Turin Shroud May Be Genuine After All

By Uwe Siemon-Netto - United Press International

From The Middle East Times Archive

The Turin Shroud bearing the features of a crucified man may
well be the cloth that enveloped the body of Christ, a
renowned textile historian told United Press International
Tuesday.

Disputing inconclusive carbon-dating tests suggesting the
shroud hailed from medieval times, Swiss specialist
Mechthild Flury-Lemberg said it could be almost 2,000 years
old.

Perhaps even more important is what Flury-Lemberg saw when
she examined the back of the shroud - the first researcher
ever to do so. While it bore bloodstains, there were no
mysterious marks comparable to those on the front of the
cloth.

These marks show an amazingly detailed picture of a bearded
man who had been beaten about the body, crowned with thorns
and pierced with nails through the wrists and the feet.

On the side of the body's outline there appeared to be an
image of a wound, which was perhaps the one caused by a
Roman soldier's spear when he tried to find out if the
crucified Jesus was alive or dead.

Flury-Lemberg, a Hamburg-born scholar now living in Berne,
Switzerland, did preservation work on the shroud this
summer. She said the outline of the body looked somewhat
like burn marks, but only in the top 2 millimeters of the
cloth.

Some theologians believe this may have occurred as Christ's
body exited the shroud during his resurrection.
Flury-Lemberg was quick to point out, though, this could
never be scientifically proven. The same applied to the
question if the tortured and crucified man buried in the
shroud was Jesus.

Flury-Lemberg investigated the cloth this summer as she
separated it in from the Dutch linen cloistered nuns in
ChambŽry in Savoy had sewn it to after a fire in 1534.

She explained the linen's progressing oxidization had been
endangering the shroud. As she separated the two textiles,
she removed "spoonfuls of soot." She cleaned the shroud
before it was sewn to a new cloth.

Pollen analysis and the shroud's measurements suggested it
originated in the Middle East and not in medieval Europe.
Flury-Lemberg described its quality as "stunningly noble,
with an almost invisible seam."

She related she discovered identical forms of weaving and
high-quality sewing on textiles found at Masada, the ancient
fortress in southeastern Israel. They hailed from the year
AD 73.

According to the Berne scholar, other first-century cloths
found in the Red Sea region showed weaving patterns similar
to those of the Turin Shroud.

"All these things are mosaics that don't prove anything
scientifically," she insisted.

"However, this cloth left a radiant expression on me,"
Flury-Lemberg told UPI. She made it clear she was not a
Roman Catholic but a Lutheran, "but this shroud is not just
a Catholic relic but a treasure of all Christendom."

She said regardless of this impression, she has had to work
on the Shroud dispassionately "like a surgeon operating on
his own wife."

Flury-Lemberg questioned the relevance of findings by other
researchers who discovered pollen and dust traceable to the
Middle Ages on the cloth.

"Of course it had such particles on it," she said, "after
all, the Shroud was exhibited a great deal in those days."

Historian Karlheinz Dietz of Wuerzburg University in Germany
shares Flury-Lemberg's doubts of the 1988 carbon-dating
results claiming that the cloth was made between 1260 and
1290.

In an interview with the Germany daily, Die Welt, he stated,
"If you believe that the cloth hails from the Middle Ages
then you must also believe that a man looking exactly like
Jesus ... was whipped, crowned with thorns, crucified and
then placed on linen imported from the Middle East and
sprinkled with aloe and myrrh, and that on top of all he had
invented monumental photography."

Dietz was referring to the discovery of the Christ-like
image by Italian photographer Secundo Pia in 1889.

"On the Shroud we see a genuine 'photography' that
originated long before photography was invented," Dietz
said.

Scientists can't say what might have caused this ancient
"photography" of a Christ-like figure. Many Catholic and
Protestant theologians do not doubt, though, it was the
Resurrection. If it was that, test results show it must have
occurred no later than 36 hours after the dead man's bloody
body had been wrapped in this expensive shroud.

This too, corresponds to the Biblical narrative.