New shroud of Turin theory

2005-03-24 15:51

Spokane, Washington - Nathan Wilson is an English teacher with no scientific training, but he thinks he knows how Jesus' burial cloth was made and he thinks it's not a physical sign of the resurrection.

In other words, in Wilson's estimation, the Shroud of Turin is a fake - produced with some glass, paint and old cloth. And that theory, especially with Easter this weekend, has so-called "Shroudies" a buzz.

"A lot of religious people are upset," said Wilson, 26, who teaches at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho.

Wilson is himself an evangelical Christian but said his views on the shroud don't change his faith.

"I'm a Bible-believing Christian who believes in the resurrection completely without a doubt," he said.

The English instructor believes a medieval forger could have painted the image of a crucified man on a pane of glass, laid it on the linen, then left it outside in the sun to bleach the cloth for several days. As the linen lightened, the painted image of the man remained dark on the cloth, creating the equivalent of a photo negative.

Ingenious

Wilson wrote his theory in Books and Culture, a magazine for Christian intellectuals. It was picked up by several websites and is being debated in shroud circles. Wilson's website received more than 100 000 hits from 45 countries in the first week of his article's publication.

Shroud expert Dan Porter said that while Wilson's theory is ingenious, it does not produce images identical to those on the 4.3m-long, 7.6cm-wide strip of linen.

"It is not adequate to produce something that looks like the shroud in two or three ways," said Porter, who lives in Bronxville, New York. "One must produce an image that meets all of the criteria."

Porter contends sun bleaching cannot have produced the image, which he and many others say is the result of chemical reactions on the cloth.

"A problem with Wilson's hypothesis is that sun bleaching merely accelerates bleaching that will occur naturally as the material is exposed to light," Wilson wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "Eventually, Wilson's sun bleach shroud image will fade into the background as exposure equalises the bleaching."

Robbed a grave

The shroud has often been displayed, sometimes in bright sunlight for days at a time, and no such image fading has occurred, Porter said.

Porter and others also question whether panes of glass at least 1.8m-long were produced in medieval times, as Wilson's theory would require.

Radiocarbon tests of the Shroud of Turin were done in 1988, and dated the cloth at AD 1260 to 1390. But Raymond Rogers of Los Alamos National Laboratory recently argued that the tested threads came from later patches and might have been contaminated. Rogers calculated that the shroud is 1 300 to 3 000 years old and could easily date from Jesus' era.

Wilson said he wants to write a novel about his theory. The forager or perhaps foragers, Wilson theorises, probably robbed a grave and pulled the aged shroud off a body, then crucified someone to obtain the blood and study the wounds of Jesus.

"Most likely it involved some real wicked people," Wilson said.

- AP