Word: cloth
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...wait a moment. There's something wrong with this picture. Hasn't this all been settled--and in the negative? It certainly seemed so. In 1988, just as scientific testing and historical scholarship had convinced ever greater numbers of intelligent people that the shroud might indeed be Jesus' burial cloth, its keepers elected to allow one more test. They distributed small samples to three laboratories for radiocarbon dating. Several months later, the labs revealed their verdict: the linen of the cloth dated no earlier than the late Middle Ages. Skeptics rejoiced; romantics were subdued. One crestfallen enthusiast later wrote...
...testing on unreturned remnants. That is bad news, given 20th century humanity's ravenous hunger for literal certainty. Transubstantiation is well and good, but the tantalizing notion that the red spatters on linen are Christ's actual blood, rather than wine as blood, and that the imprint on cloth was left by the resurrected body, not a Communion wafer, is intoxicating...
...make any difference for receiving grace," she notes. A few years ago, Trabattoni saw a videotape about the relic. The tape spent a few minutes on the results of the radiocarbon dating, mostly to disparage it. But what Trabattoni remembers is the details it pointed out in the cloth. "The wounds on the shoulders," she explains, "the wounds from the flogging, the wounds on the knees. And there was one thing I remember very distinctly that touched me very much. There was a professor of medicine who studied the shroud and said the point at which the nails were driven...
...this week, an act of rebellion is under way. It is not as sweeping as the creationists' jihad against Darwin, but it is also far more focused: what is under attack here is not a vast theory with admitted gaps but a specific experiment on a specific piece of cloth--an apparently pure application of the scientific method that the West has taken for granted since the days of the Enlightenment...
...Shroud of Turin happens to be a letter declaring it a fraud. In 1389 Pierre d'Arcis, then Bishop of Troyes, described a "twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and the front...thus impressed together with the wounds which he bore." The linen cloth had occupied a place of honor in a church in the tiny French town of Lirey since the 1350s; D'Arcis, who was writing to his Pope, complained that "although it is not publicly stated to be the true shroud of Christ, nevertheless this is given out and noised abroad...