The Shroud of Turin

Podcast Transcript

In the 13th century, a French knight came forward and displayed what he claimed was the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

Almost immediately, its authenticity was challenged by religious authorities.

In the centuries that followed, it became an object of fascination, curiosity, veneration, and controversy.

Finally, after centuries of conflicting opinions, scientists were allowed access to the cloth to date it, but even that didn’t end the debate.

Learn more about the Shroud of Turin and its history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Shroud of Turin is one of the most famous religious objects in the world.

In a previous episode, I covered the topic of holy relics generally, but in this episode, I want to zoom in on the shroud because it is the best-known object and because there is so much history and controversy surrounding it.

So let’s start by describing what the Shroud of Turin is.

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth measuring roughly 4.4 by 1.1 meters, or 14 feet, 5 inches by 3 feet 7 inches. On it are front and back faint images of a man who appears to have suffered wounds consistent with the crucifixion of Jesus as described in the Bible.

The image shows apparent marks on the wrists, feet, and side, as well as numerous marks across the body, suggesting scourging.

There are some burn marks on the sheet, which were caused by a fire in 1532. Molten silver dripped onto the shroud, burning a series of holes through it when it was folded. These holes were patched by nuns in the late 17th and mid-19th centuries.

Whenever you are dealing with any historical or archeological object, one of the primary things that is analyzed is the provenance of the item. This is the documented history of the item and its chain of ownership or possession over time.

The earliest documented mention of the Shroud of Turin dates to the 14th century in France. All reliable historical trails begin there, not earlier. The shroud first appeared in the small French town of Lirey, near the city of Troyes, in the 1350s.

The earliest known owner was Geoffroi de Charny, a French knight of notable reputation who fought at Calais and Poitiers and was close to King John II of France.

Around 1353 to 1357, Geoffroi, or his widow, arranged for the linen to be displayed in a newly built collegiate church in Lirey that he had founded.

Pilgrims came to see what was described as the burial cloth of Jesus, bearing the faint front and back image of his body. Medallions and pilgrimage badges produced in Lirey, several of which have survived to the present day, depict a long cloth with a double image, confirming that the object on view was already recognizably the same as the modern Shroud of Turin.

The relic’s authenticity was questioned immediately.

Around 1389, Pierre d’Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, wrote a memorandum to Pope Clement VII at Avignon protesting the public exhibitions. D’Arcis stated that one of his predecessors, Bishop Henri de Poitiers, had already investigated the cloth years earlier and found that it was “cunningly painted” and that the artist had confessed.

He argued that the image was a human creation, not a miraculous imprint, and that the displays misled the faithful.

Here, I should note that the Catholic Church’s long-term policy has always been to treat relics such as the Shroud of Turin with respect. The official policy is one of respectful veneration, not unquestioned belief or authentication.

The Church distinguishes between faith in what a relic represents and belief in the object’s physical authenticity. The Church will never come out and say something associated with the life of Jesus is authentic, because there is no way to possibly prove it.

Another thing I should note…

Almost no organic material from the ancient world has survived. Of the millions and millions of items of clothing from the ancient world, nearly none of it has survived to the present day.

What few organic items that have survived usually come from a desert region such as Egypt, where dry conditions can preserve them in tombs. Likewise, a few leather items have been found buried in bogs without oxygen or on glaciers, frozen in ice.

Back to the provenance of the shroud….

Geoffroi de Charny’s family retained the cloth for nearly a century. His granddaughter, Margaret de Charny, inherited it and, after years of disputes with the Church and local authorities over its possession, transferred it in 1453 to the House of Savoy, the ruling dynasty of a region straddling modern-day France and Italy.

From there, it was moved to Chambéry, where it was kept in the Savoy chapel and narrowly survived the 1532 fire, before finally being brought to Turin in 1578, where it is known as the Shroud of Turin.

One of the biggest problems with the shroud is the lack of provenance before the mid-14th century. This period corresponds to the sudden appearance of many relics claiming to be directly associated with Jesus.

These include the Holy Blood of Wilsnack in northern Germany, the Crown of Thorns located in Paris, and the Veil of Veronica in Rome.

I should mention one theory that attempts to explain the shroud’s provenance prior to the 14th century. This theory claims that the shroud is actually the Image of Edessa.

That is Edessa with an E, not Odessa with an O, which is in Ukraine.

The Image of Edessa, also known as the Mandylion, was a revered Christian relic said to bear a miraculous image of Jesus Christ’s face on a cloth.

According to the traditional account, King Abgar V of Edessa, which today is in southeastern Turkey, suffered from a serious illness and wrote to Jesus asking him to heal him.

Jesus supposedly replied that he could not come but would send one of his disciples. Later, the disciple Thaddeus came to Edessa and cured the king.

In later versions of the story, particularly from the 4th to 6th centuries, this narrative was expanded: Jesus himself was said to have wiped his face with a cloth, miraculously leaving his image imprinted upon it, and this cloth was then sent to Abgar.

The Image of Edessa became an object of pilgrimage and veneration. By the 6th century, it was credited with saving the city of Edessa from Persian and Arab sieges. It was later reportedly hidden inside a city wall, rediscovered in 544, and enshrined in the cathedral of Edessa.

In 944, the Byzantine Emperor Romanos I Lecapenos obtained it from Edessa. They transferred it to Constantinople with great ceremony, where it was housed in the imperial chapel of the Blach-er-nae Palace.

After the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, the relic disappeared from recorded history. Some modern theories propose that the Image of Edessa and the Shroud of Turin are actually the same object, folded so that only the facial portion was visible in antiquity.

It should also be noted that there is no evidence for this, and nothing ever claimed that the Image of Edessa was folded. The theory is just based on the fact that the Image of Edessa is supposed to have disappeared approximately 150 years before the Shroud of Turin appeared.

The shroud remained in Turin for several centuries, where it was an object of regional importance.

The shroud became a worldwide sensation in 1898 when Italian photographer Secondo Pia produced the first photographs of the shroud, whose negatives made the body image appear with striking clarity.

Ownership of the shroud remained with the House of Savoy until Italy’s former king, Umberto II, who was king for about one month in 1946, bequeathed it to the Holy See in 1983. However, custodianship remained with the archbishop of Turin.

The shroud is rarely displayed publicly. Major exhibitions occurred in 1898, 1931, 1933, 1978, 1998, 2000, 2010, and 2015, drawing millions of pilgrims and tourists.

When I visited Turin, I went to the cathedral, and you could just see where the shroud was stored, not the shroud itself.

The big question that has hung over the shroud since it first appeared in the 14th century is, “Is it real?” or more generally, “Is it at least plausible that it could be real?”

In the 1970s, the Swiss criminologist Max Frei lifted dust from the shroud with sticky tape and reported dozens of pollen types, many from plants he said were characteristic of the Levant and Anatolia. He argued this supported an eastern origin.

However, later electron microscopy of adhesive samples from the face region revealed only a small number of pollen grains, insufficient to draw any conclusions.

The biggest scientific inquiry into the shroud took place in 1978. The Shroud of Turin Research Project, or STURP, received about 120 hours of direct access to the shroud and ran a large battery of non-destructive tests.

These included high-resolution photography across the spectrum, reflectance and fluorescence spectroscopy in ultraviolet/visible/Infrared wavelengths, X-radiography, thermography, microchemical tests, and adhesive-tape sampling of fibers for later lab work.

The STURP team reached several conclusions in their report.

One was that no conventional paint was found for the body image. They reported that the image color resides in a very thin layer on the outermost linen fibers and did not detect binding media consistent with a painted image.

Data supported the claim that typical pigments or stains did not produce the sepia body image.

This doesn’t mean something wasn’t used; it only means it wasn’t a typical type of paint.

Second, using the tape samples, STURP reported positive microchemical tests for heme derivatives and bilirubin in the reddish areas, and argued the bloodstains were consistent with blood rather than paint.

Other STURP and independent papers characterized multiple iron forms and noted heme-related signals in blood areas.

There was dissent within the STURP team. Microscopy specialist Walter C. McCrone examined tape samples and argued the body image and “blood” were actually iron oxide and vermilion particles in a protein binder, or in other words, it was a medieval painting.

However, the majority STURP scientists rejected his interpretation based on their spectroscopy and microchemistry.

The disagreement has persisted in the literature ever since.

The big test, however, was conducting Carbon-14 dating of the cloth itself.

Small samples from a corner of the shroud were taken for destructive testing.

In 1988, the samples were sent to three Accelerator Mass Spectrometry labs. One in Oxford, one in Arizona, and one in Zurich.

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry directly counts the number of carbon-14 atoms relative to stable carbon-12 and carbon-13 atoms using a particle accelerator. This allows dating of much smaller samples with much greater precision.

In 1989, the three labs jointly published their findings in the journal Nature. They concluded that the fiber samples can be dated between 1260 and 1390.

The same approximate dates as when the shroud first appeared.

I should also note that every finding and every test that was run by the STURP team has been criticized by someone. Some people are adamant that the shroud is real, and others are just as adamant that it is a medieval creation.

Critics of the Carbon-14 tests have claimed the tested corner may have been part of a medieval repair and not representative of the original cloth.

Others claim that biogenic material, smoke, or oils might have skewed the carbon ratio toward a younger date.

One problem is that, even in 1978, the time researchers were given to examine the shroud was extremely limited. Since then, research techniques have improved dramatically, but the same level of access hasn’t been given since.

All of the current evidence, from scientific data to the lack of provenance, indicates that the Shroud of Turin was probably manufactured sometime in the 14th century. The sheer odds of anything made of linen surviving for 1,300 years without being mentioned once, despite being the most holy relic in Christendom, only to randomly show up in the middle of France, are highly improbable.

However, I would also have to say that the evidence isn’t 100% conclusive yet.

But even if it is a creation of the Middle Ages, and even if it was created with the intent to deceive people, I don’t know if that necessarily takes anything away from it.

It just means that whoever made it inadvertently created one of the greatest religious works of art in history.