Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [113]
However, for anyone who's impatient, or if you have a plane to catch and can't wait, then just down the aisle from the aquarium stands a life-size rectangular photographic replica dating back to 1898.
At first glance—and I feel terrible saying this, because someone's bound to be offended—as is the case with the building it's in, the Shroud is a little unimpressive. Like a faded hearth rug. There are burn holes in it, and bits missing. In fact, if some jokester told you it was a length of dirty roller towel, the sort you see crumpled up on restroom floors when the dispenser breaks, you'd be inclined to believe him.
“Where does his head start?”
My little guide points out the features. “Head, chest, arms, legs …”
“Aah, yes.”
What I'm looking at is the front and the back of the man they claim is Jesus Christ. And if it is him, then, believe me, he was quite a hunk, ladies! Muscular, bearded, about five foot nine, with long hair parted in the middle, exactly the way he appears in movies.
There are two photographs on display, one in normal black-and-white, and then a second with the colors reversed for contrast, like a negative. It's in the negative that the features truly come alive, dispelling once and for all to my mind the theory that it's Hulk Hogan asleep. Most persuasive are the bloodstains: some close by his wrist, another alongside his waist, then many more down his legs, with a speckle of pinprick wounds around the forehead from his crown of thorns. The instant I see this, I'm a convert, utterly convinced of the Shroud's authenticity. No further proof needed. I'm in.
If only everyone in the world were as gullible as I am.
Sadly, they're not. In 1988, Science, which hates mysteries, examined the Shroud and came to the conclusion that Christ's image had not been burned onto the cloth by his Divinity as much as it had probably been painted on with watercolors. And that includes the bloodstains too.
Well, these were fighting words. Straight away, critics of modern carbon dating techniques, who had a vested interest in keeping their Christian superstitions alive, claimed that the material was contaminated and the tests were wrong, wrong, wrong.
“The method with the carbon,” the guide says, “has a lot of problems, connected with the fact that the object, the linen, can have on it microorganisms, and also carbon from the fire that destroyed part of the Shroud when it was at Chambéry.”
Chambéry's in France, and was the former seat of the Savoy dynasty. In 1532 the chapel there fell victim to a terrible fire that scorched the linen sufficiently to throw off carbon-dating calculations by a thousand years or more.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, for its part, won't commit either way, stating that, if you want to believe that the Shroud was the burial cloth of Jesus, that's up to you, buddy. Which is exactly the stand I'd take, too, if I thought I might have a total dud on my hands but thousands of pilgrims kept descending on my duomo every year demanding to look at it.
I ask my little bald friend what percentage sure he is that the Shroud is the real deal. “Sixty percent sure? Seventy-five percent?”
Astonishingly, he says, “Ninety-nine. On it we can see all the characteristics of a very particular crucifixion. Exactly the same characteristics that were written in the Gospels about who Jesus was, and in particular …”
As he's talking, something extremely odd happens, diverting my attention.
I feel a sharp twinge. Underneath my rib cage on my right side. To begin with, I dismiss it as indigestion. The pappardelle repeating on me. But I've had indigestion before, and this—this seems fifty times worse. And in the wrong place. Also, indigestion subsides,