by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I stayed up with our friend
Garry Hobbs and watched a DVD he’d brought over called The Mysterious Man of
the Shroud, a gloriously tacky TV
documentary about the Shroud of Turin. I would have no problem living my life
completely unaware of the existence of the Shroud of Turin, but in case you’ve
been fortunate enough actually to pull that off, it’s the piece of twill-woven
cloth which first publicly appeared in 14th Century France after it
was supposedly brought back from Jerusalem by Crusaders searching for relics of
the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was purchased from the
family whose crusader ancestor supposedly brought it back from there by the
Royal House of Savoy, which eventually fled France and relocated to Italy,
which is how it ended up at Turin, and the Vatican, which now has nominal
ownership of the Shroud, has never said yea-or-nay to the claim that it’s the
actual burial shroud of Jesus Christ but allows it to be exhibited and used as
an object of public veneration. The only person listed on the imdb.com page for
the program is Hector Elizondo, who appeared on-screen as narrator and host,
but the program — written and directed by Terry Landau for his own company,
Landau Entertainment — was very much in the typical mold of History Channel
documentaries on so-called “supernatural” or “paranormal” phenomena, lots of
talking-head interviews with experts (I was amused at how the scientists and
historians from Israel, the self-proclaimed “Jewish state,” were considerably
more skeptical about the claims made for the Shroud as being the actual burial
cloth of Jesus which became imprinted with his image when he essentially burned
through it as he was resurrecting himself), bizarre re-enactments (focused less
on when the Shroud was supposedly made and used and more on when it was first
photographed, in the 1890’s and then not again until the 1930’s by a French
researcher who thought he could capture more detail as camera equipment had
improved) and an overall air that to this highly skeptical observer comes off
as kind of a breathless silliness — “Could it be that … ?” “Is the Shroud possibly … ?” “Can it have happened that … ?”
The most blatant bit of ballyhoo both in the
movie itself and in the promotional material on the DVD box cover was the
“three-dimensional image” of the man who might or might not have been buried in
the Shroud that might or might not have contained the body of a person who
might or might not have been Jesus Christ, basically a tall, rather plump guy
with a lot of stab marks all over his person (alas, his crotch and butt cheeks
were carefully concealed — tough luck for all those perverted Gay men out there
who might have been wondering about the cock size of the Son of God) with long
dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard — since one of the show’s more believable
arguments was that, authentic or not, the Shroud has set the template for most
artistic depictions of Jesus. The Mysterious Man of the Shroud showed scientists who claimed to have lifted blood
from the Shroud’s surface and tested it to confirm that it was human DNA (which
gave me the idea for a science-fiction tale, sort of The Passion of the
Christ meets Jurassic Park, in which a mad scientist who’s also a committed
Christian uses DNA extracted from the Shroud to try to clone Christ and thereby
bring about the Second Coming), though when the blood was deposited on the Shroud’s surface
remained a mystery. It also showed the outcome of radiocarbon-14 dating tests
(which meant having to take a few pieces of the Shroud and essentially turn
them into charcoal) which established that the cloth was not from 2,000 years ago but from the 14th
century, when the Christian world was being flooded with relics looted from the
Holy Land by Crusaders, and there was a thriving business in manufacturing fake relics, not so much to sell them as to build
up certain regions and ruling families as holders of actual objects involved in
the Christian founding history. There was a joke once that if all the
“splinters of the True Cross” that circulated in the Middle Ages had been
authentic, Jesus would have had to have been crucified on an entire forest
containing at least 60 different species of trees.
The show did offer some insight into the mechanics of how
crucifixion worked — thanks largely to the discovery of the skeleton of an
actual crucifixion victim (the show hinted that crucifixion was a considerably
rarer form of execution than some historians have maintained, reserved for the
“worst of the worst” criminals whom the authorities wanted publicly shamed)
with the obligatory stake through both legs — and it argued that while most
crucifixion victims were attached to the cross with rope bindings around their
wrists, people the authorities especially wanted to humiliate and torture were
nailed to the cross through their wrists (not their palms, even though that’s become the norm in
artistic depictions of crucifixion, because nails through the palms would not
have supported the weight of a human body), in addition to a single nail at the
base of the cross through the
victim’s feet — the point of all this being that the crucifixion victim could
inhale but if he needed to exhale, he would have to bend his body into a shape that would cause even more
excruciating pain. (The ancients were decidedly not nice people. Crucifixion, like the hemlock
poisoning Socrates was killed with, was deliberately designed to make capital
punishment as drawn-out and excruciatingly painful as they could.) Frankly, the
most credible explanation for the Shroud of Turin in this program was the one
that it’s a “dust painting,” a form of art that involves sprinkling dust on a
piece of paper, then putting cloth over the paper, transferring some of the colored (pigmented) dust to the
cloth, then heating the cloth so the image “sets” and becomes permanently
fixed. It was almost certainly a fake, created in the 14th century
at a time when the demand for relics of early Christianity was at its peak
(despite the attempts by believers to claim that the radiocarbon dating was
wrong because the original Shroud’s carbon atoms supposedly got mixed with the
secretions of other things, ranging from bacteria to humans, that could have
contaminated the samples and got the measurements mixed up), a fake that
arguably succeeded beyond its creators’ wildest imaginations, to the point
where we’re still arguing about it (and watching TV shows about it) to this
day.
