Christ's 'death cert' found on Turin Shroud
Saturday November 21 2009
A Vatican researcher claimed last night to have discovered Christ's "burial certificate" on the Turin Shroud.
Barbara Frale, a historian at the Vatican archive, said she had found the words "Jesus Nazarene" on the shroud, proving it was the linen cloth that Christ's body was wrapped in.
She said computer analysis of photographs of the shroud revealed extremely faint words written in Greek, Aramaic and Latin. Her claim was immediately contested by scholars, who said that radiocarbon dating tests in 1988 showed the shroud to be a medieval forgery.
Dr Frale asserts in her new book, 'The Shroud of Jesus the Nazarene', that computer enhancement enabled her to detect the archaic script, which appears on various parts of the material.
She suggested it was written by low-ranking Roman officials or mortuary clerks on a scroll or piece of papyrus to identify Christ's corpse.
It would have enabled relatives to retrieve a body from a communal morgue, she said. The hidden text was in effect the "burial certificate" for Jesus Christ, she said.
Dr Frale said she used computers to enhance images of faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the shroud.
She says the words include the name "Jesus Nazarene" in Greek, proving the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have labelled Jesus a Nazarene without referring to his divinity.
The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen fibres at the time of his resurrection.
The fragile artifact, owned by the Vatican, is kept locked in a special protective chamber in Turin's cathedral.
While faint letters scattered around the face on the shroud were seen decades ago, serious researchers dismissed them due to the test's results, Dr Frale said. But when she cut out the words from photos of the shroud and showed them to experts, they concurred the writing style was typical of the Middle East in the first century.
Dr Frale claimed the text also partially confirms the Gospels' account of Jesus's final moments. A fragment in Greek that can be read as "removed at the ninth hour" may refer to Christ's time of death reported in the holy texts, she said.
Dr Frale is noted in Italy for her research on the medieval order of the Knights Templar.
But her latest book raised doubts among some experts.
"People work on grainy photos and think they see things," said Antonio Lombatti, a Church historian who has written books about the shroud. "It's all the result of imagination and computer software." (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Nick Squires in Rome
Irish Independent
