Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Science (20 page)

Hunger Pangs

True hunger pangs begin only 12 to 24 hours after eating. They reach their maximum strength three to four days later and then weaken.

Meat and Fullness

Every now and then, after a week or so of not eating meat, I have what I call a ‘meat hunger’. I want some meat and, after eating it, I then feel full.

A few years ago, on an American holiday, we happened across a bakery having a lunchtime barbecue. My son and I ate enormous amounts of meat, including beef, chicken, bacon, pork, ham and turkey – it was not a vegetarian bakery. (Anyhow, the whole point of travel is to experience what the locals experience.) That night, I had absolutely no hunger. The next morning we were still not hungry. Slight twinges of hunger began to appear around lunchtime – a whole day after the gigantic meat meal.

Yes, meat can give a sense of ‘fullness’ or ‘satisfaction’ that carbohydrates do not. We are not sure why. But this ‘fullness’ does not mean that the meat is not being digested, and that it is rotting in your gut.

Toothpaste

However, in each part of the gut, the mushy contents tend to move through as a unit, similar to toothpaste being squeezed out of its container. These are thoroughly mixed in together before they eventually escape to the outside world.

Those parts of the mush that were originally meat are not separated out, and are not specially kept aside to rot quietly. If you want your meat to rot, you need to put it to the side of your plate…

References

Bodanis, David,
The Body Book: A Fantastic Voyage to the World Within
, Little, Brown & Co., 1984, pp 210-212.

Graff, J., et al., ‘Gastrointestinal mean transit times in young and middle-aged healthy subjects’,
Clinical Physiology
, March 2001, Vol 21, No 2, pp 253-259.

Guyton, Arthur C. and Hall, John E.,
A Textbook of Medical Physiology
, 9th edition, Pennsylvania: W.B. Saunders Company, 1996, pp 793-844.

Mikkelson, Barbara and David P., ‘Meat your maker’, 31 December 2005, http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/fecalcolon.asp.

Shroud of Turin

In 1898, the city of Turin in northern Italy was celebrating the 400th anniversary of the inauguration of its major church, the Cathedral of St John the Baptist. As part of the celebrations, Secondo Pia, working in the relatively new field of photography, was commissioned to photograph a famous local relic stored in one of the chapels of the cathedral. The relic was a linen shroud or ‘winding sheet’, supposedly used to wrap the dead body of Jesus Christ. On 28 May, as Secondo Pia processed the glass plate to get the negative image (from which a positive photograph would later be made), he was astonished to see a positive human-like image on the glass.

To him, at that moment, the only possible interpretation was that he was looking at the face of Christ. And that’s where and when all the current hype about the now famous Shroud of Turin began.

Biblical History of Shroud

According to the New Testament of the Christian Bible, Jesus Christ lived, performed miracles, was crucified and died. After his death, a man known only as Joseph of Arimathea became involved with the disposal of Christ’s Body. According to the authoritative
Catholic Encyclopaedia
of 1910, Joseph of Arimathea
‘was a wealthy Israelite’ (
Matthew
27: 57), ‘a good and a just man’ (
Luke
23: 50), ‘who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God’ (
Mark
15: 43). He is also called by St Mark and by St Luke a
bouleutes
—literally, a ‘senator’, i.e. a member of the Sanhedrin or Supreme Council of the Jews.

Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, probably since he first heard Christ preaching in Judea (
John
2: 23), but he did not declare himself as such ‘for fear of the Jews’ (
John
19: 38). On account of this secret allegiance to Jesus, he did not consent to His condemnation by the Sanhedrin (
Luke
23: 51), and was most likely absent from the meeting which sentenced Jesus to death (cf.
Mark
14: 64).

At this turbulent time, so soon after Christ’s death, it was a risky affair to be linked to Jesus Christ. Even so, Joseph bravely petitioned Pontius Pilate for the Body, and was successful. He and Nicodemus (who came with many kilograms of spices used for anointing a body) wrapped the Body in fine linen and laid it out in a brand-new unused tomb. They closed the tomb by rolling a great stone up against the opening.

Three days later, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and was astonished to find that the great stone had been rolled away. Then, according to
John
, 20: 2-7, ‘She ran therefore and cometh to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved and saith to them: They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre: and we know not where they have laid him. Peter therefore went out, and the other disciple: and they came to the sepulchre. And they both ran together: and that other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulchre. And when he stooped down, he saw the linen cloths lying: but yet he went not in. Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulchre: and saw the linen cloths lying. And the napkin that had been about his head, not lying with the linen cloths, but apart, wrapped up into one place.’

This is the original story of the Shroud, or the Holy Winding Sheet of Christ.

The Shroud Today

After that tumultuous day when St Peter first found the Holy Winding Sheet, for some unknown reason, it simply dropped out of sight. And it took well over a millennium before the Sheet—now known as the Shroud of Turin—made an appearance.

Today, the Sheet called the Shroud of Turin is a long, skinny rectangular piece of cloth, about 4.34 m long by 1.09 m wide.

If you look carefully, you can just see two faded yellow-brown images. They show the entire front and back of a naked man with his hands covering his groin. The man is thin, heavily bearded and about 1.8 m in height—tall for a person of that time in the Middle East. There are stains from nail wounds in the feet, shoulder abrasions, and stains from puncture wounds on the head. There are also flogging injuries on the man’s back, and a wound through his left wrist. The images are consistent with a man being laid on a long cloth with his feet at one end and his head in the middle, and then the other half of the cloth being folded back over him.

The images are very faded, and difficult to see.

Before examining its authenticity here’s a little on the history of the Shroud.

Holy Winding Sheet, 1353+

In the year 1353, on 20 June, the famed knight Geoffroy de Charny, the Seigneur or Lord of Lirey, founded a church in Lirey. A smaller chapel inside this church was set aside to show, for veneration, the Holy Winding Sheet (as it was known back then).

Shrouded in Controversy

After Christ’s death, it was still a risky affair to be linked to Jesus Christ. Even so, Joseph bravely petitioned Pilate for the Body, and was successful. He and Nicodemus (who came with many kilograms of spices for anointing a body) wrapped the Body in fine linen, and laid it out in a brand-new unused tomb. They closed the tomb by rolling a great stone up against the opening.

The images on the shroud are very faded, and difficult to see.

This is the very first well-documented report of the existence of the Holy Winding Sheet after the Resurrection of Christ.

In those days, there was a good living to be made from charging the faithful to view biblical relics. Within a few years, by 1357, the Shroud had become a nice little earner, many pilgrims coming from far and wide to see the one-and-only, the true and the original Burial Shroud of Christ. According to
National Geographic
, ‘the 14th century, especially, was notorious for relic mongering, when chicanery and fraud abounded’.

But Bishop Henri de Poitiers of Troyes was sceptical about the Shroud, and carried out an investigation into its validity. This ancient town of Troyes (situated about 16 km to the north of Lirey) has a very long history, getting its first bishop in the early 300s. With regard to the wars of the times, politically Troyes is very strategically located, being about 130 km to the east of Paris, and about 100 km south of Reims, the capital of Champagne. The small village of Lirey (where the Winding Sheet was held) was part of the diocese, or administration, of Troyes. The bishop found that the Sheet was a fake, a mere painting, and so it was quietly taken off the Biblical Relics Circuit.

Holy Winding Sheet, 1389+

In 1389, about three decades later, after all the fuss had died down, the Holy Winding Sheet went on its First Comeback Tour on the Biblical Relics Circuit, again lightening the purses of the faithful.

This time Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, the new bishop of Troyes, denounced it as a fraud. He wrote to Pope Clement VII (a member of the ‘breakaway’ Avignon Papacy in France, who reigned from 1378 to 1394), saying that with regard to the Holy Winding Sheet, the canons of the church at Lirey had ‘falsely and deceitfully…with avarice…procured for their church a certain cloth on which
was cunningly painted…the image of one man…pretending that this was the actual Shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb.’

Bishop d’Arcis thought it scandalous that ‘it was then being exhibited by the Canons of Lirey in such a way that the populace believed that it was the authentic shroud of Jesus Christ’. He then referred back to the research of his predecessor, Bishop Henri de Poitiers, who personally knew that this Holy Winding Sheet was a fraud, because ‘after diligent inquiry and examination’ he had found that the Shroud ‘was cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it’. In other words, Bishop de Poitiers had tracked down the very artist who had manufactured this relic. This letter, in which Bishop d’Arcis states that the artist confessed to manufacturing this forgery of the Winding Sheet of Christ, still exists today.

In response, Pope Clement VII declared in a Papal Bull that the Sheet could be exhibited as an object of pilgrimage and devotion, but only if it was made perfectly clear that this sheet was just a ‘representation’ of the original shroud used to wrap Christ. ‘The pope, without absolutely prohibiting the exhibition of the Shroud, decided…that in the future when it was shown to the people, the priest should declare in a loud voice that it was not the real shroud of Christ, but only a picture made to represent it.’

Holy Winding Sheet, 1418+

But some people thought there was still some life left in the Shroud as a Holy Relic.

By 1418, the Hundred Years War (which ran from 1337 to 1453) was raging. To protect the Holy Winding Sheet, the canons of the church in Lirey entrusted it to Humbert, the then Lord of Lirey.

After his death, and as the war was winding down, the canons of Lirey asked for it to be returned. However, Humbert’s widow Margaret (the granddaughter of Geoffroy de Charny) refused to return it to the canons, despite their many requests. Instead, she generously gave this very same Winding Sheet to Louis, Duke of Savoy, in 1452. He too was generous and, in exchange, gave her two castles.

The Sheet has remained with the House of Savoy from then up to the present day. (The House of Savoy grew so much that it later became the ruler of Italy—the Italian Monarchy—until 1946.)

We know that the Sheet was at Chambéry (the capital of Savoy in France) in 1453. Chambéry is about 330 km to the south-southwest of Lirey, and much closer to the Italian border. In 1464, the Duke of Savoy agreed to make an annual payment to the canons of Lirey, if they would drop all claims to ownership of the Winding Sheet.

In 1467, the then Duke of Savoy, Amadeus IX, built a Ducal Chapel (the Sainte Chapelle) in Chambéry especially to house the Holy Winding Sheet.

Holy Winding Sheet, 1471 +

The passage of a century of time, as well as a different political climate, had reversed opinions as to the authenticity of the Holy Winding Sheet.

Pope Sixtus IV (who was pope from 1471 to 1484) wrote that in this Shroud, ‘men may look upon the true blood and portrait of Jesus Christ himself’. (As an aside, Sixtus IV looked after his own family very well indeed, was a patron of the arts and letters—e.g. he built the Sistine Chapel—and vastly improved the sanitation of Rome.)

Pope Julius II (who was pope from 1503 to 1513) agreed. He mentioned in his Papal Bull
Romanus Pontifex
of 25 April 1506, the ‘most famous Shroud in which our Savior was wrapped when he lay in the tomb and which is now honorably and devoutly preserved in a silver casket’. (As an aside, Julius II was a very successful warrior pope who re-established the Pontifical States and helped free Italy from France. As one of the greatest papal patrons of the arts he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He also had three daughters.)