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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.
