The mortal Jesus, the Jesus of Nazareth, was an empty and irrelevant container of no importance, the temporary abode of the spiritual Christ; to some sects, he was just another man, to others not even a man of flesh and bone, but some sort of ectoplasm. To both, at any rate, the Resurrection had never happened, because the heavenly Christ could neither suffer nor die; there had been no sacrifice to redeem mankind, and the Eucharist was a meaningless ritual and so should not be celebrated. God had sent this celestial Messenger of his among men under the false appearance of a mortal man, of a commonplace individual, so that he could preach to mankind and so redeem it from their false opinions; the physical baggage of the Messenger was nothing but a kind of visual delusion needed so that people could see him, but of no real consistency. Certain extremist
Gnostic groups went as far as to say that it had actually been Simon of Cyrene who had been crucified: for at the right moment God had as though dazzled the soldiers, to force them to get the wrong man.
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Apart from these exaggerations, the
Gnostic movement had its own fascinating theology which exalted the spiritual greatness of the Christ and celebrated the way in which the human soul, through his mediation, carried out a great path of ascesis till it came to contemplate the face of God. From the end of the first century till the age of Constantine, even Catholic Christianity was more than once attracted by this intellectual and spiritual vision of Jesus, which underplayed the value of his human nature and interpreted every bit of the gospels allegorically. Several representatives of these views moved constantly on the edge of orthodoxy, such as the theologian
Valentinus, who had lived in Rome during the reign of
Hadrian, of whom we are left a fragment of great religious poetry:

When the Father, the sole good being, tuns to it his glance, the heart is sanctified and shines with light; and so he is made blessed who has such a heart, for he will see God.
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Already from the end of the first century, Christians felt this kind of idea very keenly, and their attraction was reinforced by the fact that Gnostics lived exemplary ascetic lives.
Valentinus had a special intuition, and he seemed to somehow have set into motion that theological debate which was later to ripen into the dogma of the Trinity. The beauty of his religious thought, joined as it was with an overwhelming power of eloquence, had let much of the clergy of Rome to propose him as a future Pope; something, however, had gone wrong, and in the another candidate, of no great theological gift, but who had given an impressive witness of faith in his daily life, had been elected instead. The reasons for this choice must be found in a peculiarity of Gnostic thought already denounced by St.
Ignatius of Antioch, who had a major role in the Christian community in the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD):
Gnostics neglect to help the poor, the sick, widows and orphans. That was the inevitable result of their theological apparatus: if flesh is nothing but sin and corruption, why cure the sick? If life is nothing but incarceration and exile, why help the poor live longer? In short, their exaggerated ascetic ideal made
Gnostics pretty nearly inhuman. Jesus, on the other hand, had been very clear: following his path meant helping anyone who needed help, whatever the cost. The primitive Church had been, before it had been anything else, a group of religious volunteers made up of people who held their goods in common to feed the poor and care for the sick; there was no doubt that this was the will of Jesus, since this happened when he was still with the Apostles and had guided them. These sects interpreted the message of Christ as though it were pretty much a school of philosophy, and ignored charity to the needy. Even if they were pure of any stain,
Gnostics ended up betraying the essence of Christianity.
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Disappointment at missing the Papacy caused
Valentinus the theologian to develop a violent resentment against the Roman clergy; it seems that he left the capital for the East, and that he started to write works widely different from what he had previously published, expounding aggressively
Gnostic theories against the human body of Christ, which he had perhaps already worked out without ever making them public before. Peter’s vision, which had handed down a cult of Jesus as the Christ announced by the prophets and still a man of flesh and bone, ended up prevailing, and
Gnostic doctrines were refuted; Gnosis however did not altogether vanish, for its roots were deep both in the East and in the West. Modern historians have trouble seeing the differences between one sect and another, because notices are few and as often as not they come from contemporary Christian intellectuals, who had it in for those doctrines because of the confusion they sowed among the public: some leaders of major
Gnostic schools had circulated heavily-edited versions of the gospels, or even gospels of their own writing and devising. The text of John, peculiarly full as it is of symbolic expressions, was their favourite target.
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