Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Read online

  At 2:00 P.M. on August 2, 1946, U.S. Army officers in Nuremberg, accompanied by municipal officials, ordered an inspection of crates stored in cell number 3 of the Upper Schmiedgasse. The cell contained twelve crates, and in crate 8 was found the Holy Lance. Shortly after, the Second World War of the twentieth century having ended, the lance and the other sequestered treasures in Nuremberg were returned home to Vienna.

  LOCATION: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

  Footnote

  *The Longinus legend goes back at least to the sixth century, as evidenced by the Rabula Gospel, written in Syriac and dated to A.D. 586. One of its miniature paintings depicts Jesus and the two thieves nailed onto crosses, with soldiers and spectators gathered around. To the left of Jesus is a Roman soldier holding a spear up to his side with Greek letters written above the soldier’s head giving his identification as Longinus.

  THE SHROUD OF TURIN

  DATE: A.D. 30 by tradition; 1260 to 1390 by carbon dating. Modern scientific analysis is continuing.

  WHAT IT IS: The shroud is a linen sheet that for at least six centuries has been reputed to be the one in which the corpse of Jesus Christ was wrapped and entombed after the Crucifixion. Radiocarbon tests of a single sampling of cloth from a worn (and repaired?) and controversial corner of the shroud produced a date from the mid-fourteenth century. Despite this finding, there are many puzzling, inexplicable elements about the cloth and the image on it, and many people continue to believe that it may be the shroud of Christ.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The shroud measures 14 feet 3 inches long by 3 feet 7 inches wide, and bears faint front and back negative images of a man who has been crucified. The linen cloth has a herringbone weave, is burned in some places, and has yellowed through time.

  In the hours after the Crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea went to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to ask for permission to take away the body of Christ. Pilate, after ascertaining that Jesus was in fact dead, consented, and Joseph went to Calvary with a man named Nicodemus, who brought along a mixture of aloes and myrrh. The two men carried the body to a nearby garden in which there was a new tomb. Precisely how the body was prepared for burial is not known, but Joseph and Nicodemus probably, in accordance with Jewish burial customs for torture victims, spread out a linen cloth on a burial bench in the tomb and laid the unwashed body upon it. (While normal Jewish custom was to wash the body of the deceased, a victim of violence was not washed.) The spices were used in some manner, but it is not clear from the Gospels exactly how; the body could have been “packed” with spices still in their containers, the great share of the spices could have been burned as incense within the tomb, a “wash” of the spice mixture could have been “painted” on the walls and bench of the tomb just prior to the burial, the linen cloth could have been dabbed or sprinkled with the spices, or the mixture could have been directly smeared on the body. Since it was close to the Sabbath, when Jews were prohibited from fully preparing a corpse for burial (including washing, anointing, plugging up all the orifices, tying the jaw shut, tying the hands and feet, and wrapping or dressing the corpse), and because the body of Jesus had been so brutalized from the scourging and Crucifixion, Joseph and Nicodemus did the minimal treatment permitted, left the cloth-enfolded corpse inside the tomb, rolled a rock in front of the entrance, and left.

  John’s Gospel tells us that on the third day after the Crucifixion, in the darkness of the Easter morning, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to see the body. She found the stone removed and ran to get two of Jesus’ disciples. They entered the tomb and saw that the body was missing. The disciples left, and Mary Magdalene stood outside weeping. Then she crouched down and looked inside and saw two angels where the body of Jesus had lain. They asked her why she was weeping, and she replied that her Lord had been taken away, and she did not know where he was. Then she turned and saw Jesus before her, only she did not recognize him. He asked the same question, but, thinking he was the gardener, she asked where he had placed the body so that she might take it away. Jesus then called her name, and she realized who he was, saying in Hebrew the word teacher. Jesus said that she must not touch him, for he had not yet ascended to heaven. He asked her to go to his disciples and tell them she had seen the Lord, and all that he had said to her. This conversation transpired while the linen cloth, from which the dead Jesus had arisen, was left lying in its place—on the burial bench—in the tomb.

  Throughout the centuries of the first millennium after his death (approximately April 7 of A.D. 30, according to many New Testament scholars), several shrouds purported to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ emerged. False claims were commonly made, for the Shroud of Christ would be among the holiest of relics, with potential benefits of immense riches and power. But one of these relics may actually have been what later became known as the Turin Shroud. There is the Veronica Cloth, for instance, which had once been known as the Image of Edessa, or, after it was moved from Edessa (Urfa in modern-day Turkey) to Constantinople in 944, as the Mandylion. Scholars historically described it as a cloth bearing a Christ-like image of only a face (as opposed to a full body). Some evidence indicates that the Mandylion, which probably dates at least from the sixth century, was a smaller cloth than the Turin specimen. But many sindonologists, or shroud scholars, attribute this to the cloth having been publicly displayed only in folded form.

  Other alleged “True Shrouds” include revered cloths in a monastery near Jerusalem and on a tiny island near the British Isles. Over the years, various stories and legends surfaced, such as the one of Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, discovering the Holy Shroud in Jerusalem. Saint Helena is said to have established in Constantinople a collection of major holy relics, including the True Cross.

  Although the written record reveals no unequivocal mention of the Turin Shroud until late in the Middle Ages, there are early pictorial renderings that support its existence prior to this time. Of the more certain references to the shroud, the oldest is that of a Byzantine tremissis. This late seventh-century coin, which bears a frontal bust of Christ, has some twenty-one features with matching representations on the shroud. For example, on the coin there are strange lines connecting the pupils of the eyes to the eyebrows; a defect in the weaving of the linen cloth traverses exactly the same eye areas. The peculiarities on this coin can best be explained as meticulously depicted flaws in the weave of the shroud, which was used as the engraver’s model. The multitude of matching features suggests the shroud was in existence at least as early as about A.D. 690, when the coin was engraved, and this in turn implies that the shroud was already, in Byzantine tradition, considered a holy cloth connected with Christ.

  Another significant artifact that supports the existence of the shroud prior to the thirteenth century is the Hungarian Pray Manuscript, an illuminated manuscript that dates from 1192 to 1195, some sixty-five to two hundred years earlier than the age of the Turin cloth as determined by modern radiocarbon tests. A picture of the crucified Christ shows a burial cloth with two remarkable features. There is a strange geometric pattern on the cloth (probably the artist’s attempt to render the herringbone weave) and a peculiar L-shaped configuration of circles corresponding to a burn pattern seen today on the shroud itself (an apparent attempt to represent the holes from a fire). The Turin Shroud was burned on two occasions. The first fire happened prior to 1516 since these holes appear in a drawing of the shroud dated to that year. But if the Hungarian Pray Manuscript can be entered as evidence, that fire must have happened even before 1192. The second fire occurred in 1532.

  Pictured are positive (top) and negative (bottom) photographic images of the shroud.

  Continuing along the trail of evidence for a pre-thirteenth-century shroud, we find a description of a shroud seen in Constantinople by the French knight Robert de Clari during the sack of the city in 1204 by soldiers of the Fourth Crusade. Could this be the Turin Shroud? De Clari described a shroud that strongly resembles it. Could, in fact, the Image of E
dessa, or Mandylion, the de Clari shroud, and the Turin Shroud be one and the same? Such a claim would require specific written and pictorial evidence.

  Negative and positive images of the face on the Shroud of Turin

  Such evidence came to light in the 1980s. Willi K. Müller, a German medical doctor-sindonologist, first made public an important identification of such a picture in a lengthy medieval text known as the Skylizès Manuscript. The significance of this was later explored by the French researcher Brother Bruno Bonnet-Eymard. In the text, profusely illustrated by colorful drawings, an artist has depicted a cloth being presented to the East Roman emperor Romanus I (Lecapenus), who ruled in the first half of the tenth century. The cloth is so long that the bearer must drape one end across his shoulder while Lecapenus is required to gather up the other end to keep it from touching the floor. This extraordinarily long cloth had a face in the middle. And since it is labeled “Holy Mandylion,” the so-called small cloth that bore the Lord’s face, one is forced to ask, “If this cloth were so small, why would the artist have depicted it as very long?”

  In 1982 an Italian classical scholar, Dr. Gino Zaninotto, discovered in the archives of the Vatican a revealing document (Codex Vatican Graec. 511). This was a sermon written by Gregory the Archdeacon and Referendarius. Gregory, who witnessed the presentation of the shroud or Mandylion to Romanus I as depicted in the Skylizès Manuscript, described an image on the cloth bearing not only the face but also a wound in the side and possibly even more than this. From the artistic and written evidence, then, a case may be made for a link among the Mandylion, the de Clari shroud, and the Shroud of Turin.

  It is now time to examine the documented history of the Shroud of Turin. The written record indirectly implies that around 1354 Geoffrey de Charny, a knight who had recently been in a military campaign, built a church in Lirey, France, for a cloth bearing the image of a tortured Christ. Although it was branded an artist’s creation in 1389 by Bishop Pierre d’Arcis with the clear intent that it be dismissed, the de Charny family apparently disagreed, for it remained carefully guarded by them until the mid-fifteenth century. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Margaret de Charny, through an arrangement with Duke Louis of Savoy, turned the shroud over to the protection of the Savoy family. For a long time they kept it sequestered at the Sainte-Chapelle in Chambéry, France. The cloth was almost destroyed when a fire erupted there in 1532, but some quick-thinking priests and civilians rescued it. In 1578, when the dukes of Savoy became the kings of Sardinia and Northern Italy, they brought it with them to the capital city of Turin, where it has been ever since. The shroud remained in the Savoy family until the death, in 1983, of King Umberto II, who willed it to the Vatican.

  The shroud was a bona fide religious icon for many people. Its image of a crucified man certainly evoked the Passion of Christ, and its overseers guarded it zealously, as they continue to do today. Its rare public exhibitions only add to its mystery.

  An event occurred in May 1898 that swelled public interest into worldwide excitement and controversy. A weeklong exhibition of the cloth was held at the cathedral that housed it, and during that time an amateur Italian photographer named Secondo Pia, having obtained permission, produced the first photographs of the shroud. In his darkroom, as the images emerged on the glass plates, Pia was in awe. In Pia’s photographic negative, dark and light representations became reversed, and the subtle image of the shroud became vivid. What could only be perceived faintly on the cloth became startlingly apparent in the negatives!

  Pia’s work provoked intense debate. Comprehensive scientific experiments were performed, and experts of all kinds joined the argument over the shroud’s authenticity.

  The experiments had begun in 1900 after Yves Delage, an agnostic, showed his friend Paul Vignon the photos that Pia had taken in 1898. They were soon joined by René Colson (a professor of physics) and Armand Gautier (a professor of biological medicine). These investigators performed tests until 1902—laboratory simulations, because permission had not been granted to use the actual shroud—that might either show the shroud to be a forgery or help substantiate claims supporting its veracity. They tried creating a similar image on a comparable linen cloth by painting and dressing a body with chemicals and pressing the sheet against it, obtaining similar photographic negatives from other linen cloth images; they analyzed the wounds and scourge marks and their arrangements on photographs of the shroud, and compared them to damage that might be inflicted by actual ancient weapons and a crucifixion; they studied simulations of blood staining and clotting on the cloth and made chemical tests. These men approached the shroud legend with great skepticism, but their investigations convinced them they were dealing with an artifact of history and that the shroud was indeed a burial cloth.

  Delage presented the Pia photographs and the scientific findings to the French Academy on April 21, 1902, and the story hit the papers on April 23, 1902. Paul Vignon’s first publication, The Shroud of Christ (first in French, then in English), also appeared that same year. Based on his careful study of the Pia photographs and his painstaking work, Vignon proposed that there was a relationship between the image and cloth-body distance—that is, that there was three-dimensional information coded into the shroud.

  Then, in the early 1930s, an eminent French surgeon, Pierre Barbet, performed experiments with cadavers and suggested a solution to a mystery of the shroud that was a point of contention among its doubters: Why were both thumbs missing from the image of the hands on the cloth? Barbet spiked a nail experimentally through the wrist of an amputated arm and found that the thumb moved inward toward the center of the palm, the nail having hit a tendon in the wrist. Barbet’s findings increased the shroud fever. New photographs of the shroud taken just prior to that time by a professional named Giuseppe Enrie, using equipment and techniques more modern than Pia’s, supported Pia’s results and supplied Barbet with a powerful tool for his medical researches.

  In 1973 and again in 1978, the head of the Zurich, Switzerland, police lab, Dr. Max Frei, had removed dust samples from the shroud. From his study of the pollen in this material, he identified fifty-eight kinds of plants represented on the cloth, of which forty-four grow in Palestine. Seven of these were desert-derived salt-loving types and could not have come from France or Italy where the shroud is known to have been housed. Frei concluded that the shroud must once have been in the Holy Land.

  Tests conducted on samples removed in 1978 by American, Swiss, and Italian teams showed at least 95 percent support for an as yet unidentified image-causing mechanism. Many scientists were inclined to associate that mechanism somehow with a proposed body once enwrapped in the cloth. Only the testing conducted by an American microscopist, Dr. Walter C. McCrone of McCrone Research Institute in Chicago, argued for the possibility that an artist might have rendered the image on the shroud. However, the preponderance of scientific evidence collected made this conclusion a most controversial one.

  The Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc., or STURP, was formed in 1977 specifically for the purpose of scientifically studying the image mechanism. At the 1978 examination of the shroud, using 6.3x-64x microscopy, the American STURP researchers learned that the image is confined only to the crowns of the threads, that is, the image is found only on the very uppermost portion of each exposed thread in the image area of the fabric. They also learned that the darkness or lightness of the image is not due to darker or lighter fibers, as one might expect in a painting, but instead all image fibers are the same color, straw yellow. Wherever there are more of these fibers, the image is darker. It is this phenomenon that gives the shroud image its three-dimensionality when examined with a space-age machine known as a VP-8 Image Analyzer, explaining and underscoring Vignon’s proposal made in 1902.

  Shortly after the STURP team returned from Turin, two of their scientists tested the red material in the blood areas with thirteen different chemical tests and determined that it is in fact blood on the cloth and tha
t it probably was there before the image was there because there is no evidence of the image beneath the bloodstains.

  Simultaneously, an Italian team headed by forensic pathologist Dr. Pierluigi Baima Bollone, conducting independent tests, went even further, stating that their results not only showed it was human blood but proved it was blood type AB!

  Since the advent of radiocarbon dating in 1949, experts called for such an analysis to be made which would fairly and accurately date the cloth. For years this idea was rejected because it would require large samples of the cloth to be cut. However, over time the technique became refined so that it required only postage stamp-size samples.*

  Finally, in 1988 carbon-14 tests were conducted to determine the age of the cloth. If the tests showed the cloth came from the time of Jesus or before, it might be the true Holy Shroud; if they showed it came from a later time, it could be spurious. Investigators cut a single swatch from a corner of the cloth and sent it, along with controls (samples whose dates of origin were definitely known) from the early second century and from the late Middle Ages, to laboratories in the United States, England, and Switzerland. Nuclear accelerators measured the residual radioactive carbon isotopes in the flax from which the linen was made. Such tests can have an accuracy of 95 percent, and the results can be correct within a range of two hundred years or less. The carbon-14 tests rendered a mean date for the shroud sample in the mid-fourteenth century.

  Radiocarbon dating has proven over the years to be fairly reliable as an indicator of the age of an object. However, in certain special cases the age determined by the tests does not always match the age expected. Thus archaeologists well know that the radiocarbon test is but one data point that must be evaluated in the light of the spectrum of data collected. The Shroud of Turin may be one of these special cases. Whenever there is a question surrounding the radiocarbon results, one looks at three sources for error: the chemical pretreatment, the equipment used, and the sample itself.