Book review: The Sign: The Shroud Of Turin And The Secret Of The Resurrection

E M Cioran once wrote that stigmata – the miraculous appearance of wounds in the hand, which were witnessed although we know Jesus was crucified through the wrist – as “necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity”. His words haunted me reading this book which is by turns curious, vainglorious and ludicrous.

Art historian Thomas de Wesselow believes that he has solved two great religious mysteries. One is the nature of the Turin Shroud. The other, as he humbly puts it, is that “the challenge that defeated Reimarus and his rationalist successors has finally been met: the birth of Christianity can be integrated, at long last, into a purely secular history of the world”. Specifically, this refers to the enigma that after the crucifixion, something happened which turned a fearful, persecuted handful of men and women who had known the teacher Jesus into an evangelising church of Christ. It is the basis of both Tom Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God and the earlier, more populist Who Moved The Stone? by Frank Morison. De Wesselow thinks that the Turin Shroud genuinely is the linen sheet in which the body of the crucified Jesus was wrapped. Moreover, when the Bible refers to people seeing Jesus after Easter Sunday, de Masselow argues, they are really talking about seeing the eerie phantom images on the Shroud.

There are more problems with this than there are angels dancing on a pin, but let us begin by looking at what is of worth in de Wesselow’s book. Many people will be aware that the carbon dating of the Shroud undertaken in 1988 claimed that, with 95 per cent certainty, it dated from between 1260 and 1390; roughly the period when it was first displayed in Lirey, and the Bishop of Poitiers denounced it as a painted forgery. De Wesselow amasses enough textual, scientific and circumstantial evidence to suggest that a new carbon dating should be undertaken. This, I fear, would be insufficient as a pitch to land a book deal. The evidence is presented, initially, in an academic manner: one scientist claims that pollen found on the shroud was from the halophyte genus, which suggests the Shroud was in Turkey or Palestine. The text and footnotes admit that other scientists have been sceptical about such a definitive claim. Then – this is De Wesselow’s favourite form of academese legerdemain – the findings are summarised, usually with the phrase “as we have seen”, and any doubts are made to vanish quicker than if the Shroud had been put in a washing machine.

Another tactic is to cast aspersions: dealing with the carbon dating evidence; de Wesselow, with candid open-mindedness, refuses to rule out deliberate fraud. After all, the date from C-14 decay was suspiciously close to the date of the medieval debut of the Shroud – exactly what someone would have wanted if they were trying to discredit it. Likewise, the Vatican’s “secret” restoration in 2002 has “interfered drastically with its fabric” – so any future results contradicting the thesis can be explained away in advance. Moreover, “scientists are still being denied access to the cloth”. De Wesselow shows admirable restraint in not introducing an albino monk tattooed with a double-headed eagle and assassinating texologists at this point.

The material about the Shroud raises sufficient doubts for further work to be undertaken. The material about the Resurrection story is, frankly, bonkers. I half-hoped that Terry Jones, in drag, would burst in and shout “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very manky blanket!”

According to de Wesselow’s thesis, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to finish the funeral rites, and discovered the miraculous imprint on the sheets. Because she was from ye olden days – sorry “pre-scientific times” – and is therefore thick as a plank she ignored the rotting body of her lover (de Wesselow is of the opinion that since it is never mentioned that Jesus was celibate he must therefore have been married, which gets him the nihil obstat from the Dan Brown brigade) and instead sees the imprint on the sheet, which is – bear with this – to her mind the angelic form of Jesus. It isn’t a sign that he was resurrected; the shroud actually is the resurrection, an angelic version, a liminal, smudgy, inexplicable thing. Peter orchestrates a mass viewing of the Shroud – in the Temple, supposedly – which is where the Epiphany story starts. When Saul is on the road to Damascus, this is all an allegory for his seeing the incomprehensible shroud. The point where I actually just laughed was page 279 where de Wesselow writes “This puzzling decision can be explained, as usual, with the help of the Shroud”. Aye, and a man with a hammer sees everything as a nail.

There are so many errors, elisions and omissions in this story that it should be shelved alongside Erich von Däniken. De Wesselow is quick to denounce fables and fictions in the Bible. He points out that the composition of the Gospels may be as late as 70AD – and then swallows wholesale books like The Gospel of Peter which are 100 years older again. He cites the Mozarabic Rite, which is 700 years after the event in question, as a marvellous trace of the “true story” that agrees with his, while dismissing the accounts from 70AD. At one point, while unpicking the account of Paul’s conversion in Acts he harrumphs that it’s all fictional, and then, in the next chapter says “Acts tells us, Paul stayed in Damascus for three days “without sight, and neither ate nor drank”. De Wesselow informs us that, “His blindness may be a symbolic fiction, but the report of his abstinence from food and drink is likely to be historical”. So the same sentence conceals an outright fabrication and a genuine truth. This is the pick’n’mix approach to early texts about Christianity taken to a degree that would make liberals incandescent and conservatives wince.

But here’s the crux. De Wesselow, despite some speculation about vapours rising from the body, cannot explain how the image came to be on the Shroud. He rather half-heartedly includes a photograph of a nylon bedsheet stained with the incontinence of a cancer patient as the only similar stain. But many people were tortured, died, and were buried in the first century under the Roman Empire, and yet there is not a single article similar to the Shroud. De Wesselow keeps throwing his hands in the air over the impossibility of a medieval artist faking the Shroud, but ignores the fact that the history of art is littered with anomalies and oddities. If, in 1,500 years time, an archaeologist stumbled on a Joseph Cornell Box, would they automatically assume it was a work of art, or presume it was a grave-good similar to the Mask of Tutankhamen? De Wesselow cannot explain the Shroud, but makes it explain everything. There is a technical term for this: apophenia – the psychological condition of seeing connections in random data.

“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything”. GK Chesterton’s wise words should be stickered on the jacket of this sad and wrong and obsessive volume.

The Sign: The Shroud Of Turin And The Secret Of The Resurrection

By Thomas de Wesselow

Viking, 448pp, £20