Religion: The Mystery of the Cloth

How big was Jesus Christ? Was He a strongly built man 5 feet 10 inches tall, with long, delicate hands & feet, a right shoulder slightly lower than the left? Did He have a brain weighing approximately 1,492 grams? These questions were debated for three days last week by 200 learned scientists and black-robed scholars of the Roman Catholic Church in the huge, frescoed Hall of the Papal Chancellery in Rome. It was the first International Congress of Studies of the Holy Shroud.

During the 7th Century two early churchmen, Saints Braulionis and Adamnan of lona, referred to the existence of a cloth venerated as the shroud in which the body of Christ was wrapped when it was laid in the tomb. In 1171 William, Archbishop of Tyre, mentioned such a shroud in Constantinople. In 1204 a member of the Fourth Crusade, which sacked the city, sent the shroud to his father in France. But in 1349 the Church of St. Stephen in Besançon, where it was kept, caught fire, and the shroud seemed to have vanished.

The following year, King Philippe de Valois of France presented to one of his lords a cloth purporting to be the same shroud. Two bishops forbade veneration of it, presumably because it was a fraud; and in 1390 Pope Clement VII issued a special bull ordering that it should be treated only as "a painted representation of the original, authentic Holy Shroud, whose whereabouts are unknown." Since 1452 the cloth has been the property of the Italian House of Savoy. On special occasions it was exhibited to the faithful, but in the 19th Century, at least, it seems to have appeared not as a painting but as a soiled and damaged piece of white linen.

65 & 90 Degrees. In 1898, Italy's King Umberto I agreed to have the relic photographed. Secondo Pia, a photographer of Turin, was given the job. While developing the plate, he reported: "Suddenly I was so filled with fear that I almost fainted. For there grew plainly visible on the plate the face and body of a man whose head was covered with blood, whose wrists carried stigmata, whose expression was one of untold majesty."

Ever since, the argument has raged: Does the 14 ft. 3 in.-long cloth really bear the front & back imprint of Christ's naked body, as though it had enveloped Him lengthwise, or is it the work of a clever forger? Points mentioned in favor of the shroud's authenticity:

¶The figure on the shroud is like a photographic negative (light areas appear dark), which would seem to indicate that it is the result of an impression rather than a painting (though an impression might still be a forgery). According to a letter read at the Congress by Roman Catholic Professor Rudolf Kynek of Czechoslovakia, "We have treated corpses with myrrh and aloes, and when we placed them in linen an impression of the corpse could afterwards be plainly seen on the linen when we exposed it to light. As time went by ... when humidity covered it with invisible fine molds it became invisible to the naked eye . . ."