The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (19 page)

In the language of Scripture, this was called the “sign of Jonah”, with reference to the episode of Jonah who had spent three days inside the belly of a whale. Jesus had used this comparison to announce his death and coming resurrection, and in Christian art the symbolic tale of Jonah coming out of the mouth of the sea monster had always been widely popular, since it allowed the artist’s fantasy to run wild. It was also an excellent way to inculcate the mystery of the resurrection to simple and unlettered people.
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The Templars belonged to a religious order and followed the liturgies of the Canons of the
Holy Sepulchre: their daily lives were timed by a fixed cycle of hours during which they listened to readings of the Old Testament and the gospels. They knew perfectly what the “Sign of Jonah” was, and its exact meaning; if they saw the image on the shroud, the unbelievable realism of that tense and tormented body must have roused emotions beyond what we can guess. Even in Constantinople, the sight of the ribs must have roused profound emotion and astonishment, as shown by the words of Gregory the Referendarius, who first saw the image in 944 when the
mandylion
was taken from its holder and subjected to in-depth investigation to ensure it was the right item to take to the capital; to the Templars, if anything, the shock was even stronger, because the order had been established for the armed defence of Christians, and in its own specific ideology lay the idea that the Templar who died to save the weaker was imitating the sufferings of Christ. During the Cyprus trial, a layman appeared in defence of the Templars and explained it all with exemplary clarity to the commissioner bishops, remembering the sacrifice made by Grand Master
Guillaume de Beaujeu, who had practically let himself be killed to cover the retreat of others: “he preferred to die to defend the Catholic faith, and chose to pour his blood for Christ against the enemies of the faith just as Christ did for our redemption”.
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About one-quarter of the length of the Shroud, there is another series of holes that also seem arranged to mirror each other on both sides, because they also come from a burn that took place while the sheet was folded. They are four holes, three in a row and one further on the side. Already in the past it had been noticed that a shroud with this exact kind of holes is represented in a miniature of the striking Pray manuscript, a codex made between 1192 and 1195 in a Benedictine Abbey, well known among scholars for containing the first written testimonies of the Hungarian language. A recent study by
Marcel Alonso,
Éric de Bazelaire and
Thierry Castex has brought out the fact that the miniature of the three Marys visiting the sepulchre tells the story rather oddly: the angel shows the women the shroud that had covered Jesus’ face, fallen to one side, while the larger shroud is still found stretched out on the stone where the body had lain. In typical XII century fashion, the artist shows the shroud cloth with an upper face in fishbone weave, and on which can be noticed four holes in the very same shape they bear in the Turin cloth; on the back, there is a white lining decorated with many red Greek crosses like those which were the badge and the pride of the Templars.
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It’s an interesting clue that suggests that in
Constantinople too they attached a lining to the Shroud to increase its consistency, like they were to do in the 1500s in Chambéry; but nobody says that that motif in closely drawn red crosses should necessarily be connected with the order of the Temple. In fact, it was a symbolic decoration widely used in
Constantinople: a lovely icon from the 1300s which represents Christ as Supreme Pontiff, shows his sumptuous liturgical dress studded with crosses just like those in the
Pray codex miniature, and many other Saints’ figures in Byzantine icons with that typical design of many closely drawn crosses. More than any direct contact with the Templars, what these ornamental motifs in the
Pray codex confirm is that in 1192-1195 the Shroud was still in the possession of the Emperor of Byzantium; but that does not make the idea of any connection with the Templar Order wholly absurd. The Templars had a special funerary custom, which allowed the monk who had lived with honour the privilege of being buried in a linen shroud on which was woven a red woollen cloth cross, the Greek cross patent that was the badge and honour of the order. It was a local and uncommon habit, since in Western monasticism monks were generally buried in the usual habit of their order.
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We don’t know at present whether the abbey where the
Pray codex was made had any special link with the Temple, but it is certain that the Templars had several establishments in the area; furthermore, they were familiar with the Byzantine court, since some of their dignitaries had been employed by Byzantine emperors in delicate diplomatic missions.
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At any rate, the miniatures of the
Pray codex represent a first-rate avenue of research in the early history of the Shroud. They represent the burial of Christ with unusual realism for the period: Joseph of Arimathea takes an already stiff corpse down from the cross, places it naked on the shroud, and cannot compose the hands over the pubis properly because they were still spread out in the cross posture. This corresponds exactly to what may be seen of the man of the Shroud; considering the stiffness of the muscle, to place the hands one over the other they must in all likelihood have bound his wrists together.
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Another major fact is that the Jesus of the
Pray codex has hands whose thumbs cannot be seen. This is alien to the whole tradition of Christian iconography, and can only be derived from the Shroud, in which the thumb, exactly, is folded inward – hence invisible – by the damage caused to the median nerve by the nail. This surprising detail, together with the fishbone weave and the four holes in a pattern, means that the author of the miniatures was not meaning to draw any kind of shroud, but intended to make an exact depiction of the Shroud of Turin, an individual and extremely famous object, unique and with unmistakeable details. The Pray miniature, in short, contains an identikit of the Shroud as it appeared in the eleventh century to pilgrims – one of whom was probably the ancient miniaturist – who had the privilege to see it exhibited in
Constantinople on the occasion of very solemn ceremonies, garnished with a precious lining bearing the signs of high priesthood according to Byzantine religious culture. It should be noted that the King of Hungary,
Béla III, had married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143-1180). These are facts of overwhelming historical importance: the Pray code is much older than the age suggested by a 1988 radio-carbon test on the Shroud. It seems clear that something went wrong with that test, possibly a simple lack of essential data.

To finish with, we do not currently have any certain information on the moment the Templars took possession of the Shroud, nor do we know precisely when it passed into other hands; most likely, the politically-demanded forced dissolution of the order in 1312, and then the death of the last Grand Master at the stake, forced it into the hands of other guardians. There are on the other hand no doubts that the Shroud, thanks to its unique properties, left ineffaceable traces on the Templars’ spirituality and liturgical uses: traces already pointed out by Ian
Wilson in 1978, and which led to similar beliefs by
Malcolm Barber and Francesco
Tommasi, two great scholars in Templar history. Systematic investigations into the Templar
trial in recent years have done nothing but confirm their intuitions. And maybe they allow us to say a little more still.

Images

The Shroud’s cloth carries traces of aloe and myrrh, substances used in antiquity to help the preservation of dead bodies: they could be bound together to form an oily anointing substance, or else used as powders to spread over the corpse. According to some investigators, these substances had a basic role in the mechanism that allowed the forming of the strange image. The traces of humus already mentioned can be found near the heels, typical of a body that had walked without shoes, and near the right knee, where the image also shows a noticeable swelling, as if the person had fallen and hit the ground viciously; since the same humus has also been found near the tip of the nose, it has been deduced that the victim must have tumbled down without a chance of covering his face with his hands.
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This is also a detail that must make historians reflect. None of the four gospels speaks of Jesus falling during the climb to Golgotha; but in the special liturgy of the
Via Crucis
, celebrated during Holy Week, it is remembered that Jesus fell to earth under the weight of the Cross no less than three times. The glaring swelling visible on the man in the Shroud’s knee and face could give great credibility to the notion of several falls to the ground, and this might even suggest that the Holy Week liturgy had been affected by the examination of this astonishing object, taken in the past for an undoubtedly genuine relic. From what we know, the
Via Crucis
was born in Syria-Palestine from a very ancient local tradition first given fixed shape by St. Petronius in the fifth century. Later, during the Crusades, the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem played a major part in popular devotion: a special staged pilgrimage in the places of Jerusalem where the Passion had taken place. Later still, towards the end of the Middle Ages, this liturgy was greatly encouraged by Franciscan and Carmelite friars. All its “stations” recall facts mentioned in the Gospels, except for three: Jesus’ meeting with his mother, the merciful gesture of Veronica in drying his bleeding face, and the three falls. These are believed to actually come from the popular religious tradition of Jerusalem, a wealth of traditions probably handed down in the local Christian community from father to son.
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The two images – front and back – present in the Shroud, are found exactly above this big mark left by blood, sweat and other substances such as myrrh and aloe; it was formed after all these compounds had entered and soaked the cloth. As pointed out earlier, it has the singular feature of being visible only if the observer stands at a distance from two to nine metres from the unfolded sheet: any closer or farther off, and the human eye can only see featureless bloodstains. What is seen is the outline of a tall adult male, presumably 170-180 cm, with a long lean figure, and well-defined muscles, possibly in part because of the cadaveric rigidity already discussed. The subject must have been between 30 and 40; to judge from the lack of fat in his physique, he did not eat much and was used to manual labour. His neck is wholly collapsed forwards, with his chin touching his sternum, his chest has stiffened while being flexed forwards, and his legs also seem slightly folded; his arms are stretched along his sides, while forearms and hands, one over the other, are joined to cover the pubes. Neither hand’s imprint shows the thumb, and this (as I mentioned) is probably to do with the wound in the centre of the wrist: the object that pierced it also damaged the median nerve, and the finger reflexively bent completely towards the inside of the hand. The feet are also slightly superimposed, and the right foot seems almost crushed against the cloth, as if cadaveric rigidity had set in as the man found himself with this foot attached for the whole of its length to a hard and vertical surface. The man wore a moustache and a middle-length beard that seems to be parted in the middle and was in part torn off; his long hair reached to his shoulder and joined along the axis of his back in a sort of pigtail, while on the side of the face it appears slightly lifted rather than falling straight down, just as if it had been corrected by some support.
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In May 1898, Secondo Pia, a Turin lawyer, took some photographs of the Shroud, and the result was an absolute shock: it became evident, for the first time, that the sheet acted like a photographic negative. That pale, indistinct, yellowish image perceived by the naked eye, is changed by photography into a clear, hyper-realistic picture, full of striking detail. The image is indelible, it has not been painted on and it is not due to any kind of dye. There is no trace of brushstrokes. The sepia colour is due to the fact that the thin surface linen fibres have yellowed thanks to a process of oxidation, dehydration and conjugation of the cellulose molecules that make up linen threads; the phenomenon only affected the fibre itself to an infinitesimal depth (125 micron), leaving the rest untouched, so that the image cannot be seen from the back of the cloth. In about a century of studies, hundreds of analyses and experiments had been carried out, among them many intended to duplicate the image through various techniques. Scientists started very early to try and produce new “Shrouds” by various devices, managing only to produce copies that have, at most, a few of the original’s very strange properties. These attempts are praiseworthy and indeed very useful so long as they are carried out scientifically, for they allow us to discard fruitless procedures and channel energies towards more profitable directions; alas, it often happens that they are exploited for cheap and tawdry commercial ends, nothing less than swindles at the expense of a passionate public without the scientific education to defend itself from fraudsters. From time to time some occasional writer will emerge out of nowhere, fabricate a dirty rag, and write a book of sensational revelations accompanied by much advertising.
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One of these mystifications even claimed to prove that the Shroud bore the image of the last Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de
Molay. This barely deserves my time to mention it; the reader’s intelligence can judge it for itself. Jacques de
Molay was burned at the stake on a small island in the Seine, in Paris, at sunset on 18 March 1314. His body was reduced to ashes, and we know from an eyewitness that the commoners of Paris fought to take away some of the ashes from that pyre, which they regarded as the mighty relics of a saint. And another thing: when he died, Jacques de
Molay was about 64, at a time when old age began at 60, and had spent his last seven years in the horrors of
Philip the Fair’s dungeons. The man whose imprint was left in the shroud was indubitably young and strong, no more than 40.
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