Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries Brian Haughton (an ebook reader .txt) 📖

In 1357 the shroud was exhibited by Jeanne de Vergy, widow of the French Knight Geoffroi of Charney, in a church in the small village of Lirey, northeastern France. In 1453 the cloth came into the possession of Duke Louis of Savoy, who kept it in his chapel in Chambery, the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, in the modern Rhone-Alpes region of France. In 1532 the shroud was damaged in a fire in the chapel where it was stored. (It may also have suffered water damage at this time from attempts to extinguish the fire.) Poor Clare nuns attempted to repair this damage by weaving patches into the cloth. In 1578 the shroud arrived in its present home in Turin, and in 1983 it became the property of the Holy See (Vatican City), after Umberto II, the last of the House of Savoy dynasty, left it to the pope in his will. The shroud remains today in Turin, in the round chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist.

In 1988, among much publicity, the Holy See allowed the relic to be independently radiocarbon dated by three separate research institutions: Oxford University, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The laboratories all used parts from the same sample, a piece of cloth just 1 centimeter by 5.7 centimeter, taken from the corner of the shroud, for testing. The conclusion from the tests was that the object dated from sometime between A.D. 1260 and 1390, the era when the shroud was first exhibited, and was therefore not the burial cloth of Christ, but a medieval forgery.

Another piece of evidence which appears to support the theory that the shroud is a medieval forgery comes in the form of a letter from Bishop Pierre D'Arcis of Troyes, in northeastern France. This letter, written in 1389 (ostensibly to the Avignon pope, Clement VII, in southern France) claims that an investigation into the nature of the cloth by his predecessor Bishop Henri of Poitiers had exposed the artist responsible for painting it, and he requested that the relic be removed from display. The letter goes on to say that the cloth could not be the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ because "the holy Gospel made no mention of any such imprint; while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely that the holy evangelist would have omitted to record it, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time." However, this document appears to be a rough draft of a letter that was never actually sent, and some researchers have questioned the motives of Bishop D'Arcis, suggesting that he coveted the cloth for his own gain.

But if the cloth was a fake, who was responsible and how had they carried it out? In their book The Second Messiah, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas claim that the face on the shroud belongs to Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Templar. De Molay was arrested on the orders of Philip IV of France for heresy and burnt at the stake on an island in the river Seine in Paris on March 18, 1314. According to the authors, de Molay was tortured and his arms and legs nailed to a wooden door to parody the sufferings of Jesus. After this, they hypothesize, de Molay was laid on a length of cloth on a soft bed and part of the cloth was draped over his head covering the front of his body. Apparently he was then left, perhaps partly comatised, for

a period of 30 hours, during which time the sweat and blood from de Molay's body imprinted an image on the sheet.

Further evidence, which apparently backs up the de Molay theory, is that the Grand Master was executed together with Geoffroy de Charney, the Templar preceptor of Normandy, whose grandson was Geoffroi de Charney. After the death of Geoffroi de Charney in 1356 at the battle of Poitiers, his widow, Jeanne de Vergy, allegedly discovered the shroud in his possession and put it on display at the church in Lirey. The Knight-Lomas theory relies heavily on the reliability of the radiocarbon dates from the shroud obtained in 1988, and the hypotheses of the authors about the torture methods used on de Molay. Nevertheless, the image on the shroud does bear a resemblance to depictions of de Molay in medieval woodcuts, and to a 19th century color lithograph of him by Chevauchet.

Another candidate for the face on the shroud is the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince have proposed that the shroud actually represents a self-portrait of da Vinci, and is possibly the first example of photography in history. The photograph theory, which has also been proposed by other researchers, suggests that the image on the cloth was constructed with the aid of camera obscura (a dark room or box with a hole in one side, through which an inverted image of the scene outside is projected onto an opposite wall, screen, or mirror, and then traced by the artists to make the image). The main objections to this theory is that da Vinci was born almost a century after the appearance of the cloth in historical records, and also that he lived outside the time frame of A.D. 1260 to 1390 given by the radiocarbon dates.

However, recent research has thrown considerable doubt on the validity of the 1988 radiocarbon dates. A paper by chemist Raymond N. Rogers (published in the January 2005 issue of the scientific journal Thermochimica Acta) indicates that the original sample of cloth used for radiocarbon dating was invalid. Chemical testing found that the radiocarbon sample had completely different chemical properties than the rest of the shroud, persuading many researchers to believe that the sample used for radiocarbon dating must have been cut from one of