Was this it? Did the documented history of the Sudarium and its similarity to the Shroud validate the authenticity of the Shroud? Were they both silent witnesses to the same truth? Were both cloths sacred? Did they contain nothing less than the DNA of God? “According to the carbon-dating tests, the Shroud can’t be the burial cloth of Jesus.”
I had called Paul Roberts again and asked him about the carbon-dating tests performed on the Shroud—something I had been putting off.
“Harold Greeley, the prime inventor of the accelerator mass spectrometry, the method used to test the Shroud, said that the chances of the Shroud being authentic were one in a thousand-trillion.”
So that was it. All my other findings were moot. If the linen of the Shroud didn’t date back to the time of Christ, it didn’t matter how the image of the body was formed on it or that it contained real blood.
“Why didn’t you mention this the first time we spoke?”
“You didn’t ask,” he said. “We were just getting started when we ran out of time. And I figured you could read it for yourself.”
“Where did they date it?” I asked.
The door to my office was closed, but I could see a steady stream of blue through the thin panel of glass as the inmates filed past it on their way to the sanctuary for choir practice. The inmates who formed the choir were some of the most religious in the institution. They were also some of the most difficult and obnoxious.
“Between 1260 and 1390,” he said. “The Middle-Ages, which is about when it first appeared in the historic record.”
He hesitated, but I didn’t say anything. I was too disappointed—and not just for Mom, but for me, too. I had become mesmerized by the man of the Shroud. I wanted the image to be Jesus. I wanted it to be a sign of the resurrection. I wanted it to be a point of contact between heaven and earth, between my heavenly mother and my earthly one.
“Do you understand what carbon-dating is?” he asked, his voice cold and scientific.
“No,” I said.
“You okay?” he said. “You sound disappointed.”
Through the wall behind me, I could hear the sounds of choir practice beginning, but it wasn’t music or singing. It was the sound of inmates arguing over who was going to sing which song and who was going to play which instrument. Half the rehearsal time would be spent that way.
“I am,” I said. “I wanted it to be the real thing.”
“The test is based on the principle that all living things, in their taking in of carbon dioxide, also take in a tiny amount of radioactive isotope carbon-fourteen, which is continually being formed in the upper atmosphere. It comes down in the air we breathe, via photosynthesis, and the food chain. It’s an integral part of all plants and animals.”
“So it’s in the fabric of the Shroud?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s in every living thing. In all living organisms, non-radioactive carbon is maintained at about one part in a trillion. But when a living thing dies, carbon-fourteen begins to decay, reducing its proportion to the stable carbon-twelve in whatever may be left. So, the test compares the proportion of carbon-fourteen to carbon-twelve. And it can be done in anything: bone, wool, leather, wood, or linen. All along, there’ve been a lot of people that thought the Shroud was a fake, and they challenged it to a carbon-fourteen test. It was done by three different laboratories: one in Zurich, one in Tucson, and one in Oxford.”
“And they all got the same result?” I asked.
An inmate knocked on my door and I turned to see who it was. When I did, he could see that I was on the phone, but didn’t offer to leave.
“Yeah,” he said. “On October 13, 1988, they all announced their results, dating the origin of the shroud somewhere between 1260 and 1390.”
“Which means it couldn’t possibly have been around to wrap the dead body of Jesus,” I said.
“On the basis of this test, no,” he said. “In fact, the head of the Oxford laboratory said on public television that anybody who doesn’t believe the results they obtained ought to belong to the ‘flat earth society.’”
I sighed heavily.
“What is it?” he said. “Were you thinking it was real?”
“I was hoping.”
I told him about Mom and her hope to be healed through the Shroud, but only if it were authentic. “This was the last thing I could do for her,” I said. “This and take her to see it.”
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. If I’d’ve known I could have—”
“What?” I asked. “What could you have done?”
“I could’ve lied to you,” he said. “Which is what you should do to your mom.”
Mom looked worse than she had the last time I had seen her—a lot worse, and it had only been a couple of days. When I walked into her room, she made no attempt to sit up, merely extended her small hand over to me. I took it. And held it. And told her how much I loved her before bowing my head and praying with her.
When I had finished, she looked up at me with tears in her eyes. “How are you?” she asked. “Tell me what’s going on in your life.”
I did. Well, I told her the good parts. As I talked, I could tell she felt a part. Perhaps it was the first time since she and Dad had divorced that she had.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“You know. Good days and bad,” she said, between shallow gasps of breath. “This is one of the bad.”
“I’m sorry. What can I do?”
I held my breath as I waited for her to ask me about the Shroud.
“Just sit here with me,” she said. “You can tell me some more about yourself or what’s going on in your life, or you could just sit here and hold my hand for a while.”
Relief washed over me.
“Chaplain Jordan?” the voice in the receiver asked.
“Yes.”
I was back in my office at the prison.
“This is Jamie Sandford. I’m a colleague of Paul Roberts.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, he asked me to call you,” she said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because,” she said. “For some very good reasons, I believe the carbon-dating tests done on the Shroud of Turin were wrong and that the burial cloth is actually the one that covered Christ.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and there’s a lot of people like me,” she said. “We don’t believe that the earth is flat or that science is evil or that there was a conspiracy behind the dates reported. Just people who interpret the mountain of other evidence on the Shroud as being at least as valid as carbon-dating, and who don’t simply write it off on the basis of the one test alone.”
“I’m listening,” I said. “And I could really use some good news this morning.”
“Paul said you probably could.”
“He’s got a heart after all,” I said.
“I’m not as convinced of that,” she said. “Anyway, did you know that none of the STURP scientists went into their tests of the Shroud believing anything but that it would be proved to be a forgery?”
“No.”
“It’s true,” she said. “They were scientists looking for how the image of the Shroud was formed. And what they discovered made religious men out of most of them. They could not prove that the Shroud was a forgery. But they could prove by an overwhelming degree of probability that the shroud was not a forgery. They could not, nor can anyone since find any chemical or physical or biological process—in any combination—to account for the properties of the image.”
I found myself nodding in agreement, though she couldn’t see me.
“And tests that are admissible in a court of law have proven that blood is present on the cloth,” she continued.
I didn’t say anything.
On the corner of my desk was a picture of Jesus behind bars that someone had sent me, and though I liked the concept, the execution was all wrong. For one thing, it was in a gold frame. For ano
ther, the bars looked superimposed and fake, which they were. But most of all, the Jesus of the picture was a bland, pale European, Jesus, not the radical Jewish rabbi who came to set the captives free.
“Well, don’t you understand what that means?” she asked.
I shrugged, though she couldn’t see me. “I guess not,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“If the carbon-dating tests are accurate, and that’s a very big if, then what we have is the miraculous, inexplicable image of a fourteenth-century crucifixion victim on a burial cloth.”
She paused, but I didn’t say anything, suspense hanging on the line between us. I knew she had more to say.
Since count had cleared, inmates had been continually trickling into the chapel. Now it was noisy and busy, and I could hear the beginnings of theological arguments already.
“Crucifixions weren’t done in the fourteenth-century,” she said. “Not by anyone. So, if you believe that the Shroud is a fourteenth-century piece of linen, then you believe that someone was crucified in the exact same manner as in first-century Rome. And that someone murdered a man just to produce a forgery of the burial cloth of Jesus. And that still doesn’t explain how the image got onto the cloth.”
I realized how impetuous I had been to write off the whole investigation based on one piece of evidence.
“Now who’s a member of the flat-earth society?”
“Not you,” I said.
Through my window, past the rose beds, two overweight correctional officers with expressionless faces stood at the back of the security building smoking. Their light brown uniform shirts, expanding to hold back the landslide of fat hanging over their belts, resembled maternity clothing. Neither of them spoke, just stared down the compound disinterestedly.
“And what about the C-14 test itself?” she said. “Each lab was supposed to get three samples without knowing which one was the actual Shroud, but they didn’t. And all the samples were taken from the same place—of course the labs came up with the same date, they did the same test on the same sample. And the sample wasn’t taken from a very good place. It came from the edge. Remember, how many people have handled that edge over the years. The public displays use to involve people grabbing it by that edge and holding it for long periods of time.”
She took in a deep breath and began again.
“And remember, the Shroud has been repaired. It has a backing and threads in it that are from the Middle Ages. In fact, one thread was sent to a different lab for a test and it dated between 200 and 1,000 A.D. And what about the fire of 1532? It got so hot the silver of the box the shroud was in melted on it.”
I thought about the burn marks I had seen, extending the length of the shroud.
“So silver, fire, and water all touched the Shroud. You don’t think that changed its chemistry? Of course it did. And what about the build-up on the linen itself? Think about two-thousand years of dust and debris and organisms.”
“Quit with all the ambiguity,” I said.
She laughed, but only for a second and was back at it. “Carbon-dating is not an exact science. Do you know how many mistakes have been made using it? Some of them have dated things off by thousands of years. And get this. In their own reports, the labs that did the tests have to concede that all the statistical manipulation in the world can’t get rid of the fact that the range of the dates is much too large to be accounted for by the expected errors built into radiocarbon dating. In other words, there’s a ninety-five percent chance that the discrepancy in the raw dates means that there were variables ratios in the samples themselves. In 1988 the whole world carried the story about the carbon-dating of the shroud, but in 1990, when the Vatican publicly stated that the results of the tests were strange, nobody reported it.” She paused for a moment, then said, “So, whatta you think?”
“That I broke one of my cardinal rules of investigating,” I said. “I rushed to judgment without considering all the facts.”
“Bottom line, the carbon-dating tests were contaminated,” she said. “And they are only a small part of a very large mountain of evidence, all the rest of which points to the Shroud being the actual burial cloth of Jesus.”
When we had finished talking, Jamie Sandford e-mailed some additional information on the Shroud to me, and although I printed it, I read the entire article on my monitor, eyes transfixed to the screen.
Though the most venerated relic of Christianity was declared a fake in 1988 by three independent scientific institutions, new science suggests the Shroud deserves another look.
Willis Gray, a retired physical chemist, proposes that the samples used to date the Shroud in 1988 were flawed and the experiment should be repeated. His assertion is based on a recent chemical analysis of the shroud and previous observations made during the 1978 STURP examination, of which he was a part.
In 1988, the Vatican allowed small stamp-size pieces to be cut from one corner of the shroud and distributed to three laboratories—at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Oxford University in England, and the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich—for carbon-dating. The results, published in 1989 in the journal Nature, revealed that the fabric was produced between 1260 and 1390.
Recently, Gray received a sample of the shroud from a colleague who had collaborated on STURP. The sample was taken from the same strip of cloth distributed for carbon-dating in 1988. Through chemical and microscopic analysis, he discovered a madder dye and mordant and gum mixture—evidence the cloth had been repaired at some point. Even more interesting is the fact that these ruby-colored madder dye-mordant mixtures did not even reach France or England until the 16th century.
Gray also uncovered evidence that the patch he was examining had not only been dyed but also been repaired and re-woven. He posits that the dye and repair job were probably done in the Near East during the Middle Ages, which coincides with the carbon-dating results.
“The date published in 1989 of 1260 to 1390 was accurate for the sample supplied,” Gray said. “However, there is no question that the radiocarbon sampling area has a completely different chemical composition than the main part of the shroud. The published date for the sample was not the time at which the cloth was produced, but the time it was repaired.”
This corroborates earlier findings of STURP scientists who, using ultraviolet fluorescence, also revealed that the sampled corner was unlike any other region of the Shroud and had been excessively handled over the years.
“You reached a conclusion yet?” Milton Warner asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve barely begun,” I said, “and there’s so much evidence on both sides.”
The clear blue of his eyes was penetrative as he held my gaze.
“Aren’t you almost out of time?”
I nodded.
“What’re you going to tell your mother?”
“I really don’t know,” I said.
He nodded slowly, his lined face softening some.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Better, actually,” I said. “And I think it has something to do with the Shroud.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure exactly,” I said. “It’s not that I’m convinced that it’s authentic—hell, I’m not even sure what I believe about the resurrection, let alone that this could be a snapshot of it—but it’s such a haunting image, such a profound mystery … I just find it … inspiriting somehow.”
He nodded. He rarely showed a reaction to anything I said, but he seemed pleased.
“Most people I deal with are frightened by the unknown or inexplicable,” he said. “They want answers—”
“There aren’t any.”
“But you … You seem to be inspired by the mystery of it all.”
I nodded, and thought about what he had said.
We were quiet a moment.
“Do you think the Shroud has the power to heal?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s having an effect on me,” I said. “I guess I think an
ything can become an agent of healing. Probably has far more to do with the person being healed than the object.”
“Do you think if you tell your mom you’re convinced that the Shroud is genuine and take her to see it, she’ll be healed?”
“I just don’t know,” I said. “I can’t say for sure that she wouldn’t.”
“Then why not lie to her?”
I thought about it. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ve certainly lied for less noble causes, but I just don’t think I can.”
He nodded, but there was nothing in it except acknowledgment.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
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