The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [116]
“Certainly,” Middagh said, pleased to have another chance to contribute his expertise to the discussion. “In 1978, Swiss criminologist Max Frei worked with the Shroud of Turin Research Project to obtain samples of dust from the Shroud by applying dabbed strips of sticky tape onto the cloth’s surface. Dr. Frei correctly assumed the dust samples would contain microscopic spores of pollen that would provide clues to where the Shroud had been over time. Under microscopic analysis, pollen spores have a hard outer enzyme shell that remains resistant to change for thousands of years. If the Shroud contained only French or Italian pollen spores, the results of the analysis would support the hypothesis that the Shroud had been forged in Europe in the years 1260 to 1390 A.D.”
“But this is not what we found,” Coretti quickly added.
“Right,” Middagh said. “Before his death in 1983, Frei had identified fifty-eight varieties of plant on the Shroud, permitting him to conclude the Shroud was once in the Middle East. Frei found pollen samples he identified as from plants found in Jerusalem; other pollens were characteristic of the areas around Edessa and Constantinople; there were also pollen spores common to Europe. Frei concluded the pollen had been deposited on the Shroud from its various public expositions over the centuries. At one time or another, the Shroud must have been exposed to the air not only in Jerusalem, but also in southern Turkey, including the surroundings of Constantinople, which is now Istanbul. Frei’s analysis established definitively that the Shroud did not originate in France or Italy.”
“One last point,” Dottoressa Coretti said. “In 1978, when they were working with the NASA VP-8 three-dimensional Image Analyzer that I believe you heard about at CERN, Dr. John Jackson and his longtime associate Dr. Eric Jumper discovered what looked like coins resting over the eyes of the man in the Shroud of Turin. Then in 1980, Father Francis Filas of Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit like our Father Morelli here, and Michael Marx, an expert in classical coins, identified the object over the right eye as a Julia lepton coin with a distinctive design of a sheaf of barley. Pontius Pilate minted the Julia lepton, equivalent to a low-value Roman mite, between 29 and 32 A.D. to honor Emperor Tiberius Caesar’s wife, Julia. The word lepton designates ‘small’ or ‘thin.’ The lepton with the distinctive barley sheaf design was minted only once, in 29 A.D. Putting coins on the eyes of the dead has a long history in the Middle East. In various religious traditions the coins are seen as providing the money to pay for the trip to Heaven, not just keeping the eyelids closed in death—”
Middagh interrupted. “Please allow me to elaborate why various Shroud researchers consider the coins to be an important discovery.
“Of course.” Coretti acquiesced, certain she would appreciate his explanation.
“The coins on the Shroud had a misspelling,” Middagh explained, preparing to point out why the detail was important. “The coins were Roman and the emperor’s name would have been spelled in Greek on the coins as TIBERIOU KAISAROS. The problem was that the recognizable writing on the coins on the Shroud was UCAI, formed by the end of TIBERIOU coming together with the beginning of kaisaros. That would seem to indicate a misspelling, where the C should have been a K. It was a problem, that is, until several similar coins were found with the misspelling. In a way the misspelling confirmed that the researchers were looking at real coins that had been placed over the eyes of Jesus in death. Had an artist painted in the coins or had the researchers been seeing what they wanted to find, the likelihood