Whether or not the shroud is Christ’s, it is an extracanonical witness to his death.
John H. Heller, Southern Baptist and biophysicist, does not particularly care whether the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial garment of the crucified Christ. “My belief in Christ is an article of faith, and I see no reason to extend that faith to a piece of cloth. It’s not required,” he explains. Yet, Heller the biophysicist is fascinated with the scientific enigma the shroud poses.
His participation over the past several years with the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) has now resulted in a book, Report on the Shroud of Turin, that documents what went on behind the scenes of STURP’s investigation. For 120 hours in 1978, a team of 40 scientists performed a battery of tests on the linen cloth, which is housed at Turin, Italy. All but one or two of them fully expected to expose it as a medieval fake—a relic forged to dupe the faithful, like slivers of the true cross.
However, the 14-foot length of fabric, bearing a faint negative image of a battered man, refused to yield its secrets to space-age techniques. The scientists concluded that the shroud is no forgery, cannot be reproduced by any known means, bears traces of real blood and dirt, and casts a startling three-dimensional human likeness when it is subjected to photographic-image analysis (that is the technique used in astronomy to project lifelike photographs of planets). It was Heller who discovered the presence of actual blood on the shroud, using a technique he helped develop at the New England Institute.
“I started out very arrogant,” Heller recalls. “Nobody could have convinced me that there was any way the shroud could have eluded a scientific answer. Scientists do one thing: measure. We’re remarkably good at it, and the instruments we have are incredible.” Despite extensive, overlapping experimentation, though, the STURP team remained stumped.
Heller and his colleagues insist on separating their faith from their science in order to maintain professional credibility. But what the shroud has done for the faith of individual team members is nearly as complex and intriguing as what they did to the shroud. Primarily, it has heightened interest among hard-bitten empiricists in what Science magazine called “the physics of miracles.” As Heller interviewed fellow team members for his book, he recalls one scientist who was a confirmed agnostic saying, “I’m still an agnostic, but now my antenna is up.”
The team consisted of six avowed agnostics, two Mormons, three Jews, four Catholics, and the rest Protestants, John Jackson, a theoretical physicist at the Air Force Academy, is the project’s leader and chief organizer, and he was inclined to believe the shroud was authentic from early on. In Heller’s book, Jackson reacts to his first glimpse of a three-dimensional projection of a shroud photograph by commenting, “we may be the first people in 2,000 years who know exactly how Christ looked in the tomb.”
This possibility—however remote—impelled the team members to keep at their task no matter what the costs. Heller recounts that his pastor warned him, “If this is of Christ, remember one thing: you’re going to run into Satan.” Heller dismissed this as “Old Testament bombast,” but recanted later on when he was besieged by controversy. He was accused of misappropriating public funds to pursue a “private religious hobby,” and the assistant attorney general of Connecticut, where Heller lives, was persuaded to take the matter to court. Heller says, “When this happened, I knew where it came from, and I knew whose side I was on.”
For their part, the team has been forced to conclude, according to Heller, that the shroud “is an extracanonical witness to what happened to Jesus Christ, whether the man in the shroud was Jesus or not.” Further, STURP’s findings corroborate the Gospel accounts.
Heller quotes from a forensic pathologist (a specialist in determining the cause of violent death) who analyzed the shroud image:
“This is a five-foot, eleven-inch male Caucasian weighing about 178 pounds. The lesions are as follows: beginning at the head, there are blood flows from numerous puncture wounds on the top and back of the scalp and forehead. The man has been beaten about the face, there is a swelling over one cheek, and he undoubtedly has a black eye. His nose tip is abraded, as would occur from a fall.… There is a wound in the left wrist, the right one being covered by the left hand.… On the back and on the front there are lesions which appear to be scourge marks.… There is a swelling of both shoulders, with abrasions indicating that something heavy and rough had been carried across the man’s shoulders within hours of death. On the right flank, a long, narrow blade of some type entered in an upward direction, pierced the diaphragm, penetrated into the thoracic cavity through the lung into the heart. This was a post-mortem event.… Finally, a spike had been driven through both feet.”
As Heller points out in his book, “Nothing in all the findings of the shroud crowd in three years contained a single datum that contravened the Gospel accounts. The stigmata on the body did not follow art or legend. They were of life. They were medically accurate evidence” of a genuine crucifixion.
If the shroud carries a message for today, Heller believes it is a reaffirmation of the gruesomeness of a “passion that has been sanitized through time.” Still, he insists, he wrote the book to allow readers to make up their own minds. “I figure the faithful don’t need it, the faithless won’t read it, but there may be a lot of people in between who would like to have some more evidence. It seems to be working out that way. The shroud has the ability to make people sit up and take notice.”
BETH SPRINGin Connecticut
