The Fifth Gospel(23)
“A one-to-one reproduction of the Holy Shroud,” Nogara said, raising a hand to point, but never allowing his fingers to touch the cloth. “Fourteen feet long, four feet wide.”
The image created a strange tension inside me. The ancient tradition of Eastern Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, is that holy icons are portraits of saints and apostles that have been accurately copied and recopied for centuries. Of all these images, the Holy Shroud is king, the image at the heart of our faith.
It is also our greatest relic. The Bible says that the bones of Elisha raised a dead man to life, and that sick people were healed by touching the garments of Jesus, so to this day every Catholic altar and every Orthodox antimension has a relic inside it. Almost none of these can claim to have touched our Lord, and only one—the Shroud—can claim to be his self-portrait. Never has so important a holy object been shunned.
Yet even after the carbon dating, the Church never transferred the Shroud to a museum, never quietly swept it under the rug. The cardinal of Turin said it was no longer correct to call the Shroud a relic, but he didn’t order the cloth removed from the cathedral. It took John Paul a decade after the radiocarbon tests to visit it again. When he came, though, he called the Shroud a gift from God and urged scientists to keep studying it. This had been the Shroud’s place in our hearts—in my heart—ever since. We had no answer for the radiocarbon tests. But we believed we hadn’t heard the last word, and until that word came, we would not abandon the defenseless. We would not forsake the forsaken man.
My inner turmoil increased when I saw that Peter was paying attention now as well. I’d never spoken to him about the Shroud. The complexity of my feelings about it would’ve been unfair to heap on a child.
“The first thing you must know,” Nogara said, “is how the Shroud covered Jesus’ body. It wasn’t draped on top of him like a sheet. It was laid under him, then back over him, in a band. That’s why we have a front image and a back image.”
He pointed to gourd-shaped holes cut into the cloth. All of them were in a pattern that matched the folds in the linen. “But the marks I want to focus on are these. The burn marks.”
“Who burned it?” Peter asked.
“A fire broke out,” Ugo said. “In 1532, the Shroud was being kept in a reliquary made of silver. The fire melted part of it. A drop of molten silver landed on the Shroud, burning through every layer of the folded cloth. The damaged linen had to be repaired by Poor Clare nuns. Which brings me to my point.”
Nogara plucked a trade journal from a bookshelf and handed it to me. The cover said Thermochimica Acta.
“This coming January,” he continued, “an American chemist from the national laboratory at Los Alamos will publish an article in that scientific journal. A friend at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences sent me an early copy. See for yourself.”
I flipped through the pages. They might as well have been written in Chinese. “Enthalpies of Dilution of Glycine.” “Thermal Studies of Polyesters Containing Silicon or Germanium in the Main Chain.”
“Skip to the end,” Nogara said. “The last article before the index.”
And there it was: “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin.”
It contained pictures of what looked like worms on microscope slides, and charts I couldn’t fathom. At the beginning of the text, though, in the abstract, were two sentences whose gist I understood:
Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the shroud.
“The sample wasn’t part of the Shroud?” I said. “How is that possible?”