The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (21 page)

Marastoni feels that these signs were written on some object placed on the convict’s head. It may have been a
mitra infamiae
, a kind of crude and light hood, made for instance with material or papyrus, on which outrageous sentences were written for the exact purpose of humiliating the convict; the slight shifts of this hood might have caused the double imprint of the characters IB on the forehead, which otherwise needs explaining. The professor also saw two more Latin texts that ran vertically along the left cheek (right on the negative) parallel to each other. The biggest one showed a series of letters that seemed to him to form the sequence NEAZARE, with the Z written in reverse, and the other written, in smaller characters, INNECE, what is left of the Latin expression in
necem
(“to death”); even further down, in the lower quarter, he saw again a Latin capital T, and just under the chin a strange sign that seems made from two capital N’s joined together. Meanwhile an IT expert, Aldo
Tamburelli, tried to subject the Shroud to a recently designed test, and had thus discovered another surprising feature of the picture, the fact that it is three-dimensional: even though it behaves like a photograph, the image does not come from a procedure like that of photography, because photographs are two-dimensional.

Marastoni got in touch with
Tamburelli and wished to verify whether the writing was still visible on the three-dimensional elaboration of the Shroud: the result was not only positive, but thanks to IT applications, the characters could be read much better.
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The term NEAZARE seems right away a very likely deformation of an original NAZAPENOS found both in Mark and in Luke; it is the adjective for Jesus’ geographical origin, “inhabitant of Nazareth”.
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The group INNECE also seems highly pertinent in the context: it is Latin, it means “to death”, and it is clear that the Shroud covered, exactly, a victim of the death penalty. Finally,
Marastoni noticed another piece of writing in the negatives of some photographs taken in 1931, quite clear and articulate this time: it is a little above the knee, it is built around a cross, and to judge by its lines it seemed traced with a quill and ink on some different support (such as papyrus or parchment) that touched the linen. The fragments of the words it was made of (ISSIE, ESY, SNCT, I SERE, STR) were immediately identified by the professor of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart with a Latin prayer (
Iesu sanctissime Miserere nostri
, “Most Holy Jesus, have mercy on us”): the form of the letters is rudimentary Gothic, and its presence corresponds quite well to the widespread mediaeval usage of placing notes written on paper or parchment with prayer formulas over relics, to make them into relics as well, by virtue of the belief that they could soak up the same spiritual power through contact. Considering the age suggested by the shape of the letters, as far as they can be estimated, this prayer-bearing paper might well have been made by none other than the Templars.

Captions?

In 1994,
Marcel Alonso and
Éric de Bazelaire, two members of the Centre International d’Études sur le Linceul de Turin in Paris, decided to start over again on the matter of the writings, and see whether the technologies developed in the meantime could offer any extra contribution. They also decided to go to specialists, and took the problem to the scientists of the Institut d’Optique Théorique d’Orsay, near Paris, a greatly respected research centre where some physicists who specialise in treating images work, among other things, on the identification of writing in palimpsests and other unreadable texts.
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A team of experts in signal analysis was assembled, led by André
Marion, a researcher of the Cnrs and professor in the Institut d’Optique; over seven months, between May and December 1994, they studied the most suitable procedure to deal with the problem, then in January 1995 André
Marion and his colleague
Anne-Laure Courage presented the results of their long work to a conference. All around the face of the executed man who had left his image on the linen of the Shroud there were at least five separate words in Greek and Latin, to which must be added, at least three series of single characters.
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Along the left side of the face (right on the negative) two parallel vertical sequences were identified, one in Latin characters INNECE (inside and near the cheekbone) and the other in Greek, NAZAPENOS (more outside). These are the same words seen by
Marastoni, but the second is corrected: the computer does not make it NEAZARE but NAZAPENOS, and both its N’s seem made in the same funny way, as two Ns bound together, which
Marastoni had already identified inside INNECE and as an isolated mark beneath the chin, which was also confirmed. But there was more: still in the same area, a little further down beneath the isolated sign of the two joint N’s, a sentence could be read which
Marastoni had not read, and which seemed utterly to the point: it is the group HSOY, immediately recognised as the central part of the word (I)HSOY(S). It is the Greek name of Jesus, and together with the other Greek word, says nothing but “Jesus of Nazareth”.

Vertically along the left cheekbone two more words, also in parallel, could be read, the one outside in larger characters, the other inside in smaller but in fine relief: the first showed the group in Greek characters: S, separated by some blank space as if it were the ending of a word, then a sequence of three signs of which KI seemed quite clear while the last is dubious and might make one think of an A. The smaller writing still in Greek, said PEZ, and had the singular quality of appearing clear over the negative while the others appeared dark, so it must have been made with a different ink or material. As for the isolated clusters,
Marion and
Courage picked out, above the head, nearly at the centre but shifted somewhat to the right side, a sequence which seemed to them to be formed by the characters IC (which in Latin stand for i and
k
, in Greek
i
and
s
); near NAZAPENOS they could see the cluster ARE a second time, and the two items of writing are one above the other, as if the same text had been attached twice to the linen at different times, leaving two distinct marks at almost the same point. Further outside and with the same orientation, they also read a cluster of four signs, of which the first three (in Greek characters, A.A) are clear, while the last (which seems to the French scientists like an U or maybe a rounded M) was covered by some sort of stain; finally, still near the word NAZAPENOS, but further below and orientated upside-down, the signs SB appeared.

At this point we have to attempt to interpret.
Marion and
Courage had submitted the writings to some experts in disciplines to do with ancient and mediaeval history, a real roster of famous names working at the Sorbonne and other prestigious institutions.
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The two parallel writings, HSOY(S) and NAZAPENOS hardly seemed to give great problems: they were nothing tougher than the Greek for the name
Jesus of Nazareth
, with a small variant as compared to the standard Gospel spelling, that is the vowel
Eta
(that is H) instead of
Epsilon
(that is E), and thus ended up being NAZAPHNOS. The confusion between these two vowels was a very common feature of the Roman-age Middle East, and is so widespread in written Greek of that period that epigraphic catalogues hardly even mention it among the peculiarities. The sequence INNECE offers no difficulties either, given that the context involves an executed man; while the identification of the remaining clusters (several fragments of words) seemed tougher and less obvious. As for the purpose these words were meant to serve, on the other hand, the two physicists received no agreed opinion, for theories were many. One of the most interesting suggests that these words were written on a reliquary or on some kind of container: they were a kind of caption, whose traces were inadvertently transferred on to the sheet. Most recently, another signals analysis expert, the Frenchman
Thierry Castex, has applied the same method perfected by
Marion and
Courage, and managed to identify new traces of Hebraic characters in the area under the chin, which he was kind enough to send to me for a second opinion; this is the first time that, with his permission, they are mentioned in print. Among the visible marks it seems possible to distinguish the characters
mem
,
sade
and
aleph
, corresponding to the root
ms
, which is found in both Hebraic and Aramaic and means “to find”; there is also a second sequence of two marks that might be
nw
or
ky
, given their similar shapes and the objective difficulties in reading. The whole might then be
nw
ms
’ (“we have found”) or else
ky
ms
’, “because found”.
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It seems rather an interesting question: those words, torn off from a longer sentence, correspond exactly to a passage of the Gospel according to Luke to do with the trial of Jesus. To be precise, it is Luke 23.2, when the High Priest and the Sanhedrin deliver Jesus to Pontius Pilate, with a precise charge: “We found this man subverting the nation, forbidding to pay tax to Caesar, and saying that he himself was Christ, a king”. Besides, a 1989 study by Roberto Messina and Carlo Orecchia had pointed out more Hebrew characters in the area of the forehead.
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Byzantine tradition has no trace of these strange scattered writings on the Shroud, and to the question whether they might be the Templars’ work, the answer must be, no: only the small area with the inscribed prayer Most holy Jesus, have mercy on us, corresponds to their time. The experts consulted by
Marion and Courage agree that nearly all the Greek and Latin passages were carried out long before the foundation of the Order of the Temple, indeed that they seem to go back to the early Christian age, to about the first to third centuries AD. These were devotional writings made by some believer to clarify who was that man whose image was left, or maybe scrolls with some legal value – that is, documents to be kept – as a hypothesis of Grégoire
Kaplan’s once suggested.
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The trace of Hebraic writing leads us to think that they were carried out in Syria-Palestine (or Qumran?) at a very early age. Everything rejects the suggestion that they might have anything to do with the Templars. It may be that the Temple brothers noticed their existence, as will be said below: and if so, that will have encouraged them to keep the Shroud strictly to themselves.

The trail of the “Jewish question”

In the view of many experts who have long studied the Shroud of Turin, the image is growing less vivid as time goes on, on account of the natural degradation due to the effects of light, and in past centuries it could be seen more neatly; in effect, some ancient representations of the Shroud show the imprint in a much more intense tint of sepia, although we cannot exclude that the painters may have reinforced their colour to make the idea stand out better. When starting their research, André
Marion’s team of physicists chose to work from certain negatives shot by Enrie in 1931, both because the analogue photographs of the time carried an enormous amount of information, and because there is a suspicion that the image may then have been noticeably more intense than today, and so much richer in detail. The hints of writing may be recognised just because of the contrast of tone against tone, because they are like so many ivory-coloured stains in the shape of letters against the light sepia background of the image. In order to see them today we have to make use of photographic negatives, which play up contrasts greatly; but if the scientists are right and the image was once darker, maybe some writings could be seen with the naked eye, too. This is not a matter of small importance, if we take into account the social history of the Middle Ages; the words in Greek and Latin would not have been an issue, but the same absolutely could not be said for the Jewish characters.

Relationships between the Jews and political power in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages were variable. After the edict of Milan of 313 AD, Constantine vigorously promoted the growth of Christianity, and certainly did not favour the Jews, but decades later, when the whole empire was essentially Christian,
Theodosius I (379-395 AD) issued a series of decrees for the protection of this minority, which was by then no threat to his religious policy. In the West, the Popes often protected them: especially
Gregory I the Great, who designed a clear and permanent strategy to defend them from their enemies, by which must be meant essentially the local authorities and the local populace. We have no less than six letters from this Pontiff condemning acts of violence and chicanery against Jews, and we know that the communities scattered in the countries of the Christian world would often turn to the Rabbi who led the Roman community to intercede with the Pope, so that the latter could help as a political mediator with kings and emperors. The most famous of these letters, titled
Sicut Iudaeis
, was later repeated in following centuries by many Popes: its basic concept had already been stated by Emperor
Theodosius I, and yet it was extremely difficult for it to enter the mind of the commons: “There is no law to forbid the Jewish religion”.
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From the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages, Europe was shaken by frequent bouts of anti-Semitism, acts of hard-to-imagine violence arising spontaneously among the public because of a widespread hostility born of intolerance, which rulers, be they popes, emperors or kings, always tried to uproot, for it was a threat to public order. It was however in the lower Middle Ages that the question took alarming proportions. tarting from about 1150, and even more in the 1200s and 1300s, waves of anti-Semitism followed each other, causing slaughter. A spectre rose from the dim past, the spectre of a very ancient popular tale: Jews kept a Christian boy hostage for one whole year, fed him abundantly to fatten him up; then, when he was properly plump and ready, had killed him and eaten his flesh during one of their sacrilegious ritual banquets. This macabre fable was already doing the rounds of the Roman empire in the days of the pagan philosopher
Celsus (II century AD) it was used indifferently against Christians and Jews by the pagan populace, who felt disgust at oriental usages of theirs such as circumcision. When it came back into fashion a thousand years later, it found particularly fertile ground, and spread with devastating effect. In 1144, the body of a boy murdered by an unknown person was found in Norwich; the local Jews were immediately blamed, and wiped out. Some 20 years later, a rumour swept Gloucester that a youth called Harald had been first barbarously tortured and then even crucified by Jews. From then on, cases multiply as in the beginning of an epidemic: in Bury St. Edmunds, Bristol and Winchester in the last years of the 12th century, then in the first of the 1200s in Lincoln, Stanford and London. From England, the legend crossed over to France, spreading its vicious spell everywhere: it was as though any tragic and not very clear event had necessarily to be the fault of the Jews. As early as 1171 the evidence of one of these “ritual murders” had been thought to have been found in Pontoise. The victim was buried in Paris, in the church of the Holy Innocents; rumours spread that the young man had performed many miracles, and many people took to making pilgrimages to the tomb of this boy, seen as a martyr of “Jewish perfidy”. Even a special rite was written to honour him. In the same year,
Thibaut, Count of Blois, had no less than 32 Jews burned at the stake on account of this legend, and the local community; while on the other hand his neighbour
Thibaut IV, Count of Flanders, like King
Louis VII of France and Emperor
Henry VI, all proclaimed officially that the tale had no real basis, and tried to uproot it – alas, with no success. During the 1200s, the dark legend spread the length and breadth of Europe, and was easily believed by a credulous populace. Its hold on the imagination was so strong that it developed a new and hideous feature: Jews needed human blood to make the unleavened bread they ate during their Paschal rites.
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