COULD THE TURIN SHROUD BE REAL?

Or were medieval relic forgers just more talented than we are willing to allow?

Among the most memorable characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is the Pardoner. A blithe and cheerfully irreligious swindler, he makes his money by selling fake relics to gullible Christians. He specifically mentions the shoulder-bone of a ‘holy Jew’s sheep’ which he pretends can cure sick animals and prevent spousal jealousy; and a mitten which gives its wearer the ability to raise healthy and bountiful crops.

The Pardoner is a chancer and a spiv. But he is also a talented, if shameless, salesman. When he has finished telling his Tale, despite having admitted to his fellow pilgrims that all his relics are trash, he nevertheless offers to sell them some. This earns him a telling-off from the Host, who says:

‘You would have me kiss your old breeches

And swear they were the relics of a saint,

Though they were spattered with your excrement,

By the Cross that Saint Helen found

I wish I had your bollocks in my hand

Instead of relics or a reliquary;

Let’s cut them off, and I’ll help you carry them,

They shall be enshrined in a hog’s turd.’

The Pardoner is rather affronted. But peace is soon made and the tale-telling moves on. Meanwhile, as readers today we are left with the impression that the late medieval relics business was an outrageous racket, which the Reformation did well to sweep away. We wonder how people in the Middle Ages could be so dumb as to have fallen for it.

Yet assuming that previous generations of humans were stupider and simpler merely because they lived long ago is always a dangerous thing for a historian to do. And it can lead to some very wrongheaded conclusions.

Pope Francis I and the Turin Shroud in 2015

I mention Chaucer’s Pardoner because he was the first person who sprang to mind this Easter weekend when I read the latest news about the Turin Shroud - a relic which has been held in Turin Cathedral since the late sixteenth century.

The Shroud is a large linen sheet purportedly found in Christ’s empty tomb after the Crucifixion. It bears a faint imprint of a man’s face and body, some stains which may or may not be blood, and some evidence of fire damage and repairs dating to the 1530s. Its provenance is pretty secure to the fifteenth century, dodgy in the fourteenth century and effectively non-existent before that.

What’s more, for the past forty-some years scientists have been unanimous that it is a phoney.

In 1988 radiocarbon dating tests performed by multiple laboratories on little fragments of the Shroud found that the fabric was either thirteenth- or fourteenth-century. There is, in other words, a bit of a gap between Jesus dying on the Cross, coming back to life and redeeming mankind and this piece of cloth being imprinted with a human form.

Or is there? Yesterday newspapers reported that David Rolfe, who made a film about the Turin Shroud in 1988, has now concluded that the radiocarbon dating was flawed, having been carried out on bits of the Shroud that were patched up in the Middle Ages.

From this Rolfe extrapolates the possibility that in fact the Shroud may not be a medieval forgery after all. And he backs this up by arguing that people in the late Middle Ages were not sophisticated enough to produce such a convincing fake. Rolfe has challenged the British Museum, who were involved in the 1988 dating work, to repeat the exercise; if they forge a similarly convincing Shroud, he says he will give them $1m.

Nice work if you can get it. But what does this all mean?

Ultraviolet photographs of the Turin Shroud

I cannot tell you anything authoritative about the date of provenance of the Turin Shroud except what has been concluded by people who were skilled in their field and carried out scientific enquiries in good faith. Which is to say: whatever doubts are now cast on the 1988 analyses of the Turin Shroud, nothing has been produced since that time which overturns their conclusions. According to the best tests done to date, this is a piece of medieval linen, and until more tests are done, that’s all we can know with any degree of confidence.

What I can say is that attempting to undermine the possibility of a medieval provenance for the Turin Shroud by suggesting that the Middle Ages was a time of (in Rolfe’s words) ‘far less sophisticated forgery techniques’ ignores the fact that the Middle Ages was the time of the most dedicated and enthusiastic relic-forging industry in the history of humanity.

Relics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were an essential part of Christian worship, practical medicine and agriculture. Yes, they were mostly used for ends that we now consider hopelessly superstitious. But that is neither here nor there. The economic and spiritual imperatives for forging really good relics (as well as cheap-o bargain basement ones) was enormous. And some very fine relics were produced.

Take, for example, the Crown of Thorns, purchased at vast cost by Louis IX of France in the 1240s; or the Iron Crown of Lombardy, lined with a thin-hammered nail supposedly (but falsely) used in the Crucifixion. These were fine, fine works of art, the craftsmanship of which belies our suppositions about the primitive state of medieval man.

Moreover, the Middle Ages never lacked for sublime artists. There would be few people today who could produce a completely convincing fake Van Eyck or Leonardo. Few too would be the architects who could design a Gothic cathedral like Notre Dame or Lincoln, or a vast Duomo like Brunelleschi’s. The fact that 500-odd years of history separates us from them doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Yet we instinctively patronise medieval artists - be they engaged in high art or low skulduggery.

There is, in fact, no reason at all to suppose that we today would be better at forging a Turin Shroud, as Rolfe has challenged the British Museum to do. Especially since the motivation - even priced at one million dollars - is markedly less now than it was then.

Finally, a word on relics in general. Today, in our contented state of post-Enlightenment rationalism, we can only really imagine that anyone who venerated a relic of a saint’s finger and could not see that it was probably a pig-bone must have been an incurable dupe or dullard: a patsy who deserved to be conned by a rogue like The Pardoner.

Yet I think the medieval reality was far more subtle than we tend to imagine. Chaucer’s contemporary Giovanni Boccaccio did a fine job of explaining how fourteenth-century people dealt with the reality behind relics, in the very first story of his Decameron.

There, Boccaccio tells of a dreadful criminal who tricks a town into believing he is a saint; the criminal dies and everyone in the town scraps over fragments of his clothing, which they revere as relics for generations afterward. Are we to think of these townsfolk as idiots and dupes? Not quite. For, explains Boccaccio, God knows very well that relics are often totally dodgy. But all he really cares about is the sincerity of the individual believer’s faith.

In other words, to bring things full circle, if anyone sincerely believes the Turin Shroud is a physical way to commune with the extraordinary mystery of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, then that’s good enough for God.

A million dollars doesn’t really come into it.