The Shroud Codex

Also by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.

America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty

Why Israel Can’t Wait: The Coming War Between Israel and Iran

The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality

The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada

Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians

Black Gold Stranglehold: The Politics of Oil and the Myth of Scarcity

Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry

Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders

JEROME R. CORSI, Ph.D.

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Copyright © 2010 by Jerome Corsi

Photographs copyright © 1978 Barrie M. Schwortz Collection, STERA, Inc., All Rights Reserved

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Designed by Joy O’Meara

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

ISBN 978-1-4391-9041-8

          ISBN 978-1-4391-9045-6 (ebook)

For
Melania M. Menzani,
who made it possible for me to view the
Shroud in Turin, Italy, in 1998;
with loving memory
and continuing appreciation

And he [Joseph of Arimathea] bought fine
linen, and took him [Jesus] down, and wrapped
him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre
which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a
stone unto the door of the sepulchre.

M
ARK
15:46

THE
SHROUD
CODEX

Liberated, he felt himself moving free, as a spirit. Easily, he moved upward, leaving behind the police and ambulance sirens below, as rescue workers rushed to the scene.

Ahead of him, he could see the purest of white light streaming from a tunnel that loomed in the sky above him.

In the depths of his soul he felt a peace he had never felt before, a peace he had always longed to feel. He was happy to be free of his broken body and he felt no sorrow at leaving his life behind.

As he entered the tunnel, the luminescence surrounded him. He held his hands in front of his face and turned them so he could see his palms. He was intact. He felt his legs and they too were fine. He was uninjured.

He wondered, Why am I surprised?

Then the car crash flashed back to him in horrific detail.

He had been at the wheel of his car, applying the brakes as hard as he could. He had just come around a sharp curve to find ahead of him two semi-trucks jackknifed together in a multiple-vehicle wreck that blocked both lanes of the interstate.

As if watching a movie, he saw himself behind the wheel of his car, screaming and bracing for the impact. At sixty-five miles
per hour, the hood of his car crushed back upon him like an accordion. The impact was a more powerful jolt than he had ever imagined possible.

An unexpected summer thunderstorm had sent a driving rain down on the highway and he should have known to slow down, but he was preoccupied, lost in thought, totally unaware of the oil on the highway that had turned slick in the rain, causing the trucks ahead of him to collide and jackknife, setting off a chain reaction of a dozen more vehicles.

Yes, that afternoon, Father Paul Bartholomew, a Catholic priest, died.

The police report would read that he was killed in a motor vehicle accident at 3:35
P.M.
ET on August 15.

He died on the operating room table after the horrific car crash he suffered while driving that Sunday afternoon to the cabin in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where he had spent summers as a boy.

But now all that seemed like a dream. The luminescence in the tunnel surrounded him like a fog and he felt drawn to move forward.

As he approached the end of the tunnel, he could see people milling about. Strangely, they all seemed to be floating with the light and the fog enveloping them. Vaguely he thought he could detect friends and relatives who had been dead now for many years.

Suddenly, he was thrilled to see his mother coming forward to embrace him. His mother had died ten years earlier of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive nerve disease in which the brain loses the ability to move the body’s muscles. The disease took five years to kill her and in the last two months of her life her paralysis increased to near total.

Paul at that time was on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton. He was the youngest physicist ever to be asked to join the esteemed institute. Before his mother’s illness, Dr. Bartholomew was considered one of the most promising young physicists in the world.

When his mother was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, his life was shattered. Six months before she died, he moved his mother out of the hospital and brought her back home, where he hired nurses around the clock to care for her. As his mother’s paralysis became complete in her final days of life, the institute gave Bartholomew a leave of absence. He never left his mother’s side until she died; he moved a small cot into her room so he could take care of her in the middle of the night. He prayed that God would take him and spare his mother.

Then, as she went into a coma, he spent hours at her bedside, holding her hand, trying to communicate with her one last time. In the middle of the night, as she took her final labored breaths, Bartholomew wiped her brow with a cold cloth, trying to ease her pain. When she died, he felt desolate and abandoned, his tears unable to bring her back or express his pain. At her funeral, Bartholomew wished there was a way he could join her in death, and he would have, except he felt it was against God’s law for him to commit suicide.

The death of his mother marked a turning point in Bartholomew’s life. What kept him going was a determination to understand what his life was about. Why was he here on earth in this here and now? He had no ready answer.

In the depths of his crisis, he railed against God for taking from him the only person in his life who truly understood him. As he grieved his loss, he realized he had gone into physics in an attempt to find God, and now, with the despair he felt with his mother gone, he was ending up with nothing. Regardless of how brilliant he had been in science, having received his Ph.D. from
Princeton when he was only twenty-five years-old, the death of his mother made him realize that God could not be found in a particle accelerator or a quantum equation. The head of the physics department was shocked when Bartholomew came into his office and announced he had decided to resign from the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study.