History's Greatest Mysteries (2020) s05e04 Episode Script
The Shroud of Turin
Tonight,
its haunting images captivated
millions around the world.
Many people believe this is
the cloth that wrapped
Jesus of Nazareth
after his crucifixion.
It is a bloodstained image
that is forensically accurate.
It's an anatomically
perfect human being.
But is the Shroud of
Turin a genuine holy relic
or something very different?
The image on the shroud
reflects what the Bible says
about the beating, the torture,
and the crucifixion of Christ.
If you look at
the image carefully,
you'll see some inconsistencies.
Millions of people die.
We have nothing else like this
for any other human being.
Now, we explore the top theories
behind the origin of
one of the world's
most mysterious objects.
We don't know how
this image was created.
It's not painted.
There's no way to tell how this
image ends up on the shroud.
To replicate the shroud image,
you would need 14,000 lasers
all going off instantaneously
at the same time.
How did this image come to be?
And is it truly
an image of Jesus?
Jerusalem, 33 AD.
According to the gospels,
after years of preaching
and gathering disciples
throughout the Holy Land,
the life of Jesus of Nazareth
reaches a pivotal moment.
For many Christians,
the story of Holy Week
begins with Jesus on Sunday
entering into
Jerusalem in triumph.
Here he is in the most
important city for Jews.
He's in this temple,
the sacred place
for Jewish worship,
and he's appalled by
what he finds there.
The gospels have Jesus
going into the temple complex
and overturning the tables
of the money changers there.
He's condemning the abuse
of people that are poor.
He's condemning
the abuse of people
that might want to go to the
temple to actually worship.
He says, "You've taken something
that is holy and beautiful,
and you've made this
a den of thieves."
When your control is
being threatened, you act.
And so what the
aristocratic priest do
is they bring Jesus
in for a hearing.
And they're not
so much interested
in hearing what he has to say
but imposing charges on him
that he was threatening
to damage the temple.
When Jesus is arrested,
they argue that he
has disrupted Judaism,
that he is claiming to be God
and hasn't been mindful
of secular authority.
What Jesus is doing in Jerusalem
is absolutely upsetting
the status quo,
and they're just not sure
what to do with this guy.
The Jewish aristocratic
leadership,
they are not the
most senior members
in the status quo
power of Jerusalem,
the Romans are,
so they need to take Jesus
to the civil authority.
The Jewish
authorities arrest Jesus
and hand him over to the Romans.
The Roman governor,
Pontius Pilate,
declares that Jesus's claim
to be king amounts to treason
and sentences him to
death by crucifixion.
Crucifixion is not
a noble form of death.
Crucifixion is brutal.
He was to carry his own cross
to transport the
instrument of his death
to the location
where he would die.
His hands are
nailed to the cross.
His feet are nailed
to the cross.
Above his head is this phrase,
"Jesus of Nazareth,
The King of the Jews,"
crowned not with a
crown but with thorns.
This is partly punishment.
This is partly to
humiliate Jesus.
The Romans use
crucifixion as a deterrent
and what better deterrent
than one that causes death
in a slow, agonizing,
and painful way.
For the Romans, this is
a public way of saying,
"If you mess with us, if you
mess with the Roman Empire,
this is what will happen to you.
You will die and you will
die horribly and publicly."
It takes roughly six
hours for Jesus to die.
Once he's dead,
he's taken off the cross
and wrapped in cloth
and taken to a borrowed tomb.
Jesus' death at three
o'clock in the afternoon
means that burial needs to
occur very, very quickly
because the setting of the
sun and the start of Sabbath
is going to be on them
very, very quickly.
So there's a sense of urgency
about moving Jesus' body
from the execution site
to the burial site.
There could be no work
done on the Sabbath,
so there was a rush to get
him enshrouded and entombed.
And that is why, of course,
the women were returning on
Sunday morning after the Sabbath
so that they could finish
the anointing of his body.
What happens is, of course,
the great event in
Christianity, the resurrection.
Jesus isn't there.
His body isn't there.
He has been resurrected.
All that remains
is the linen cloth
that once covered the body.
Jesus's burial cloth
aren't mentioned
again in the gospels
and what happens to
them is a mystery.
The next chapter in
the story of the shroud
doesn't happen for more
than a thousand years.
The next time we see it
showing up in history is 1355,
where a Christian knight who
has been part of the Crusades
obtains this cloth,
brings it back to
his home church,
and he claims that it
is the burial shroud
that held the body of Jesus
before his resurrection.
Because this knight
fought in the Crusades,
there was reason for
folks to believe
that he may have been
able to secure this cloth
in the Holy Land and
bring it to his church.
There's no good
reason to suspect
he wasn't able to find something
while he was there in
Jerusalem, in the Holy Land.
There's obviously a direct
connection between this man
and the treasures that
he may have discovered
while he was in those Crusades.
The knight is Geoffroi de Charny
and a close examination
of the cloth
seems to confirm his story.
The shroud is roughly
14 feet long, 3 feet wide,
and it contains the image of
a man who has been tortured.
You see his front
as well as his back.
And what really captures
the imagination of folks
is that the shroud
seems to contain
a tremendous amount of blood
in areas that would
suggest crucifixion.
The image seems to suggest that
this person had been whipped
and the blood around the
head seems to suggest
something placed on the head,
perhaps along the lines
of the crown of thorns
the Bible says was placed
on the head of Jesus.
Wounds on the wrist,
wounds on the feet suggest
a narrative very similar
to what we have been told about
the crucifixion of Christ.
The shroud is
the subject of veneration
and speculation
for many centuries.
This cloth comes
into knowledge in 1355.
It stays in the Charny family
for about a hundred years.
Eventually, it's sold
to the House of Savoy,
which has jurisdiction ruling
over what is now
France and Italy.
The Savoy family
actually provides
the perfect historical construct
for us to piece together
most of the documented
history of the shroud.
The Savoy family came into
possession of the cloth in 1453.
The Savoy family
would take it with them
and display it in different
churches over the years,
particularly when they
were still in France.
When they moved it
to Turin in 1578,
that sort of became the seed
of the Savoy family's power.
When the last of
the House of Savoy,
the last king of Italy,
Umberto II, dies in 1983,
he wills the shroud
to the living Pope,
who was at the time,
Pope John Paul II.
It was with the stipulation
that the shroud would be
the property of the Pope,
whoever the Pope is,
as an individual,
and would not belong to the
institutional Catholic Church.
More than 600 years
after the shroud first appears,
scientists are granted a
chance to uncover the answers.
The shroud itself was moved
amidst conditions
of great secrecy.
It was done at midnight,
no cameras were allowed in,
and the Roman Catholic priests
who are the normal custodians
took a solemn oath
afterwards that the cloth,
which was placed in
the display cabinet,
was indeed the Holy Shroud.
The Shroud of Turin
Research Project, or STURP,
was a group of 33
scientists and researchers
who came together in 1978
to perform an in-depth
scientific examination
of the Shroud of Turin.
In their report, the
STURP team concludes
that there was no scientific
explanation for the image
that could be accounted for
by any known scientific means.
In the decades since,
hundreds of scientists have
studied the data collected
by the Shroud of Turin
Research Project,
but one professor has
proposed a unique explanation
for the appearance of
the image on the shroud.
Giovanni Fazio is a researcher
out of Messina in Italy,
and in 2015, he comes up
with this really
interesting hypothesis
that maybe what's caused the
image to appear on the shroud
would've been on the body as
it was prepared for burial.
According to Fazio's theory,
the process begins in
the hours after Jesus
is lowered from the cross.
Jesus was Jewish
and traditionally
in Jewish burials,
you should be buried
within 24 hours of death.
So what you did was
you used substances,
oils, ointments, myrrh.
You wrapped the body in cloth
partly to avoid this to smell,
partly to counter the fact
you've had a decomposing body
in the hot sun.
A biblical passage
describes what happened
with Jesus's body.
The gospel
according to St. John
is the one that gives
us the most detail.
In John's gospel,
there's an interesting
character, Nicodemus,
who brings about 75
pounds of oil, aloes,
to help prepare Jesus's
body for its burial.
This is enough to
bury several kings.
But how could this oil
have created the image seen
on the Shroud of Turin?
It is possible that there
can be residues left on cloths
from certain ointments or oils,
particularly ones that
are very, very dense,
very thick in their composition.
One of the really interesting
things that Fazio raises
is that if you
look at the shroud,
the image on the back
is a little bit darker.
This makes sense,
according to his theory,
that the person being
laid on their back,
the oils on the back would've
had a lot more chance
to absorb into the
fabric of the shroud.
It seems like
a logical explanation,
but some believe Fazio's theory
contradicts the extensive
testing done in the 1970s.
That Shroud of
Turin Research Project
relied heavily upon film
photography, use of x-ray,
use of microscopic imaging
technologies as well,
to examine individual fibers.
They were able to
say from the x-ray,
from the spectroscopy,
from all the other
analysis that they've done,
there's no evidence of
any kind of oil or perfume
on the shroud.
In 1532, there's a
fire that breaks out
in the chapel where
the shroud was held.
This is what Fazio thinks is
the reason why there's no oil,
that given the heat, given
what happened with the fire,
that those oils and perfumes
would've evaporated.
The fire may have
changed the shroud
in ways that are picked up
by the scientific testing
and warp the findings.
Despite Fazio's explanation,
other experts remain skeptical.
A problem with the theory
is that we do have cloths
from that time period
where these oils were used,
but they don't make an
image on that shroud.
The Shroud of Turin has been
an object of fascination
since its emergence
in the mid-14th century.
The Savoy family gets the
shroud from the Charny family.
In 1532, there's a
fire that breaks out
in the chapel where
the shroud was held.
It was rescued from the fire
and the image itself
was not damaged.
But the shroud was folded
into a metal reliquary
and so the heat from the fire
left the parallel
set of scorch marks
that run the length
of the shroud.
And the Savoy family
regularly displayed it.
They would hang it from the
balcony of their royal palace.
They displayed it
at royal weddings.
And more importantly, for
the provenance of it,
every time it was
publicly displayed,
they commissioned an artwork.
The Savoy family's involvement
kept fascination with the
shroud alive for centuries,
but the origins of its ghostly
image remain a mystery.
Burial oil stains could
be one possible cause.
But in 2003, one
of the scientists
on the 1978 Shroud of
Turin Research Project
suggests a new possibility.
Dr. Ray Rogers is one of the
original STURP team members,
brilliant chemist who was with
Los Alamos National
Laboratories,
and he had an interesting theory
that this could be the
product of a natural process.
According to Rogers,
the key is a phenomenon we
experience when we cook.
Dr. Rogers thinks that
the image may be caused
by the Maillard reaction,
which has to do with a
chemical reaction that happens
when amino acids and
sugars interact with heat.
We see an example of
the Maillard reaction
when bread is baked,
the sugars, the yeast, the
amino acids in the bread
combined with the
heat of the baking
to form that nice, crispy,
brown crust on the bread.
The Maillard reaction
is very similar
to toasting a piece of bread.
You get a different coloration
on perhaps the very
top of the bread.
But you haven't done
anything to change,
in a permanent, lasting
way, the bread itself.
According to Rogers,
all the necessary elements
would have been present
following Jesus's crucifixion.
A few hours after death,
the body starts to break
down and decomposes,
and there's well over
30 kinds of amino acids
that are released from
the body after death.
After you have these
amino acid compounds
coming off the body,
what you then need is the sugar
that has to combine to
create this reaction.
Rogers believed that sugar
comes from the cloth itself.
Rogers and his team,
when they were looking at the
composition of the shroud,
realized that in ancient times,
they would've used
flowers to make the linen,
and this particular kind
of flower, Saponaria,
that has a fairly
high sugar content.
So the sugar that
the amino acids
would've been in touch with
would've been in the fabric
of the shroud itself.
Rogers had a theory where
he suggested that the cloth
was soaked in a solution
from the soapweed plant,
and it acts as a
preservative and a fungicide
but it would leave a very
thin sugar compound layer
all over the cloth.
With two of
the three conditions met,
Roger's next turns
to identifying
a possible source of
heat in the cave.
After death, when
a body decomposes,
you see a temperature spike.
It may go as high
as 106 degrees,
especially if the person
has died of dehydration.
What's interesting here
is that we know that Jesus
would've been dehydrated
from his time on the cross,
so it makes sense that his body
would've been able to reach
that kind of
temperature after death.
There would've been
just enough heat
combining with
amino acids released
from that decomposing body
mixing with the
sugars in the shroud
to create that brown image.
Rogers and his
team conduct an experiment
to test the hypothesis.
Dr. Rogers realized you
can't use modern linen,
which is bleached,
which is treated,
so he was able to find
people who used techniques
that go back 2,000 years
to create the kind of cloth
that would've been used
at the time of Jesus's burial.
Using cloth that was made
in that traditional way,
Rogers subjected it
to ammonia vapors,
which would've simulated gases
that would've been
coming off of a body.
They turned up the heat
to about 106 degrees
and they were able to get
the same kind of darker color
that shows up on
the Shroud of Turin.
Biophysicist John DeSalvo
contends there could be
another agent at work:
human sweat.
John DeSalvo realized
that someone who died in
the way that Jesus did,
his body would've been
covered with sweat.
And that's where you get
the organic compounds
that are able to make
these kinds of images.
This also helps to explain
some of the coloration
on the shroud,
the darker areas were where
the sweat was in direct contact
with the shroud.
There's a correlation
between the density
or the darkness of the
image on the shroud
and the distance it
would've been from the body.
So whether it was
direct contact,
the image on the shroud,
tip of the nose,
top of the hands,
the image is darkest.
As the distance increases up
to about 3 1/2 centimeters,
the image grows more faint.
So what you have is the
sweat sort of evaporating,
not literally being
absorbed into the shroud,
so you have this
interesting image
of these light and dark areas.
But critics say
there are still many
unanswered questions.
The Maillard reaction hypothesis
is interesting and intriguing
in that it can
reproduce an image.
It leaves an after effect,
but it does not produce
something that is complex
as the image on the shroud.
On the shroud, you see
the detail of the hair,
the eyes, the areas of the face
that weren't directly
touching the shroud.
You don't get that
kind of detail
with this sort of reaction.
Millions of people die.
Millions of people
have been enshrouded,
their bodies decompose.
We have nothing else like this
for any other human being.
Jesus's burial
cloth is lost for centuries,
until it turns up with
Geoffroi de Charny
in medieval France.
We do not have a record of
de Charny acquiring the shroud.
We do not know how he
came to possess it.
We know that he comes
from a chivalrous family.
There have been a lot of
historical assumptions made
that perhaps he had
been a crusader.
For centuries,
it's assumed de Charny found
the shroud in Jerusalem.
In 1997, two scholars bring
that assumption into question.
Robert Lomas and Christopher
Knight have a theory
that yes, the shroud is
evidence of a crucifixion.
Yes, it is a burial cloth,
but not for the
figure you think.
After the Christians
reconquered Jerusalem
during the Crusades,
you have the creation
of the Knights Templar.
This, in order to help
protect Christian pilgrims
as they're going
to the Holy Land
to visit these places that are
so important to Christians.
The Templars took their name
from where their
barracks were located,
on the grounds of Solomon's
temple in Jerusalem.
And after the first Crusade,
they actually became
a quite wealthy order.
They developed a
complex banking system
and developed a network of
fortresses across Europe.
They were powerful and
reported only to the Pope.
But by the 14th century,
the Templar's power and
prestige are declining
and they've made
a powerful enemy:
King Philip IV of France.
King Philip IV, who was
indebted to the Knights Templar,
had borrowed money.
Rather than paying it back,
argued that they were heretics
that did not practice
the faith properly
and that the Pope
should end them.
Philip is, I think, concerned
that the Knights Templar
are so powerful,
they're wealthy.
Moreover, he's indebted to them.
He's gone for the Knights
Templar to get money
to help support his
wars against England.
So he owes the
Knights Templar money
and he sees them as a threat.
What better way to
get rid of the threat
and also to cancel your debt
than to declare
them as heretics?
In 1307,
King Philip has Templar
leader, Jacques de Molay,
arrested on blasphemy
and heresy charges.
de Molay is forced to face
the French Inquisition.
King Philip thought
this punishment should
involve crucifixion.
The inquisitors would've
done to Jacque de Molay
what had been done to Jesus,
that he's stripped naked,
he's scourged, he's whipped,
the crown of thorns
put on his head.
But Robert
Lomas and Christopher Knight
see evidence of something
different in the shroud.
The position of the
arms is not identical
to the description of how
Jesus is hung on the cross.
The legs are also
positioned differently.
The book's authors hypothesized
that the pattern on the shroud
isn't from someone
who's crucified
in a normal kind of way,
with their arms
stretched outright.
It's someone who's
crucified very differently.
And in this case,
the pattern seems to match
someone who's crucified
with their right arm
above their head bent
and their left arm
stretched out on the side
as if they're placed on a door.
And this would be the
convenient way to do this
if you don't have a cross.
The crucifixion of the
leader of the Knights Templar
was not meant to kill him.
It was meant to
produce enough pain
to get him to admit he was
a heretic and to recant.
And it did just that.
After the confession,
the inquisitors have
one final humiliation
left for de Molay.
For the inquisitor,
wrapping this knight in a shroud
was meant to amplify
the embarrassment,
to amplify the humiliation.
He's left wrapped in
that shroud for 24 hours,
long enough for the
blood and the sweat
to soak in to the shroud
and produce the image
that we now see.
Despite his ordeal,
de Molay lives
another seven years,
only to be burned at the stake
for renouncing his confession.
But what happened to the shroud?
Jacques de Molay
is tortured in 1307.
The hypothesis from the authors
is that there's a
Templar, Jean de Charny,
who takes this
shroud and keeps it.
What's interesting
is Jean de Charny
is the grandfather
of Geoffroi de Charny,
who's the one that
we know in 1355,
first brings the shroud
to our attention.
The haunting image
on the Shroud of Turin
has been an enigma since the day
it was first publicly
unveiled 700 years ago.
And while millions are convinced
it's the imprinted
image of Jesus,
the shroud's authenticity
remains in debate.
Historians often
cite one big question
as a reason for doubt:
why was it missing for so long?
The 14th century is a long
way away from the event itself,
in the first century.
You know, you're talking
about 1,300 years.
You would think, if this
were important to the story,
it was important to
communicating that story,
it would've shown up somewhere.
And it simply doesn't.
Skeptics also note
that the shroud may not
match the description
of Jesus's burial
cloth in the Bible.
In the earliest accounts,
we do have cloth mentioned,
and not in the
singular but plural.
We have cloths
that are mentioned.
When you're looking
at the Shroud of Turin,
you're looking at one
long piece of cloth,
14 feet long, that
covers the entire body.
But these would've been
several pieces of cloth,
according to the
biblical accounts.
And there
appear to be inconsistencies
in the imagery itself.
The front and the
back don't line up.
If this were actually
the imprint of Jesus,
wouldn't those line up?
If the shroud was
wrapped over Jesus
and you have the image of
the front and the back,
why is it these images
are two different lengths?
It means that his front
side is a different length
than his backside.
There is
one possible explanation,
one that would shatter
a long-held illusion.
The sudden appearance
of the shroud
coincides with a period in
which relics are important.
You have all sorts of relics,
you have all sorts of churches
that have things on display
that they claim to
connect back to Jesus
or the early
Christian community.
Relics play an important
part in the church.
People come to give
money to visit these,
people donate for this,
and so this is a source
of revenue for the church.
But we know that
relics can be faked.
If you stood to
benefit financially
from relics in general,
you stood to benefit
extraordinarily
from a relic like
the Shroud of Turin.
I think that it is proper
for anyone to be suspicious
about any relic that has a
footprint in the Middle Ages.
In an age when you
could go into a pasture
and pick up the bone of a cow
and pass it off as
the femur of a saint,
I think we are right to be
suspicious about anything
that we can even link
to the Middle Ages.
When the French
knight, Geoffroi de Charny,
first appears with
the shroud about 1355,
it immediately goes on
display in his church.
If you wanted to
encourage pilgrims
to come to your church,
to come to your abbey,
to come to your village,
it was important that
you have a relic.
Hence, the proliferation of
relics in an age when perhaps,
I think it's fair to say,
that in many occasions,
the supply might have
outstripped the demand.
If relics are
like trading cards,
they're not all
of the same value.
And there are some relics
that are going to
be of minor value
and some that are of
extraordinarily major value,
and I gotta put a relic
like the Shroud of Turin
at the top of that list.
Even at the outset,
not everyone's convinced
it's the real thing.
In 1389, Bishop Pierre d'Arcis,
of the Diocese of
Troyes in France,
writes to Pope
Clement VII in Avignon
that he knows that this shroud
that is being displayed in Liray
is in fact an artwork.
He claims he knows the artists.
He claims that this
is an exhibition
that needs to be
stopped immediately.
He's saying that
this is a forgery,
that an artist has
confessed to painting
this image on the shroud.
d'Arcis is scandalized,
and his letter to Pope
Clement talks about
how scandalized he is
by these pilgrims
who've been swindled,
where this money has
been rung out of them
under false pretenses.
In the 1300s, crucifixion
paintings were quite popular,
so there's no
surprise here to think
that someone might
have painted this image
and that it would've been used
to raise funds for the church.
Was the Bishop right?
Is the shroud a painting?
It will take nearly 600
years to get an answer.
The Shroud of Turin
Research Project
was given access to
the shroud in 1978
and they were allowed to
analyze it 'round the clock.
After a battery of tests,
the research team
releases its findings.
Painting, in the
High Middle Ages
and certainly by the time
of the Late Middle Ages,
was a highly developed craft
and we know a lot about
the pigments and dyes
that were used in
those processes.
But the Shroud of
Turin Research Project
demonstrated conclusively,
in peer reviewed science,
that there is not a trace of a
pigment, or a dye, or a paint
on that linen anywhere.
The research team concluded
that they don't know how
this image got there.
It wasn't paint, the
bloodstains are real.
They don't know how
that image got there.
They don't know how
the blood got there.
In an age when relics did
not have to be sophisticated,
in an age when people
did not ask the questions
that the modern mind asks,
why did this image have
to be that sophisticated?
And how, importantly,
did that image get there
in the first place?
For centuries,
visitors to the Shroud of Turin
were only able to
see a faint image
of what is allegedly Jesus
after the crucifixion.
But with the advent
of modern photography,
the shroud would reveal
yet another secret.
Barrie Schwortz was the official
documenting photographer
for the Shroud of Turin
Research Project in 1978.
So in its early days,
there were people of faith
who were aware of the shroud.
Science, on the other hand,
I don't think was
very interested
until 1898 when the first
photograph of the shroud
was permitted.
Italian lawyer and amateur
photographer named Secondo Pia
made this first
photograph of the shroud
and that ushered
in the beginning
of the scientific
era of shroud study.
When Secondo Pia
develops his photographic
plates of the Shroud of Turin,
he's shocked by what he sees.
Of course, not
knowing that it was
going to spark a controversy,
he went into the dark room
to process his glass plate.
This is 19th
century photography,
so we're talking about
a prolonged process.
And it was that moment
when he processed that
glass plate and held it up
that the image on the
shroud itself is a negative
and when inverted,
he had a much more
natural-looking
result in his hands
than what was on
the cloth itself.
It's one of those really
interesting paradoxes
that if you look at the shroud,
you don't see the detail.
If you look in the negative,
you see the detail of
the face, of the beard.
It's almost as if this
was meant to be seen
in a photograph of the image,
not the image itself.
It's as if the shroud itself
is a photographic negative,
a concept that boggles the mind.
There's no precedent for it.
There isn't another image
that I've seen in my 50-year
professional experience
that even comes close to
having these properties.
We know that photography
didn't exist until
about 1826 or 1827.
Consequently, there was no way
that someone in medieval times
could have created a
photographic image.
On the other hand, artists
back in medieval times
did use a technique
called camera obscura.
So what they did was they
would make a little hole
at one end of the room
and put, say, a canvas
at the other end,
and the hole acted like a lens
to focus what was outside
that camera obscura onto that
and then the artist could
then paint or illustrate
what the camera was pointing at.
Camera obscura is ancient.
I mean, we do know it
from the ancient texts.
It is a very simple principle.
The earliest evidence we
have of a camera obscura
is by a Chinese writer, Mo Tzu.
The ancient Greeks
knew about this.
And so in the medieval world,
certainly even in
the first century,
people would've
known about this.
In 1993, art
historian Nicholas Allen
proposes a radical theory:
a medieval forger could have
used an ancient technique
known as camera obscure
to create the world's
first photograph.
In order to make the
cloth photo sensitive,
you would have to coat
it with silver nitrate.
You would've coated
the cloth with this
and then when light
hits the cloth,
it would expose the silver
nitrate and leave a dark pattern
like the negative
on a photograph.
Theoretically,
the chemicals needed
to produce an image
were available in
the Middle Ages.
But when analyzed, the cloth
was missing one vital element.
We were looking for silver
nitrate on the shroud,
and we could detect
one part per billion,
and we didn't find any silver
anywhere on the shroud.
Nicholas Allen says he soaked
his cloth in a silver solution
to create his
light-sensitive emulsion,
so they would be
permeated with silver.
We found zero silver
anywhere on the shroud.
What would
prompt a medieval inventor
to create an image
like the shroud?
There's no evidence that
anyone used the camera obscura
in the fashion that
Nicholas Allen proposes.
And if he had,
I think we'd be seeing a
lot more examples of it.
Art history itself tells us
that this is not something
that some medieval artist
would've even thought to
do or even cared to do
when a simpler attempt at
depicting Jesus on a cross
would've been plenty acceptable
by everybody in the
medieval world anyway.
What's the motivation
for creating something that's
a pious fraud on the public?
I can make money from it.
I become more prestigious
because of it.
I have a souvenir
that no one else has.
There's a lot of things
that could motivate
the development of something
like the Shroud of Turin.
Did they? That's the question.
In 1988, the
Shroud of Turin undergoes
what many consider to be
a definitive analysis.
These carbon dating tests make
headlines around the world.
They indicate the cloth
was made between 1260
and just before French
knight, de Charny,
brought it to his church.
But not everyone
believes the findings.
There was a fire in 1532
and there was repair
done to the shroud
by the Poor Clares,
this order of nuns.
Could this have
contaminated the shroud?
Is this carbon dating
not of the actual shroud
but of the material from 1532?
And in early 2022,
new evidence centered
around the age of the cloth
may support that belief.
Researchers present a
surprising observation.
They had about a dozen
samples of other linen cloths
dating all the way
back to 5000 BC
and they could assess the
amount of natural aging
in all these other cloths.
And the only cloth that
had a comparable amount
of natural aging as
fibers from the shroud
was taken from Masada,
which is in Israel,
circa first century.
And so this then becomes a
very strong piece of evidence
that suggests, just
based on natural aging,
that the cloth is far
older than the 700 years
ascribed by the carbon lapse.
That leaves us with a
very real possibility,
we could be talking about
a first century cloth.
And in 2011,
a finding by Italian physicist,
Dr. Paolo Di Lazzaro,
may offer believers
further support.
In 2011, he published
in a peer reviewed journal
how they've been experimenting
with ultraviolet excimer lasers.
These are high powered,
these are industrial lasers.
These are not some
kind of pointer.
And they determined
a 40 nanosecond burst
achieves the very same
depth and coloration
as we see on the shroud.
This experimentally
shows how the image
could indeed be the
result of light.
But it would take
an incredible amount of power
to generate the light needed
to create the shroud image
in a split second.
To replicate the shroud image,
you would need 14,000 lasers
all going off instantaneously,
at the same time.
I have to remind everybody,
lasers weren't invented
until about 1946.
So something of that
nature in medieval times,
or even in the first century,
just couldn't exist.
But if the shroud is truly
from the first century,
an event from the Bible
might reveal an answer.
Just before Jesus makes
his last trip to Jerusalem,
he takes Peter, James,
and John with him
up on a high mountain
and is transfigured before them.
Some turn to the Bible
and point to the
transfiguration of Christ
that took place when Christ
was praying with the disciples.
They read scripture
and they highlight the
passage that indicates
that his face was
shining as the sun
and his clothes
became bright white.
In the biblical account,
Jesus is transfigured into
a form of energy or light.
His disciples describe
him as his face glowing.
His clothes dazzling white.
Di Lazzaro hypothesizes
that the transfiguration's
burst of light and energy
could have repeated itself
during another important
event in Christianity.
Following his transfiguration,
Jesus tells his disciples
to not tell anyone
until the son of man
has risen from the dead.
So this clearly foreshadows
something that is
going to happen,
something that the disciples
are going to see again.
For many believers,
the idea is that
this is a snapshot,
this is literally the moment
of Jesus's resurrection.
He's wrapped in this
cloth, he gets resurrected.
There's this phenomenal
amount of energy
that must've been
released in that.
Is that what creates this image?
The marks on the cloth
are not the result
of a conventional type of heat
or a light that
would generate heat.
For instance, it's not
like you would get a scorch
on an ironing
board, for instance.
It's more analogous to a light
that might be from a laser.
Now, we know that the burns
clearly are the result of heat
because they fluoresce
under ultraviolet light.
But the body image
does not fluoresce,
so it looks like a
scorch but it's not.
For di Lazzaro,
he stopped short of
saying this is a miracle.
But of course, this
is extraordinary
because you don't have
that kind of ultraviolet
light technology needed
in the first century.
So if this actually
has happened,
this is inexplicable.
Christians will argue
that that kind of energy
was actually produced
through the resurrection.
For them, the amount of
energy needed isn't an issue.
The resurrection was
such a powerful event
that it could produce
what science cannot.
For many
Christians, the Shroud of Turin
is proof of the cornerstone
in their faith,
the death and
resurrection of Jesus.
For Christians, this
is an important symbol.
It speaks to the death
and resurrection of Jesus,
the center point,
the fundamental
meaning of the gospel.
Their argument is, until
science can tell them
how this was produced,
there is good reason to
believe that it is authentic.
I don't think we can
exclude a physical process,
but it is a physical process
that we do not understand
and cannot replicate today.
More academic scrutiny
has been brought to bear
on this 14.5 foot strip of linen
than any other
object in the world
and we still can't
explain the image.
That's a philosophical
challenge.
When you confront the limits
of your human knowledge,
your human capacity,
where else do you
go for an answer?
Over the course of many years,
scientists have applied
the latest technology
to unraveling the
mystery of the shroud.
Yet the question of what the
image is and how it was made
remains unsolved.
For the skeptics,
it's an incredibly
sophisticated medieval fraud.
For the faithful, it's
a miraculous relic.
Maybe one day, the
truth will be revealed.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries".
its haunting images captivated
millions around the world.
Many people believe this is
the cloth that wrapped
Jesus of Nazareth
after his crucifixion.
It is a bloodstained image
that is forensically accurate.
It's an anatomically
perfect human being.
But is the Shroud of
Turin a genuine holy relic
or something very different?
The image on the shroud
reflects what the Bible says
about the beating, the torture,
and the crucifixion of Christ.
If you look at
the image carefully,
you'll see some inconsistencies.
Millions of people die.
We have nothing else like this
for any other human being.
Now, we explore the top theories
behind the origin of
one of the world's
most mysterious objects.
We don't know how
this image was created.
It's not painted.
There's no way to tell how this
image ends up on the shroud.
To replicate the shroud image,
you would need 14,000 lasers
all going off instantaneously
at the same time.
How did this image come to be?
And is it truly
an image of Jesus?
Jerusalem, 33 AD.
According to the gospels,
after years of preaching
and gathering disciples
throughout the Holy Land,
the life of Jesus of Nazareth
reaches a pivotal moment.
For many Christians,
the story of Holy Week
begins with Jesus on Sunday
entering into
Jerusalem in triumph.
Here he is in the most
important city for Jews.
He's in this temple,
the sacred place
for Jewish worship,
and he's appalled by
what he finds there.
The gospels have Jesus
going into the temple complex
and overturning the tables
of the money changers there.
He's condemning the abuse
of people that are poor.
He's condemning
the abuse of people
that might want to go to the
temple to actually worship.
He says, "You've taken something
that is holy and beautiful,
and you've made this
a den of thieves."
When your control is
being threatened, you act.
And so what the
aristocratic priest do
is they bring Jesus
in for a hearing.
And they're not
so much interested
in hearing what he has to say
but imposing charges on him
that he was threatening
to damage the temple.
When Jesus is arrested,
they argue that he
has disrupted Judaism,
that he is claiming to be God
and hasn't been mindful
of secular authority.
What Jesus is doing in Jerusalem
is absolutely upsetting
the status quo,
and they're just not sure
what to do with this guy.
The Jewish aristocratic
leadership,
they are not the
most senior members
in the status quo
power of Jerusalem,
the Romans are,
so they need to take Jesus
to the civil authority.
The Jewish
authorities arrest Jesus
and hand him over to the Romans.
The Roman governor,
Pontius Pilate,
declares that Jesus's claim
to be king amounts to treason
and sentences him to
death by crucifixion.
Crucifixion is not
a noble form of death.
Crucifixion is brutal.
He was to carry his own cross
to transport the
instrument of his death
to the location
where he would die.
His hands are
nailed to the cross.
His feet are nailed
to the cross.
Above his head is this phrase,
"Jesus of Nazareth,
The King of the Jews,"
crowned not with a
crown but with thorns.
This is partly punishment.
This is partly to
humiliate Jesus.
The Romans use
crucifixion as a deterrent
and what better deterrent
than one that causes death
in a slow, agonizing,
and painful way.
For the Romans, this is
a public way of saying,
"If you mess with us, if you
mess with the Roman Empire,
this is what will happen to you.
You will die and you will
die horribly and publicly."
It takes roughly six
hours for Jesus to die.
Once he's dead,
he's taken off the cross
and wrapped in cloth
and taken to a borrowed tomb.
Jesus' death at three
o'clock in the afternoon
means that burial needs to
occur very, very quickly
because the setting of the
sun and the start of Sabbath
is going to be on them
very, very quickly.
So there's a sense of urgency
about moving Jesus' body
from the execution site
to the burial site.
There could be no work
done on the Sabbath,
so there was a rush to get
him enshrouded and entombed.
And that is why, of course,
the women were returning on
Sunday morning after the Sabbath
so that they could finish
the anointing of his body.
What happens is, of course,
the great event in
Christianity, the resurrection.
Jesus isn't there.
His body isn't there.
He has been resurrected.
All that remains
is the linen cloth
that once covered the body.
Jesus's burial cloth
aren't mentioned
again in the gospels
and what happens to
them is a mystery.
The next chapter in
the story of the shroud
doesn't happen for more
than a thousand years.
The next time we see it
showing up in history is 1355,
where a Christian knight who
has been part of the Crusades
obtains this cloth,
brings it back to
his home church,
and he claims that it
is the burial shroud
that held the body of Jesus
before his resurrection.
Because this knight
fought in the Crusades,
there was reason for
folks to believe
that he may have been
able to secure this cloth
in the Holy Land and
bring it to his church.
There's no good
reason to suspect
he wasn't able to find something
while he was there in
Jerusalem, in the Holy Land.
There's obviously a direct
connection between this man
and the treasures that
he may have discovered
while he was in those Crusades.
The knight is Geoffroi de Charny
and a close examination
of the cloth
seems to confirm his story.
The shroud is roughly
14 feet long, 3 feet wide,
and it contains the image of
a man who has been tortured.
You see his front
as well as his back.
And what really captures
the imagination of folks
is that the shroud
seems to contain
a tremendous amount of blood
in areas that would
suggest crucifixion.
The image seems to suggest that
this person had been whipped
and the blood around the
head seems to suggest
something placed on the head,
perhaps along the lines
of the crown of thorns
the Bible says was placed
on the head of Jesus.
Wounds on the wrist,
wounds on the feet suggest
a narrative very similar
to what we have been told about
the crucifixion of Christ.
The shroud is
the subject of veneration
and speculation
for many centuries.
This cloth comes
into knowledge in 1355.
It stays in the Charny family
for about a hundred years.
Eventually, it's sold
to the House of Savoy,
which has jurisdiction ruling
over what is now
France and Italy.
The Savoy family
actually provides
the perfect historical construct
for us to piece together
most of the documented
history of the shroud.
The Savoy family came into
possession of the cloth in 1453.
The Savoy family
would take it with them
and display it in different
churches over the years,
particularly when they
were still in France.
When they moved it
to Turin in 1578,
that sort of became the seed
of the Savoy family's power.
When the last of
the House of Savoy,
the last king of Italy,
Umberto II, dies in 1983,
he wills the shroud
to the living Pope,
who was at the time,
Pope John Paul II.
It was with the stipulation
that the shroud would be
the property of the Pope,
whoever the Pope is,
as an individual,
and would not belong to the
institutional Catholic Church.
More than 600 years
after the shroud first appears,
scientists are granted a
chance to uncover the answers.
The shroud itself was moved
amidst conditions
of great secrecy.
It was done at midnight,
no cameras were allowed in,
and the Roman Catholic priests
who are the normal custodians
took a solemn oath
afterwards that the cloth,
which was placed in
the display cabinet,
was indeed the Holy Shroud.
The Shroud of Turin
Research Project, or STURP,
was a group of 33
scientists and researchers
who came together in 1978
to perform an in-depth
scientific examination
of the Shroud of Turin.
In their report, the
STURP team concludes
that there was no scientific
explanation for the image
that could be accounted for
by any known scientific means.
In the decades since,
hundreds of scientists have
studied the data collected
by the Shroud of Turin
Research Project,
but one professor has
proposed a unique explanation
for the appearance of
the image on the shroud.
Giovanni Fazio is a researcher
out of Messina in Italy,
and in 2015, he comes up
with this really
interesting hypothesis
that maybe what's caused the
image to appear on the shroud
would've been on the body as
it was prepared for burial.
According to Fazio's theory,
the process begins in
the hours after Jesus
is lowered from the cross.
Jesus was Jewish
and traditionally
in Jewish burials,
you should be buried
within 24 hours of death.
So what you did was
you used substances,
oils, ointments, myrrh.
You wrapped the body in cloth
partly to avoid this to smell,
partly to counter the fact
you've had a decomposing body
in the hot sun.
A biblical passage
describes what happened
with Jesus's body.
The gospel
according to St. John
is the one that gives
us the most detail.
In John's gospel,
there's an interesting
character, Nicodemus,
who brings about 75
pounds of oil, aloes,
to help prepare Jesus's
body for its burial.
This is enough to
bury several kings.
But how could this oil
have created the image seen
on the Shroud of Turin?
It is possible that there
can be residues left on cloths
from certain ointments or oils,
particularly ones that
are very, very dense,
very thick in their composition.
One of the really interesting
things that Fazio raises
is that if you
look at the shroud,
the image on the back
is a little bit darker.
This makes sense,
according to his theory,
that the person being
laid on their back,
the oils on the back would've
had a lot more chance
to absorb into the
fabric of the shroud.
It seems like
a logical explanation,
but some believe Fazio's theory
contradicts the extensive
testing done in the 1970s.
That Shroud of
Turin Research Project
relied heavily upon film
photography, use of x-ray,
use of microscopic imaging
technologies as well,
to examine individual fibers.
They were able to
say from the x-ray,
from the spectroscopy,
from all the other
analysis that they've done,
there's no evidence of
any kind of oil or perfume
on the shroud.
In 1532, there's a
fire that breaks out
in the chapel where
the shroud was held.
This is what Fazio thinks is
the reason why there's no oil,
that given the heat, given
what happened with the fire,
that those oils and perfumes
would've evaporated.
The fire may have
changed the shroud
in ways that are picked up
by the scientific testing
and warp the findings.
Despite Fazio's explanation,
other experts remain skeptical.
A problem with the theory
is that we do have cloths
from that time period
where these oils were used,
but they don't make an
image on that shroud.
The Shroud of Turin has been
an object of fascination
since its emergence
in the mid-14th century.
The Savoy family gets the
shroud from the Charny family.
In 1532, there's a
fire that breaks out
in the chapel where
the shroud was held.
It was rescued from the fire
and the image itself
was not damaged.
But the shroud was folded
into a metal reliquary
and so the heat from the fire
left the parallel
set of scorch marks
that run the length
of the shroud.
And the Savoy family
regularly displayed it.
They would hang it from the
balcony of their royal palace.
They displayed it
at royal weddings.
And more importantly, for
the provenance of it,
every time it was
publicly displayed,
they commissioned an artwork.
The Savoy family's involvement
kept fascination with the
shroud alive for centuries,
but the origins of its ghostly
image remain a mystery.
Burial oil stains could
be one possible cause.
But in 2003, one
of the scientists
on the 1978 Shroud of
Turin Research Project
suggests a new possibility.
Dr. Ray Rogers is one of the
original STURP team members,
brilliant chemist who was with
Los Alamos National
Laboratories,
and he had an interesting theory
that this could be the
product of a natural process.
According to Rogers,
the key is a phenomenon we
experience when we cook.
Dr. Rogers thinks that
the image may be caused
by the Maillard reaction,
which has to do with a
chemical reaction that happens
when amino acids and
sugars interact with heat.
We see an example of
the Maillard reaction
when bread is baked,
the sugars, the yeast, the
amino acids in the bread
combined with the
heat of the baking
to form that nice, crispy,
brown crust on the bread.
The Maillard reaction
is very similar
to toasting a piece of bread.
You get a different coloration
on perhaps the very
top of the bread.
But you haven't done
anything to change,
in a permanent, lasting
way, the bread itself.
According to Rogers,
all the necessary elements
would have been present
following Jesus's crucifixion.
A few hours after death,
the body starts to break
down and decomposes,
and there's well over
30 kinds of amino acids
that are released from
the body after death.
After you have these
amino acid compounds
coming off the body,
what you then need is the sugar
that has to combine to
create this reaction.
Rogers believed that sugar
comes from the cloth itself.
Rogers and his team,
when they were looking at the
composition of the shroud,
realized that in ancient times,
they would've used
flowers to make the linen,
and this particular kind
of flower, Saponaria,
that has a fairly
high sugar content.
So the sugar that
the amino acids
would've been in touch with
would've been in the fabric
of the shroud itself.
Rogers had a theory where
he suggested that the cloth
was soaked in a solution
from the soapweed plant,
and it acts as a
preservative and a fungicide
but it would leave a very
thin sugar compound layer
all over the cloth.
With two of
the three conditions met,
Roger's next turns
to identifying
a possible source of
heat in the cave.
After death, when
a body decomposes,
you see a temperature spike.
It may go as high
as 106 degrees,
especially if the person
has died of dehydration.
What's interesting here
is that we know that Jesus
would've been dehydrated
from his time on the cross,
so it makes sense that his body
would've been able to reach
that kind of
temperature after death.
There would've been
just enough heat
combining with
amino acids released
from that decomposing body
mixing with the
sugars in the shroud
to create that brown image.
Rogers and his
team conduct an experiment
to test the hypothesis.
Dr. Rogers realized you
can't use modern linen,
which is bleached,
which is treated,
so he was able to find
people who used techniques
that go back 2,000 years
to create the kind of cloth
that would've been used
at the time of Jesus's burial.
Using cloth that was made
in that traditional way,
Rogers subjected it
to ammonia vapors,
which would've simulated gases
that would've been
coming off of a body.
They turned up the heat
to about 106 degrees
and they were able to get
the same kind of darker color
that shows up on
the Shroud of Turin.
Biophysicist John DeSalvo
contends there could be
another agent at work:
human sweat.
John DeSalvo realized
that someone who died in
the way that Jesus did,
his body would've been
covered with sweat.
And that's where you get
the organic compounds
that are able to make
these kinds of images.
This also helps to explain
some of the coloration
on the shroud,
the darker areas were where
the sweat was in direct contact
with the shroud.
There's a correlation
between the density
or the darkness of the
image on the shroud
and the distance it
would've been from the body.
So whether it was
direct contact,
the image on the shroud,
tip of the nose,
top of the hands,
the image is darkest.
As the distance increases up
to about 3 1/2 centimeters,
the image grows more faint.
So what you have is the
sweat sort of evaporating,
not literally being
absorbed into the shroud,
so you have this
interesting image
of these light and dark areas.
But critics say
there are still many
unanswered questions.
The Maillard reaction hypothesis
is interesting and intriguing
in that it can
reproduce an image.
It leaves an after effect,
but it does not produce
something that is complex
as the image on the shroud.
On the shroud, you see
the detail of the hair,
the eyes, the areas of the face
that weren't directly
touching the shroud.
You don't get that
kind of detail
with this sort of reaction.
Millions of people die.
Millions of people
have been enshrouded,
their bodies decompose.
We have nothing else like this
for any other human being.
Jesus's burial
cloth is lost for centuries,
until it turns up with
Geoffroi de Charny
in medieval France.
We do not have a record of
de Charny acquiring the shroud.
We do not know how he
came to possess it.
We know that he comes
from a chivalrous family.
There have been a lot of
historical assumptions made
that perhaps he had
been a crusader.
For centuries,
it's assumed de Charny found
the shroud in Jerusalem.
In 1997, two scholars bring
that assumption into question.
Robert Lomas and Christopher
Knight have a theory
that yes, the shroud is
evidence of a crucifixion.
Yes, it is a burial cloth,
but not for the
figure you think.
After the Christians
reconquered Jerusalem
during the Crusades,
you have the creation
of the Knights Templar.
This, in order to help
protect Christian pilgrims
as they're going
to the Holy Land
to visit these places that are
so important to Christians.
The Templars took their name
from where their
barracks were located,
on the grounds of Solomon's
temple in Jerusalem.
And after the first Crusade,
they actually became
a quite wealthy order.
They developed a
complex banking system
and developed a network of
fortresses across Europe.
They were powerful and
reported only to the Pope.
But by the 14th century,
the Templar's power and
prestige are declining
and they've made
a powerful enemy:
King Philip IV of France.
King Philip IV, who was
indebted to the Knights Templar,
had borrowed money.
Rather than paying it back,
argued that they were heretics
that did not practice
the faith properly
and that the Pope
should end them.
Philip is, I think, concerned
that the Knights Templar
are so powerful,
they're wealthy.
Moreover, he's indebted to them.
He's gone for the Knights
Templar to get money
to help support his
wars against England.
So he owes the
Knights Templar money
and he sees them as a threat.
What better way to
get rid of the threat
and also to cancel your debt
than to declare
them as heretics?
In 1307,
King Philip has Templar
leader, Jacques de Molay,
arrested on blasphemy
and heresy charges.
de Molay is forced to face
the French Inquisition.
King Philip thought
this punishment should
involve crucifixion.
The inquisitors would've
done to Jacque de Molay
what had been done to Jesus,
that he's stripped naked,
he's scourged, he's whipped,
the crown of thorns
put on his head.
But Robert
Lomas and Christopher Knight
see evidence of something
different in the shroud.
The position of the
arms is not identical
to the description of how
Jesus is hung on the cross.
The legs are also
positioned differently.
The book's authors hypothesized
that the pattern on the shroud
isn't from someone
who's crucified
in a normal kind of way,
with their arms
stretched outright.
It's someone who's
crucified very differently.
And in this case,
the pattern seems to match
someone who's crucified
with their right arm
above their head bent
and their left arm
stretched out on the side
as if they're placed on a door.
And this would be the
convenient way to do this
if you don't have a cross.
The crucifixion of the
leader of the Knights Templar
was not meant to kill him.
It was meant to
produce enough pain
to get him to admit he was
a heretic and to recant.
And it did just that.
After the confession,
the inquisitors have
one final humiliation
left for de Molay.
For the inquisitor,
wrapping this knight in a shroud
was meant to amplify
the embarrassment,
to amplify the humiliation.
He's left wrapped in
that shroud for 24 hours,
long enough for the
blood and the sweat
to soak in to the shroud
and produce the image
that we now see.
Despite his ordeal,
de Molay lives
another seven years,
only to be burned at the stake
for renouncing his confession.
But what happened to the shroud?
Jacques de Molay
is tortured in 1307.
The hypothesis from the authors
is that there's a
Templar, Jean de Charny,
who takes this
shroud and keeps it.
What's interesting
is Jean de Charny
is the grandfather
of Geoffroi de Charny,
who's the one that
we know in 1355,
first brings the shroud
to our attention.
The haunting image
on the Shroud of Turin
has been an enigma since the day
it was first publicly
unveiled 700 years ago.
And while millions are convinced
it's the imprinted
image of Jesus,
the shroud's authenticity
remains in debate.
Historians often
cite one big question
as a reason for doubt:
why was it missing for so long?
The 14th century is a long
way away from the event itself,
in the first century.
You know, you're talking
about 1,300 years.
You would think, if this
were important to the story,
it was important to
communicating that story,
it would've shown up somewhere.
And it simply doesn't.
Skeptics also note
that the shroud may not
match the description
of Jesus's burial
cloth in the Bible.
In the earliest accounts,
we do have cloth mentioned,
and not in the
singular but plural.
We have cloths
that are mentioned.
When you're looking
at the Shroud of Turin,
you're looking at one
long piece of cloth,
14 feet long, that
covers the entire body.
But these would've been
several pieces of cloth,
according to the
biblical accounts.
And there
appear to be inconsistencies
in the imagery itself.
The front and the
back don't line up.
If this were actually
the imprint of Jesus,
wouldn't those line up?
If the shroud was
wrapped over Jesus
and you have the image of
the front and the back,
why is it these images
are two different lengths?
It means that his front
side is a different length
than his backside.
There is
one possible explanation,
one that would shatter
a long-held illusion.
The sudden appearance
of the shroud
coincides with a period in
which relics are important.
You have all sorts of relics,
you have all sorts of churches
that have things on display
that they claim to
connect back to Jesus
or the early
Christian community.
Relics play an important
part in the church.
People come to give
money to visit these,
people donate for this,
and so this is a source
of revenue for the church.
But we know that
relics can be faked.
If you stood to
benefit financially
from relics in general,
you stood to benefit
extraordinarily
from a relic like
the Shroud of Turin.
I think that it is proper
for anyone to be suspicious
about any relic that has a
footprint in the Middle Ages.
In an age when you
could go into a pasture
and pick up the bone of a cow
and pass it off as
the femur of a saint,
I think we are right to be
suspicious about anything
that we can even link
to the Middle Ages.
When the French
knight, Geoffroi de Charny,
first appears with
the shroud about 1355,
it immediately goes on
display in his church.
If you wanted to
encourage pilgrims
to come to your church,
to come to your abbey,
to come to your village,
it was important that
you have a relic.
Hence, the proliferation of
relics in an age when perhaps,
I think it's fair to say,
that in many occasions,
the supply might have
outstripped the demand.
If relics are
like trading cards,
they're not all
of the same value.
And there are some relics
that are going to
be of minor value
and some that are of
extraordinarily major value,
and I gotta put a relic
like the Shroud of Turin
at the top of that list.
Even at the outset,
not everyone's convinced
it's the real thing.
In 1389, Bishop Pierre d'Arcis,
of the Diocese of
Troyes in France,
writes to Pope
Clement VII in Avignon
that he knows that this shroud
that is being displayed in Liray
is in fact an artwork.
He claims he knows the artists.
He claims that this
is an exhibition
that needs to be
stopped immediately.
He's saying that
this is a forgery,
that an artist has
confessed to painting
this image on the shroud.
d'Arcis is scandalized,
and his letter to Pope
Clement talks about
how scandalized he is
by these pilgrims
who've been swindled,
where this money has
been rung out of them
under false pretenses.
In the 1300s, crucifixion
paintings were quite popular,
so there's no
surprise here to think
that someone might
have painted this image
and that it would've been used
to raise funds for the church.
Was the Bishop right?
Is the shroud a painting?
It will take nearly 600
years to get an answer.
The Shroud of Turin
Research Project
was given access to
the shroud in 1978
and they were allowed to
analyze it 'round the clock.
After a battery of tests,
the research team
releases its findings.
Painting, in the
High Middle Ages
and certainly by the time
of the Late Middle Ages,
was a highly developed craft
and we know a lot about
the pigments and dyes
that were used in
those processes.
But the Shroud of
Turin Research Project
demonstrated conclusively,
in peer reviewed science,
that there is not a trace of a
pigment, or a dye, or a paint
on that linen anywhere.
The research team concluded
that they don't know how
this image got there.
It wasn't paint, the
bloodstains are real.
They don't know how
that image got there.
They don't know how
the blood got there.
In an age when relics did
not have to be sophisticated,
in an age when people
did not ask the questions
that the modern mind asks,
why did this image have
to be that sophisticated?
And how, importantly,
did that image get there
in the first place?
For centuries,
visitors to the Shroud of Turin
were only able to
see a faint image
of what is allegedly Jesus
after the crucifixion.
But with the advent
of modern photography,
the shroud would reveal
yet another secret.
Barrie Schwortz was the official
documenting photographer
for the Shroud of Turin
Research Project in 1978.
So in its early days,
there were people of faith
who were aware of the shroud.
Science, on the other hand,
I don't think was
very interested
until 1898 when the first
photograph of the shroud
was permitted.
Italian lawyer and amateur
photographer named Secondo Pia
made this first
photograph of the shroud
and that ushered
in the beginning
of the scientific
era of shroud study.
When Secondo Pia
develops his photographic
plates of the Shroud of Turin,
he's shocked by what he sees.
Of course, not
knowing that it was
going to spark a controversy,
he went into the dark room
to process his glass plate.
This is 19th
century photography,
so we're talking about
a prolonged process.
And it was that moment
when he processed that
glass plate and held it up
that the image on the
shroud itself is a negative
and when inverted,
he had a much more
natural-looking
result in his hands
than what was on
the cloth itself.
It's one of those really
interesting paradoxes
that if you look at the shroud,
you don't see the detail.
If you look in the negative,
you see the detail of
the face, of the beard.
It's almost as if this
was meant to be seen
in a photograph of the image,
not the image itself.
It's as if the shroud itself
is a photographic negative,
a concept that boggles the mind.
There's no precedent for it.
There isn't another image
that I've seen in my 50-year
professional experience
that even comes close to
having these properties.
We know that photography
didn't exist until
about 1826 or 1827.
Consequently, there was no way
that someone in medieval times
could have created a
photographic image.
On the other hand, artists
back in medieval times
did use a technique
called camera obscura.
So what they did was they
would make a little hole
at one end of the room
and put, say, a canvas
at the other end,
and the hole acted like a lens
to focus what was outside
that camera obscura onto that
and then the artist could
then paint or illustrate
what the camera was pointing at.
Camera obscura is ancient.
I mean, we do know it
from the ancient texts.
It is a very simple principle.
The earliest evidence we
have of a camera obscura
is by a Chinese writer, Mo Tzu.
The ancient Greeks
knew about this.
And so in the medieval world,
certainly even in
the first century,
people would've
known about this.
In 1993, art
historian Nicholas Allen
proposes a radical theory:
a medieval forger could have
used an ancient technique
known as camera obscure
to create the world's
first photograph.
In order to make the
cloth photo sensitive,
you would have to coat
it with silver nitrate.
You would've coated
the cloth with this
and then when light
hits the cloth,
it would expose the silver
nitrate and leave a dark pattern
like the negative
on a photograph.
Theoretically,
the chemicals needed
to produce an image
were available in
the Middle Ages.
But when analyzed, the cloth
was missing one vital element.
We were looking for silver
nitrate on the shroud,
and we could detect
one part per billion,
and we didn't find any silver
anywhere on the shroud.
Nicholas Allen says he soaked
his cloth in a silver solution
to create his
light-sensitive emulsion,
so they would be
permeated with silver.
We found zero silver
anywhere on the shroud.
What would
prompt a medieval inventor
to create an image
like the shroud?
There's no evidence that
anyone used the camera obscura
in the fashion that
Nicholas Allen proposes.
And if he had,
I think we'd be seeing a
lot more examples of it.
Art history itself tells us
that this is not something
that some medieval artist
would've even thought to
do or even cared to do
when a simpler attempt at
depicting Jesus on a cross
would've been plenty acceptable
by everybody in the
medieval world anyway.
What's the motivation
for creating something that's
a pious fraud on the public?
I can make money from it.
I become more prestigious
because of it.
I have a souvenir
that no one else has.
There's a lot of things
that could motivate
the development of something
like the Shroud of Turin.
Did they? That's the question.
In 1988, the
Shroud of Turin undergoes
what many consider to be
a definitive analysis.
These carbon dating tests make
headlines around the world.
They indicate the cloth
was made between 1260
and just before French
knight, de Charny,
brought it to his church.
But not everyone
believes the findings.
There was a fire in 1532
and there was repair
done to the shroud
by the Poor Clares,
this order of nuns.
Could this have
contaminated the shroud?
Is this carbon dating
not of the actual shroud
but of the material from 1532?
And in early 2022,
new evidence centered
around the age of the cloth
may support that belief.
Researchers present a
surprising observation.
They had about a dozen
samples of other linen cloths
dating all the way
back to 5000 BC
and they could assess the
amount of natural aging
in all these other cloths.
And the only cloth that
had a comparable amount
of natural aging as
fibers from the shroud
was taken from Masada,
which is in Israel,
circa first century.
And so this then becomes a
very strong piece of evidence
that suggests, just
based on natural aging,
that the cloth is far
older than the 700 years
ascribed by the carbon lapse.
That leaves us with a
very real possibility,
we could be talking about
a first century cloth.
And in 2011,
a finding by Italian physicist,
Dr. Paolo Di Lazzaro,
may offer believers
further support.
In 2011, he published
in a peer reviewed journal
how they've been experimenting
with ultraviolet excimer lasers.
These are high powered,
these are industrial lasers.
These are not some
kind of pointer.
And they determined
a 40 nanosecond burst
achieves the very same
depth and coloration
as we see on the shroud.
This experimentally
shows how the image
could indeed be the
result of light.
But it would take
an incredible amount of power
to generate the light needed
to create the shroud image
in a split second.
To replicate the shroud image,
you would need 14,000 lasers
all going off instantaneously,
at the same time.
I have to remind everybody,
lasers weren't invented
until about 1946.
So something of that
nature in medieval times,
or even in the first century,
just couldn't exist.
But if the shroud is truly
from the first century,
an event from the Bible
might reveal an answer.
Just before Jesus makes
his last trip to Jerusalem,
he takes Peter, James,
and John with him
up on a high mountain
and is transfigured before them.
Some turn to the Bible
and point to the
transfiguration of Christ
that took place when Christ
was praying with the disciples.
They read scripture
and they highlight the
passage that indicates
that his face was
shining as the sun
and his clothes
became bright white.
In the biblical account,
Jesus is transfigured into
a form of energy or light.
His disciples describe
him as his face glowing.
His clothes dazzling white.
Di Lazzaro hypothesizes
that the transfiguration's
burst of light and energy
could have repeated itself
during another important
event in Christianity.
Following his transfiguration,
Jesus tells his disciples
to not tell anyone
until the son of man
has risen from the dead.
So this clearly foreshadows
something that is
going to happen,
something that the disciples
are going to see again.
For many believers,
the idea is that
this is a snapshot,
this is literally the moment
of Jesus's resurrection.
He's wrapped in this
cloth, he gets resurrected.
There's this phenomenal
amount of energy
that must've been
released in that.
Is that what creates this image?
The marks on the cloth
are not the result
of a conventional type of heat
or a light that
would generate heat.
For instance, it's not
like you would get a scorch
on an ironing
board, for instance.
It's more analogous to a light
that might be from a laser.
Now, we know that the burns
clearly are the result of heat
because they fluoresce
under ultraviolet light.
But the body image
does not fluoresce,
so it looks like a
scorch but it's not.
For di Lazzaro,
he stopped short of
saying this is a miracle.
But of course, this
is extraordinary
because you don't have
that kind of ultraviolet
light technology needed
in the first century.
So if this actually
has happened,
this is inexplicable.
Christians will argue
that that kind of energy
was actually produced
through the resurrection.
For them, the amount of
energy needed isn't an issue.
The resurrection was
such a powerful event
that it could produce
what science cannot.
For many
Christians, the Shroud of Turin
is proof of the cornerstone
in their faith,
the death and
resurrection of Jesus.
For Christians, this
is an important symbol.
It speaks to the death
and resurrection of Jesus,
the center point,
the fundamental
meaning of the gospel.
Their argument is, until
science can tell them
how this was produced,
there is good reason to
believe that it is authentic.
I don't think we can
exclude a physical process,
but it is a physical process
that we do not understand
and cannot replicate today.
More academic scrutiny
has been brought to bear
on this 14.5 foot strip of linen
than any other
object in the world
and we still can't
explain the image.
That's a philosophical
challenge.
When you confront the limits
of your human knowledge,
your human capacity,
where else do you
go for an answer?
Over the course of many years,
scientists have applied
the latest technology
to unraveling the
mystery of the shroud.
Yet the question of what the
image is and how it was made
remains unsolved.
For the skeptics,
it's an incredibly
sophisticated medieval fraud.
For the faithful, it's
a miraculous relic.
Maybe one day, the
truth will be revealed.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries".