Button, Button, Who's Got the Button?

Part I

Looked at the Shroud as an artifact; this part looks at a possible history of that artifact.  

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

A telling point against the Shroud is that no one seems to have known of it until it surfaced in Lirey, France, in 1349.  You would think there'd have been more notice taken of a sacred image!  But then, how many people today natter on about the Shroud of Turin, other than enthusiasts and their debunkers?  Further, it is not entirely reasonable to hold earlier eras to the standards of modern forensic laboratories regarding chains of custody.  We don't doubt Tacitus wrote the Annals even though the earliest manuscript we have of it (M1, from Kloster Fulda) is written in a Carolingian hand (8th cent.), long after Tacitus became tacit, and was itself lost for centuries and rediscovered only in 1506.  Who had the original scrolls?  Where was M1 during the intervening centuries?  How do we know that the Annals and the Histories are not medieval forgeries?  (Or perhaps Renaissance fakes!) 

Simple.  We use a double standard.  For some artifacts, we allow a reasonable filling-in of the gaps.  For other, we do not.  Especially if the other has been touted as miraculous, since at that point reflexive dogma kicks in and anything miraculous must be denied.  But if we suppose the image on the Shroud was formed by an entirely natural process involving the Maillard Reaction, and the only threatening possibility in play is that it might -- might -- establish the historicity of Jesus and the reliability of certain accounts of his death, we may be able to consider it from an entirely materialistic and secular point of view and make no demands beyond those normally made of ancient artifacts.

Of course, some people may find the simple historicity of Jesus to be threatening enough. That is an entirely different topic. 

In fact, few are the artifacts that could satisfy the demands made on this one.  All we have in history are isolated data points, and we must as it were "connect the dots," doing the best we can.  Let's take a look at one possible reconstruction.

In what follows, TOF has taken accounts from a couple of Shroudie sites, largely because no one else bothers to do this.  However, both sites presented information with cautions about reliability and interpretation, and where not, TOF has noted some cautions or omitted the item entirely.  For example, there is a Gnotic hymn called the Hymn of the Pearl that seems to TOF to require a great deal of the verbal equivalent of  pareidolia to link it to the Shroud at all.  And he was unable to find another translation on-line that matched the translation provided at the site, and so TOF does not discuss it here.

Therefore, with the usual standard cautions against the sort of details that have or have not survived the shipwrecks of time, the following reconstruction is offered.

Shrouded in Mystery

Not an actual photograph of Last Supper!
Christ: All right, who made this mess on the table?
Apostles: Not me!  Surely not I, Lord!
Judas: Food fight!

One of those things that periodically shows up on one message board or another is the ever-popular subject of the Shroud of Turin.  It is one of those matters regarded as a done deal in certain quarters, though the deal done differs from one quarter to another.  For some, it has been shown -- usually by Science!™ -- to be a medieval hoax perpetrated by preternaturally clever medieval hoaxers.  For others, it has been shown -- usually by some nit-picking of those Science results -- to be the burial shroud of Christ.  A small cottage industry has grown up around it: the Shroudies. 

Coming down squarely in the We-don't-know camp is of course the Catholic Church.  She points out quite reasonably that an object need not be factual to be useful in focusing the mind on veneration.  (No one supposes DaVinci's The Last Supper to be a photograph of the actual event, but it is often found in altarpieces and the like.)  But neither is she prepared to dismiss the Shroud tout court.  Even if it is a weird work of art, it is still a valuable and important indicator of a lost technology.

John Walsh in The Shroud (Random House, 1963) wrote:

"The Shroud of Turin is either the most awesome and instructive relic of Jesus Christ in existence... or it is one of the most ingenious, most unbelievably clever, products of the human mind and hand on record."

But there are, of course, other logical possibilities.

• It is neither a relic nor a clever product, but simply a natural occurrence.
• It really is a first century burial cloth, but it is Yussuf Schmoe, crucified in AD 80, not Jesus Christ.
• It really is the burial cloth of Jesus, but it evidences only his death, not his resurrection.

And of course, that the Shroud may have a train of material causes that account for it does not preclude its being miraculous. The word for "miracle" is simply mirabilium, which means "marvel." 

"We marvel at something when, seeing an effect, we do not know the cause.  And since one and the same cause is at times known to certain people and not to others, it happens that some marvel and some do not."       -- St. Thomas Aquinas. Contra gentiles

Is the production of a rainbow by double-refraction of sunlight through water droplets, as described by Bishop Theodoric of Freiburg in the 13th cent., any less marvelous than some mumbo-jumbo involving the goddess Iris?  Catholic and Orthodox Christians can get away with this since their notion of God as primary cause does not preclude secondary (or "intrumental") causes.  This is all much more clear in Latin, which possesses an instrumental case and in which no one could utter such absurdities as "I flew to Los Angeles," except perhaps a rational bird.  But we digress.

Shroud image at this link may be inspected in close-up zooms

A 1983 paper by archeologist William Meacham summarized the Shroud situation as follows:

From its first recorded exhibition in France in 1357, this cloth has been the object of mass veneration, on the one hand, and scorn from a number of learned clerics and freethinkers, on the other. Appearing as it did in an age of unparalleled relic-mongering and forgery and, if genuine, lacking documentation of its whereabouts for 1,300 years, the Shroud would certainly have long ago been consigned to the ranks of spurious relics (along with several other shrouds with similar claims) were it not for the extraordinary image it bears.

--- "The Authentication of the Turin Shroud:
An Issue in Archaeological Epistemology." 
Current Anthropology, v.24 No.3 (June 1983)

The Face of Jaen Cathedral
is supposedly a copy of the
medieval Veronica Veil.  Clearly
a painting in medieval style.

The only "other" shroud mentioned in the article is the Cadouin Shroud.  It is a monument to the capacity of bumpkin Frankish knights to be taken in by Middle Eastern sharpies that they could believe a Fatimid era shawl with Qur'anic inscriptions was the burial shroud of Christ.  The Cadouin Shroud bears no image, so although clearly not genuine, it does indicate that medievals had no a priori expectation that such a shroud would have an image on it. 

There are also a number of other art works purporting to be copied from the "Veronica Veil" kept in the Vatican; but they are self-proclaimed as copies, and are clearly paintings with the stylized features of the art of the time. The only close up inspection of what is supposed to be the original Veronica Veil in 1907 described it as "a square piece of light coloured material, somewhat faded through age, which bear two faint rust-brown stains, connected one to the other." 

However, from the copies made of the original image, we can get an idea what an artist of that era would consider a good Face-O'-Jesus.  It is hardly the Modern Ages concept of representationalism in art!  The face is stylized and set in a metal matting cut frame the face.  The three points of beard and hair at the bottom is a common feature of all the copies, so the original was likely the same: an image within an opening. 

This essay and the next make heavy, if tentative, use of a number of on-line resourses, which will be linked here and there, and summarized at the end.