shroud enigma

The Shroud of Turin goes on display today, apparently. This thing fascinates me: not in an obsessive way, not because I'm particularly bothered about whether it really is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, but because of its enduring enigma.

Countless people have analysed the thing, and written peer-reviewed scientific journals about it. TV documentaries about it crop up regularly. And now two million people are expected to go and see it in the six weeks it is on show. The present Wikipedia text about it remarks, with some justification

The Shroud of Turin is one of, if not the most, studied artifacts in human history.

and yet, its exact nature remains something of a mystery.

You may recall that radiocarbon dating undertaken in 1988 gave, with a high degree of confidence, a date for the cloth of between 1260 and 1390. That has since been disputed, on a couple of grounds. Numerous theories have been put forward for how the image - the 'face of Christ' - got onto the cloth: maybe it was a photographic process, maybe it arose from clever image transfer techniques, maybe it is a radiation burn. Nobody is entirely sure.

Doesn't that strike you as curious? In our present age when science leads and directs much of our society - and take the place of a religion, for some - we have an over-studied object whose nature (never mind whose provenance) is uncertain. Although various explanations have been backed by the creation of facismile shrouds, none really matches the characteristics of the original, it seems - at least, not to the satisfaction of all concerned. And it appears to be unique in history: if it was created by an artist or 'forger', whatever technique was developed to make it does not appear to have been re-used in any comparitive object. Maybe it was the work of a genius like Da Vinci, etched onto the oldest cloth he could lay his hands upon. But if so, he took the technique to the grave with him.

Of course, the approach of the shroud's custodians does not particularly help the analysis: no doubt, with more willing curators, a fresh carbon dating round could have been completed by now. More invasive analysis could surely tell us what the image is made of, and perhaps how it got there. Or maybe not: they are cautious, but have allowed all kinds of analysis to be done. Some have argued that recent restoration work will have destroyed a huge amount of potential evidence in any case.

So we have this rather remarkable artifact, which exists in plain sight and yet whose true nature is most uncertain. It presents a riddle that may never be solved, despite the power of all we know today and the attentions of hundreds of scholars. As a counter-example for the omnipotence of the scientific method, it takes some beating. For that it deserves veneration, no matter what it 'really' is.