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CHAPTER THREE:The Shroud of Turin, the Mandylion,and Veronica’s Handkerchief

The greater the potential religious and historical importance of a mysterious object, the more controversy is likely to centre on it, There are three alleged, but semi-legendary, images of Christ on cloth that need to be considered together if maximum information is to be gleaned from them. They are almost certainly one and the same thing; their seemingly different origin stories have simply been mythologized, diversified, and embroidered over the centuries. This adds to the importance of the original mystery rather than reducing it. When something is considered important enough to have stories woven around it as the years pass, it’s a safe bet to suggest that the historical original was something really significant.

To start with, there is a touching legend to the effect that a humane and pious woman named Veronica was moved with pity for Christ as the Roman executioners took him to Calvary to be crucified. She showed her sympathy in a practical and merciful way by moving through the crowd, defying the Roman soldiers, and wiping his face for him. According to legend, she was rewarded with a perfect picture of the divine countenance on the cloth she had used. Consequently, this became known as Saint Veronica’s Hankerchief. However, the name Veronica, it has been suggested, actually came from Icon Veritas — meaning the true, real, or accurate picture. Moving away from the legend of the saint’s kindness, was it possible that a Christian artist among the early disciples had painted a picture of his beloved master on cloth, a picture that later became known as the true or authentic likeness of Christ and around which the Veronica legend grew?

Early portrait of Christ, possibly based on St. Veronica’s Handkerchief, the Shroud of Turin, or the Mandylion. St. Veronica (perhaps alias Icon Veritas — “The True Likeness”) wiped the face of Christ.

The best known — and the most controversial — image is undoubtedly the Turin Shroud. Saint Luke and Saint John both record that grave wrappings were seen in the empty tomb after the Resurrection of Jesus. There is an early Christian tradition that Thaddaeus, who was one of the seventy disciples mentioned in the Gospel of Saint Luke, chapter 10, verse 1, took the shroud with him for safekeeping. Thaddaeus was said to have gone as a missionary to Edessa, which is now known as Urfa and is situated in eastern Turkey.

Mannu the Sixth persecuted the Edessan Christians, and the precious shroud was carefully concealed in a secret hiding place among the stones above the west gate. Hermetically sealed there for two or three hundred years, it came to light again in the early sixth century. A disastrous flood had made it necessary to rebuild much of the Edessan city walls, including the critical area containing the west gate. Contemporary witnesses declared without hesitation that they believed it to be the Holy Cloth, or Holy Image, that Thaddaeus had brought to the city. (Might it not have been one and the same thing as Saint Veronica’s Hankerchief — the Icon Veritas?) The Emperor Justinian also accepted its authenticity and promptly arranged for the Hagia Sophia Cathedral to be built to house it in Constantinople (later re-named Istanbul).

The mysterious image-bearing cloth (Veronica’s or Thaddaeus’s?) was from then on referred to as the Mandylion — and so the third version of the same legend was born. The Arabic term mandylion refers simply to a veil, a small cloth, or even a handkerchief — but the Shroud of Turin is well over three metres long. How is the apparent paradox resolved? Researchers have suggested that it was folded very carefully and framed in such a way that only the face was visible.

One reason for this folding may well have been the Jewish laws relating to what was considered to be ritually clean or unclean. A shroud was technically unclean, and was therefore an object to be scrupulously avoided by any law-abiding Jew.

Religious art historians have noticed that after the recovery of the Mandylion from its niche in the wall above the West Gate, all representations of Christ seem to have been based on it. Byzantine mosaics, frescoes, and paintings dating from the sixth century have shown more than a dozen significant points of similarity with the image on the shroud.

Beginning in the middle of the tenth century, the Mandylion was taken on a series of religious journeys. Art historians and icon experts again provided valuable supporting evidence for the apparent influence the Mandylion had had on religious art at this time. It would seem that during its tenth-century journeys, and right up until the start of the thirteenth century, the Mandylion, or Holy Shroud (originally called the Image of Edessa) was exhibited in its full, unfolded form. Earlier pictures of the dead Christ being laid reverently in the tomb had shown grave wrappings swathed around His body in the traditional funerary style. Pictures from the second half of the tenth century onwards, however, show the dead Christ lying in a position that would correspond to the image on the shroud.

The cataclysmic tragedy of 1204, when the misdirected Fourth Crusade destroyed Constantinople, led to the disappearance of the Mandylion for a century and a half. It seems probable that the mysterious sacred cloth was rediscovered by the valiant and indomitable Knights Templar, who had been founded in 1119, only eighty-five years before the overthrow of Constantinople. One of the central mysteries of this noble order of warrior-priests was a secret ceremony in which a sacred face, or head, was venerated. Prior to the malicious negative propaganda that Philip IV, ironically known as Philip le Bel, circulated about the Templars before his treacherous attack on them in 1307, the Templars had always enjoyed a reputation as men of total honesty and integrity. They were exactly the type of people to whom the Mandylion could have been safely entrusted.

Approximately half a century after Philip’s attack, Geoffrey de Charny seems to have had possession of the Mandylion. When he died, his widow exhibited it, charging pilgrims a small entrance fee because Geoffrey’s death had left her almost penniless. The querulous local bishop interfered and the widow’s fundraising exhibition of the Mandylion ceased. It seems ironic that the great Templar Order (which at the height of its power had ignored petty local bishops and jealous parish clergies with the contempt they deserved) should have had the exhibition of their most sacred relic inhibited by the whim of an unimportant rural bishop.

Although this discreditable episode apparently occurred in Lirey, a little French village over a hundred miles from Paris, it nevertheless brought the Mandylion back into the limelight. Research into accounts of this 1357 exhibition seems to suggest that the Mandylion was already a very old relic when Madame de Charny put it on exhibition. After her death, her son, also called Geoffrey, took charge of the Holy Shroud. This second Geoffrey of Charny also died impoverished, and his widow gave the shroud to Louis of Savoy.

In 1464, Pope Sixtus IV gave his support to the authenticity of the shroud, but it was over a century before it was sent to Turin. Borromeo saw it there in 1578, and Francis de Sales, who was then an assistant bishop, was one of those who were privileged to hold it during an exhibition in 1639.

Controversy continues to rage fiercely around the Mandylion as one piece of data continually seems to contradict another. In 1973, for example, threads from the Mandylion were scientifically examined at the Belgian Institute of Textile Technology in Ghent. Professor Gilbert Raes was in charge at the time. Rather surprisingly, traces of cotton were identified among the linen from which the shroud was largely woven, and this suggested to Raes and his colleagues that the linen had been made on a loom that was also used for weaving cotton. Cotton was apparently grown and used in Egypt and most of the Middle East in those days, but not in Europe. Raes also discerned herringbone patterns in the weave. These were characteristic of work done in Egypt and the Middle East two thousand years ago. The Associate Professor of Egyptology at Turin University in the 1970s was Silvio Curto, and it was his considered professional opinion that the cloth could indeed be two thousand years old.

Additional supporting evidence comes from Max Frei, a Swiss forensic scientist. Frei had had considerable botanical experience and was intrigued by the tiny pollen grains adhering to the shroud. In 1973, he categorized almost fifty different varieties of pollen clinging to the fibres of the Mandylion. More than thirty of the varieties he identified were found only in Palestine, the Turkish Steppes, and the area around Constantinople. Fifteen or sixteen varieties of pollen were identified as European, and some researchers argued that these grains could have become embedded in the Mandylion while it was being exhibited between 944 and 1204. As far as can be ascertained, it is highly unlikely that the shroud left European Christendom after being shown at Lirey by Geoffrey Senior’s widow in 1357.

Members of an organization known as “The Shroud of Turin Research Project” were allowed to make a close and detailed examination of it in 1978. Their report included comments about the precise size and structure of the Mandylion. It felt silky to the touch; the colour was like that of mature ivory; and the whole thing felt surprisingly light. The cloth, as they measured it, was approximately four and a half metres long and just over a metre wide. There is a distinct strip roughly ten centimetres wide on the left side; otherwise, the cloth looks as through it was woven as one single piece. The mysterious image on the Mandylion dispels the pale Victorian Sunday School image of “Gentle Jesus.” The man of the shroud was almost six feet tall and powerfully built. In life he probably weighed about one hundred and eighty pounds. As far as expert opinion can go based on so faint an image, he would have been around thirty-five years old.

The image on the shroud is very difficult to make out. Its details become much clearer in photographs and it is more easily understood at a distance than close up. The pigment — whatever it is — that is responsible for the image seems to touch only the outer fibres of each individual thread. The marking penetrates only three or four fibres down into the thread itself. Most experts are convinced that the more densely coloured areas give that appearance, not because the colour is deeper, but because the coloured fibres are more numerous in those darker areas.

In 1532, there was a disastrous fire in the Chambery Chapel, where the shroud was kept inside a silver case. The heat was sufficient to melt the silver, and consequently the molten metal dripped through, leaving scorch marks on the shroud. The nuns of the Poor Claire Order devoutly repaired it. They sewed some fourteen large triangular patches, along with seven or eight smaller ones, to repair the holes that the fire had caused. There is much to commend in the courage of the two Franciscan priests who risked their lives saving the Mandylion and who preserved it from further damage by soaking the silver case with water as soon as they were clear of the fire. The aftermath of that trauma is still visible on the Mandylion today. Scorch marks, small holes caused by the molten silver, and what are presumably water stains after the silver box was doused are still visible. Another attempt — this time deliberate — to destroy the Mandylion took place in 1972, when an intruder burst into the chapel and tried to set fire to the holy relic. The asbestos inside the shrine saved it.

In 1898, the shroud was photographed for the first time by Secondo Pia. In his midforties, Secondo was a lawyer by profession but had won a number of prizes as a photographer. In 1898, electric lighting was still something of a novelty, and its results for an amateur photographer were likely to be uncertain. Pia first tried an exposure of fourteen minutes, and then with a later picture gave it twenty. It was about midnight, while he was working in his darkroom, that Pia was totally dumbfounded (his own description of his feelings) as the face of the shroud began to appear. Only then was it realized that the image on the shroud was a negative. The discovery that Secondo made was so impressive that the old box camera he used for that photograph is still to be seen in the Holy Shroud Museum in Turin.

In 1931, some exceptionally good exposures were made by Giuseppe Enrie, accompanied by Secondo Pia, who was by then well into his seventies. A young priest who was present with the two photographers went on to become Pope Paul VI.

Doctor Pierre Barbet and Professor Yves Delage brought their special knowledge to bear on the mystery of the Mandylion almost a hundred years ago. Both medical experts agreed that the man who had been laid to rest in the shroud was one who had well-developed muscles and had been used to hard work. They detected unmistakable signs of rigor mortis but maintained that there was no evidence of corruption. Again, in the opinion of these two medical examiners and others, the wounds as shown on the Mandylion were anatomically accurate. The lacerations of the scalp and above the brow suggested to them that the crown of thorns, unlike the circlet that religious artists normally portrayed, was more like a cap. Medical experts estimated the lance wound that penetrated the heart as being approximately five centimetres long by just over a centimetre wide. In the opinion of the experts, the wound had been made posthumously. The blood flow had simply run downward with gravity and had not spurted as it would have done if a living body had been penetrated in that way. Additional medical evidence would indicate death from asphyxiation, which is concomitant with crucifixion, as the victim is unable to breathe. The man of the shroud had bruises and cuts on the knees, which would indicate at least one heavy fall, and further marks on the back indicate, or suggest, that something heavy had been carried. Again, the medical evidence points to these back injuries having been inflicted after the scourging, because the whip marks had been modified and distended by this later, larger injury. Medical evidence in connection with the scourging suggested that well over a hundred blows had been inflicted, that two executioners had been involved, and that the wounds were of a type that would have been inflicted by the notorious Roman flagellum.

More recent — but equally controversial — evidence has suggested a completely different theory: the shroud probably originated in 1307, and was used to cover the tortured body of Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar. According to this theory, the fearless Templar leader was nailed to a door by his depraved interrogators, and the door was then slammed repeatedly. De Molay was then wrapped in the cloth that later became the Mandylion, or Holy Shroud of Turin. The medical evidence pointed to the man in the shroud as being tall and muscular. That description would fit a powerful fourteenth-century warrior-priest like Jacques. The theory is fascinating, but inconclusive. The mystery of the Mandylion remains unsolved, but it is one of the most mysterious objects on the planet. As a special stop-press item, it is relevant to note that archaeologist Dr. Shimon Gibson has recently discovered a shroud in a tomb near Jerusalem dating from the first century A.D. It may provide vital comparative evidence for accurately dating the Turin Shroud.