The Shroud Codex (7 page)

The image of the man in the Shroud of Turin looked ghostly, yet it had a clearly photographic quality about it.

At first the face looked blurry to Castle, but the more he studied it, the more distinct the facial features became to him. Studying the face, Castle began to see the man many believe to be Jesus. The man in the Shroud appeared to have his eyes closed, as if in sleep or in death. Somehow the face conveyed a quiet dignity in its strong, square lines and elongated rectangular shape. The nose was prominent, but well proportioned. The mouth was closed in what looked like a thoughtful repose. The man in the Shroud looked almost as if he could be sleeping, not dead. Still, Castle could read sorrow and pain in the face, and he noted what looked like white streaks, possibly of blood, that streamed from the forehead and seemed to saturate the long hair that draped down on each side of the man’s face.

“How is this photograph possible if the Shroud is two thousand years old?” Castle asked. “Photography was not invented until the 1820s.” Castle was struggling to understand how this image had such photographic qualities when it was made either 1,800 years before photography was discovered, if the Shroud was the actual burial cloth of Christ, or some five hundred to six hundred years before photography was discovered, if the Shroud was a medieval forgery.

“It’s complicated,” Morelli answered. “But to give you the simple explanation, the Church has discovered over time that the Shroud itself is a sort of negative. Surprisingly, the man in the Shroud is most clearly seen when you look at a photographic negative of the Shroud.”

“When did the Church discover the photographic qualities of the Shroud?”

“It wasn’t until 1898, when Secondo Pia, an Italian amateur photographer, was allowed to photograph the Shroud. Working with his negatives in the darkroom, Secondo Pia was shocked when he realized his negative had produced a face. He said he felt that in his darkroom he was looking back centuries, the first person since Christ died to be looking into the living face of the Lord. Pia realized that the image of the man on the Shroud became easier to see when the light values are reversed, such that the brownish red lines on the Shroud show up as highlights in the photographic negative. In other words, the image of the crucified man that is somehow imprinted into the linen of the Shroud is most clearly seen when the brownish red lines that your eye sees as the image on the Shroud are reversed to white in the photographic negative.”

“So what I am looking at here is the negative that results when a photograph of the Shroud is taken, is that correct?” Castle asked, wanting to make sure he understood what Morelli was attempting to explain.

“That’s right,” Morelli said. “You’re looking at a photographic negative. The brownish red lines visible to the naked eye on the Shroud show up in a photographic negative as white highlights. You can easily imagine that Secondo Pia’s contemporaries in the late 1890s accused him of having perpetrated a fraud. They claimed he concocted the image of Jesus Christ that you are looking at, using darkroom tricks to produce an image that was not visible to the naked eye looking at the Shroud. Pia’s results weren’t accepted until 1931, when Giuseppe Enrie, an Italian professional photographer, was permitted to photograph the Shroud a second time and got the same results.”

From his briefcase, Morelli handed Castle a second image of the face of the man in the Shroud. “Take a look at this image and compare it with the other. I think comparing the two will give you a better idea how the process works. This is what a photographic print of the Shroud looks like. The actual Shroud looks much the same, except that the lines that mark the face would be brownish red, not the black and white of the photographic print you see here.”

Castle looked back and forth between the two images, appreciating how Secondo Pia’s photographic process had worked.

“What you are looking at now in the photographic print is how the face of the man appears on the linen of the Shroud to the naked eye,” Morelli explained. “Looking at the Shroud with your naked eye, the face of the man in the Shroud looks faint—so faint that at first you might not even see him. But then, after you study the image for a while, the face becomes clearer, as you begin to be able to see and distinguish the brownish red lines that appear on the surface.”

“So you’re telling me that whoever painted the Shroud painted a negative?” Castle asked.

“Yes,” Morelli said, pleased to see Castle was getting the point. “That’s exactly what I am saying. In other words, if you assume some medieval painter forged the Shroud, that painter would have had to be brilliant enough to understand how photographic negatives work, even though they hadn’t been invented yet. Why wouldn’t a medieval forger simply have painted a positive image onto the burial cloth, the way a painter portrays a life scene the way the eye sees it? Nobody in the Middle Ages had ever seen a photographic negative.”

“But not all photographs require a negative,” Castle observed. “Daguerreotypes are one of the earliest forms of photographs and they don’t require a negative as an intermediary step in the photographic process. If I am right, in a daguerreotype, a positive image is formed directly on a plate that is coated with light-sensitive chemicals.”

“You are exactly right,” Morelli said. “Negatives are only used in photographic processes where the image is imprinted first on an intermediary surface that has been treated with photosensitive chemicals, like silver halide. There is also no negative formed in digital photography. If the painter of the Shroud was medieval,
that person had to be brilliant enough to anticipate not only the invention of photographic processes that required negatives as an intermediary step in producing the positive photographic image, but that negatives would be a surviving photographic process. Negatives, it turns out, have been the dominant photographic process from the early Kodak cameras up until the recent advent of digital cameras. But my guess is that photographic negatives will fade away in our current era of digital imaging.”

“So you recommend I should study the negative images of the Shroud if I want to see the man more clearly?”

“Yes, that is exactly what I am saying,” Morelli said in confirmation once again. “I want you to have the clearest possible idea what the man in the Shroud of Turin looks like, for a very important reason.”

“What’s that?” Castle asked.

“I believe that when you meet Father Bartholomew you will agree he looks today just like the man in the Shroud of Turin. Father Bartholomew has the same double-pointed beard with a fork at the chin. They both have long hair covering their ears and draping over their shoulders. They both have the same face with square lines. If you permit me to interpret how they look, you will see in both the same quiet dignity, the same suggestion of inner peace despite the obvious pain and suffering. The same wrinkles in the brow.”

Castle quickly got the point. “So, what you are telling me is that if the man in the Shroud is Jesus, then Bartholomew today looks just like Jesus did the day he died. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s precisely the point,” Morelli said slowly. “The Vatican is concerned that Bartholomew is becoming Jesus. What we don’t know is whether this is a psychological process or some other reality we don’t understand.”

With that, Castle appreciated even more deeply why the pope
had asked for his help. “What you also don’t know is whether the Shroud is authentic or a fake. Isn’t that also what you are telling me?”

“Yes, it is, but before we get to that point, I want you to look at one more image.” Morelli pulled from his briefcase yet another photo of the Shroud of Turin. “This is a close-up photographic negative of the arms of the man in the Shroud. It shows the nail wounds on the wrists and the blood flows on the forearms.”

Castle examined the image carefully. Reading the medical file, Castle had observed that Father Bartholomew’s wounds were in his wrists, not in the palms of the hands. It was the same with the Shroud. The nail wounds were through the wrists, not the hands, and they looked remarkably like the stigmata wounds Bartholomew had suffered in his wrists. Anatomically, that made sense to Castle. The wounds in the arms could not have gone through the palm of the hand. The nails had to be driven through the
wrist. Otherwise, the weight of the body would have ripped the nails loose.

Castle’s medical mind envisioned how a nail driven through the junction of bones in the wrist would hold an adult male’s weight. “A nail through the palm of the hand above the wrist would tear free over time,” he suggested. “The nail would have to be placed just right in the wrist. If the nail hit the major arteries in the hand, the person being crucified might die before they were ever lifted to the cross. Nailing a person to a cross must have been an expert operation that required experienced executioners.”

“Right,” Morelli confirmed. “The Romans crucified hundreds of thousands of people. They were very good at crucifixion. Crucifixion was designed to be a brutal and humiliating form of death, typically reserved for hardened criminals or traitors foolish enough to foment insurrection against Rome.”

“How long was Christ on the cross?” Castle asked.

“Christ hung on the cross for at least three hours,” Morelli answered. “He was not dead when the sun was going down. The problem was that Christ was crucified on Friday and he had to be buried before the Jewish Sabbath began, at sundown on Friday. According to Jewish law, Christ’s body had to be taken from the cross and buried before the start of the Sabbath, which means the followers of Jesus did not have much time. Before the Roman soldiers allowed his followers to take the body off the cross, they wanted to make sure he was dead. So a Roman centurion took his lance and pierced it through Christ’s side, puncturing his heart. Only then did the Roman soldiers give Christ’s followers permission to remove his body from the cross.”

Looking closely, Castle marveled at how correct anatomically the Shroud image appeared to be. The exit wound on the back of the hand on top—really the left hand in a Shroud image that needed to be reversed right to left like most negatives—looked
like an exit wound. It appeared the nail had been driven through where several small carpal bones meet in the wrist, below the metacarpal bones that branch to the fingers, on the thumb side of the hand. The thumbs in both hands appeared to have been pulled back toward the palms of the hands such that they were not visible when the hands were viewed from above. “Driving the nails through the wrists in this area probably damaged the median nerve, with the result that the thumb would have been pulled under the palm in an action not unlike an automatic muscle reflex. So, you’re probably also asking me how any artist at the time of Christ—or even during the Middle Ages—would have been sufficiently skilled in medicine as to have captured this anatomically important detail. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Morelli answered without hesitation. “How the Shroud of Turin was created is hard to explain. The Shroud provides a remarkably detailed view of the crucifixion of Jesus as described in the Gospels and the practice itself as described in contemporary Roman accounts. Moreover, the Shroud is anatomically correct, even by our current medical standards, in documenting the effects of crucifixion on the human body.”