The Templars and the Shroud of Christ by Barbara Frale

Introduction
    As I worked on this essay, I noticed a curious fact. Several experts who had glanced at the title whilst being shown the work, got the immediate impression that it dealt with the Turin Shroud as the true funeral shroud ofJesus Christ.
    I therefore feel the need to warn the reader from the very first page that the title says The Templars and the Shroud of Christ because these mediaeval warrior monks did almost certainly keep for some time the Shroud, and contemplated in it the evidence that the Christ (not simplyJesus of Nazareth) had indeed passed through death.
    The reader may think this a futile distinction, but it is not, and this book will give ample reasons for this.
    The question of whether the Shroud of Turin is genuine or not is still open, and at any rate, beyond the purpose of this book. What my research sought to study is the cult of the Shroud among the Templars, there is no doubt that as far as the Templars were concerned, the cloth came from theHoly Sepulchre and had been used to wrap the body of Christ before he rose from the dead. This reality forces the readers to put themselves, as it were, in the shoes of the Templar Knights, even if they have to pretend to believe something they don’t. If we wish to study a certain world and understand the way it thought, we must make ourselves at one with it and try to see reality as this world saw it. Many passages in this book will, for this reason, refer to the Shroud as to the chief relic of the Passion, for that is how the Templars saw it.
    In 1988 the cloth was subjected to a radio-carbon dating test called C14, which gives reliable results, albeit with some margin of uncertainty, the object has been kept in particular conditions and has not suffered contaminations from organic materials. A good example of its accuracy was an untouched Etruscan tome, sealed in the sixth century BC and only reopened by the archaeologist who discovered it. The analyses were entrusted to three laboratories that specialise in this kind of investigations, and the result they reached dated the Shroud to the later middle ages, with an approximation of 130 years (1260-1390 AD).
    The issue, however, was not settled at all: while on one side the radio-carbon analyses roused a storm of polemics, since some people claimed that their method did not respect the rules of scientific procedure, on the other, many asserted that radio-carbon simply could not give any reliable results in the matter of the Shroud, an archaeological relic that has suffered a huge number of forms of contamination and whose history is still largely to be discovered. Indeed, even the Nobel Prizewinner Willard Frank Libby, who invented and perfected the C14 archaeological dating test, had earlier declared himself against the experiment.
    Under the late Pope John Paul II, who was devoted to the Shroud because it gave him a vivid and realistic sense ofJesus Christ’s sufferings, the then Papal guardian of the Shroud, CardinalAnastasio Ballestrero, stated that the cloth was “A venerable icon of the Christ”. Many of the faithful took these words with a tangible sense of disappointment; they had hoped for something different, hoped, in short, that the Pope should officially declare the Shroud to be the most important relic ofJesus in our possession. In those hot-headed days, it even happened thatBallestrero, until then every liberal’s reactionary Catholic bogeyman should be labelled as “an Enlightenment intellectual in purple” ( La Repubblica , 14 October 1988), a title that no priest enjoys being stuck with.
    In fact, that definition of the Shroud is best understood if we try to understand the theological concept of Icon, which is not simply the same as any holy image. The Cardinal’s words were not at all intended to place the Shroud on the same level as Michelangelo’s Pietà , or of any work of art that can represent the Passion credibly and poetically. Christian theology, eastern theology in