Vertically along the left cheekbone two more words, also in parallel, could be read, the one outside in larger characters, the other inside in smaller but in fine relief: the first showed the group in Greek characters: S, separated by some blank space as if it were the ending of a word, then a sequence of three signs of which KI seemed quite clear while the last is dubious and might make one think of an A. The smaller writing still in Greek, said PEZ, and had the singular quality of appearing clear over the negative while the others appeared dark, so it must have been made with a different ink or material. As for the isolated clusters, Marion and Courage picked out, above the head, nearly at the centre but shifted somewhat to the right side, a sequence which seemed to them to be formed by the characters IC (which in Latin stand for i and k, in Greek i and s); near NAZAPENOS they could see the cluster ARE a second time, and the two items of writing are one above the other, as if the same text had been attached twice to the linen at different times, leaving two distinct marks at almost the same point. Further outside and with the same orientation, they also read a cluster of four signs, of which the first three (in Greek characters, A.A) are clear, while the last (which seems to the French scientists like an U or maybe a rounded M) was covered by some sort of stain; finally, still near the word NAZAPENOS, but further below and orientated upside-down, the signs SB appeared.
At this point we have to attempt to interpret. Marion and Courage had submitted the writings to some experts in disciplines to do with ancient and mediaeval history, a real roster of famous names working at the Sorbonne and other prestigious institutions.[34] The two parallel writings, HSOY(S) and NAZAPENOS hardly seemed to give great problems: they were nothing tougher than the Greek for the name Jesus of Nazareth, with a small variant as compared to the standard Gospel spelling, that is the vowel Eta (that is H) instead of Epsilon (that is E), and thus ended up being NAZAPHNOS. The confusion between these two vowels was a very common feature of the Roman-age Middle East, and is so widespread in written Greek of that period that epigraphic catalogues hardly even mention it among the peculiarities. The sequence INNECE offers no difficulties either, given that the context involves an executed man; while the identification of the remaining clusters (several fragments of words) seemed tougher and less obvious. As for the purpose these words were meant to serve, on the other hand, the two physicists received no agreed opinion, for theories were many. One of the most interesting suggests that these words were written on a reliquary or on some kind of container: they were a kind of caption, whose traces were inadvertently transferred on to the sheet. Most recently, another signals analysis expert, the Frenchman Thierry Castex, has applied the same method perfected by Marion and Courage, and managed to identify new traces of Hebraic characters in the area under the chin, which he was kind enough to send to me for a second opinion; this is the first time that, with his permission, they are mentioned in print. Among the visible marks it seems possible to distinguish the characters mem, sade and aleph, corresponding to the root ms, which is found in both Hebraic and Aramaic and means “to find”; there is also a second sequence of two marks that might be nw or ky, given their similar shapes and the objective difficulties in reading. The whole might then be nw ms’ (“we have found”) or else ky ms’, “because found”.[35] It seems rather an interesting question: those words, torn off from a longer sentence, correspond exactly to a passage of the Gospel according to Luke to do with the trial of Jesus. To be precise, it is Luke 23.2, when the High Priest and the Sanhedrin deliver Jesus to Pontius Pilate, with a precise charge: “We found this man subverting the nation, forbidding to pay tax to Caesar, and saying that he himself was Christ, a king”. Besides, a 1989 study by Roberto Messina and Carlo Orecchia had pointed out more Hebrew characters in the area of the forehead.[36]
Byzantine tradition has no trace of these strange scattered writings on the Shroud, and to the question whether they might be the Templars’ work, the answer must be, no: only the small area with the inscribed prayer Most holy Jesus, have mercy on us, corresponds to their time. The experts consulted by Marion and Courage agree that nearly all the Greek and Latin passages were carried out long before the foundation of the Order of the Temple, indeed that they seem to go back to the early Christian age, to about the first to third centuries AD. These were devotional writings made by some believer to clarify who was that man whose image was left, or maybe scrolls with some legal value – that is, documents to be kept – as a hypothesis of Grégoire Kaplan’s once suggested.[37]
The trace of Hebraic writing leads us to think that they were carried out in Syria-Palestine (or Qumran?) at a very early age. Everything rejects the suggestion that they might have anything to do with the Templars. It may be that the Temple brothers noticed their existence, as will be said below: and if so, that will have encouraged them to keep the Shroud strictly to themselves.
The trail of the “Jewish question”
In the view of many experts who have long studied the Shroud of Turin, the image is growing less vivid as time goes on, on account of the natural degradation due to the effects of light, and in past centuries it could be seen more neatly; in effect, some ancient representations of the Shroud show the imprint in a much more intense tint of sepia, although we cannot exclude that the painters may have reinforced their colour to make the idea stand out better. When starting their research, André Marion’s team of physicists chose to work from certain negatives shot by Enrie in 1931, both because the analogue photographs of the time carried an enormous amount of information, and because there is a suspicion that the image may then have been noticeably more intense than today, and so much richer in detail. The hints of writing may be recognised just because of the contrast of tone against tone, because they are like so many ivory-coloured stains in the shape of letters against the light sepia background of the image. In order to see them today we have to make use of photographic negatives, which play up contrasts greatly; but if the scientists are right and the image was once darker, maybe some writings could be seen with the naked eye, too. This is not a matter of small importance, if we take into account the social history of the Middle Ages; the words in Greek and Latin would not have been an issue, but the same absolutely could not be said for the Jewish characters.
Relationships between the Jews and political power in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages were variable. After the edict of Milan of 313 AD, Constantine vigorously promoted the growth of Christianity, and certainly did not favour the Jews, but decades later, when the whole empire was essentially Christian, Theodosius I (379-395 AD) issued a series of decrees for the protection of this minority, which was by then no threat to his religious policy. In the West, the Popes often protected them: especially Gregory I the Great, who designed a clear and permanent strategy to defend them from their enemies, by which must be meant essentially the local authorities and the local populace. We have no less than six letters from this Pontiff condemning acts of violence and chicanery against Jews, and we know that the communities scattered in the countries of the Christian world would often turn to the Rabbi who led the Roman community to intercede with the Pope, so that the latter could help as a political mediator with kings and emperors. The most famous of these letters, titled Sicut Iudaeis, was later repeated in following centuries by many Popes: its basic concept had already been stated by Emperor Theodosius I, and yet it was extremely difficult for it to enter the mind of the commons: “There is no law to forbid the Jewish religion”.[38]
From the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages, Europe was shaken by frequent bouts of anti-Semitism, acts of hard-to-imagine violence arising spontaneously among the public because of a widespread hostility born of intolerance, which rulers, be they popes, emperors or kings, always tried to uproot, for it was a threat to public order. It was however in the lower Middle Ages that the question took alarming proportions. tarting from about 1150, and even more in the 1200s and 1300s, waves of anti-Semitism followed each ot
her, causing slaughter. A spectre rose from the dim past, the spectre of a very ancient popular tale: Jews kept a Christian boy hostage for one whole year, fed him abundantly to fatten him up; then, when he was properly plump and ready, had killed him and eaten his flesh during one of their sacrilegious ritual banquets. This macabre fable was already doing the rounds of the Roman empire in the days of the pagan philosopher Celsus (II century AD) it was used indifferently against Christians and Jews by the pagan populace, who felt disgust at oriental usages of theirs such as circumcision. When it came back into fashion a thousand years later, it found particularly fertile ground, and spread with devastating effect. In 1144, the body of a boy murdered by an unknown person was found in Norwich; the local Jews were immediately blamed, and wiped out. Some 20 years later, a rumour swept Gloucester that a youth called Harald had been first barbarously tortured and then even crucified by Jews. From then on, cases multiply as in the beginning of an epidemic: in Bury St. Edmunds, Bristol and Winchester in the last years of the 12th century, then in the first of the 1200s in Lincoln, Stanford and London. From England, the legend crossed over to France, spreading its vicious spell everywhere: it was as though any tragic and not very clear event had necessarily to be the fault of the Jews. As early as 1171 the evidence of one of these “ritual murders” had been thought to have been found in Pontoise. The victim was buried in Paris, in the church of the Holy Innocents; rumours spread that the young man had performed many miracles, and many people took to making pilgrimages to the tomb of this boy, seen as a martyr of “Jewish perfidy”. Even a special rite was written to honour him. In the same year, Thibaut, Count of Blois, had no less than 32 Jews burned at the stake on account of this legend, and the local community; while on the other hand his neighbour Thibaut IV, Count of Flanders, like King Louis VII of France and Emperor Henry VI, all proclaimed officially that the tale had no real basis, and tried to uproot it – alas, with no success. During the 1200s, the dark legend spread the length and breadth of Europe, and was easily believed by a credulous populace. Its hold on the imagination was so strong that it developed a new and hideous feature: Jews needed human blood to make the unleavened bread they ate during their Paschal rites.[39]
In 1235 there was a notorious case in the German city of Fulda. The Jews were charged with the murder of a miller’s five sons, and were subjected to torture so horrendous as to force them to “confess” that the unleavened Easter bread was really made by using human blood. The result was another mass murder. The episode resonated so widely that it reached, and concerned, the Emperor Frederick II. A man of immense learning, and amazingly broad-minded for his age, Frederick was very familiar with Oriental customs. Having been brought up in Sicily, where Muslims still lived, he had spent time incognito as a child with a Muslim family who took him and hid him to protect him from his enemies. The Emperor was very skeptical on the matter; since however the legend had such a firm hold of the mind of the commons, he decided to nominate an expert commission made up of Jews who had converted to Catholicism to make an accurate and in-depth study of the problem. Obviously the experts proved that the Old Testament forbids absolutely the eating of blood, even that of animals killed for food. Frederick II thought he would solve the problem for good by associating the persecutors of Jews with those guilty of lese-majesty, the most serious and most terribly punished of all crimes. And yet in the same year the communities of Lauda and Pforzheim had carried out more slaughters; Pope Gregory IX had to issue a new version of the Bull Sicut Iudaeis in which he ordered the Bishops of France to severely punish Christians who made themselves guilty of violence against the Jewish population or their property.
Just in those years, one of the most violent persecutions burst out, and it is thought that as many as 2,500-3,000 Jewish persons were murdered by the crusaders who were taking part in the Sixth Crusade, including women and children, while hundreds more were baptized by force. This may have been the moment of highest tension: exacerbated by the spread of heresy and religious contestation, the Church started to condemn traditional Jewish books such as the Talmud, which was not properly a sacred text but contained some disrespectful passages about Jesus which had come from popular literature. Hate of Jews fed on the notion that Jews deliberately profaned the Eucharist. The rumour had spread that Christian wet-nurses hired by rich Jews to feed their babies, who took Communion on Easter day, were forced to throw their milk into the toilet for three days afterward to stop the Eucharist contaminating the little new-born Jew through the milk. There were more than 50 accounts of profaning Jews who had taken consecrated hosts by deceit and had suddenly seen them turn to flesh and blood in their hands.
By the mid-twelve hundreds, Pope Innocent IV allowed himself to be conditioned enough by these notions to approve the decree of expulsion passed by the archbishop of Vienne against the Jews in his diocese; this was in fact a very rare case, since the Popes kept publishing Bulls in defence of the Jewish population, which the public regularly ignored, because the prejudice was so rooted in the popular mind as to be invincible. By the end of the century, expulsions became mass phenomena: in 1290 it was the turn of the Jews of England, then in 1306 those of France, by order of Philip the Fair. Between 1298 and 1337, Germany saw a simply monstrous wave of anti-Jewish mania: 150 local communities were destroyed because of this chit-chat about desecrated Hosts, and historians calculate that these horrors resulted in the murder of between 20,000 and 100,000 Jews.[40]
This was the climate in which the Templars, in all likelihood, gained possession of the Shroud. Most Templar monks were rather on the ignorant side, but some of the leaders were well educated. Traces of writing surely could not be noticed by pilgrims rushing by in front of the relic and kept at a safe distance, but maybe a careful, precise and prolonged exam could still perceive them. If any of the brothers had realised that the sheet carried Jewish writing, as is not at all impossible, we would have an even better reason why the Temple leadership chose to keep utterly silent about the relic. And the order simply could not afford to lose it; for certain reasons, it regarded it as a necessary bulwark against an evil that was affecting the whole of Christianity. An evil with most ancient roots, that had been finding a few victims even in the Temple.
Keep the path of Peter
In 1143 abbot Erwin of Steinfeld informed St. Bernard of Clairvaux that members of a peculiar heretical sect had been arrested in the neighbourhood of Cologne: they declared themselves member of an ancient Church which had remained hidden since the days of the martyrs, which had survived in Greece and other countries under the leadership of some “Apostles” and bishops. From the second half of the 12th century to the end of the 13th, Christian society was shaken to its foundations by the unprecedented proliferation of a movement of religious dissent which not only challenged a number of fundamental dogmas and the Church’s tradition, but associated theological protest with forceful accusations against the corruption of the clergy and vigorous political demands.[41] In this shaky climate, the relics and objects to do with Jesus’ earthly life were to the Church something like a saving anchor, something that could help Christians not to drift off after the latest faddish doctrine. It was a matter of staying within the beaten track, the track that had once been opened by the Apostles.
Shortly before his death, the old fisherman from Bethsaida in Galilee, Shimon a.k.a. Peter, had dictated to his disciples a letter which they then composed and dispatched to every Christian community that could be reached, like an actual encyclical. The letter expressed certain serious concerns of his and recommended that Christians should stay away from some recent theories that gave a merely intellectual and spiritual portrayal of Jesus, as if here were no more than the symbol of the complete renewal of mankind at large. Modern historians call this religious current docetism, from Greek dokèin (“to seem”), because their teaching was based on the idea that Jesus had no more than the external appearance of a man. Their fault was placing too much emphasis on pe
rsonal interpretation. Peter was not widely read, but those novels and sophisticated interpretations that were becoming so fashionable in Christian thought, no, he did not like them at all. For a start, they had their root not in Jewish religion but in neo-Platonic philosophy, that is the thought of pagan Greeks; what is more, they left the impression of extolling the spiritual face of Jesus to try to hide away the human face, as though being human were a weakness, something to be ashamed of. Above all, they were myths. Having followed him for three years, having seen in person the trial, the death, and the events that had followed, he kept a very concrete memory of him, and would not let the new generations imagine him as something like an abstract concept. His reaction against these new directions, so far as we know, was immediate and unreserved condemnation: Christianity meant to recognise that the Messiah of Israel was one and the same with the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, and since the Docetists refused the human being Jesus, in Peter’s eyes, they were simply not Christian. f we want to place a modern label on it, the religion of Peter, like that of Paul and John, was a historical religion, in the sense that everything was born from certain fundamental facts precisely located in time and space. There had been one strong man who had done certain things, and the soles of his feet had left their prints on the earth of Jerusalem.
The Templars and the Shroud of Christ Page 18