Paul KeenanThe Shroud of Turin continues to compel, writes Paul Keenan
"There is something here that touches one’s soul, and when this happens it is because one is in the realm of religion.”
Over 650 years after its first public display, the ability of the Shroud of Turin to transport viewers to such lyrical responses is hardly a surprise to people of faith. Here for them, after all, in the stained linen cloth is a linking of their faith to its very roots in the form of the ghostly figure whose very body is a testimony of torture and crucifixion.
No surprise either in the long queues that form daily around the Cathedral of St John the Baptist for the exposition of the shroud – from April 19 to June 24 – the first exposition since 2010 (and just the fifth since 1933).
Over one million people have reserved free tickets for the exposition, which runs 12 hours a day to accommodate the throng. Pope Francis will view the shroud for himself when he visits Turin on June 21.
And yet the shroud continues to surprise.
Take, for example, the opening quote of the cloth’s ability to “touch the soul”. A promotional quote, one might suppose, from Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Turin, custodian of the shroud, eager to draw as many faithful to the latest public display. In fact, no; the quote is actually the honest reaction of Amir Younes, the Muslim head of Turin’s Intercultural Centre Mecca, who joined with a delegation of Muslims eager to view the shroud for themselves and to use the visit as a moment of inter-religious harmony.
The visitors pointed out that the support shown by Christians for the Muslim feast of Ramadan made such a visit a natural response.
“We decided to come as a sign, to say that we are citizens of this country and city. The shroud draws Christians and Muslims, and in a world marked by division, it invites us to be brothers,” the delegation insisted.
The fraternal visit is just one surprise around this 2015 exposition, however.
Another is contained in the enduring ability of the shroud to generate widespread press coverage among the world’s secular press.
While the Wall Street Journal, for example, offered lengthy coverage to the timeless mystery that is the Shroud of Turin and the multitude of propositions as to its origins which fill the void in our knowledge, Britain’s Mirror newspaper offered full coverage of a novel experiment undertaken by the Italian police to reverse-age the face on the shroud to offer an interpretation of the young face of Jesus. That blond and blue-eyed result has caused a debate all its own.
But perhaps the surprise of the exposition to date came on May 2 when a major conference of over 300 syndologists (shroud scholars) in Turin heard from Dr Alfonso Sánchez Hermosilla, a Spanish forensic expert who has found for himself something of a niche specialism in a separate linen piece, linked by tradition to the shroud itself.
Stored in a specially-built chapel in Cathedral of Salvador in the city of Oviedo, the Sudarium of Oviedo has a richly-recorded history which pre-dates the shroud’s own.
While the larger cloth can be traced to its first public showing in 1357 in France, the sudarium can be definitively traced to 840 AD – when the chapel was built to house it – and more loosely back to Jerusalem where, in the year 614 AD, as a relic held by the early Christian community of Palestine, it began its journey to Spain, via Egypt, carried by escaping Christians ahead of Persian invaders.
Such dating is important as shroud supporters have long been at a disadvantage in attempting to push that relic back further than medieval France – where sceptics insist the shroud has its origins as an elaborate hoax (recent studies into eastern pollen grains on the shroud have helped supporters posit a geographical perspective if not a concrete historical one).
The traditional linking of the sudarium, then, has offered something of a lifeline to supporters, albeit a tentative one. Until Dr Hermosilla stood up to speak on May 2, that is.
What the forensic specialist offered to his audience was a ‘leap forward’ in terms of both shroud and sudarium studies, and a strengthening of the case for the shroud as a burial cloth originating further east than sceptics previously thought.
In short, and purely from a forensic point of view, Dr Hermosilla offered in his presentation the conclusion that “all the information that emerged from scientific investigation is compatible with the theory that the Turin Shroud and the sudarium covered the corpse of the same person.”
Dr Hermosilla reported compelling matches between shroud and sudarium in terms of staining, both in terms of size and of origin from the corpse. And, while the sudarium offers no striking facial image as on the shroud – very likely as it was laid aside at the time of wrapping the body – it does contain an impression of the original wearer’s nose. “The surface of the nose in both linens is very similar,” Dr Hermosilla reported.
Evidence
Meanwhile, in terms of the torture evidence found on the shroud, a single clue on the sudarium offers evidence that the wearer of that cloth was also the victim of flagellation, with a strike mark on the neck imposing itself on the sudarium and concurring in form with the injuries suffered by the man on the shroud.
More compelling yet, it was revealed that by modelling the face clearly evident on the shroud to create a three-dimensional image, said image allowed for a near-perfect superimposition of the wounds visible on the sudarium to the wounds visible on the model.
And lastly, and perhaps most electrifying of all for die-hard shroud supporters, Dr Hermosilla revealed to an audience which can reasonably be envisaged as holding its collective breath, that the sudarium has at last revealed that “there are stains of vital blood, that is to say blood that was shed when the convicted man was still alive, very similar on both cloths and seem to relate to the lesions on the scalp; they also seem to correspond to the kind of lesions that a crown of thorns would cause.”
Just as supporters will cling to such findings for their case, sceptics will similarly leap on them to bolster theirs (by recourse to a hoaxer referencing the biblical record). They may have different perspectives on that greatest of mysteries, but, just like Christians and Muslims visiting the exposition, they are drawn by the same enduring power of the shroud.