CASE FILE: Shroud of Christ?
THE SCENE: Turin Cathedral, Turin, Italy
LEAD DETECTIVE: Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, textile restorer
In a central part of Turin Cathedral is an elaborate, baroque shrine housing one of the Catholic Church’s most precious and controversial artifacts: a 14-foot-long piece of cloth known as the Turin Shroud. The shroud’s surface bears, in faint shades of brown, the unmistakable image of a man. The body of this individual appears to bear wounds similar to those inflicted during the ancient execution method of crucifixion. For its dedicated believers, this image is that of Jesus Christ himself, burned onto the cloth upon his miraculous resurrection from the dead.
The debate over the Shroud’s origins has raged furiously since its first documented appearance in Lirey, France, in the 1350s. Is it an authentic burial shroud, or just a brilliant medieval fake? In 1532, the Shroud was stationed in Chambery in the French Alps, when the chapel housing it burned down. The corner of the Shroud, folded to fit in a silver casket, was burned through, resulting in a pattern of 24 burn holes. A team of nuns sewed triangular patches over the worst holes and sewed the Shroud onto a linen backing cloth to strengthen it.
In 1988, three of the world’s foremost carbon-dating labs announced in agreement that the Shroud could be dated only as far back as the 13th or 14th century. Then, in the summer of 2002, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, a renowned textile restorer, was invited to Turin to undertake an unprecedented restoration of the shroud, which called for the removal of both the backing cloth and all the medieval patches. It marked the first time a fabrics expert had worked so closely with the precious relic, and what she eventually uncovered shook the study of the shroud to its foundations.
SECRETS OF THE DEAD: “Shroud of Christ?,” reveals the brand-new forensic evidence that Christianity’s most treasured existing relic is indeed 2,000 years old, dating from the time of Christ. Upon examining a side of the Shroud no one had seen before, Flury-Lemberg’s team found a style of stitching they had seen only once before — amid the ruins of the Jewish citadel of Masada, a town destroyed by the Romans in 74 A.D. Adding to the latest interest are bacteriologists’ experiments that may prove once and for all how the image on the cloth was ever imprinted, and forensic experts’ analysis of the wounds on the image, which appear closely to reflect those of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament.
A new chapter in the history of the Shroud is unfolding. SECRETS OF THE DEAD: “Shroud of Christ?” will document the fabric experts’ work, revisit the forensic science community’s many attempts to accurately date the Shroud, and follow bacteriologists’ quest to prove scientifically once and for all how the relic came to be.
