The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [131]
“When are you leaving?” Rothschild asked.
“I’m booked for tomorrow, first-class to Rome, departing out of JFK late afternoon,” Castle said, picking up the check.
“Makes sense to me,” Rothschild replied, very happy to hear the news. “Take my cell phone number with you. I want to be the first to know when you find the codex you’re looking for.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My interest in the Shroud of Turin dates back four decades, when I first learned about the Shroud while attending St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio.
In 1998, I traveled to Turin, Italy, where I had the opportunity to view the Shroud in person multiple times over several days. That Exposition that marked the hundredth anniversary of the 1898 exhibition of the Shroud, when Italian amateur photographer Secondo Pia took the first photographic images of the Shroud.
In researching this book, I was greatly assisted by John and Rebecca Jackson in Colorado Springs, Colorado. John, as mentioned in the novel, was a principal organizer of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project.
Rebecca graciously provided many excellent comments in reading an early version of the manuscript. John and Rebecca run the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado and edit the extremely valuable ShroudofTurin.com website.
Barrie Schwortz provided the photographs used in the novel. Barrie was the official photographer of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project. He edits another extremely valuable website, Shroud.com.
In writing this novel, I took the necessary liberties of fictionalizing events of the book and may well have represented the science about the Shroud or the photographic evidence in a manner John and Rebecca Jackson or Barrie Schwortz would dispute.
Neither should John and Rebecca Jackson or Barrie Schwortz be seen as endorsing the novel or the views expressed in the novel.
I am indebted to Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, for his continued friendship and his support for my efforts to write a novel about the Shroud of Turin.
The novel benefited greatly from the insightful comments and suggestions of my close personal friend Dr. Stephen Friefeld, M.D., an accomplished surgeon in Springfield, New Jersey, as he closely read the manuscript throughout the drafting process.
Again, any limitations in telling the medical part of this story are entirely my own, given that my graduate academic training is as a political scientist, not as a medical doctor.
Several books were extremely helpful in conducting the research.
Frederick T. Zugibe’s The Crucifixion of Jesus is an invaluable forensic inquiry into the ancient Roman practice of crucifixion, but also a key treatise on the medical examination of the Shroud of Turin.i
Equally important was the two-volume treatise by Raymond E. Brown titled The Death of the Messiah, an indispensable biblical analysis of the account of Jesus Christ’s death as told by the New Testament gospels.ii
Among Ian Wilson’s many important books on the Shroud of Turin, I found myself relying upon his 1998 book, The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World’s Most Sacred Relic Is Real.iii
The 2000 book The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidenceiv, resulting from Barrie Schwortz’s collaboration with Ian Wilson, was also extremely useful.
For the theory that Leonardo da Vinci created the Shroud of Turin, I found most useful Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s 1994 book, Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Truth Behind the Centuries-Long Conspiracy of Silence.v
Two books by Michio Kaku, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretic Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, provided an excellent introduction to particle physics: his 1994 book, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimensionvi, and his more recent 2005 book, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos.vii
Of the