The Shroud of Turin…a supernatural explanation?

Some weeks ago, The Catholic Weekly published a report on new scientific evidence that strongly confirms that the Shroud of Turin—which many believe to be the burial cloth of Christ—is not of mediaeval origin, as was claimed following a 1988 study using radiocarbon dating that has been subjected to much criticism over the last three decades.

Scientists at the Institute of Crystallography of Italy’s National Research Council have now studied eight tiny samples of fabric from the shroud using a method called Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS), a technique that enables researchers to determine the age of flax cellulose—long chains of sugar molecules which slowly deteriorate over time.

This research confirms other recent studies that date the shroud to the first century AD.

In another study published earlier this year, isotope tests revealed that the flax used to make the linen was grown in the Middle East.

However, the English Catholic Herald (31^st October) has published a report on an experiment carried out by an expert in facial reconstruction, Cícero Moraes, who claims that the image he has generated in a laboratory experiment using 3D software shows that the Shroud of Turin cannot be the genuine burial shroud of Christ.

The reason he gives is that if the image had been produced by the body wrapped in this large piece of linen, it could not have shown the perfectly proportioned figure of a man that we see on the shroud, but one in which the limbs were widened and distorted, and the feet splayed outwards.

This conclusion drawn by Moraes, however, is based on the question-begging assumption that the image of the crucified man imprinted on the shroud has to be explained by some natural or humanly explicable process.

In fact, I wonder if this “discovery” is really anything new at all. I remember reading over thirty years ago, long before this new 3D software was available, about a simple experiment with a freshly painted dressmaker’s dummy, wrapping it loosely in a large sheet while the paint was still wet, and then removing the sheet to see what sort of image was left on it.

The unsurprising and quite predictable result was that when the sheet, which had been curved to enfold the three-dimensional dummy, was flattened out, the image left on it by the wet paint was not the perfectly proportioned human figure we see on the shroud. Rather, it showed a distorted widening of the limbs.

This older experiment—like the new one carried out with Moraes’ new software—still leaves the origin of the image on the shroud as a profound mystery. What caused it? This technician tells us he is inclined to view it not so much as a forgery as a; “a work of Christian art, which managed to convey its intended message very successfully.”

This theory seems incredible on the face of it. To begin with, as I noted above, recent studies have shown powerful evidence that the shroud does indeed date from the first century AD. And no human artist living nearly two millennia before the invention of photography would ever have thought to produce a very faint image which could only be appreciated in all its sombre and striking realism when seen in the form of a photographic negative, with the light and dark areas of the image reversed.

There are no other examples of such an artistic genre dating from the 1^st century, or from any subsequent period, for that matter. As the Catholic iconographer and historian of sacred art Hilary White has confirmed in an email to me:

“[T]here are no other examples—not one—of what we now call ‘photo-realism’ in medieval art. . . since photography did not exist, even very realistic drawing styles were at least somewhat stylised. We modern people . . . don’t have the visual mental framework anymore to understand the difference between painterly realism and photo-realism.

“But if you’ve had some training and do understand the difference, you see immediately that the image on the shroud—if it were the work of an artist—was painted in a style that no medieval mind could possibly have produced.”

Even more importantly, there is no known artistic technique that could possibly have produced the image on the shroud. Chemical analysis has shown that there is no paint, and no brush marks on the shroud. To quote Hilary White again;

“No chemical or spectrographic analysis has ever shown the slightest presence of either pigment or medium (pigment + a medium like oil or egg yolk = paint) on the shroud. They’ve found all sorts of particulates and have easily been able to identify them all – carbon, pollen, dust etc. No paint means it wasn’t painted.”

Microscopic examination has shown that the image has been produced by the scorching of just the very top fibres of this ancient cloth, in a burst of heat or release of energy that can only have lasted a tiny fraction of a second or it would have burnt through the whole material.

This “scorched” image of a man who had suffered the cruel treatment matching the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion and death seems quite compatible with the explanatory hypothesis of a mysterious and unique supernatural event—his Resurrection.

But once we admit that miraculous hypothesis, it would be inconsistent and gratuitous to set limits to divine power. If the Lord was able to rise from the dead in a way that left an image of his body on his burial sheet, it was certainly not beyond his miracle-working power to make that image an undistorted one, more apt for our veneration.