The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (20 page)

The advances of IT have recently allowed new directions to such studies, making possible kinds of images that were once not so much as conceivable. It has been discovered that the Shroud is not even a photograph. Unlike photographs, the image contains three-dimensional information within itself. It is a kind of optical projection, reminiscent of holography in some ways. It is certain that the image has been formed after the end of the flow of blood, so that the Shroud carries no image beneath the bloodstains. The new frontier of research points in the direction of certain theories that seem particularly probable. The most studied concerns the effect of a very strong and very short (a few hundredths of a second) burst of radiation, capable of leaving an impression on the cloth and oxidize its fibres without however burning them; that model would explain many things that otherwise find no reason to exist, for instance that the intensity of the image was derived by the distance it was from the body. Many hypotheses have been made over time about the formation of the very strange image of that man; the fact remains however that no scientist has thus far managed to reproduce an object with the same features as the Shroud. The phenomenon remains unknown. The various attempts to explain, though scientifically very important, remain purely theoretical models.

New hypotheses have also recently been opened concerning the controversial radio-carbon dating. The physicist
Christopher Bronk Ramsey, director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit – that is, one of the three labs that had been given the task of dating the shroud – has said the carbon dating test should be re-evaluated. In an interesting recent interview with the BBC, he has clarified how far technology has progressed since the start of the test on the Shroud, and today the method seems far more trustworthy than before. The procedure is based on measuring the amount of carbon left on an archaeological find to be dated. Carbon is an element found in every organic matter, and diverse varieties of it exist; the most widespread in living matter (equal to 98.89%) is made of atoms whose nucleus is made of six protons and six neutrons, but there are also different types such as carbon 13 (whose nucleus bears six protons and seven neutrons) and, exactly, carbon 14, whose nucleus is made of six protons and eight neutrons. Both carbon 13 and carbon 14 are isotopes of the most widespread kind, and C14 is unstable, that is naturally radioactive: as time goes on, it slowly disintegrates, and during this process it lets out an electron and a neuter particle (neutrino). C14 is found in the atmosphere, and all living beings continuously absorb it; when the organism dies, absorption ceases and its remains start slowly losing the radio-carbon which is no longer being reintegrated. Looking at the speed of decay of C14 over time, and if it is possible to measure how much C14 is left in a certain find, then it is possible to work how long ago the organism from which that find comes from died: for instance, it is theoretically possible to go back to the period when the fibre used to make a cotton cloth was harvested. But though its working principle is quite simple in and of itself, its measurement turns out to be extremely complex. With the old method we had to measure the atoms decayed in a given period of time, making sure not to include into the measurement other atomic decays that are present but have nothing to do with the test (for instance, background radiation in the environment). There is a second method to make the count, but neither is wholly foolproof; indeed, every measurement has a built-in margin of doubt, and many possible interferences may alter the result.
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It is very rare that an archaeological find remains free from contact with the world after it has been made; in general, objects come into contact with people or substances just because they are used. Our fathers had an excellent habit of recycling objects several times over, practically until they utterly wore out. Even the very rich never threw anything away: a mediaeval lady’s dress would be inherited by her daughter, and eventually perhaps presented to a church that got a priest’s liturgical vestments out of it. When it really was too worn for any use, it was cut up for household rags; and when the rags were beyond use, they were still used to make paper.

That cotton cloth we used as an example may have passed through any amount of incarnations: worn, dyed with vegetable or animal dyes, used to clean the household, to make the stopper of an amphora of oil proof against leaks, maybe even as swaddling clouts for a new-born baby: each of which brought it into contact with other living beings or other organic material, and each time it might have absorbed C14 of alien origin. In actual fact, radio-carbon is only one of many scientific methods used to try and date a find; it is neither better nor worse than the others, and indeed in some situations it proves wholly unsuitable. Experts in the field know famous tales of C14 dating with absurd, even ludicrous results; for instance, the prehistoric site at Jarmo was tested four times and had four different results, starting with 4,700 BC, then 10,000 BC, again 7,000 BC and finally 6,000 BC. Some primitive caribou bone tools from Old Crown, Alaska, were carbon-dated, and turned out to be from 27,000 years ago; the experts, unhappy with the result because the archaeological exam suggested a much more recent date, went into the matter in more depth – and found that the dating came from material from the external part of the bone, and testing again the internal, possibly less contaminated, part, the result was a much more modest 1,350 years earlier. No doubt the most amusing case was the one that struck the laboratory at Tucson, Arizona: a helmet from a Viking tomb – a well-researched kind of site whose dating and typology can be generally guessed with some accuracy – whose every other aspect asked to have it dated to the 10th century AD, but the radio-carbon test informed the scientists that the cow whose horns decorated the helmet was yet to be born! These are of course paradoxical cases, which are however very useful to scientists, because they show how easy it is to go monumentally off the trail even when you are using the finest technology available. You may carry out the test in the most textbook fashion, but the absence of essential data can totally compromise the result.
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Doubts had been gathering over the Shroud’s C-14 dating almost from the moment the results were published. Some denounced the whole procedure as approximate and lacking in scientific rigour. Even scientists outside the fray had noticed that the approach had been, to say the least, unusual: no notes or minutes had been taken during the collection of samples, which laboratories always do because all kinds of unexpected things can happen during the work and must later be taken into consideration; the specific weight of the samples taken (300 mg) was nearly double the Shroud’s average specific weight for that surface (161 mg), whereas, it being the same cloth, it should have been more or less identical; finally, more samples had been taken behind closed doors and without notifying the scientific community, and in fact in following years the results of exams carried out on threads and fragments of the Shroud, which according to the agreements should not even have existed, have kept popping up here and there. Besides the genuine professional rivalries between the laboratories concerned, who were keen to be awarded the examination, other interests appear to have come into play. The controversy surrounding the tests eventually turned into something akin to a thriller rather than a scientific test; it is therefore not surprising that several books were written about this incredible story.
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Today the international scientific community is inclined to believe that if there were any errors, they were due to a technology still too unripe to hope to date such a complex object. Much of the Shroud’s history is still unknown, we have no idea what contaminations it may have suffered; to know the manipulations suffered by a find proves vitally important to carry out a reliable test. It is not a hard concept to understand: an analysis of urine which uses a contaminated test tube is not valid. We only know the detail of the Shroud’s history for the last 650 years or so: so many imponderables lurk in its past that radio-carbon testing seems still inappropriate, and we seriously risk cutting it away piece by piece before any really reliable test is developed. A significant example is the presence of a bioplastic coating on the linen fibres, due to the activity of a bacterium, which contaminated the sample and might well have “rejuvenated” the linen with extra helpings of C14 that had nothing to do with the Shroud. The bioplastic coating was only discovered years after the 1988 test, and obviously the test did not take into account its presence, and the contamination it carried.
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How many other contaminating agents could be present in the cloth even today, with us still knowing nothing of them?

The continuous progress of science leads us to hope that in a few years new dating techniques may be developed, more refined and above all, less destructive. They are badly needed: every square millimetre of Shroud that is destroyed is a loss of great value as it cannot be examined by our successors, who will surely have measuring tools which are more advanced than ours.

Meanwhile the hair area is being investigated with particular care: thanks to it, it is thought that the idea that the image was formed by contact should be excluded. The hair would then have looked crushed, whereas it is soft and flowing, as if free from any pressure.

Mysterious traces of writing

In 1978 the chemist Piero
Ugolotti was examining a negative of the Shroud drawn from some photos taken some ten years earlier. He noticed some marks that decidedly leapt to the eye: they were not like stains, or if they were, they seemed to have a curiously neat geometry, all orientated in the same way, closely reminiscent of alphabetic characters, and what is more they appeared to be arranged in groups. In short, they looked very much like written words.

The history of writings on the Shroud began that day 30 years ago, and is still taking place: in this book I shall only give a brief notice, otherwise the argument would take us too far along the paths of Syria-Palestine in the days of the Second Temple, within Roman-age Judaism, and we shall be forced to deal with issues too distant from the story of the Templars. At any rate, the presence of this writing, and in particular some of them in Jewish characters, is not without importance even for the purposes of our argument, since it may help us to understand why the Templars ever chose to keep the Shroud secret in the crucial historical moment when it reached them.

Piero
Ugolotti had managed to clearly distinguish the outlines of some Greek and Latin letters, but even though he was an educated person, he did not want to risk trying to read them alone and preferred to entrust it to a specialist: Aldo
Marastoni, teacher of ancient literature at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, who had edited important editions of Seneca and other Latin authors for the prestigious Bibliotheca Teubneriana of the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin.
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Marastoni identified the letters at once, but he also saw other things that captured his interest; so he asked for new negatives from the Centro Internazionale di Sindonologia di Torino, the most illustrious and respected institute of Shroud studies. Having obtained the negatives, the two set to work: these traces of writing can only be seen thanks to the contrast of clear and dark tones in the photo, so it is necessary to develop it several times and make several photocopies to make the letters stand out as much as possible. The result was electrifying: on the Shroud were traces of Greek, Latin and even Hebraic writing. These are not characters written directly on the sheet, but on a different object, that had been partially transferred to the cloth: looking directly at the Shroud – which, we remember, behaves like a negative – almost nothing could be distinguished, while on the negatives (which return the realistic image of a man as if it were the positive or photograph itself), the characters become recognisable.

As was natural, considering the context, imagination went straight to the words of the Gospels: Pilate had had a placard placed on the cross of Jesus which spelled out the reason for his conviction, the famous
titulus crucis
. The three synoptic texts (Mark, Matthew and Luke) mention the fact briefly, quoting only the actual cause why the heads of the Sanhedrin and the scribes had denounced Jesus to the Roman procurator, presenting him as a rebel leader who had proclaimed himself “the King of the Jews”; the gospel of John on the other hand gives a longer and more detailed account:

And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin. (John 19, 19-20).

But immediately after the understandable early rush of enthusiasm, the situation struck
Marastoni as very strange, maybe even disappointing: in effect, what can be read on the Shroud does not answer the Gospel description, because essential details reported by the Gospel of John are missing, while alien items with nothing to do with the Gospels are present. Above the right eyebrow (left in the negative),
Marastoni points out the presence of at leas three characters in square Jewish writing: a
taw
, a
waw
or
iod
, then a mark that seems to him a
zade
(corresponding to the sound
ds
) in the form used only at the end of a word, then another rather confused character that appeared as if it could be the
soph
pasu
, an interpunction comparable to a modern full stop. He takes them for parts of some word in Hebraic or Aramaic, which, however, does not coincide with the description of the writings stuck on Jesus’ cross according to the Gospels. In the centre of the forehead, he reads the sequence of Greek characters IBEP, and in particular the group IB, which seems to him repeated immediately close by, parallel, but slightly shifted rightwards.
Marastoni immediately thinks that the sequence might be the remnant of the name TIBEPIOS written in Greek, a name popular among Romans since the Etruscan age and used by several Emperors, of whom the first, the adopted son of Augustus, reigned just in the years when the Gospels place the death of Jesus (14-37 d.C.). The discovery recalls another that took place in 1979 thanks to Francis L.
Filas SJ, a theologian from the St. Ignatius University of Loyola, Chicago: within the print of the right eye socket a small circle can be noticed, and within that, a few tiny letters. The sequence identified after a series of enlargements is UCAI, and forms an arch around a curious form not unlike shepherd’s crook carried by bishops.
Filas carried out patient research and found that those marks correspond to a particular coin coined by Pontius Pilate during his governorship of Judaea, from 26 to 36 AD. The legend on this coin bears a strange grammatical error, which is anything but unusual in Roman provinces; here Greek was spoken by the people, being a kind of universal language everyone knew, but it was full of incorrect grammar and dialect forms that made it quite unlike the language spoken in Athens.
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The Greek text TIBEPIOU KAICAPOS (“
Tiberius Caesar”) came out wrong, written as TIBEPIOU CAICAPOS. The sequence UCAI corresponds to the central part of this legend.
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