Shrouded History T
he Shroud first came into focus in 1353 when a French knight,
Geoff roi de Charny, acquired it for a monastery in Lirey, 130 miles east of Paris, France. By the early 16th century, it had
been moved to Chambéry, where it was damaged by a fire in 1532, leaving scorch marks and water stains still visible on the fabric. In 1578, its new owners, the House
of Savoy, moved it to their capital, Turin. It has been there ever since. British author Ian Wilson has
served at the forefront of Shroud origin theories, writing in his 1986 book The Mysterious Shroud that discovered manuscripts from Hungary showed an artistic depiction of the Shroud half a century before de Charny’s acquisition. The illuminated manuscripts,
dated to the late 12th to early 13th centuries A.D., show Jesus entirely naked with his arms on his pelvis, his thumbs retracted with only four
fingers visible, a herringbone pattern on the fabric, and four tiny circles on the lower image. The Shroud of Turin shares all the same unique features. But Wilson suggests that the
Byzantine Empire even had access to the Shroud in their capital city of Constantinople hundreds of years before that. He cites one recorded
correspondence in 1171 A.D. where Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Comnenus supposedly displayed “the cloth which is called sisne in which he was wrapped” to Amaury I, the crusader King of Jerusalem. Crusader knight Robert de Clari
also wrote to soldiers back home as he toured the city in 1203 that at a “church called My Lady St. Mary of Blachernae . . . there was the Shroud [sydoines] in which Our Lord had been wrapped, which every Friday raised itself upright, so that one could see the figure of Our Lord on it.”
Sudarium of Oviedo A
nother bloodstained cloth that has puzzled researchers is the Sudarium of Oviedo, in Spain’s Cathedral of San Salvador.
The cloth, thought to have been
wrapped around Jesus’ head at the time of the descent from the cross, measures 33 by 21 inches. Carbon-14 testing estimated it around
700 A.D., though there are historical references to the Sudarium much earlier. There are fascinating similarities
between the Sudarium and the Shroud. For instance, the two seemingly
unconnected pieces of fabric are both stained by the same rare AB blood type, which is only shared by around 4% of the population. The two fabrics also share key blood
clot locations, including where the crown of thorns could have been. Dr. Alan Whanger of Duke University Medical Center developed a technique
54 NEWSMAX | APRIL 2023
for two images of the cloths to be superimposed using polarized filters. It found over 75 congruent bloodstains
on the facial portion of the cloths and 55 congruent bloodstains on the back of the head and back. Israeli botanist Avinoam Danin, an
authority on flora in the Middle East, said, “There’s no possibility that the Oviedo and the Shroud would have the same bloodstains and these pollen grains unless they covered the same body.” Both cloths featured a man’s face with
a nose measuring about 3 inches and high cheek bones. The beard on the Sudarium also matches the beard on the Shroud. Spanish researchers found the cloth
was in touch with the man’s body for a short time, because the stains were of fresh blood, not coagulated blood. And the flow of the blood suggested the cloth was on the “head of a man on the cross tilted 70 degrees forward and 20
degrees to the right.” Dr. Juan Manuel Miñarro, a Spanish
sculptor at the University of Seville, reported in 2016 that after comparing the faint facial markings visible on the Sudarium to those on the Shroud, he had uncovered that the geometries were quite similar. The study “doesn’t prove in itself that this person was Jesus Christ, but it does clearly advance us along the path of being able to indisputably demonstrate that the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium were wrapped around the head of the same cadaver,” Miñarro declared.
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