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

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.

INTRODUCTION

On 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 shroud’s 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 figure’s back, arms, and legs; small rivulets of what looks to be blood flow from what appear to be tiny puncture wounds on the figure’s forehead; similar blood flows down the arms from what appears to be a large wound in the figure’s 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 God—as 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 Fe—then, finally, to the hamlet of Lirey in northeast France, where, in the mid-14th century, the shroud’s 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 king’s life; the knight’s 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 shroud’s first owner. The backdrop against which the shroud’s story unfolds is a grim mélange 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 Harvard’s 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 don’t 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 Christ’s Passion story, and the documents relating to the shroud’s first appearance in the historical record—coupled with its carbon-14 dating in 1988 to between the years 1260 and 1390—would 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 artists—and 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?

My perspective is that of an art historian, and my focus is specifically on the four decades in the second half of the 14th century (1350–1390) when the Holy Shroud was made and then created its initial public stir. My story is a personal journey of discovery as I have played the Holy Shroud detective. And the guiding spirit on my journey has been William of Occam, who died in Munich in 1347, just a few years before the shroud was first shown to pilgrims. The story of the Shroud of Turin, for those who take its authenticity for granted and absorb each new bit of shroud evidence with their deep-seated confirmation bias, is the story of piling complexity upon complexity, with every seeming dead end in the chain of logic calling for yet another contrived explanatory wrinkle. Inspired by William of Occam and his razor—his law of succinctness—I have taken the opposite path: The arms of the Man of the Shroud are impossibly long not because Jesus had Marfan syndrome, but because the artist manipulated the figure’s arms in the printing process to cover his genitals.

The shroud’s next public showing is scheduled for 2025, but if this book finds its audience, that display may never take place. The Catholic Church may finally acknowledge publicly what it has known privately for more than six hundred years: that the Shroud of Turin is certainly not the burial cloth of Jesus. And more than that, the church may at last do what a crusading 14th-century bishop begged it to do in order to halt the idolatry it inspires: renounce the shroud as one enormous hoax, and tuck it away forever.

TIMELINE

1

Hooked

I met the Shroud of Turin for the first time on the side of the road in Washington, DC, on a sunny morning in March 1981. I was thirty-five years old and the father of two girls; my wife, Elana, was teaching French in a private school, and we lived in a row house on the north edge of the city. In those days, I loved to walk to work, and that meant four miles, from just south of the Maryland line to Dumbarton Oaks, at the top of Georgetown. I had earned my PhD in art history from Princeton a few years earlier and now had my first paying job, with the lofty title Associate for Byzantine Art Studies. I was a scholar, pure and simple, at that most luxurious enclave for Byzantine studies, Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

I took different routes south and west toward DO (as we insiders call Dumbarton Oaks), always on the lookout for the street that time forgot. Mostly, this meant meandering through the elegant neighborhoods north of the National Cathedral, with the goal of passing yet again—and almost always alone—through its lovely boxwood garden. This morning, though, perhaps because I was starting late, I chose the direct and prosaic Wisconsin Avenue route. I wasn’t long into my journey when I spied it there on the ground, partially stuck in the remnants of a snowbank: a crumpled copy of that week’s National Enquirer that happened to fall open to a page with an advertisement featuring a picture of the Shroud of Turin. I was immediately intrigued.

The idea was simple: You send $12 to an address in Richmond, Virginia, and someone there will send you a two-and-a-half-foot linen replica of the Shroud of Turin. This, the Holy Shroud Miracle Cloth, will, in the words of the ad, bring you everything in life you desire and so rightly deserve. Drape the Holy Shroud Miracle Cloth over your bed or fold it up in your wallet and the same miraculous forces that brought about the creation of the Shroud (will) go to work for you, bringing you remarkable cures, good luck, love, money, robust health and happiness, not to mention success at bingo, the races, card games, the casino and other games of chance. All of this is guaranteed or your money back, even though there is no claim that the Holy Shroud Miracle Cloth had ever touched the real shroud, had ever been to Turin, or, for that matter, had been blessed by anyone with church credentials.

Of course, I immediately ordered my own Holy Shroud Miracle Cloth and, a few years later, while in Richmond to see an exhibition of icons, I went to the address listed in that National Enquirer advertisement. I wanted to discover the secret to the Miracle Cloth’s potency. What I found was a simple, green one-story frame house, the sort transported on flatbed trucks; it was tucked in behind a car dealership on the north edge of town. A small cardboard plaque set in a slot on its front door identified it as The House of Power. Unfortunately, I arrived too early for a visit with the staff; office hours were 2:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

The initial reason that National Enquirer ad caught my attention was that I was then finishing research for a small exhibition called Sacred Souvenirs: Byzantine Pilgrimage Art that would open at DO the following year. I recognized immediately that the Holy Shroud fit perfectly into what I already had learned from my study of Christian relics. So I assumed that it could not be genuine, any more than the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Nails, or the Holy Foreskin are genuine.

I’ve always been interested in relics. Maybe that’s because I was brought up as a Lutheran in a tiny town in Minnesota. We had neither saints nor relics in our version of Christianity at Hope Lutheran Church. And like nearly everyone else in this mostly Norwegian American community of 1,500, I was suspicious of the few local Catholics, who, I was told, worshipped painted statues. Our Hope Lutheran Jesus in stained glass had light brown hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, just like my father. And he was still bloodless, in the hours just before his arrest, earnestly praying against a large rock in the Garden of Gethsemane.

I encountered Christian relics for the first time at age twenty. It was the summer after my graduation with an art history degree from Carleton College, and three of us rented a blue Citroen 2CV, the anemic French version of the German Beetle, for a grand European road trip. We drove twelve thousand miles, from Paris to Naples to Berlin to Amsterdam, camping all the way and drinking vast quantities of beer. This was my first trip to Europe, and suddenly, my art history books had come to life. I was delirious.

We mapped our path south and west through France, along the medieval pilgrimage route that led from Paris to Poitiers to Toulouse and, ultimately, on to the famous pilgrimage shrine of Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. We headed back east and north just after Barcelona, though, toward Aix-en-Provence, because I wanted to drive our little Citroen up Mont Sante-Victoire, that otherwise undistinguished mini-mountain that my favorite artist Paul Cezanne made famous in his paintings. Our last overnight before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain was in Toulouse, and it was there, in its magnificent Romanesque basilica of St. Sernin, that I first felt the power of relics.

I slowly made my way counterclockwise around that great church, and in every one of its many side chapels, I found teeth, bone chips, or scraps of cloth protected behind dirty glass disks set in elaborate gilded reliquaries. And everywhere, before each reliquary, were rows of votive candles. I was pretty much alone, save for a few old women wearing scarves and dressed in black, kneeling and crossing themselves. My two Carleton friends did not share my newfound fascination with relics, and almost immediately walked out of that dark church into the sunlight of a beautiful June day.

I was absolutely enthralled, which made no sense, given that seven years earlier, at the age of thirteen, I had converted from Lutheranism to unstated atheism. I saw no reason to upset my parents, so I kept my mouth shut. But by that age, the idea of a long-haired man in a robe and sandals rising from the dead suddenly seemed ridiculous to me. So no, I didn’t think those relics could perform miracles, as I assumed the women in black did. But still, I felt that I was in the presence of something powerful.

It was around noon when I arrived at the midpoint of my little pilgrimage around the basilica. I was just behind the altar, and I saw steps going down to the crypt, where I assumed I would find at least a few bits of Saint Sernin himself. I recall a landing a few steps down, and stairs going down from there to both the left and right. I have a clear image of that landing in my head: There was a single relic in a little gold box. The label simply read: Vraie croix. Given its extraordinary treasure, I was surprised that this golden box with the True Cross was not protected behind thick glass, and that there was no guard around to keep it safe. I remember a hinged lid and a little latch at the front center, with no sign of a lock.

I looked around, as a shoplifter might, and I saw no one. So slowly, I reached forward. And the second that my extended right hand came to rest on that little golden latch, there was an enormous blast from the pipe organ in the balcony above the front door. It was a deep and powerful single cord that suddenly shattered the dead silence of the church. For the first time I understood what it meant to have your hair stand on end.

The other reason that strange ad in the discarded tabloid captured my attention was that just then, in March 1981, my current DO exhibition, Questions of Authenticity Among the Arts of Byzantium, was at the midpoint of its four-month run and getting lots of attention. It was a tiny show—just three wall cases in the corridor leading toward the legendary warm and woody Music Room, with its enormous French Renaissance fireplace and its spectacular 16th-century marble arches imported from Italy. It was in