Word: shroud
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...sure, not even the most avid defender of radiocarbon dating would deny that at least one mystery continues to surround the shroud: How did the image of a man, plainly crucified and preternaturally finely rendered, get on it in the first place? Were the image not allegedly Christ's, the matter would be relegated to obscure academic journals on Byzantine textile technology. As things stand, however, the conundrum of origin and the slim chance that the scientific dating may have been rigged (not likely) or flawed (a better possibility) are being employed by die-hard shroudies to shore up their...
...14TH CENTURY SKEPTIC One of the first universally accepted documentations of what we now know as the 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...
...already faded then: a more recent witness described it as having "both the color and character of faint scorch marks on a well-used ironing cover." But not so faint that, D'Arcis excepted, people doubted who it was. Believers continued to converge on Lirey. Later, after the shroud fell into the possession of Italy's royal Savoy family and was moved to Turin, the church granted it its own feast day, and crowds viewing its public showings grew so thick that some pilgrims died of suffocation...
...Middle Ages, of course, were salad days for relics, real and fake (churches in Constantinople and Angeli boasted heads of John the Baptist), and as the centuries rolled on, bits of the True Cross or Our Lady's shoe faded from prominence within their gilded reliquaries. What catapulted the shroud into its role as a modern touchstone was the testimony of a thoroughly modern invention: the camera. On May 28, 1898, a city councillor named Secondo Pia took the first photographs of the relic. One scholar recounts that as the negative image began to appear in his darkroom, Pia "nearly...
...public but also to several waves of scientific observers. The trend's high point occurred in 1978, when the Roman Catholic Church allowed a five-day extravaganza during which more than two dozen scientists from the U.S., Italy and Switzerland performed a battery of tests on the shroud and also used pieces of tape to lift material from its surface for later study. The tests included photo- and electron microscopy, X rays, spectroscopy, ultraviolet fluorescence, thermography and chemical analyses. Among the scientists' findings: that the shroud had come into direct contact with a body and that the "blood...