Gary Vikan - The Holy Shroud : A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death

THE HOLY SHROUD

Pegasus Books Ltd.

148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2020 by Gary Vikan

Scientific Addendum 2020 Robert Morton and Rebecca Hoppe

First Pegasus Books edition May 2020

Interior design by Maria Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Jacket design: Brock Book Design Co. / Charles Brock

Cover painting of Turin market: A. De Gregorio / De

Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images Additional imagery: Adobe Stock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-432-1

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.us

For Bob Morton and Rebecca Hoppe,

who figured it out;

Andrea Nicolotti,

who gave the Shroud the scholarship it deserves;

and

Alain and Monique Hourseau,

who bring the 14th century to life.

O n Sunday, April 19, 2015, two weeks after Easter, the Holy Shroud went on display for sixty-seven days in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. This was its fifth showing in thirty-seven years; the first, in the fall of 1978, drew 3.5 million pilgrims in just five weeks. The 2010 viewing, which lasted six weeks, attracted more than 2 million. Pope Benedict XVI was among the pilgrims in attendance on May 2, 2010, when he described what he saw as an icon that once wrapped the remains of a crucified man in full correspondence with what the Gospels tell us of Jesus. The pope could gaze at his leisure, whereas ordinary visitors, numbering close to fifty thousand a day, had to catch a brief glimpse from out in the crowd of the shrouds shadowy body image of a battered naked man, about six feet tall and weighing perhaps 175 pounds, with shoulder-length hair, a mustache and beard, and arms extended with his hands covering his genitals.

The Man of the Shroud, as he is called by those who study him, is imprinted front and back in pale sepia tones on a rectangular piece of fine herringbone-woven linen just over fourteen feet long and just under four feet wide. Close examination reveals what appear to be graphic wounds of whipping on the figures back, arms, and legs; small rivulets of what looks to be blood flow from what appear to be tiny puncture wounds on the figures forehead; similar blood flows down the arms from what appears to be a large wound in the figures right side, as well as from a similar major wound in the upper right hand, which overlays the left wrist.

For millions of believers worldwide, to gaze upon the face of the Man of the Shroud is to gaze upon the face of the Son of Godas if it were an ancient photo, captured just minutes after Jesus came down from the cross. But where believers see their Savior, I see the greatest deception in the history of Christianity. And, at the same time, I see the work of an artistic genius.

From the moment of my first encounter with the shroud in 1981, I knew it could not be the burial cloth of Jesus. Of course, many inside and outside the church shared my skepticism. But unlike the others, I could not simply accept it as a fake and move on. Instead, I set my sights on exposing once and for all the truth behind the Shroud of Turin. As it turned out, my quest, with many interruptions and multiple detours, would last a quarter of a century and take me on a circuitous journey from Turin to Jerusalem, Constantinople, Rome, Avignon, the green country of northeast Oklahoma, and the desert hills north of Santa Fethen, finally, to the hamlet of Lirey in northeast France, where, in the mid-14th century, the shrouds story began.

The amazing cast of characters I encountered along the way includes an audacious pope in Avignon who wanted to make France the center of the Catholic Church; an ill-fated French king, dubbed the Good, who was captured in battle; the most illustrious knight of the Middle Ages, who died saving a kings life; the knights aspiring widow, who likely had a hand in the Holy Shroud hoax; bands of Catholic fanatics who publicly whipped themselves nearly to death; a pair of angry bishops with a shared gift for conspiracy theories; a quirky scientist from Oklahoma with an unmeasurable IQ; and an amateur historian and irrepressible tour guide in Lirey, who in period costume takes on the persona of the shrouds first owner. The backdrop against which the shrouds story unfolds is a grim mlange of the most devastating plague in human history and a brutal war between France and England that lasted more than a century. Though I suppose it should have been obvious from the beginning: A creation as astounding and enduring as the Shroud of Turin could only have been realized in an extraordinary age and with epic players.

I began my quest nearly forty years ago with the blind optimism and puffed-up ego of a recent PhD graduate, but in truth, there were many false starts and dead ends along the way. In following my shroud journey, readers will get to know an admittedly arrogant Byzantine academic who pushed against the ivory tower of traditional art history to dig into a subject of tabloid fascination, even when it meant that his boss at Harvards prestigious Dumbarton Oaks research center banished him to the basement for his first shroud television interview. More than once my own hubris got in the way, and it was dumb luck alone that opened an unanticipated path forward. What I could not have guessed when I started, though, was that I would eventually discover a basic, counterintuitive truth about the shroud; namely, that most people dont want its mysteries to be solved. Mysteries, after all, are the stuff of television shows and novels.

I naively believed that my arguments of the early eighties, which I based on the history of relics, the evolving iconography of Christs Passion story, and the documents relating to the shrouds first appearance in the historical recordcoupled with its carbon-14 dating in 1988 to between the years 1260 and 1390would put the authenticity question to rest. But they did not. Successive public displays of the shroud in 1998, 2000, 2010, and 2015 each drew millions of pilgrims and the endorsement of the reigning pope.

After a quarter of a century of struggling to solve the mystery of the shroud, I knew one thing for certain: My quest would never be over until I figured out how the image of the Man of the Shroud was created. But how could I, when dozens of very smart scientists had struggled with that question over decades and had failed to come up with the answer? In 2006, when I had all but given up hope, I met, by chance, an extraordinary Philips Petroleum material chemist from rural Bartlesville, Oklahoma, who, with his daughter, made the breakthrough I desperately needed. They discovered that the Man of the Shroud was made by a simple but messy printing technique using everyday materials well known to scribes and artistsand with a living human subject. After that stunning discovery, I moved on into territory rarely explored in books about the Shroud of Turin: When was the shroud made, why, and by whom? And who was behind the hoax?