Baroquem

The Shroud and the Templars?

The (UK) Times Online is reporting that a document from the Vatican Archives might shed some light on the Shroud of Turin’s missing history:

… her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

This is circumstantial evidence, but it’s intriguing. The two main problems with the Shroud are the results of the carbon-14 dating done in the 1980s — which concluded that the Shroud dated from the late 13th or 14th century — and the historical record, which shows the Shroud popping out of nowhere into a small town in France during the middle of the 14th century.

One of the popular theories to deal with the latter point was the one developed by Ian Wilson. In his reconstruction, the Shroud made its way from Edessa to Constantinople earlier in its history; from there, it was taken by the Templars when Constantinople was sacked, kept secret for the next century and a half, and eventually given into the care of its documented French owner, who was affiliated with the Templars. It’s long been known that the Templars were supposed to have venerated some sort of mysterious image of a face (which Wilson suggests was the Shroud, folded so that only the head was visible), but this is the first testimony alluding to a full figure on a cloth.

Here’s the thing about the Shroud: a lot of people are inclined to dismiss it out of hand because they place their full faith behind the carbon dating result. “If science says so, it must be true.” However, science has a lot more to say about the Shroud. It’s been exhaustively tested and studied, using countless methods and disciplines: optical microscopy, photography, x-ray photography, physics, chemistry, blood chemistry, forensics, textile science, geology, history, art history, and many more. Much of the evidence points toward authenticity, not forgery. And even if we could definitively say that the Shroud was a fake, made during the Middle Ages to dupe credulous pilgrims, that wouldn’t be the end of the story. Because we don’t know how the image was produced. With all our modern science and craft, we can’t say how a medieval artist could have made that image — and we can’t duplicate it ourselves.

Even if you think the Shroud is not a true relic of Christ — and I believe that there are legitimate reasons to think that it is — then it’s still quite worthy of scientific study. I’d say that many of the people who discount the Shroud do so out of prejudice, because it’s a religious artifact, because it can’t be real. Well, fine. If there’s nothing to it, then explain it.