You Want to Believe
Of course you do! Thing is, how far are they willing to go to verify facts? Oh, facts … their facts, his facts, her facts, your facts. Facts from experts, facts on experts …
One of my favorite quotes from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is “Archaeology is the search for FACT, not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.” (Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay)
Appearing in the Gainesville Times, October 4, 1988, Prof. Alex Taylor throws light and shade on the Shroud of Turin, the noun, and its forensic facts.
A transcript and additional commentary follow the column.
TRANSCRIPT:
Mystery cloaks origin of Holy Shroud of Turin
One of the world’s great unsolved mysteries, a 13-by-3 foot strip of linen known as the Holy Shroud of Turin, has again made international news. This time, advanced scientific inquiry will tell us if the shroud, said to be the burial cloth of Christ, is genuine . . . or an elaborate hoax. News leaks have already indicated the shroud is a very good impression of a man who had undergone torture, then death . . . in the 15th century, not 1,400 years earlier. The sadness and disappointment of these findings is evident in the enormous grief expressed by those who wanted desperately to believe.
But wait! If the shroud is a hoax, the mystery deepens, for who did originate the impression and even more, who was the tortured model?
Let’s return for a moment to the late summer of 1900, and the laboratory of French surgeon and forensic scientist Yves Delage. A free-thinker, believing only in scientific principles, Delage accepted basic details of the Holy Shroud.
Since the 15th century, the Savoy family of northern Italy had kept the cloth inside Turin Cathedral. In 1898, a photographer named Pia had been granted permission to photograph the cloth. Pia set up the camera, exposed his plates, then found an amazing photographic negative of the outline of a man. All of Europe was stunned by the implications and Delage, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, was asked to conduct further research on the cloth.
Recruiting a colleague, Dr. Paul Vignon, Delage began his investigation, which took 18 months and was completed on April 21, 1902. The image on the cloth of Turin, he said, was a detailed portrayal of a man who had undergone a highly unusual form of torture and death. The back, chest, abdomen and thighs were covered with marks that indicated the body had been badly beaten with a two-thonged flagrum or whip, of a kind used by Roman soldiers. Both shoulders had abrasions, and the one on the right had been severely bruised. The face had been badly beaten and the right eye was almost swollen shut. Bloodstains on the black hair and forehead indicated that the head had been punctured by several small, sharp instruments. Two nail wounds were just behind the heel of each hand. Most ancient paintings of the crucifixion showed nails driven through the palms of each hand, yet the weight of the body would have caused the nails to tear through the flesh of the hand, but not the wrist. A large wound between the fifth and sixth ribs showed clearly and stains on the cloth consisted of blood and mucus. Finally, the body had been sprinkled with powdered aloes.
Dr. Delage, in his presentation to the Academy of Sciences, stated, “There has been unfairly grafted onto this scientific issue a religious question which has excited men’s minds and misled right reason. If not Christ, but Sargon or Achilles or one of the Pharaohs had been involved, no one would have any objection. I consider Christ as a historical person and fail to see why people should be scandalized if there exists a material trace of his existence.”
How can anyone argue with that kind of logic? But if you look closely in the dusty archives of a certain large cathedral in France, perhaps you will find the story of Canon Ulysse Chevalier, who believed Bishop Henry of Poitiers (1612-1657) hired a poor artist who was very good with oils and . . .
-Alex Taylor’s column on history and criminology appears in The Times on Tuesdays.
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Might try “Henri” as an alternative spelling if you’re interested in further research.
Means, Motive, Opportunity … was it a crime?
