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BUCKING THE ODDS "If it were proved fake tomorrow, it wouldn't shake my faith," says Ian Wilson from his home near Brisbane, Australia. "The fact that it might have touched the body of Christ doesn't move me at all. It's just knowing that the image exists. I would be as interested in a 14th century cloth if I could find the artist who made it."
Well, maybe. Few people have put as much effort into proving that no human hand painted the shroud--and that it is far older than the radiocarbon dating allows--as the cheerful, Oxford-educated Wilson. Perhaps the best known and most open minded of the shroud apologists, Wilson, 57, has penned three shroud books and spent innumerable hours researching the relic. He was first captivated by a photograph of the image at age 15. "It just didn't seem like a work of art to me; it whetted my interest and rocked my agnosticism." He eventually converted to Catholicism and penned what is probably the most stirring hypothetical description ever of the shroud's possible origin. "In the darkness of the Jerusalem tomb the dead body of Jesus lay, unwashed, covered in blood, on a stone slab," he wrote in his 1978 best seller The Shroud of Turin. "Suddenly there is a burst of mysterious power from it. In that instant the blood dematerializes, dissolved perhaps by the flash, while its image and that of the body becomes indelibly fused onto the cloth, preserving for posterity a literal 'snapshot' of the Resurrection."
Despite such eloquent partisanship, which he sustains in The Blood and the Shroud, Wilson is punctiliously fair minded, always printing the other side's opinion before politely taking issue with it. He delights in sindonology's varied arcana. The new book touches on such points as Roman graffiti, the readouts of a machine called the VP-8 Image Analyzer, grisaille (monochrome gray) painting and the feeding habits of the ibis. He discusses the musculature of the brow and the existence of the twill-and-herringbone weave in ancient Palestinian linen, and in a footnote he downplays the possibility that the image on the shroud is that of a leader of the Knights Templar who was crucified before being executed. But he also keeps an eye on the basics. What does he feel he can say unequivocally about the shroud? "Based on medical evidence and other information, the image seems to be someone crucified in the manner of Christ." As opposed, he means, to the manner in which the Crucifixion has traditionally been depicted in Western art. "The nail wounds in the hands go through the wrists, not the palms," consistent with what little we now know about the gory practice in the Roman Empire of the 1st century. "And those are real blood flows," following laws of physiognomy that were unknown to doctors or painters either in Jesus' time or during the Middle Ages. Against those who suspect the stains are faked or late additions because they have remained reddish, Wilson calmly produces an expert on ancient DNA who says blood from a traumatic death can retain its tint for millenniums. Wilson's conclusion, based as well on the eerie three-dimensional quality of the image's photographic negative, is that it is not, as Bishop d'Arcis contended, a cunning painting. "To try to interpret it as the product of some unknown medieval faker seems rather like arguing for the Taj Mahal being a mere geological accident," he has written. It "must have come into contact with a real body."