Open Letter to John Dominic Crossan

For More Information See: Shroud of Turin Story
 

Galileo’s Problem

Galileo thought that he could convince church authorities and particularly Cardinal Bellarmine, by evidence and mathematics alone, of the correctness of Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the earth circling the sun. He was wrong. Ultimately, Galileo’s belief in the Copernican theory would lead to house arrest and being silenced by the Inquisition. It wasn’t that Bellarmine didn’t understand science or appreciate Galileo’s work. He did. Bellarmine was trained in science but gave it up when he encountered contradictions with the prevailing theologically-derived worldview, which included the Aquinas model of the sun and all heavenly bodies circling a stationary round earth. Bellarmine trusted his worldview. We all trust our own worldview. Today’s prevailing worldview thoroughly infused with science, objective history, and the logic of Western philosophical thought, is very different. But our response to it is just the same.

We trust whatever our worldview is and we intuitively trust whatever we hear or read that resonates with it. It is our view of the way things work in the world: the way things are and the way things have been. It may well be, at least in the Western world, that we are intellectually conditioned to be skeptical of the Shroud by the largely-shared, modernistic worldview. The Shroud just doesn’t make sense to many of us. Dead men, after all, don’t normally leave images of themselves on burial cloths. And, we know only too well that Medieval Europe was rife with fake relics. We suppose, without much thought, that the Shroud must be just another fake relic. And so we doubt that the Shroud is authentic. It just doesn’t make sense.

In a book he coauthored with N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, historian Marcus Borg describes this prevailing worldview as the “worldview of mass culture in the West” and he explains – I think very correctly – how it works:

Borg: Like all worldviews, it functions in our minds almost unconsciously, affecting what we think possible and what we pay attention to. It is especially corrosive to religion. It reduces reality to the space-time world of matter and energy, thereby making the notion of God problematic and doubtful. It reduces truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable facts. It raises serious doubts about anything that cannot be accommodated within its framework, including religious phenomena such as prayer, visions, mystical experiences, extraordinary events, and unusual healings. 

To many people, to think that the Shroud is real is simply incredulous. We don’t need proof; we just know it. We don’t need information; our worldview is all the information we need. We don’t need to think about it because worldview prejudges. We are, all of us, well practiced in the art of worldview nullification. Borg points out that religious phenomena are not easily accommodated to the modern view of reality. C. S. Lewis said something similar in his book Miracles. He wrote: “Nothing arbitrary, nothing simply ‘stuck on’ and left unreconciled with the texture of total reality, can be admitted.”

But we need not limit worldview nullification to phenomena or miracles. It is every bit as applicable to the unexplained, mystery, enigma and anything that is implausibly strange. It is by our worldview that many of us may think that people who take the Shroud seriously – Shroudies they are called – are like people who sit beside Scotland’s Loch Ness waiting for a glimpse of Nessie, the water monster first encountered by St. Columba in 565 CE. We may think that Shroudies are like those who traipse about the English countryside searching for crop circles in farmer’s fields, and then upon finding one, examining it with all manner of divining paraphernalia looking for extraterrestrial origin or mystical meanings. Shroudies, we may think, are like people who flock to a New Jersey backyard to see a molded-plastic statue of Mary that weeps (for ticket holders only). Shroudies, we may suppose, are like people who see in the shadows and highlights of an official NASA photograph, a gigantic human face on Mars. We might wonder if Shroudies are not as nutty as the people who really believe that the earth is flat.

The modern worldview that Borg describes is resonant with newspaper headlines that declare that the Shroud is a fraud. It inclines us to trust a news anchor on Fox News (ironically, the network with the motto ‘We report, you decide’) when she says: “Many people believe that the Shroud is Jesus’ burial cloth, but scientists say no way.”

Intuitively, we trust what we think we know about science. For instance, we know that carbon 14 testing is regularly used for testing all manner of artifacts and so it must be right. We intuitively trust Nature, the very prestigious science journal, the British Museum, and three radiocarbon dating laboratories associated with academic institutions. We don’t think about it. We trust that they know what they are talking about when they “prove” that the Shroud is medieval.

We also intuitively trust what we think we know about history. The first historically reliable documented record of the Shroud dates from 1356. We can trace the cloth’s history, year by year, owner by owner, and place by place from that date forward. Any historical record before that date is a bit loose (which, by the way, was not uncommon for that time in history). Luther and Erasmus complained about fake relics. We think; it must be medieval.

We intuitively trusted Biblical Archeological Review, when in the November-December 1998 issue; it carried two articles on the Shroud. One by Walter McCrone merely restated his findings of paint particles and his conclusion that it was a painting. The other by Gary Vikan, the Director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, revisited the carbon 14 dating, the d’Arcis Memorandum, and argued that the Shroud was produced for the lay brotherhoods of Francis of Assisi . . .

Vikan: . . . that his piety and his cult of self-mortification engendered. These Christians appreciated and understood Jesus’ wounds in a very physical way. This is the world of the holy shroud; these are the people for whom it would have held special meaning; and these, certainly, are the people for whom it was made . . . these medieval Christians would have understood that the nails must have gone through Jesus’ wrists in order to hold the body to the cross (although in medieval art these wounds are invariably in the palms). And their cult images would match this physical understanding of crucifixion, even to the point of adding human blood . . .  All of which is to say that the indication of nail holes in the wrists and what some claim is the presence of blood on the linen need not add up to a miracle.

Is there any basis for this claim? The best Vikan can do is to assume that medieval penitents are comparable to modern-day Spanish American Catholic penitents in New Mexico who practice self-mortification and self-crucifixion, very much incorrectly. He also claims in his article that there are many images like those of the Shroud. That is true if we allow for paintings that are not negatives, are not terrain maps that produce 3D isometric plots, and are not on Masada-like linen with forensic evidence of pollen and travertine aragonite from the environs of Jerusalem. Vikan is right if we also ignore the medically accurate bloodstains and images resulting from inexplicably caused chemical changes to the linen.

It is interesting to note that in a preface to the Vikan article, the editors of Biblical Archeological Review acknowledged the problem with the mysterious images and some of the forensic pathology. They wrote:

Biblical Archeological Review: . . . although radiocarbon tests have dated the shroud to 1260-1390 A. D., no one has been able to account for the shadowy image of a naked 6-foot-tall man that appears on the shroud. With bloodstains on the back, wrists, feet, side and head the image appears to be that of a crucified man. The details - the direction of the flow of blood from the wounds, the placement of the nails through the wrists rather than the palms - displays a knowledge of crucifixion that seems too accurate to have been that of a medieval artist.

The real keystone of Vikan’s argument was a simple appeal to common sense. And because it may resonate with our worldview, we intuitively trust his polemics. He imaginatively and fictively quotes students of the Shroud and then interprets what they think:

Vikan: ‘It doesn’t look like any known work of art,’ they say. The implication is that its creation was somehow miraculous, perhaps caused by a sudden burst of cosmic energy as the cloth came into contact with the dead body of Jesus.

We intuitively trust him though there is no truth in this statement. In fact, most shroud researchers, to their credit, avoid metaphysical or supernatural interpretations and stress the point that science and objective history cannot provide such explanations. Most students of the Shroud are highly critical of those few who posit unfounded hypotheses to support a miracle.

The Shroud is very probably the most studied artifact in all of history. Those who study it are not, as some skeptics charge, religious fanatics or over zealous Christian apologists. Many of them believe in miracles and many of them do not. Many of them are not Christian. A fair number of them are Jewish. Some are agnostics. Those that are Christian span the full spectrum of progressive-liberal to conservative theological and Christological thought. They include Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Evangelical Christians.

They include archeologists, historians, chemists, physicists, botanists, palynologists, forensic pathologists, image analysts, art historians, textile experts, and technical photographers. Most of them are from leading academic institutions or from prestigious scientific establishments including the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Sandia Labs, the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago.  Their work, which is well documented, formidable in detail, and much of it carefully peer reviewed, warrants consideration. Most of the researchers who have studied the Shroud extensively, conclude, that at some level of understanding, it is authentic.

Yet the myth persists that the Shroud has been proven to be medieval. Dom, you said that it was your best understanding that it was a medieval relic-forgery. Some skeptics will say that it has not been proven that the carbon 14 tests are false. That is true. They may not be scientifically definitive and are suspiciously inaccurate, but they have not been proven wrong. Skeptics will argue that Pierre d’Arcis has not been proven a liar. That is also true. But what are we to make of all the contradictions, the preponderance of other evidence?  Can we simply ignore the fact that the fabric of the Shroud is very likely an ancient cloth like those found at Masada? Can we simply ignore the pollen and dirt that forensically links the Shroud to the environs of Jerusalem, Edessa and Constantinople? Can we simply ignore the Sudarium? Is the history that offers possibilities that the Shroud is authentic simply to be ignored? 

Bertrand Russell in Problems of Philosophy described the problem of contradiction as it relates to “our immediate experience,” our worldview:

Russell: In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.

We need not think that there is something miraculous or even religious about the cloth to accept that it is authentic. Yet we must realize that so long as the images remain unexplained, the opportunity exists, for all whose worldview accommodates miracles – what C. S. Lewis calls “rare exceptions to the laws of nature” – to imagine miraculous explanations. We might think that the images are somehow a byproduct of the miracle of resurrection. For those whose worldview does not include the likelihood of miracles, it is at least fair to say that the Shroud is, seems to be, or could be authentic and the images are simply an unexplained phenomenon, perhaps the result of some unrealized naturalistic process.

“Only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe,” says Russell. Part of that process must be to examine and fully understand the contradictions. Part of that process should also be to understand and test the reliability of our own individual worldview.