Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Shroud of Turin

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the 13th century, a French knight came forward and displayed what he claimed was the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Almost immediately, its authenticity was challenged by religious authorities. In the centuries that followed, it became an object of fascination, curiosity, veneration, and controversy. Finally, after centuries of conflicting opinions, scientists were allowed to access the cloth to date it. But even that didn't end the debate. Learn more about the Shrout of Turin and its history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. The Shroud of Turin is one of the most famous religious objects in the world. In a previous episode, I covered the topic of holy relics generally, but in this episode I want to zoom in on the

Starting point is 00:01:28 shroud because it's the best known object and because there's so much history and controversy surrounding it. So let's start this discussion by describing what the Shrout of Turin is. The Shrout of Turin is a linen cloth measuring roughly 4.4 by 1.1 meters or 14 feet inches by three feet seven inches. On it are front and back faint images of a man who appears to have suffered wounds consistent with the crucifixion of Jesus as described in the Bible. The image shows apparent marks on the wrist, feet inside, as well as numerous marks across the body suggesting scourging. There are some burn marks on the sheet which were caused by a fire in 1532. Moulton silver dripped onto the shroud burning a series of holes through it when it was folded. These holes

Starting point is 00:02:17 were then patched by nuns in the late 17th and early 19th centuries. Whenever you're dealing with any historical or archaeological object, one of the primary things that is analyzed is the provenance of the item. This is the documented history of the item and its chain of ownership or possession over time. The earliest documented mention of the Shroud of Turin dates back to the 14th century in France. All reliable historical trails begin there and know earlier. The shroud first appeared in the small French town of L'Réry, near the city of Tois, in the 1550s.

Starting point is 00:02:53 The earliest known owner of the shroud was Geoffroix de Channes, a French knight of noble reputation, who fought at Calais and Portier, and was close to King John II of France. Around 1353 to 1357, Geofferoy or his widow, arranged for the linen to be displayed in a newly built collegiate church in Leret that he had founded. Pilgrims came to see what was the first of the church in Lerais that he had founded. Pilgrims came to see what was described as the burial cloth of Jesus, bearing the faint front and back image of his body. Medallions and pilgrimage badges, produced in Leret, several of which have survived to the present day, depict a long cloth with a double image, confirming that the object on view was already

Starting point is 00:03:32 recognizable as the same modern shroud of Turin. The relic's authenticity was questioned immediately. Around 1389, Pierre D'Arcy, the Bishop of Trois, wrote a memorandum to Pope Clement the 7th at Avignon protesting the public exhibitions. Darcy stated that one of his predecessors, Bishop Henri de Portier, had already investigated the cloth years earlier and found that it was cunningly painted and that the artist had already confessed. He argued that the image was a human creation, not a miraculous imprint, and that the displays misled the faithful. Now here I should note that the Catholic Church's long-standing policy has always been to treat relics such as the crowd of Turin with respect. The official policy is one of respectful veneration, not unquestioned

Starting point is 00:04:22 belief or authentication. The church distinguishes between faith in what a relic represents and belief in the object's physical authenticity. The church will never come out and say that something associated with the life of Jesus is authentic because there's no way to possibly prove it. And another thing I should note, almost no organic material from the ancient world has ever survived. Of the millions and millions of items of clothing from the ancient world, nearly none has survived the present day. What few organic items that have survived usually come from a desert region such as Egypt, where dry conditions can preserve them in tombs. Likewise, a few leather items have been found buried in bogs without oxygen or on glaciers frozen in ice. Back to the providence of the shroud.

Starting point is 00:05:12 Geoffroix de Chani's family retained the cloth for nearly a century. His granddaughter, Margaret Deschani, inherited it, and after years of disputes with the church and local authorities over its possession, transferred it in 1453 to the House of Savoy, the ruling dynasty of a region, which today straddles modern-day France and Italy. From there, it was moved to Chamboree, where it was kept in the Savoy Chapel, and narrowly survived the 1532 fire, before finally being brought to Turin in 1513. where it became known as the Shrout of Turin. As I mentioned, one of the biggest problems with the shroud is the lack of provenance

Starting point is 00:05:51 before the mid-14th century. This period also corresponds to the sudden appearance of many relics claiming to be directly associated with Jesus. These include the Holy Blood of Wilsenac in northern Germany, the Crown of Thorns located in Paris, and the Vale of Veronica in Rome. I should mention one theory that does attempt to explain the Shrewan, shroud's providence prior to the 14th century. The theory claims that the shroud is actually the image of Edessa. That is, Odessa with an E, not Odessa with an O, which is a city in Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:06:25 The image of Edessa, also known as the Mandillion, was a revered Christian relic said to bear a miraculous image of Jesus Christ's face on a cloth. According to the traditional account, King Abgar the 5th of Edessa, which today is in southeastern Turkey, suffered from a serious ill. and wrote to Jesus asking him to heal him. Jesus supposedly replied that he could not come, but would send one of his disciples. Later, the disciple Thaddeus came to Odessa and cured the king. In later versions of the story, particularly from the fourth to six centuries, this narrative was expanded. Jesus himself was said to have wiped his face with a cloth, miraculously leaving his image imprinted upon it, and this cloth was then sent to King Abgar. The image of Edessa became

Starting point is 00:07:12 an object of pilgrimage and veneration. By the sixth century, it was credited with saving the city of Edessa from Persian and Arab sieges. It was later reportedly hidden inside a city wall, rediscovered in 544, and enshrined in the cathedral of Edessa. In 944, the Byzantine emperor Romanus Icapanos, obtained it from Edessa. They transferred it to Constantinople with great ceremony where it was housed in the imperial chapel of the Blacheney Palace. After the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantin, Antonopal in 1204, the relic disappeared from accorded history. Some modern theories proposed that the image of Edessa and the Shrout of Turin are actually the same object. Only the image of Edessa was folded so that only the facial portion was visible in antiquity.

Starting point is 00:08:00 It should also be noted that there is no evidence for any of this, and that nothing ever said that the image of Edessa was folded. The theory is just based on the fact that the image of Edessa is supposed to have disappeared, approximately 150 years before the Shroud of Turin suddenly appeared. The shroud remained in Turin for several centuries, where it was an object of regional importance. But the shroud became a worldwide sensation in 1898, when Italian photographer, Secondo Pia, produced the first photographs of the shroud,

Starting point is 00:08:31 whose negatives made the body image appear with striking clarity. Ownership of the shroud remained with the House of Savoy until Italy's former king, Umberto II, who was king for about one month in 1946, dequeathed it to the Holy See in 1983. However, custodianship remained with the Archbishop of Turin. The shroud is rarely displayed publicly. Major exhibitions occurred in 1898, 1931,

Starting point is 00:09:00 1933, 1978, 1998, 2008, 2000, 2010, and 2015, drawing millions of pilgrims and tourists. When I visited Turin, I went to the cathedral, and you could see where the shroud was stored, but not the shroud itself. The big question that has hung over the shroud since it first appeared back in the 14th century is, is it real? Or, more generally speaking, is it at least plausible that it could be real? In the 1970s, the Swiss criminologist Max Frey lifted dust from the shroud with sticky tape and reported dozens of pollen types, many from plants he said, were characteristic.

Starting point is 00:09:42 of the Levant and Anatolia in Turkey. He argued that this supported an eastern origin of the shroud. However, later electron microscopy of adhesive samples from the face region of the shroud only revealed a small number of pollen grains, insufficient to draw any conclusions. The biggest scientific inquiry into the shroud took place in 1978. The Shroud of Turin Research Project, or Stirrup, received about 120 hours of direct access to the Shrown, and ran a large battery of non-destructive tests. These included high-resolution photography across the spectrum, reflectance and fluorescent spectrography in the ultraviolet visible and infrared wavelengths,

Starting point is 00:10:25 X-ray radiography, thermography, microchemical tests, and adhesive tape sampling of fibers for later lab work. The stirrup team reached several conclusions in their report. One was that no conventional paint was used for the body image. they reported that the image color resides in a very thin layer on the outermost linen fibers and did not detect binding media consistent with painted images. Data supported the claim that typical pigments or stains of that period did not produce the sepia body image.

Starting point is 00:10:58 That doesn't mean that something wasn't used, it only means that it wasn't a typical type of paint of the period. Second, using the tape samples, Stroop reported positive microchemical tests for heemned derivatives and bilirubin in the reddish areas and argued that the blood stains were consistent with blood rather than paint. Other stirrup and independent papers characterized multiple iron forms and noted heem-related signals in the blood areas. I should also note that there was descent within the stirrup team. Microscopy specialist Walter C. McCrone examined tape samples and argued that the body image and blood were actually iron oxide and vermilion particles in a protein

Starting point is 00:11:39 binder. Or in other words, it was a medieval painting. However, the majority of stirrup scientists rejected his interpretation based on their spectroscopy and microchemistry. This agreement has persisted in the literature ever since. The big test, however, was conducting carbon 14 dating on the cloth itself. Small samples from a corner of the shroud were taken for destructive testing. In 1988, the samples were sent to three accelerator mass spectrometry labs, one in Oxford, England, one in Arizona, and one in Zurich, Switzerland. Accelerator mass spectrometry directly counts the number of carbon-14 atoms relative to stable carbon-12 and carbon-13 atoms using a particle accelerator.

Starting point is 00:12:26 This allows dating of much smaller samples with much greater precision. In 1989, the three labs jointly published with their findings in the journal Nature. They concluded that the fiber samples from the shroud can be dated to between the years 1260 and 1390. The same approximate dates as when the shroud first appeared. I should also note that every finding and every test that was run by the stirrup team has been criticized by someone. Some people are adamant that the shroud is real and others are just as adamant that it is a mid-eval creation. Critics of the Carbon 14 tests have claimed that the tested corner may have been part of a medieval repair and not representative of the original cloth. Others claim that biogenic material, smoke or oil

Starting point is 00:13:16 may have skewed the carbon ratio towards a younger date. One problem is that even in 1978, the time researchers were given to examine the shroud was extremely limited. Since then, research techniques have improved dramatically, but the same level of access has never been given sense. All of the current evidence, from scientific data to the lack of provenance, indicates that the Shrout of Turin was probably manufactured sometime in the 14th century. The sheer odds of anything made out of linen surviving for 1,300 years, without being mentioned once, despite being the most holy relic in all of Christendom, only to randomly show up in the

Starting point is 00:13:57 middle of France are highly improbable. However, I would also have to say the evidence isn't one hundred. 100% conclusive yet. But even if it is a creation of the Middle Ages, and even if it was created with the intent to deceive people, I don't know if that necessarily takes anything away from it. It just means that whoever made it inadvertently created one of the greatest religious works of art in history. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

Starting point is 00:14:28 The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make the show. this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Shroud of Turin

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.