SANCTA SINDONE

THE SHROUD OF TURIN

THE HOLIEST OF RELICS OR THE HOARIEST OF HOAXES?

By Philip St. Vincent Brennan

FOR MY BELOVED BARBY WHO LIVES FOREVER IN THE BOSOM OF THE MAN ON THE SHROUD

SANCTA SINDONE

FOREWARD

It is fourteen feet long and three-and-a-half-feet wide and obviously very old. The
cloth is linen, hand-woven in what is known in the textile trade as a three-to-one
herringbone twill. Experts say that this technique is over two millennia old, and used
by weavers even before the time of Christ. The cloth has been around since the late
14th century, that much is certain. Under any circumstances, its antiquity alone
would, therefor, be of historical interest. But its age, though a matter of bitter
dispute, is not what makes it unique. It is, instead, the image that seems to float on
its surface -- the image of a crucified man -- that has intrigued the world for
hundreds of years. For centuries it has been one of Christianity's most puzzling
artifacts. In this century it has been pored over by experts of all stripes, from
historians to physicists and NASA space scientists. In recent years, thanks to some
dubious carbon-14-dating tests, the Shroud of Turin has been dismissed by many as a
masterful fraud, created by some twisted genius in the 14th century. But new dating
tests have challenged the validity of the original examinations, and Shroud experts --
known as sindonologists, -- continue to insist that it cannot be a forgery -- that it
was simply impossible for anyone to have been pulled off such a technologically
sophisticated fraud in the 14th century, or even this one, for that matter.

CHAPTER ONE
TURIN, ITALY -- 1898

It is the image of a man, both front and rear. The head on the frontal image abuts the
head on the dorsal side, indicating that the cloth on which it appears had been draped
over the entire body, starting at the back of the heels, over the top of the skull,
and back down to the tips of the toes.

The eyes appear to be open, and staring straight ahead. The face is serenely majestic.
The body is lean, the hands crossed with long, graceful fingers. The entire body,
front and rear, bears shocking evidence of having been subjected to horrendous torture
prior to death and having been enshrouded in the cloth.

It is May, 1898. For three days now the cloth and the faint image it bears have been
displayed inside a wooden frame suspended before the great altar at Turin's Cathedral.
It is the first time the public has been allowed to view it in 30 years. From dawn to
dusk , from the 25th of the month to the 28th, huge throngs of people have filed past
it reverently, their eyes filled with awe at what most believe is the image of Jesus
Christ imprinted on His burial shroud.

Now the final night of the exposition has arrived, and the crowds are gone. The
massive Cathedral doors have been closed and only one man, a middle-aged Italian
lawyer and amateur photographer of note, remains behind. He is there to make a second
attempt to capture the blurred image on his photographic plates.

Earlier, on the 25th, he made a similar attempt to photograph the relic and its image,
but the effort had failed for a myriad of technical reasons.

This will be his last chance. When he has finished exposing the cloth to his camera's
lens, it will be removed from its frame, rolled up like a scroll, placed in an
elaborate series of containers, and returned to its resting place atop the baroque,
black marble altar in the Royal Chapel of the Savoy family, its nominal owners and
Italy's monarchs. It will not be seen again for years to come.

Secondo Pia. the photographer, mounts the elevated platform he erected in the
sanctuary, and focuses his camera on the cloth. At 11:00 p.m. he begins to make the
first of the two exposures.

For 14 minutes the lens shutter remains open. Then Pia closes it and removes the heavy
glass plate negative from the back of the camera. He puts a new plate in its place and
repeats the process. This time the exposure will last a full 20 minutes.

It is near midnight when he finishes.

Pia has set up a make-shift darkroom in the Cathedral sacristy, but he decides that he
would rather work in his own, which is located in his apartment, a mere five minute's
carriage ride away.

A few minutes after midnight, Pia is in his darkroom, anxiously scanning one of the
glass plates which now lies in a developing solution of iron oxalate. His hands are
trembling; later he will describe his mood as one of "trepidation." His attempts have
been the first ever to photograph the cloth and its mysterious image and, he knows
that given the rarity of its public exposure, it will most certainly be his last.

Slowly he sees the first dim outlines begin to form on the plate. The seconds tick by.
The image seems to be growing stronger; more well-defined. Pia holds his breath as the
image comes slowly into even sharper focus and then his eyes bulge when he realizes
that the plate is starting to reveal a clarity far more intense than the wispy image
on the cloth he had photographed.

He reaches into the tray and picks up the plate. His hands are shaking so badly he
nearly lets it slip from his grasp and go crashing to the floor. He tightens his grip,
lifts it slowly and holds it up in front of a small red bulb.

Until the day he dies he will never forget that moment.

In the years to come, his eyes will fill with tears whenever he tries to talk about
his next few moments alone in that silent darkroom. He is never able to describe fully
the emotions he felt at that crowning moment of his long life. Words were simply not
adequate to convey what he experienced as he stared at the plate and saw what his
camera had captured. He is simply dumbfounded and it is minutes before he even begins
to grasp what happened. The image has incredible clarity; it is as clear as any
positive photograph he has ever seen.

Slowly the idea begins to form in his mind. If the image is indeed a positive one, and
its stunning clarity argues persuasively that if this is indeed the case, then the
only rational conclusion he can reach is that the cloth itself is a photographic
negative.

Negative Image                                              Postitive image

There is, he realizes, no other rational explanation for this phenomenon.
Secundo Pia has unlocked a secret hidden within the folds of the cloth for almost 19
centuries. In so doing he has uncovered for all the world to see, a mystery which will
boggle the minds of scientists and scholars for the next century.
Gradually, men of science historians, clerics, art experts and a host of others whose
lives are spent in the exploration of nature's most arcane puzzles, will study the
cloth and many will come away with some stunning new discovery about the story it has
to tell mankind.

The story of the cloth, Sancta Sindone, spans almost two millennia of human history.
It is as dramatic a story as has ever been told. It has been called the Fifth Gospel
of Jesus Christ, a fitting description. For if it is indeed what it surely appears to
be, the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, it has a message for mankind not yet fully
deciphered.

CHAPTER TWO LIREY, FRANCE, CIRCA 1353-89 AD

Geoffrey Charny was France's most famous warrior, a heroic knight and deeply devout
Christian. But his great deeds on and off the battlefield are all but forgotten. What
he is remembered for is the fact that he was the first recorded owner of the Shroud of
Turin, and the man most responsible for the mystery surrounding its true origins.
Charny went to his grave without every revealing how and where he got it, and
historians are left to speculate about its whereabouts before the late 14th century.
Little is known about Charny's familial background. He just seems to have appeared on
the scene in the early 14th century, was elevated to knighthood by France's King
Philip The Fair, and fought like a tiger in numerous battles against the English. In
one of these, the battle of Calais on New Year's Eve, 1349, Charny was captured by the
English during a commando-like raid on his camp.

He spent the next 18 months in a British prison, much of the time in prayer. In July,
1351 the French king John The Good coughed up a king's ransom of 12,000 gold ecus to
win the release of his bravest knight.

It appears that while imprisoned Charny made a vow to build a church in Lirey, where
was feudal lord, and two years after his release John the Good granted him a subsidy
which enabled him to establish a small wooden church and finance the clerics who would
serve it.

The Church was dedicated by the bishop of Troyes, Henry of Poitiers, on May 28, 1356.
An inventory of the relics stored in the church made no mention of the shroud,
strongly suggesting that it was not in the possession of the church at that time.
Scarcely three months later, Geoffrey I Charny, Lord of Lirey, and the King's standard
bearer was killed at the battle of Poitiers. He gave his life protecting the king.
When an English knight thrust his lance at the king, Charny stepped in front of his
monarch and took the fatal thrust.

Things now get very muddy. It appears that sometime after Charny's death, his wife
Jeanne de Vergy, saddled with the upkeep of the Lirey church and the salaries of the
monks there, was in desperate financial condition. Left almost without means by her
husband's death she seems to have tried to solve her financial woes by putting the
shroud on public exhibit. When and how this happened is just one more aspect of the
shroud's history that remains shrouded in mystery. What is known is the fact that the
exhibition angered Bishop Henry of Poitiers, who launched some kind of investigation
of this artifact which was being openly proclaimed to be the burial shroud of Jesus
Christ.

It was not until 1389 that a second exhibition drew the wrath of Henry's successor as
Bishop of Troyes, Peter d' Arcis, that the results of the investigation were made
public.

In a memorandum to the Avignon anti-pope Clement VII, d'Arcis wrote that Henry of
Poitiers probe revealed a fraud:
"Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how
the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who
had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought
or bestowed."

This memorandum is the first of many challenges of the Shroud's authenticity. There
would be countless others.

It came about when his Excellency, Peter d'Arcis, the Bishop of Troyes got word that
something very odd was going on in Lirey, which lay within his diocese.. Someone, he
was told, was exhibiting a long piece of cloth that bore the image of a man. Nobody,
the Bishop was told, was actually claiming that the image was that of the crucified
Christ, but nobody was discouraging the belief it was, either. And, his informers
added, people were treating the cloth with almost as much reverence as they accorded
the Holy Eucharist -- the Body and Blood of Christ.

His excellency, sick and feeble at the time, had enough problems on his hands without
this shocking revelation. He vaguely recalled his predecessor branding the Lirey
curiosity as a fake, and, aware of his responsibility to protect the faithful from
such false claims on their piety, he ordered an immediate halt to the exposition.
The good fathers at Lirey were told in no uncertain terms to put the thing away
posthaste until a full investigation of it could be launched, or find themselves
excommunicated.

The good fathers, however, had no intention of hiding their celebrated light under an
ecclesiastical bushel, and they officially appealed the Bishop's edict, asking d'Arcis
to reconsider.

And they went one step further -- they went to their liege lord, Geoffrey II, Charny's
son and successor, and asked him to assume legal possession of the relic. That was
fine with his lordship. He then proceeded to take part in ceremonies honoring the
cloth and went so far as to talk the King into posting a guard of honor around the
relic.

The Bishop, being a little more respectful to a lord of the realm, politely requested
that Charny stop exhibiting the relic at least until the pope could reach a decision
about what should be done with the shroud. Charny simply ignored the request.
Now the King got involved, ordering Charny to turn the relic over to the Bishop. His
majesty even sent an officer to get it but Charny, who seems to have inherited his
father's courage as well as his title, sent him away empty handed. The whole matter
was getting out of hand when the pretender to the throne of Peter, Clement VII, got
involved at Charny's request.

Clement gave his permission for the exhibition to continue, as long as it was
identified as a "copy or representation" of Christ's shroud and not the real thing. He
also ordered the guard of honor to find something else to look after, and told all
parties involved to keep their mouths shut about the shroud.

The ball was back in d'Arcis' court, and his excellency let everyone know he was going
to be heard loud and clear. Charging that the Dean of the church in Lirey was playing
fast and loose with the truth about the shroud solely because he was profiting from
the exhibitions, d'Arcis let loose this blast:

"Some time since in this diocese of Troyes, the dean of a certain collegiate church,
to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of
avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church
a certain cloth, cunningly painted, upon which, by a clever sleight-of-hand was
depicted the twofold image of a man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely
declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Savior Jesus
Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Savior had remained thus impressed, together with the wounds he bore."

The bishop added that he had all this on good authority; his predecessor had conducted
a "diligent inquiry and investigation" and had concluded that the shroud was nothing
more than a painting. Moreover, those stubborn priests at Lirey had ignored the
earlier bishop's orders, just as they were now ignoring his.

He then told Clement: "I still oppose the said exposition until I have fuller
instructions from your Holiness yourself, now better informed of the facts of the
case. I would ask you ... to take measures that such scandal and delusion and
abominable superstition may be put an end to, both in fact an in seeming ... to
express horror of such superstition it be publicly condemned ... I cannot fully
express in writing the grievous nature of the scandal ..."

Clement ignored d'Arcis and reiterated his original edicts. The bishop died in 1395,
and the first documented fight over the validity of the shroud ended inconclusively.
To this day nobody has the vaguest idea of who conducted the alleged investigation for
Henry of Poiters, d'Arcis' predecessor, who the alleged forger was, or how the
investigators reached their conclusion. But the matter would re-emerge 500 years
later, and set off a whole new controversy.

From this point forward, the history of the Shroud is beyond dispute. When Geoffrey II
died in 1398 it became the property of his daughter, Margaret de Charny. During her
long lifetime, Margaret fought a running battle with the monks at Lirey over where the
Shroud should be kept. She married twice. After her first husband was killed in battle
she married a wealthy nobleman, Humbert of Villersexel. In 1814, fearing for the
safety of the relic, she and her husband had the Shroud taken to their castle at
Montfort placed in the Chapel des Buessarts.

The final chapter of the Charny saga was written in 1453, when Margaret turned the
Shroud over to Duke Louis of Savoy, believing he would be able to safeguard the holy
relic better than could the clerics at Lirey.

History would prove it was a wise choice. The Savoy family would be around for a long
time, longer than any other European ruling family, and they would always be in a
position to guarantee the safety of the relic.

The Savoys tended to get what they wanted, no longer how long it took. And what this
ambitious family wanted was Italy -- all of it. They gradually branched out from their
family seat in Savoy, eventually becoming kings of the island nation of Sardinia.
Italy took longer. One of the more farseeing Savoys suggested that Italy was best
eaten like an artichoke: one leaf at a time. And that's how they did it. They made
alliances with whatever side they thought would prevail in the countless wars that
kept erupting around Southern Europe -- making those pacts towards the end of the
conflicts, when it was obvious who would be the winners. The Savoys then picked up
their share of the spoils. And they slowly consumed Italy, leaf by leaf, until they'd
eaten the whole thing.

They guarded the Shroud zealously, regarding it as some sort of royal good luck charm.
They trotted it out for public exhibition whenever a family occasion warranted its
exposure -- a royal birth or wedding or some other event important to the family. It
would remain theirs until the death of Italy's deposed last King Humberto in the
1980s.

Chambery, 1502 -- Turin 1694-1995

In 1502, the Sainte Chapelle of The Holy Shroud, built specifically to house the
Shroud by Duke Amadeus IX, son of Louis, was dedicated, and the relic was placed in a
silver casket and exhibited annually for the next 30 years.

On December 4, 1532 a fire broke out in the sacristy of the chapel and quickly spread
to the chapel itself.

In his book on the findings of the Shroud of Turin Research project, Portrait of Jesus
(Stein & Day, 1983) Frank C. Tribbe told what happened after four men rushed through
the flames to carry the silver casket containing the Shroud to safety:

"The casket had become so hot that the Shroud was deeply scorched along its
longitudinal folds, and holes were burned through its various layers, by the melting
silver dripping onto the Shroud."

For the next two years Poor Clare nuns worked on the relic patching and darning and
reinforcing it, Tribbe wrote.

The repaired shroud was exhibited in 1534 to show the public it had not been
destroyed. It was shown in Turin in 1535, in Milan in 1536, and in Nice the following
year.

In 1537 the Shroud was moved to the Savoy castle in Verceli, Italy where it remained
until 1561. Returned to Chambery, it remained there until 1578, when it was taken to
its permanent home in Turin, where, it has been for the most part ever since.


CHAPTER THREE

SANCTA SINDONE -- THE MISSING YEARS

What follows is based on the remarkable research done by British historian and
scholar Ian Wilson, described in the revised edition of his extraordinary book The
Shroud of Turin (Image books, 1979) and other sources including Frank Tribbe in his
admirable book, Portrait of Jesus (Stein & Day). Go get them both and read them!

EDESSA, THE ACHEIROPOIETOS
In 525 AD, the city of Edessa in what is now Turkey was devastated by a flood which
historians say killed a third of its population and destroyed countless buildings. The
tragedy evoked a response from the heir to the throne of Byzantium, Justinian, that
has a thoroughly modern ring to it. He declared Edessa a national disaster area in the
same manner U.S. presidents respond to cataclysms.

Justinian dispatched his own version of our Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) team to the ruined city and put them to work rebuilding what was then a major
way-station on the fabled silk route from the Far East.

Justinian's engineers diverted the Daisan, the offending river, with a dam that is
still around today in the city now known as Urfa. And they rebuilt the massive walls
that ringed the city. Part of that reconstruction involved the Kappe, or West gate and
its arch, which Ian Wilson and others believe was the hiding place of what was to
become known as The Image Of Edessa -- a linen cloth dubbed achereiropoitos - not made
by human hands - that depicted the face of Jesus.

Wilson speculates that the image was found hidden in the elaborate arch above the West
gate, but there is no contemporary historical record of its existence before 544, when
it was used as a charm to ward off an attack by a hostile Persian army according to
6th century Syrian historian Evagrius.

The Edessans, he wrote,"...brought out the divinely-made image not made by the hands
of men which Christ our God sent to King Abgar..."

How the image got to Edessa in the first place is a matter of speculation, There is
evidence that it was brought there by the disciple Thaddaeus who used to cure the
Edessan King Abgar of leprosy.

At the time of Christ, Edessa was a prosperous trading center smack astride the
principal east-west trade routes. It was an independent principality within the vast
Parthian empire, a conglomeration of tough warriors who for decades had been
successfully thumbing their noses at the mighty Roman empire and sending packing the
legions Rome occasionally dispatched in vain efforts to conquer them.

The city-state was ruled by a toparch, King Abgar V. He was the head man in town from
13 AD to 50 AD. Abgar, a pagan idol worshipper, was suffering from leprosy. In his
History of the Church, written around the year 325, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea told
how Abgar heard about a miracle worker in Palestine and had sent a messenger to the
Holy Land to beg Jesus to come and heal him. Jesus declined the invitation, Eusebius
wrote, but promised to send one of his followers to cure Abgar.

Eusebius said that his source for this story were Edessa's own records, and other
accounts of the story, also based on ancient records, tell of the arrival of
Thaddaeus, the curing of Abgar, and his apparent conversion to Christianity. And they
all mention a miraculous image of the face of Christ not made by the hands of men as
the means by which the king was healed.

Whether Abgar converted, or merely tolerated Christianity is a metter of debate. This
much is certain. Abgar allowed his subjects to be converted and practice their
newfound religion. The son who took the throne after Abgar's death followed suit, but
when the new king died prematurely, he was replaced by a younger brother, Ma'nu VI, a
fanatic pagan and bloodthirsty tyrant who adopted the new Roman fashion of trying to
kill off Christianity by killing off Christians.

From this point on, for the next 400-plus years, the image brought to Edessa by
Thaddaeus simply vanishes, apparently stashed away for safety's sake in its niche
above the Kappe gate by somebody who then took the secret hiding place to the grave
with him.

Critics of the Shroud often cite the absence of any mention of the shroud and its
image in the Four Gospels as proof that Sancta Sindone cannot be Christ's burial
cloth. But the Bible does mention a shroud, and the biblical accounts suggest that
there was something very strange indeed about the burial cloths seen in the tomb by
the Apostles Peter and John.

St. Luke wrote that Peter "beheld the linen cloths laid by themselves and departed
wondering in himself."

St. John wrote "Then went in also the other disciple, which came first to the
sepulcher, and he saw, and believed."

Just what the two apostles saw that left Peter "wondering in himself," and caused John
to see and believe, is left to our imagination. It seems obvious, however, that a
piece of linen cloth alone could not have provoked such awed reactions.

Wilson and a host of historians all agree that Jewish law forbade any contact with
items that had come into contact with a corpse -- items such as a shroud. It would not
be surprising, then, that the gospel writers might have seen and believed because of
the image on the shroud yet kept their collective mouths shut about the miraculous
image.

From 544 AD onward, the Image of Edessa, also known as the Mandylion, is a historical
fact, known throughout the world in the second half of the first millennium. Countless
copies of the relic were made and given places of honor in churches and cathedrals.

Edessa became a major tourist center, with pilgrims from as far away as Britain
flocking to see this miraculous image of Christ, not made by human hands.

Shroud debunkers note that the Mandylion was merely a depiction of Christ's face, but
Wilson and others have a ready explanation for that: the Shroud was encased in a
lattice-work frame many copies of the Mandylion depicted and folded in such a way that
only the face of Christ was visible. And, they point out, the creases made by the
folding of the shroud that concealed all but the Lord's face are still visible on
Sancta Sindone.

The Mandylion was kept in a special shrine in a magnificent cathedral, Hagia Sophia. A
contemporary hymn makes it obvious that the Mandylion was considered to be much more
that merely a famous icon when it declares that the shrine "contains the very essence
of God."

By the mid-10th century, Edessa had fallen into Moslem hands, but the sons of Allah
had zealously protected the Mandylion, which, being a world-famous tourist attraction,
was a rich source of tourist money.

The mullahs also looked upon the relic as a source of divine protection against all
kinds of misfortunes, as had the earlier Christian Edessans.

Both advantages were not lost on the Byzantine emperor, Romanus. He thought it might
be a dandly addition to his own vast treasure trove of relics, and he sent one of his
generals, Curcuas, to get it.

After wondering around and doing unpleasant things to neighboring cities, Curcuas and
his army arrived outside Edessa in mid 943 AD. In one of the earlier episodes of Let's
Make a Deal, the general offered to free 200 high-ranking Moslem POWs, spare the city
the kind of brutal sacking that was then the rage among armies, fork over a whopping
12,000 silver crowns, and pledge to make Edessa a war-free zone forever immune from
attack by Byzantine armies.

In return, the emir now in charge in Edessa had only to hand over the Mandylion.
The emir relayed the offer to his superiors in Baghdad and the powers-that-be kicked
it around for months before deciding to give Curcuas what he wanted.

The Mandylion arrived in Constantinople on August 15, 944 -- the feast of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Constantinople was the Jewel of the East in the late 10th century -- a glittering city
of palaces and cathedrals and shrines. Its great cathedral -- another Hagia Sophia --
was the most magnificent religious structure in the world. Built by the emperor
Justinian, it still stands today, stripped bare of its former glory, but still as
imposing a building as can be found anywhere on the face of the earth. Its just plain
huge.

Constantinople was also something of a religious Disney World. Among the relics
displayed in the city was the Virgin Mary's robe, which every Friday, thanks to an
ingenious device that would have made Walt Disney envious, would suddenly fling itself
open to reveal an image of Mary inside.

The new emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, had a contraption attached to his throne
that sent him suddenly spiraling upward. He would then descend clad in robes entirely
different from the ones he had been wearing before blasting off into inner space
before the astonished eyes of his visitors.

This is an important detail, because around 1204 one witness, the French crusader
Robert De Clari, wrote:

"...there was another of the churches which they called My Lady of Blachernae, where
was kept the sydoine in which our Lord had been wrapped, which stood up straight every
Friday so that the figure of Our Lord could be plainly be seen there."

De Clari's account echoes one written about two years earlier by Nicholas Mesarites,
the keeper of the Pharos Shrine where the Mandylion was kept: "... in this chapel Christ rises again, and the sindon with the burial linens is clear proof ..."

Mesarites was even more explicit as to the nature of the Mandylion:
"The burial sindon of Christ, this is of linen, of cheap and easily obtainable
material, still smelling fragrant of myrrh, defying decay, because it wrapped the
mysterious dead body after the Passion."

Both accounts clearly demonstrate that by the beginning of the 13th century the
Mandylion was no longer believed to be merely a facial depiction of Christ not made by
human hands, but the full-length burial shroud of Christ showing Our Lord's entire
body.

The idea that having the burial shroud of the Lord in your possession constituted a
kind of divine insurance policy against enemy armies got a rude shock in 1204, when
Robert De Clari's fellow knights of the Fourth Crusade took it into their heads that
it would be more fun, and certainly more profitable, to sack Constantinople instead of
going on to the Holy Land where the pickings would be at best, slim.

They rampaged through the city, leveling its magnificent buildings, looting its vast
treasures and, if Wilson is correct, making off with the greatest treasure of all, the
Shroud.

Once again, the Image of Edessa does a disappearing act.


CHAPTER FOUR

(In his History Of Those Who Conquered Coonstantinople, Robert de Clari described the
sindone "in which our Lord had been wrapped, which every Friday, raised itself upright
so that one could see the form of our Lord on it ...." as having disappeared after the
city was sacked in 1204. Once again the Mandylion simply vanished from history.

According to historian Ian Wilson, it would reappear 153 years later in Lirey, France,
not as the Mandylion, but as the Shroud in which the body of Christ was wrapped. )
If the Image of Edessa/Mandylion that vanished in 1204 and the Shroud that surfaced
in Lirey in 1357 are one in the same, and the eyewitness testimony of Robert de Clari
and Mandylion custodian Mesarites strongly suggests that this is the case, just where
was this sublimely magnificent relic for 153 years?

If Ian Wilson's exhaustive research is on target, it was in very good hands indeed!
The whole known history of the Mandylion/Shroud is filled with instances of what is
either pure luck or Divine providence. For a relic purported to be 2,000 years old, it
has survived clear threats to its existence against all the odds. It's almost as if
somebody up there wanted it kept safe and secure for all those centuries and took
steps to see to it that wherever it was, it was in the hands of those most capable of
protecting it against all threats.

As the Image of Edessa it would surely have been destroyed during the persecutions
launched by the pagan King Ma'nu IV had not some pious Christian hid it in the safest,
most secure place around -- the stone arch above the city's West gate. It remained
hidden there for almost 500 years, surviving not only Ma'nu's persecutions and the
flood of 524 AD, but the iconoclasm that rampaged across the East during that time
and which would have posed a serious threat to the continued existence of this most
sacred of images.

Removed from Edessa where it existed solely under the sufferance of the City's Moslem
rulers, it was zealously guarded by the powerful Byzantine emperors until the city was
sacked by knights of the Fourth crusade.

The history of the Shroud since it first appeared in the West in 1357 further suggests
Divine guidance. When threatened by religious authorities it was under the protection
of the De Charny family, which fiercely safeguarded it until it finally passed into
the hands of the Savoy family. And if you wanted to find the perfect custodians for
the Shroud you couldn't have done better than this acquisitive family that managed to
avoid the frequent dynastic changes that plagued all other royal families and managed
to last longer than any other royal family in Europe.

And if Ian Wilson is right, during that 153-year hiatus between the sacking of
Constantinople and the emergence of the Shroud in France that Divine protection was
very much in force. The shroud, Wilson argues persuasively was in the hands of the
most powerful group of men in all of Europe at that time -- The Knights Templar.

They were the spawn of the Crusades, conceived to protect those devout Christians
making pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Founded around 1118 AD, by Hugh de Payens, a
nobleman and knight, they were officially known as the Knights of the Temple of
Solomon. Headquartered in Jerusalem near the ruins of Solomon's Temple, they soon
became known simply as the Knights Templar.

Fierce warriors, utterly dedicated to their mission, they fought valiantly in all but
the first of the ten Crusades launched between 1095 and 1291 to secure the Holy Land
for Christianity.

The Order, which combined overwhelming military might and religious fervor, was always
on the lookout for a few good men and it had no trouble attracting the cream of
European nobility. The order grew rapidly in size and reputation until it became
Europe's most powerful organization.

Bound by monastic oaths of chastity and celibacy and absolute obedience to the pope
and their Order superiors, the Knights Templar built impregnable fortresses all over
Europe. Because of the security they offered, the Templar strongholds turned into
mini-Fort Knoxes, each holding vast fortunes deposited for safekeeping by the
Continent's rich and powerful. Their treasuries also held their own vast fortunes, the
spoils of the countless wars they fought.

In 1187 their Saracen enemies drove them from their Jerusalem headquarters, and they
retreated to their stronghold in the seaport of Acre. In 1291 that fortress also fell
to the Saracen forces, and the Templars retreated across the Mediterranean to Cyprus.

It was around this time that the order became Europe's most powerful bankers,
financing wars and lending their enormous resources to kings and aristocrats at
interest rates that only served to further fatten their already swollen coffers.
And that's how they got involved in the bloody business of sacking Constantinople. As
Europe's leading bankers, they helped finance the Fourth Crusade, and Knights Templar
were there among the crusaders to grab the lion's share of the loot.

Robert de Clari wrote that he saw the Mandylion in 1204 in the Church of St. Mary of
Blachernae, one of about 20 chapels on the vast complex of the Blachernae Palace. And
he noted that it vanished during the looting that followed the capture of
Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders.

The Templars participated in these festivities and, as a result, had so much booty,
eyewitnesses said they had to establish a special treasury just to hold all that
lovely loot.

And, says Wilson, they got their hands on the greatest treasure of all, the Mandylion,
then already recognized as Christ's burial shroud.

In 1306, the Templar's incredible wealth was moved from across the Mediterranean from
Cyprus to France, coming ashore in Marseilles and then taken overland to the Order's
Paris headquarters.

By this time, the Knights Templar were universally despised. Kings and nobles feared
their great power, and envied their privileges and their wealth. It's often been noted
that the most efficient way to make an enemy is to lend him money -- and the Order
lent a lot of people a lot of money.

But they seemed untouchable -- they were the Teflon figures of their age, so secure
behind the massive stone walls of their great fortresses and their armed might that
any attempt to conquer them by frontal assault seemed to be doomed to certain failure.
Among their enemies was France's King Philip IV, a wily monarch with itchy palms who
had the support of the Avignon anti-pope Clement V. Between them they cooked up a
sordid little plot designed to discredit the Templars by accusing them of everything
from heresy to devil worship.

And this is where the Templar-Shroud connection becomes more evident.

For a long time, there had been rumors of a mysterious head which the top men of the
Order were rumored to worship in bizarre midnight ceremonies. Information obtained by
royal spies described the idol as: "...a man's head with a large beard, which head
they kiss and worship at all their provincial chapters; but this not all the brothers
know, save only the Grand Master and the old ones."

The King and his anti-pope ally seized on this as evidence that the Templars were
dangerous heretics who worshipped a pagan idol of some kind. Clearly these people had
to go. And, of course, their vast wealth needed to be placed in more reliable hands,
such as those of good King Philip.

Given the armed might of the Templars, however, that was easier said than done. Going
face to face with these well-armed warriors was not really a very smart move. So on October 3, 1307, the king launched simultaneous dawn raids on the Order's members all across France, sweeping down on and arresting all the Templars in much the same manner as the KGB later rounded up dissidents in the late Soviet Union. In a vain attempt to find evidence of idol worship, the raiders also searched the Order's temples for the mysterious head but came up empty handed.

In custody, the Templars were tortured and many were forced to confess to charges of
idolatry and heresy. The Order's Grand Master and Normandy Templar Master were tried
and burned at the stake in March 1413, protecting their innocence until the very end.
The Templar Master of Normandy was a knight by the name of Geoffrey de Charnay.
The mysterious head they were said to have worshipped was never found but forty-three
years later the shroud turns up in the hands of another knight -- Geoffrey de Charny.
Coincidence?

Copies of the so-called head were alleged to have been kept in all of the Order's
temples, and descriptions of it sound very much like the Mandylion. Four of these
copies were located in the Order's temples in England.

In 1951 the ceiling of a cottage outbuilding in Somerset, England collapsed during a
severe storm, revealing a painting of a man's head -- a painting that in most respects
matches known copies of the Mandylion. And the village of Templecombe where the
cottage is located was the site of a Templar preceptory built in 1185!


CHAPTER FIVE


(Ian Wilson's research shed a lot of light on the vexing question of the Shroud's
whereabouts between the time that Constantinople was sacked and the Shroud's
appearance in Lirey 123 years later. If Wilson is right, and he makes a very
persuasive case for his conclusions, the problem of the Shroud's history is pretty
well solved. What we now confront is the matter of the scientific evidence that has
emerged over the years. Incredibly, few realize just how much solid scientific
evidence exists, or how absolutely compelling it has proved to be. Here we begin our
examination of that evidence with one of the most controversial and best known
scientific tests of the Shroud.)

The matter is settled, scientists told us; long awaited Carbon 14 dating tests proved
that the Shroud is a 14th century fake.

For years, the Vatican had resisted submitting the Shroud to Carbon 14 dating because
it had required cutting away too much of the linen. But Rome relented in 1988 after
newer techniques were developed which required only tiny fibers.

Three laboratories were chosen to do the tests of threads from an 8-millimeter strip
of linen cut from bottom left hand corner of the Shroud. One test was done at Oxford
University, another at the University of Arizona and the last at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology. All three reported that their tests showed the Shroud to date
back only to medieval times (between `1260 AD and 1390 AD) and that was that. The
world at large lost interest in the relic.

But not everybody agreed with the test results. Some quoted Professor Giovanni Riggi,
the man who cut the sample from the Shroud, as saying that he trimmed the specimen
"due to contamination of the cloth with threads of different origins" -- a factor that
cast doubt on the dating. Critics also said the threads were considered border
material that may have been sewn onto the original Shroud.

Samuel Pellicori, an optical physicist and member of the scientific team that studied
the Shroud in 1978 said the test sample was cut from an area which "showed
discoloration due to contamination."

Archeologist William Meachem expanded on the contamination of the Shroud, noting it
contained oils, wax, soap, deposits from open wounds, saliva, sweat. preservatives,
image enhancers, oil lamp smoke and wood cellulose.

Moreover, the British scientist who headed the test project violated the scientific
integrity of the test when he gave the three laboratories the dates of the first and
11th century supposedly-blind samples used in the test.

Even the man who had invented the accelerated mass spectrometer (AMS) method used by
the three labs criticized the manner of testing used, insisting that another
time-tested method, the decay-counting method should also have been used.

Henry E. Gove had written a letter to the British Museum in which he expressed his
dissatisfaction with the way his testing method was being used. He said it had "become
a somewhat shoddy enterprise." He recommended using different technicians and the use
of a total of seven laboratories to perform the tests in order to "make them as
credible as possible.

Ian Wilson chimed in by warning: "Few realize that instead of being totally
dispassionate scientific institutions, the AMS laboratories are involved in an all-out
war with their competitors."

And there the matter rested until the intrepid Dr. John Jackson, a member of the
original Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) and the director of the Turin Shroud
Center in Colorado Springs joined forces with a renowned Russian researcher Dr.
Dmitri Kousnetzov, the director of Moscow's Sedov Biopolymer Research Laboratory.
Jackson concentrated his efforts on the effects of temperature on the "yellowing" of
the linen while Kouznetsov researched the exchange of carbon isotopes with linen.
Their joint efforts, they revealed, cast serious doubt on the 1988 carbon 14 dating
tests.

The fire in 1532 in the Sainte Chapelle at Chambery damaged the Shroud which was
encased in a wooden box covered with silver. Silver mixed with an alloy melts only at
temperatures above 200 degrees F and drops of the molten metal fell on the linen and
burned holes in the corners of the folded Shroud and almost ignited the whole relic.
Kouznetsov cites a process known as biofractionalization and the possibility of
extraneous carbon having chemically bonded to the Shroud as factors that cast extreme
doubt on the 1988 test results. He insists that if you make allowances for the damage
done to the relic by the fire you must conclude the Shroud is "not less than 1800
years old."

The Russian researcher took a linen cloth that came from Israel and had been carbon 14
dated back to 200 AD and tested it under the conditions that existed during the 1532
fire. After the cloth was exposed to the same kind of temperature and molten silver,
it was subjected to another carbon 14 dating test.

The new tests showed the cloth to be 1400 years younger!

According to a recent report by Rev Fr. John Kennington published in the November 25,
1995 Holy Shroud Newsletter, Dr. Kouznetsov and his colleague Dr. Ivanov tested linen
wrappings on a mummy known to date back at least 2,000 years. Tests showed the
wrappings to be younger than the mummy inside. The two scientists explained that when
flax fibers are made into linen thread, their chemistry is changed to such an extent
that carbon 14 dating is unreliable.

Kouznetsov recently revealed that a piece of modern linen was exposed to a devastating
store fire. Carbon 14 dating of the linen showed it had not yet been made, giving it
an origination date in the future.

Last January, Dr. Gove, the inventor of the AMS dating test used on the Shroud in 1988
recently said: "A scientist, Dr. Leoncio A Garza-Valdes M.D. of San Antonio, Texas has
produced strong evidence for a type of modern carbon contamination on Shroud threads
produced by a certain type of bacteria that the cleaning procedures of the three C14
testing labs may not have removed. Depending on how thick the coating is, it can cause
the date published by the three laboratories to be too young."

It would seem the matter is far from closed!



CHAPTER SIX

(Taken by themselves the threads of evidence that attest to the authenticity of the
Shroud of Turin are open to challenge; woven together they become a fabric that defies
any explanation other than that this relic is a shroud that covered the body of a man
who was crucified around the time of Jesus Christ. The whole body of evidence is
totally compelling; it admits of no other conclusion. But is there evidence that the
man on the shroud is indeed Jesus? In Chapter Five we continue our examination of the
scientific evidence that has emerged over the years, much of it indicating that the
answer is yes.)

In the late 1970s scientists studying the shroud began to apply modern investigative
techniques to their examination of the relic. After conducting a forensic examination
of the image of the man on the shroud one of the scientists, Dr. Robert Bucklin, then
LA County deputy coroner and a prominent forensic pathologist, issued a report on his
findings. It reads like an autopsy report on a murder victim.

Here is what he wrote, slightly altered to eliminate medical jargon by Shroud of Turin
Research team member Dr. John Heller for his book Report on the Shroud of Turin
(Houghton Miflin):

"Irrespective of how the images were made, there is adequate information to state that
they are anatomically correct. There is no problem in diagnosing what happened to this
individual. The pathology and physiology are unquestionable and represent medical
knowledge unknown 150 years ago.

"This is a 5-foot, 11-inch male Caucasian weighing about 178 pounds. The lesions are
as follows: beginning at the head, there are blood flows from numerous puncture wounds
on the top and back of the scalp and forehead.

"The man has been beaten about the face, there is swelling over one cheek, and he
undoubtedly has a black eye. His nose tip is abraded, as would occur from a fall, and
it appears that the nasal cartilage may have separated from the bone.

"There is a wound in the left wrist, the right one being covered by the left hand.
This is the typical lesion of crucifixion. The classic artistic and legendary
portrayal of a crucifixion with nails through the palms of the hands is spurious; the
structures in the hand are too fragile to hold the weight of a man, particularly of
this size. Had a man been crucified with nails in the palms, they would have torn
through the bones, muscles, and ligaments, the victim would have fallen off the cross.

"There is a steam of blood down both arms. Here and there, there are blood drops at an
angle from the main blood flow in response to gravity. These angles represent the only
one that can occur from the only two positions which can be taken by a body during
crucifixion.

"On the back and on the front there are lesions which appear to be scourge marks.
Historians have indicated that Romans used whips called a flagrum. This whip has two
or three thongs, and at their ends there were pieces of metal or bone which look like
small dumbbells. These were designed to gouge out flesh.

"The thongs and metal end-pieces from a Roman flagrum fit precisely into the anterior and posterior scourge lesions on the body. The victim was whipped from both side by two men, one of whom was taller than the other, as demonstrated by the angle of the thongs.
"There is a swelling of both shoulders, with abrasions indicating that something heavy
and rough had been carried across the man's shoulders within hours of his death. on
the right flank, a long narrow blade of some type entered in an upward direction,
pierced the diaphragm, penetrated into the thoracic cavity through the lung, into the
heart.

"This was a post-mortem event, because separate components of red blood cells and
clear serum drained from the lesion. Later, after the corpse was laid out horizontally
and face up on the cloth, blood dribbled out of the side wound and puddled along the
small of the back. There is no evidence of either leg being fractured. There is an
abrasion of one knee, commensurate with a fall (as is the abraded nose tip); and,
finally, a spike had been driven through both feet, and blood has leaked from both
wounds onto the cloth.

"The evidence of a scourged man who was crucified and died from cardiopulmonary
failure typical of crucifixion is clear cut."

This one report alone should be sufficient to establish the identity of the man whose
image is imprinted on the shroud.

He was scourged before being crucified. Sometime during his ordeal he was beaten about
the face. He was crowned with a cap of thorns. He carried the cross piece (patibulum)
to his place of execution and it left both his shoulders swollen. He fell, bruising
his knees and his nose. Nails were driven through his wrists and a spike through his
feet. His side was pierced after death. The wound emitted blood and clear serum
(water).

Bucklin's report fits the biblical description of Christ's passion and death like
glove.

Moreover, historians point out that only one victim of crucifixion was ever known to
have been crowned with thorns. And that man was Jesus Christ.

Bucklin was by no means the first doctor to probe the medical aspects of the shroud.
In his the American edition of his moving study of the man on the shroud "A Doctor At
Calvary" (P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1953), the late French surgeon Pierre Barbet described
his findings.

Barbet was the first to realize that the nails had to have penetrated the wrist
instead of the palms because the weight of the body would have torn the man's hands
loose had the nails gone through the palms.

Barbet experimented with cadavers and discovered that whenever he drove nails into
Destot's space the thumbs were automatically drawn up against the inside of the palms.
The thumbs of the man on the shroud are not visible, having been drawn up against the
palms.

As Bucklin noted earlier: "The pathology and physiology are unquestionable and
represent medical knowledge unknown 150 years ago."

Wrote Frank Tribbe in his book Portrait of Jesus (Stein & Day): "The images were not
painted or otherwise put on the cloth by a medieval (or earlier) artist, technician or
hoaxer. Such a medieval forger could not have known that the nails must go through the
wrists; not through the hands as Bible translators have erroneously stated..."


CHAPTER SEVEN

It is a photograph. No artist could have created it. There isn't a speck of paint on
its surface. Nor is there even the slightest possibility that any 14th century painter
could have possessed the enormous store of knowledge required to produce an image of a
crucified man in such accurate anatomical detail.

As famed British photography expert and inventor of a 3-D photographic process and a
noted agnostic Leo Vala put it: "I can prove conclusively that claims calling the
Shroud a fake are completely untrue. Even with today's advanced photographic resources
nobody alive could produce the image -- a photographic negative -- embodied in the
Shroud."

Writing in Rolling Stone from Turin during the STURP project, Michael Thomas was even
more emphatic in writing about the positive-negative aspects of the Shroud: "This is
unheard of. It never happens. Nobody knows, not even Kodak today can say how you
communicate a negative image onto a piece of linen that possesses the qualities and
contains the hidden information of the image on the shroud."

He added: If it is a forgery, then some sly devil in the fourteenth century knew more
about photography than we know now."

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence to emerge from the research conducted by
the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) involved the relic as a genuine 3-D
photograph.

Experts deem the possibility of a flat 2-D photograph having 3-D characteristics
impossible. A 2-D photograph has two dimensions: height and width. A 3-D photograph on
the other hand has both height and width -- and a third dimension: depth.

The shroud is flat. A photograph of the Shroud appears to be flat as well -- having
only height and width. Yet it produces depth when subjected to sophisticated,
space-age tests.

In the earliest stages of the STURP project, prior to its formal organization, two
scientists at the JPL Laboratories, John Jackson and Eric Jumper gave photographs to
William Mottern, a scientists at the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico.

On a hunch, Mottern subjected the photos to a VP-8 analyzer -- a piece of equipment
used by NASA to turn satellite images of planets into 3-D pictures. It does this by
interpreting darkness as distance.

An ordinary 2-D photograph put into the VP-8 image analyzer will produce distorted
pictures because it lacks depth.

But if the image in the photograph has depth it will produce a clear 3-D picture.
When Mottern put the Shroud photos through the VP-8 process a perfect 3-D image
emerged. As Dr. John Heller noted in his book on STURP's work "It was as stunningly
different from the photograph as a statue is to a painting.

"The long hair, full beard and mustache, the serenity on the face of a badly battered,
crucified man, came alive, giving Jackson and Mottern the eerie impression that they
were gazing at an actual face of a man, not at a painting or a sculpture."

The idea that any 14th century artist could have created a photographic negative with
3-D characteristics goes beyond the absurd into the realm of sheer fantasy.

Another extraordinary facet of the photographic image came to light when Jesuit Fr.
Francis L Filas, a theology professor at Chicago's Loyala University followed up on
the computerized VP-8 imaging work done by Mottern, Jackson and Jumper. The three had
discovered that the analyses showed button-like projections over the right and left
eyes of the shroud image.

Using the results of a Log E/Interpretations Systems study at Overland Park, Kansas,
Fr. Filas proceeded to demonstrate that the "button-like projections" on the right and
left eyes of the image were actually coins minted between 29 and 32 A.D. during the
time that Pontius Pilate was the Roman procurator in Palestine.

"This new image analysis not only confirmed the existence of a Pontius Pilate coin on
the right eye, but it added further information concerning the coin on the left eye,"
Filas said.

"Pontius Pilate was the only person in numismatic history to issue coins that carried
full-length replicas of an astrologer's staff, something that looks like a shepherd's
staff or a bishop's crosier," Filas explained.

"During the three or four years between 29 A.D. and 32 A.D., Pilate's coins also
carried the Greek inscription, Tiberiou Kaicaroc or Iou Kaicaroc ('of Tiberius
Caesar') in half-moons around the edges."

Filas said that high-contrast enlargements of the second and succeeding generations of
the photograpic negative show quite clearly the staff over the right eye with the
letters UCAI. He noted that the use of C for K was not an unusual spelling error given
the state of the art of coinage at the time.

"To have four letters of the Greek alphabet appear [in the UCAI order] would amount to
one chance in eight million," Filas wrote. Overall, the appearance of the letters and
the astrologer's staff in the positions on the shroud eye by coincidence, he wrote,
would amount "at the minimum to one chance in the astronomical number of six times a
trillion times a trillion times a trillion."

Pontius Pilate coin (left) Shroud Image, Right eye (right)Note letters UCAI on upper
left part of Shroud inage eye and the astrolger's staff below and to the right of
them.

Fr. Filas' work was confirmed by Duke University psychiatrist and Shroud researcher
Dr. Alan D. Whanger and his wife Mary.

The two researchers projected an image of a sixth century icon of the face of Christ
on a coin minted then on the face of the Shroud image. The two fit together like
gloves.

"The coin and the icon relate with astonishing exactness to the facial aspects of the
Shroud," Whanger told this writer in a 1981 interview.

"My evidence indicates that the icon and the coins were copied from the facial imprint
on the Shroud 800 years before the Shroud turned up in France."

His comparisons showed that the painting matched the Shroud face at 60 different
points. The face on the coin matched the Shroud image at 45 different points.
Using the same techniques he used on the painting. Whanger made photographic overlays
of an actual Pontius Pilate coin and projected them on the coin on the right eye. The
two images merged at 74 points, fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Whanger and his wife overlaid a "Julia" coin -- so-called because it was minted in 29
A.D. as a memorial to the wife of the Emperor Tiberius -- over the left eye of the
Shroud image. The two inmates merged at an astonishing 73 places.
"It fit very nicely," he said. "The coins are now definitely identified over each eye.
"The Shroud has now dated itself."

CHAPTER EIGHT

(During the Shroud of Turin Research Project studies, extensive tests were conducted to determine if there was blood on the relic -- a finding that would dispute the claims of Dr. Walter McCrone who insisted that the marks were paint! The tests were conducted by Dr. John Heller, a Yale University professor of medicine and medical physics, and a renowned blood expert, Dr. Alan Adler, a professor of chemistry at New England Institute, and Dr. Samuel Pellicori, an optical physicist at the Santa Barbara (Cal) Research
Center.)

The battery of scientific tests used by the STURP team to identify blood on the Shroud
were exhaustive. Heller listed some of their jaw-breaking names in his book:
microspectrophotometric scans of crystals and fibrils; reflectance scans on the
Shroud; positive hemocromogen tests; positive cyanomethomoglobin tests; positive tests
for bile pigments; and characteristic heme porphyrin flourescence.

"Any one of these is proof of the presence of blood, and each is acceptable in a court
of law," Heller wrote. "Taken together, they are irrefutable."

At a STURP meeting in the Fall of 1981, Dr. Adler listed the exhaustive testing that
registered the stains positive as blood, and then concluded: "That means that the red
stuff on the Shroud is emphatically, and without reservation, noting else but
B-L-O-O-D!"

Pellicori's work with the blood stains (which, unlike the image, had penetrated all
the way through the cloth) turned up a fascinating sidelight.

In the area of the shroud image showing the wound in the crucified man's side,
Pellicori found evididence that something besides blood had soaked the linen: a
viscous fluid less dense than whole blood.

Pelliocori saw it as the serum that separates from blood at the time of death, the
"blood and water" St. John described as flowing from the lance wound after Jesus' side
was pierced.

McCrone, who won fame as the scientist who years before had exposed the famed Vinland
map as a forgery, was not a member of the STURP team. He was, however, given shroud
fibrils to study. In a widely publicized statement, later reported in a scientific
journal he published, McCrone charged that he found iron oxide -- a substance found in
paint -- on the Shroud, and that the blood was really paint put there by the medieval
forger who painted the image.

The STURP team's tests all but demolished McCrone's claims. They not only proved that
the stains were blood, but their tests showed there was not a single brush stroke
anywhere on the Shroud.

Heller writes that since you have to stand as far away as six feet in order to see the
blurry Shroud image, the "artist: had to use a brush three to six feet long. Moreover, the brush could not have had more than a single bristle, because it was capable of painting individual fibrils each a miniscule 10 to 15 microns wide.

To see what he was doing, this miraculous forger would have to have had a microscope
"with an enormous focal length that would permit a brush to operate under it," Heller
wrote.

Heller had a little further fun with the idea, noting that the physics of optics
"preclude" such a device unless it is attached to a TV set -- and that would have had
to have been a color set because the straw yellow color of the image is not strong
enough to show up on black and white TV.

Not even the B & W TV set owned by the miraculous forger back in 14th century?
About the only possibility Heller ignored was that the "artist" had arms up to six
feet long, and the telescopic eyes of Superman.

Considering the incredible abilities and range of knowledge this alleged forger needed
to pull off his scam, to accept the Shroud image as a 14th century fake requires a
level of gullibility far above and far beyond that which allows the perverbial hayseed
to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

This super artist had to have known things not another soul on the face of the earth
knew back in the 1300s. He had to have been an expert on the exact mechanics of
crucifixion as practiced by the Romans in the first century, had medical and
anatomical knowledge equivalent to that of an expert, late-20th century surgeon, known
artistic techniques unknown to any other artist in history, understood the principles
of photography to the extent he was able to produce an image that was a photographic
negative, which, when photographed, would produce a positive image which nobody
including himself would be able to see for another 500 years, got his hands on a large
sheet of ancient linen manufactured in the Middle East, and to have produced such
features as the scourge wounds invisible to the human eye.

If you believe that such a talented and far-seeing magician ever existed back around
1357, I have a dandy little perpetual motion machine I'd like to sell you.

The Work of Dr. Max Frei , a Swiss criminologist and expert botonist, may have shed
some light on the perigrenations of the Shroud. Frei examined pollen grains found
embedded in the fabic. he found 12 pollen samples that originated in Italy and France,
nine found only in Istanbul (Constantinople) and Southern Turkey -- the location of
Edessa, pollen found only Palestine including one sample of pollen from a plant that
exists only in the area from Jericho to the Dead Sea. Pollen from eight diffrent
plants found only in the Jerusalem are were found on the Shroud.



CHAPTER NINE

(In the years before the Shroud appeared in Lirey, France in the 14th century, many
icons and mosaics were copied from the Mandylion, or Image of Edessa. These icons and
paintings bear a striking resemblance to the image on the Shroud, giving weight to the
research of Ian Wilson and others who say that the Shroud and the Image of
Edessa/Mandylion are one in the same, thus dating the Shroud to the sixth century.)

In the Fifth century AD, St. Augustine wrote that there were countless images of
Christ, all different, and explained the discrepancies by noting that nobody had the
vaguest idea what Christ really looked like.

The earliest Christians appear to have followed the Jewish tradition that prohibited
artistic renderings of the human form. It was, therefor, a long time before artists,
in response to what appears to have been widespread demand. began to portray Christ
Ian Wilson found what he described as a "somewhat heated correspondence" in the early
fourth century between the Empress Augusta and Bishop Eusebius of Caesaria in which
the universal curiosity over the appearance of the Savior was cited.

In that era, when portraits of Jesus were painted at all, they tended to show Him as a
beardless youth with short hair.

Wilson found this kind of fourth century likeness at Rome's cemetery of Massimus and
St. Felicity, and as far away as on a mosaic floor of a Roman house excavated in
Dorset , England.

Then, all of a sudden in the sixth Century, -- when the image of Edessa was found
concealed in the arch of that city's West gate -- the images changed -- drastically.
Now many artists were portraying Christ as a bearded, long-haired man strikingly
similar to the image on the shroud!

Writes Wilson: "What seems clear is that at one given point, the sixth century, the
features of Christ in art were brought into focus, as if by invisible decree." He notes that the new images of Christ had an "authority" about them that "seems to suggest that someone, somewhere, suddenly knew what Jesus looked like."

The icons or paintings of that time are eerily similar to the shroud image -- so
similar, in fact, that many of them mistakenly showed features of the shroud itself
such as wrinkles and folds in the fabric, as facial features of the image.
Two 20th century Shroud researchers, Dr. Paul Vignon and Fr. Edward Wuenschel compared icons painted between the sixth and 13 centuries with the face on the shroud image and found that they showed as many as 20 peculiarities which had absolutely nothing to do
with portraiture and everything to do with the shroud itself.

They included features of the cloth weave, wrinkles in the linen, blood stains, and
other non-artistic peculiarities.

Most show a cloth wrinkle as U- shaped mark at the bridge of the nose with a v in the
middle and portray two rivulets of blood at the hairline as curls! A wrinkle in the
cloth shows up as a scar in the middle of the forehead, a bruised left eyebrow is
shown as a physical deformity making it appear larger than the right eyebrow, and many
show neither ears, neck or shoulders.

Wilson lists 15 of these peculiarities shown on various paintings and icons and finds
some or all on some of the more famous works of art:

On the above painting there are 13 of the 15 features. The same number are found on a
fresco at Sant'Angelo and 14 are found in an apse mosaic at Celafu. The mosaic at
Hagia Sophia in Istanbul has nine of the features.

Most show Christ's eyes open, exactly as they appear to be on the Shroud.
It seems clear that it is far more than a mere coincidence that in the sixth century
the image of Edessa was found and at the same time there was a sudden and universal
revelation that enabled artists to portray Christ as he had never before been shown.


CHAPTER TEN

The evidence is in, and it is conclusive.

The so-called Carbon-14 dating to the contrary, the Shroud of Turin can be dated back
to the time of Christ. The coins on the eyes alone offer sufficient proof of this.
Space Age technology has disproved the allegation that the image on the Shroud is the
work of some 14th century artistic genius, revealing not a single brush mark or any
other evidence of forgery.

The evidence, revealed by Dr. Heller and his colleagues, of the presence of blood on
the Shroud, the anatomical precision of the image containing information about the
human body unknown to medical science as recently as a century-and-a-half ago, the
fact that the image is 3-dimensional when subjected to computer-enhanced analysis,
the biblically-and-medically correct exactitude of the image as that of a man brutally
scourged and crowned with a cap of thorns before being crucified and then having his
side pierced, the indisputable fact that the crucified man in the Shroud did not
remain within its folds long enough for his body to begin the process of deterioration
-- in the light of all this it requires a far more incredible leap of faith to believe the Shroud is a medieval forgery than it takes to believe it is the burial Shroud of Jesus Christ.

As convincing as this mountain of evidence is, there are those who will continue to
scoff at the idea that miracles such as this can occur ... ever ... just as it is
certain that were Christ to suddenly appear in the heavens and work the most
incredible wonders in the sight of all mankind, many would still refuse to believe He
exists.

But for those who do accept the fact that the Shroud meets the burden of proof
required of such miracles, believing in its validity as the very shroud in which the
body of the crucified Christ was wrapped is only the beginning. For if indeed this is
what the evidence shows it to be, the Shroud has something very important to tell us,
something God waited until now to reveal.

One cannot help but ask why it was not until this woebegone century was about to burst
upon us that the Shroud of Turin was suddenly revealed in such detail? Just what is
the significance of the timing?

The latter question is easier to answer -- God uses historical developments to serve
His Divine purposes, and it is only in hindsight that we come to recognize the Divine
hand at work in human events.

Why, for example, did Jesus Christ choose the time he picked to come into the world?
Only from hindsight can we begin to understand the timing.

Jesus Christ came into the world at the height of the expansion of the Roman empire.
By the time of His arrival, the Romans had spread their tentacles far and wide,
extending their empire from the borders of Asia to the British isles, and encompassing
most of the Mediterranean littoral. They built roads and bridges from one end of the
empire to the other, established a thriving maritime trade that took their ships from
one end of the Mediterranean to the other, built cities and towns in what had been
wildernesses, and offered the protection of the legions to travelers and merchants
never before available to them.

The Roman empire may not have been established by divine will, but an omniscient God
simply waited until it came into being to take full advantage of the possibilities it
offered. It was a perfect vehicle for the rapid spreading of Christ's message to most
of the known world -- a vehicle never before available -- and His apostles and
disciples used it to the fullest, roaming far and wide and spreading His gospel to the
entire Roman world -- and beyond.

So it must be with the Shroud. The secrets hidden in the fabric could only be revealed
by photography, and mankind lacked the ability to take photographs until the mid-19th
century.

Moreover, as we have seen, the mere photographic revelation of some of the wealth of
information the image contains was scarcely enough to convince even believers that the
Shroud is Christ's burial cloth. Only in the late 20th century, with the advent of the
space age and the magic of computers, did the technology exist to plumb the depths of
this astounding relic.

It seems obvious that it is the Divine will that the Shroud should convey a specific
message to this specific age -- that from the very beginning God meant to use the
relic as His medium to tell this corrupt and cynical world something vitally
important to our spiritual well-being.

From a purely materialistic standpoint, it is not a comforting thought. One cannot
help but to speculate that this might well be a message for a mankind facing the end
of an age and all that that portends. A final word before the flood.

The Shroud has a sublime message for us. It is nothing less than a graphic description
of the, passion, death and resurrection of the God/Man -- truly, the Fifth Gospel of
Jesus Christ.

A medical scientist and former agnostic who spent much of his later years decyphering
the medical information encoded within the Shroud image has given us a graphic account
of the last hours of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Pierre Barbet was so moved by what he learned from his study of the Shroud image
and the mechanics of crucifixion that he could no longer pray the Stations of the
Cross. Knowing exactly what our Lord had experienced in his final hours made following
in Christ's footsteps to the cross a devotion he could no longer bear to practice.
In his book, A Doctor At Calvary, he describes in vivid detail what Christ suffered.
Yet being made aware of that suffering in all its gory horror is only an introduction
to the Shroud's message to our age. It has something far more important to tell us --
something our Lord wants us to know and understand as we face an uncertain future.



CONCLUSION

WHAT THE SHROUD OF TURIN CAN TELL US

(In the foreword we wrote that if Sancta Sindone is what the evidence clearly shows
it to be -- the burial shroud of Jesus Christ -- it has a message for mankind not yet
fully deciphered. You don't have to break the code, however, to understand one
significant part of the Shroud's message to our age. Thanks to a number of medical
researchers, especially the late Dr. Pierre Barbet and his heart-stirring book, A
Doctor At Calvary, we can begin to grasp the very essence of what the Shroud is
capable of telling mankind.)

"We did not know; nobody ever told us that."
Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, after being told what Barbet's Shroud research
had revealed about the true extent of Christ's excruciating suffering during his
Passion.

Not long after the 1931 exhibition of the Shroud, a priest friend approached Dr.
Barbet and showed him the Enrie photographs of the relic taken during the exhibition.
The priest, a Fr. Armailhac, asked Barbet, a renowned expert on human anatomy, for his
opinion of the anatomical accuracy of the Shroud image.

Between 1932 and 1935 Barbet spent much of his time doing anatomical experiments on
cadavers, sometimes even crucifying them to observe the effects on the human body of
this barbarous method of execution. During the same period he studied the work of
other medical experts who had studied the Shroud image, and scoured ancient texts for
information on the mechanics of crucifixion as practiced by the Romans.

In his book he wrote that he began his work in order to learn if the markings on the
Shroud were consistent with what he called "the realities of anatomy and physiology."
Noting that he undertook his research with an open mind, he said he was fully prepared
either to affirm the Shroud's authenticity or to brand it as a fraud. His research
showed him that from a medical standpoint, the Shroud was as modern a textbook on the
anatomy of a crucified man as it would be if written in this era.

".... I was gradually forced to agree, on every single point, that it's markings were
exact," he recalled.

"Furthermore, those which seemed the strangest were those that fitted best with my
experiments."

Drawing on his medical knowledge and his years of research, Barbet constructed a
detailed tableau of what Christ endured during his Passion and the agonizing hours on
the cross. It is nothing less than a horrifying recital of a series of incredibly
painful tortures followed by one of the worst forms of execution ever inflicted by
men upon their fellow men.

Barbet's studies of the image, and those of other medical researchers, showed him in
shocking detail what Christ endured in those final hours of his life. Within its folds
Barbet discovered a docudrama to which the biblical accounts of Christ's passion and
death are mere preludes.

A meticulous researcher, Barbet confined his observations solely to those fully
justified by the evidence disclosed by the Shroud. But he notes in passing that the
Christ's bloody sweat in the Garden of Gethsemani and described by St. Luke, himself a
physician, is a known but rarely seen medical phenomenon called Hematidrosa.

The condition, according to Dr. LeBac's book, The Torture of the Cross, is brought on
by "great physical debility accompanied by violent mental disturbance, following on
profound emotion or great fear," or exactly the physical and mental effects Christ's
foreknowledge of what was coming would have produced. It causes tiny hemorrhages and
attacks nerve endings in every part of the body leaving them vibrating in torment.

But Barbet mentions it only as a sidebar to tell us how at the very outset of his
ordeal Christ was undoubtably in great physical pain, with every nerve ending in his
body screaming out messages of severe distress. He hastens to inform us that
hematidrosa would leave no visible evidence on he Shroud, and it is solely visible
medical evidence with which he is dealing. In other words, the Shroud cannot verify
it.

From the Garden of Gethsemani, Christ is taken before the Sanhedrin where he is
mistreated by the Temple guards. He is then sent to the Roman praetorium, where he
suffers more physical assault at the hands of the Roman legionaries, who some
historians say were most likely Syrian auxiliaries and thereby more prone to enjoy
such sport at the expense of a Jew.

Citing the work of his colleague Dr. Judica, described in the November, 1938 issue of
the journal Medicina Italiana, (Le lesioni da traumi contusivi sul Corpo di Christo),
and his own extensive research, he writes that the Shroud image bears mute testimony
to this particular form of brutality.

The face on the image is covered with a mass of contusions (Barbet calls them
"excoriations") especially on the right side, which is badly deformed. (This is the
strange facial feature found on many of the icons copied from the Mandylion.) It shows
that the marks were caused by blows from either a stick or a fist, and which cut deep
into his skin below the brow.

The worst contusion is located just below the right eye socket. It is triangular in
shape, points upward and has a 3/4 inch base. It melds with another contusion about
two thirds of the way up the nose. At that point there is a fracture of the posterior
of the cartilage, giving the nose the appearance of being broken.

"All these lesions seem to have been caused, Judica says, by a stick about 1 3/4
inches in diameter, and vigorously handled by an assailant standing on the right of
Jesus," Barbet wrote.

There are other contusions and lesions on the left cheek, at the tip of the nose and
on the lower lip. The image of the man in the Shroud shows clear evidence that he was
brutally beaten by persons who were trying their best to inflict maximum pain on him.
And anyone who has ever been beaten about the face knows just how painful such
beatings can be, especially when aimed at the areas around the eye sockets and nose.
And this was only the beginning. Reeling from the savage beating, Christ was to be
subjected to an even worse ordeal -- scourging.

The biblical accounts of the scourging give no idea of the torture involved in this
extreme form of punishment. The Romans called it "the little death" and when carried
to extremes it could easily result in real death.

Because it could be fatal if not cut short, Hebrew law allowed no more than 39
strokes, yet the wounds on the Shroud image show that Christ was given about 60
lashes, all of them delivered with unbridled savagery.

Thanks to the Shroud, it is possible to reconstruct this ordeal in starkly realistic
detail. It shows: Christ arms were bound above his head to the upper part of a column or whipping post. Two men, one taller than the other, took turns whipping him. They struck with great enthusiasm and vigor, inflicting deep wounds, ripping the flesh from his body and
spraying his blood outward in every direction; There are about 120 wound marks, each one caused by one of the flagrum's double thongs. And each wound shows the marks caused by the dumbell-shaped pieces of metal or bone embedded near the tips of each thong; Christ's body is covered with these wounds.

Flagrum

"They are scattered over the whole body, from the shoulders to the lower part of the
legs." Barbet wrote.

Most of the wounds are on Christ's back, but when the thongs struck the rear of his
body they tended to wrap around him, inflicting deep lesions on the front of his
chest, pelvis and legs. The marks show he was naked.

Only those scourged with a flagrum could possibly understand the indescribable agony
this kind of punishment causes its victims.

If your back has ever been so badly sunburned that you could not even bear to have
clothing touch your skin you might get a vague idea of the pain you'd undergo if you
were to be repeatedly lashed as Christ was with whip thongs containing pieces of
metal.

The word agony is too mild to describe the horror of that kind of ordeal.
Shroud Imprints of Bar bell--Shaped Metal Pieces Embedded in Flagrum ThongsBut the
legionaries aren't finished. These Syrian auxiliaries want to have a little fun with
this Jew who refused to give them the satisfaction of uttering even a single cry as
the repeated lashes fell on his body.

A little mockery is called for. After all, he pretended to be some kind of a king, so
shouldn't they pay homage to his Majesty? One soldier takes a course red woolen cloak
-- the royal purple -- and drapes it over Christ's torn and bloody shoulders already
in agony from his ordeal at the whipping post. He winces. (Remember that sunburn and
the pain caused by contact with clothing? Imagine how much greater pain you'd feel if
someone put a course garment over a mass of gaping fresh wounds on your back and
shoulders.)

But something is lacking. A king needs a crown. So one of the worshipful soldiers
finds twigs from a thorn-bearing tree common in Judea, the Zizyphus spina Christi. He
plaits it into a cap, puts it on Christ's head, binds it with a circle of plaited
rushes and pounds it down on this would-be king's head, driving the thorns deep into
the flesh. Copious amounts of blood pour out of the wounded scalp, leaving stains all
over the Shroud, especially on the dorsal image. (One of these rivulets shows up as a
curl on copies of the Mandylion.)

Anyone who has suffered a scalp wound can testify to the pain it causes. It is sharp
and intense. And in Christ's case, it was continuous.

But there's more to come-- much more.

Christ has been condemned. Roman custom decrees that one sentenced to death by
crucifixion carry his own cross to the place of execution. The legionaries put the
heavy crosspiece known as the patibulum across his shoulders. It weighs about 120
pounds and is rough hewn. It immediately digs into the mangled flesh on his shoulders
and upper back, ripping the wounds open and intensifying the pain.

He must carry this burden to the hillock known as Golgotha to the Hebrews, and Calvary
to the Romans. He is now reeling, giddy, so weakened he is barely able to put one foot
in front of the other.

Prodded along by the legionaries, he stumbles three times, hitting his knees on the
cobblestones and leaving contusions still visible on the Shroud. And the deep
indentions across his upper back show where the patibulum dug deeper into his flesh.
It is enough, more that he can bear. He is now near death. To prevent him from dying
before he can be crucified to fully satisfy Roman justice, a Cyrenian bystander named
Simon is recruited to carry his burden.

Barbet quotes Isaias' prophecy: "From the sole of the foot unto the top of the head,
there is no soundness therein: wounds and bruises and swelling sores: they are not
bound up, nor fomented with oil." (Isaias 1:6).

Atop the appropriately named Golgotha (Hebrew for "place of the skull") the
executioners put the patibulum down on the rock-strewn surface. Christ is made to lie
on his torn back. His head rubs against the ridge of the patibulum which drives the
thorns in his crown deeper into his pain-wracked scalp.

His torn and bloodied back scrapes against the rough ground and he is overcome by a
new wave of nearly unendurable pain.

The executioners take his arms and stretch them out along the length of the patibulum
until they are at a 90-degree angle. One of the executioners, well practiced in this
brutal art, takes a square nail, presses it against the spot in the upper wrist known
as the Space of Destot and with one blow of his hammer, drives it through the flesh
and into the wood.

The nail strikes one of the body's great median nerves and the pain shoots up his arms
to his brain and explodes in a cataclism of pain. (If you have ever had symptoms of
carpal tunnel syndrome you might get the merest idea of what kind of pain is
associated with this carpal nerve. It can be excruciating beyond description.)
The executioner repeats the cruel process with the other wrist and the agony is now
doubled. His brain is aflame in a conflagration of anguish.

Christ is now firmly fixed to the crosspiece. The executioners pull him to his feet
and drag him to the stipes -- the upright piece already embedded in the earth. They
lift the crosspiece and fit it into the top of the stipes. The executioners bend his
kness and press the sole of his right foot flush against the surface of the stipes.
While one holds the right foot in place the other puts the sole of his left foot over
it and then drives a nail through both feet and into the wood.

It is all done with mechanical precision with no concern for the victim -- after all,
he's just another troublemaker who has somehow offended the majesty of Caesar's law.
The job is done. Christ is firmly fixed to his cross.

It is fiendish, torture beyond any human understanding. Those nails in his wrists are
scraping against the median nerves like a bow held against violin strings and they are
playing an endless symphony of excruciating agony.

And he thirsts! His mouth is dry. His body is dehydrated. He gasps. "I thirst." A
soldier finds enough compassion to dip a sponge into a bowl of posca, the common
soldier's drink of vinegar and water. He puts it on a hysop reed, and presses it
against the lips of the crucified man.

Part of the satanic reasoning behind crucifixion, Roman-style, involves the physical
reactions it is bound to create in its victims. It elongates the process of dying.
Under the right circumstances the victim can live several days, all the while enduring
a variety of tortures that come in waves.

The weight of Christ's body makes him sag. He is no longer at a 90 degree angle to his
cross. The 65 degree angle his body has assumed is pressing the nails against the
median nerves and the pain is unrelenting. But now there's something new. First his
arms, hands and chest muscles begin to cramp, imposing a new tier of pain atop layers
of other torments.

Slowly the cramp runs down his body to the toes of his feet. His entire body is locked
in a giant spasm. Barbet describes the process as tetanisation -- a state of
generalized cramping as painful as any of the other tortures Jesus has endured.
(Think of a Charley Horse in your thigh and try to imagine that kind of spasm holding
your entire body in its grasp. You might come close to beginning to understand what
Christ was enduring. But only close.)

This is the evil genius of crucifixion -- the process is inevitable. The ingenious
Romans planned it that way. They mean to punish, and to them punishment must take the
most extreme forms.

Gradually his breathing becomes labored and shallow. He can still inhale, but slowly
but surely he is losing the ability to exhale. If you have ever been winded you can
get some idea of the panic the victim faces when he can no longer breathe. His body
demands air, but can't get it. He will automatically react and try desperately to
breathe at any cost.

Ah those crafty Romans -- they knew this was coming. That's why they nailed Christ's
feet to the cross. They knew he could only get the air his body demanded by somehow
pushing himself upright and relieving the pressure that was immobilizing his lungs.
The nail in his feet gave him something to stand on!

Slowly and with great effort he straightened his legs by pushing against the nail
until he had managed to correct his angle in relation to the cross to 75 degrees. The
pain caused by this action makes his feet objects of torture but the cramp begins to
abate and all of a sudden he can breathe. The longer he remains in this position, the
deeper his breathing. But at what cost.

Suffering from the copious loss of blood and the ordeal through which his torturers
have put him, he is desperately weak. He cannot continue to hold himself erect. But
it is only in this position that he can speak.

His first words are spoken to his Father. He looks into the hate-filled faces of his
enemies and accusers even as they continue to mock and insult him and ask him why he
cannot save himself if he is indeed the son of God, yet he cries out "Father forgive
them; they know not what they do."

But he can no longer support himself in this position. His body begins to sink. And
when he sags and the weight of his body drags him down, the nails in his wrists once
again rub against the median nerves and bolts of new pain shoot up his arms to his
brain and explode anew.

The process repeats itself. Cramps, near asphixiation, pushing himself upright,
breathing and then once again sagging. It happens over and over, for three terrible
hours. It is unimaginable.

And then he cries out Eli, Eli, lama Sabacthani the first line of the 21st Psalm, King
David's prophetic description of what is happening to him on the cross.

"But I am a worm, not a man; the scorn of men, despised by the people. All who see me
scoff at me; they mock me with parted lips, they wag their heads: 'He relied on the
Lord; let him deliver him, let him rescue him, if he loves him."

It is a recitation of Christ's Passion, written hundreds of years before he was born.
'I am like water poured out. My heart has become like wax melting away within my
bosom. My throat is dried up like naked clay, my tongue cleaves to my jaws; to the
dust of death you have brought me down."

And at last he looks up to heaven and wills his death. He has accomplished all he
came to do. "It is consumated." and then "Father, into your hands I commend my
spirit."

Every detail of this account is written on the Shroud's linen fabric, fully
understandable to any medical scientist willing to examine it as carefully as Barbet
and other experts did.

We can no longer echo Pius XII: "We did not know. Nobody ever told us."

Now we know.

What is the message of Sancta Sindone?

It is a love letter sealed for more than 19 centuries. It is a love letter written
specifically for our callous and unbelieving age. It is Jesus telling us: "This is
what I endured for you. This is the price I willingly paid for your failure to love my
Father and your failure to love your brothers and sisters as you love yourselves.
"This is how much I love you."

Author's Note: In writing Sancta Sindone, I approached the subject as a journalist. I am not a scientist or an historian, but I am an experienced investigative journalist, and my intent was to examine the overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the Shroud's authenticity and show just how compelling it is when assembled in one place.I avoided technical details as much as possible, and omitted some of the voluminous evidence compiled by scientists that is
simply too complex to explain in simple terms.

My interest in the Shroud of Turin began back in the 1930s, when as a nine-year-old I
was given a copy of the Enrie photograph of the Shroud taken in 1931 during an
exposition of the relic. It has fascinated me ever since. I have followed developments concerning the Shroud for many years, and back in the 1980s I spent a considerable amount of time researching the history of the relic for a novel I planned to write but never got around to.

During the course of that research I interviewed Fr. Peter Rinaldi, one of the
Shroud's most vigorous advocates, Fr. Francis Filas and Dr. & Mrs. Whanger, the coin
experts who found and developed the evidence of the Pilate coins on the eyes of the
Shroud image.

I have examined the claims of the militant skeptics to discredit the Shroud as a
clever forgery and they simply fail to measure up against the overwhelming weight of
evidence of the relic's authenticity. In most cases, they border on the absurd.

The fact remains that the Shroud has been around in the West since the 14th Century
and it is simply impossible for any contemporary forger to have had the knowledge and
ability required to pull off what would have been the greatest scientific feat in
history. With all the sophisticated technology available to us now, it remains and
impossibility.

But people will believe what they want to believe, and no amount of evidence will ever
convince those skeptics that the Shroud of Turin is the burial shroud of Jesus Christ.
The implications of that are simply too mind-boggling for them to accept and remain
skeptics, atheists or whatever they care to call call themselves.

Phil Brennan, April, 1996


SOURCES:

Books:

The Shroud of Turin (Image Books, 1979) revised edition, by Ian Wilson
The Shroud, (Random House, 1963) By John Walsh
Shroud, (Bantam Books, 1978) by Robert K. Wilcox
Portrait of Jesus? (Stein and Day, 1983) by Frank C. Tribbe
Report on the Shroud of Turin (Houghton Mifflin, 1983)
It Is The Lord (Warner Books, 1975) by Fr. Peter M. Rinaldi
A Doctor At Calvary (P.J. Kenedy & Sons) by Dr. Pierre Barbet, Translated by the Earl
of Wicklow
The Man In The Shroud (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972) by Fr. Peter Rinaldi
Michael Thomas, in Rolling Stone magazine, 1978
INTERVIEWS:
Fr. Peter Rinaldi
Fr. Francis Filas
Dr. Alan Whanger



Phil Brennan is a veteran investigative journalist. He wrote the FromWashington
Straight column for William F. Buckley's National Review magazine in the early 1960s
under the Cato byline. His books include The Goldwater Story (1964) with Ralph de
Toledano, Claude Kirk, Man and Myth (1970) also with Toledano, St. Marys, The Story of
A Church (1958), and 3 MicroMag books on food and nutrition (1995). He edits and
publishes Wednesday on The Web, an internet magazine. He handled part of the
Washington end of the successful public relations campaign for Alaska Statehood. From
1960. until 1966 he worked on Capitol Hill as Director of Public Relations and Special
Projects for the Republican Policy Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and
later as Administrative Assistant to the late Congressman James Utt (R-Cal). His
investigative work included the breaking of the notorious Bobby Baker case which
resulted in the conviction of the secretary of the U.S. Senate, a close aide of
President Lyndon Johnson. He writes for NewsMax.com and is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute.