Saturday, April 25, 1998

Trail of blood holds the key to Shroud of Turin, physician says

By Richard C. Dujardin / The Providence Journal-Bulletin

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- It wasn't the news he expected.

Still, when three different labs announced in 1988 that their carbon dating of the famed Shroud of Turin showed it could not have been the burial cloth of Jesus -- having found it to be only 700 years old -- Dr. Gilbert R. Lavoie says he was willing at first to accept the verdict.

After all, he said, he's a man who goes by facts, and the new "evidence" seemed to say the shroud was a medieval fake.

But was it? By then he had by that already spent more than 10 years studying and saw what he believed was strong evidence the shroud was as real as the back of his hand.

Yes, he said, carbon dating is an important piece of the puzzle, but should that it be the sole reason for dismissing experiments by Max Frei, a biologist and criminologist from the University of Zurich, who was able to remove from the shroud's surface grain pollens from 57 different plants, many of them common only to Israel and the area where Christ died? Was Frei's work with the pollen to be judged less scientific than the carbon dating?

And what, he wondered, was to become of the findings of American scientists, who after putting the shroud under rigorous analysis in 1978, found that the faint portrait of a crucified man was not from paint or pigment but from the yellowing of fibers that were half the width of human hair -- a yellowing that, more mysteriously, went only one fiber deep.

Lavoie's own analysis of the shroud had already led him to other conclusions as well. Knowing what he knew about blood, he was convinced that the brownish stains he saw on the cloth were not an artist's renderings but the dried blood of a real man who had been whipped and crucified.

And so it is that when the world got ready for the first public exhibition of the controversial shroud in more than 20 years -- which opened last weekend for two months in the Cathedral in Turin, Italy -- Lavoie was going on network TV and radio talk shows to promote his view that the shroud is real.

"Don't misunderstand," he says. "I go by facts, not wishful thinking. I said before that I'd give $2,000 to any person who can prove to me that the shroud is fake, because if it is a fake, I'm out of here. I have other things to do with my life than waste my time on something that isn't true."

Lavoie, who during the last two decades has practiced both internal medicine and occupational medicine in Boston and Worcester, Mass., wasn't actually a member of the team of scientists who examined the famous cloth in 1978. But he was close at hand and attended the International Congress on the shroud held in Turin that same year, where he developed a working partnership with some of the team's participants.

By studying the shroud and conducting his own experiments, Lavoie says he discovered new things about the 14-foot-long cloth that were apparently overlooked by others. He outlines these in his book, "Unlocking the Secrets of the Shroud" (Thomas More, $12.95), which came out in January.

Given his background, it's probably not surprising that Lavoie takes special interest in the shroud's trail of blood. Taking off on the work of Alan Adler, a chemist in Connecticut who concluded that brownish-reddish stains on the cloth came from whole blood, he set out to see if the stains on the shroud could have physically matched the wounds of a crucified Christ.

To do so, he traced the blood stains from a copy of the shroud onto a sheet, and cut them out with scissors. He then draped the sheet over the head of his parish priest, whom he asked to volunteer, and using a magic marker he then marked each place where there had been a cutout.

Removing the sheet, he discovered that the marks of "blood" did not end up being in the priest's hair, but rather on the temples and cheeks.

"People looking at the shroud assume that the stains of blood originate in the hair. But they don't. The confusion comes from the fact that the process that caused the body image and the process that caused the stains were two separate events."

That is to say, the blood stains that soaked into the shroud came from direct contact with the skin. The body image was like a projection.

Using the same procedure that he used on the head, Lavoie found that the stains on the arms and torso were just where they should be if the shroud were draped around a crucified body -- from the nail wounds in the wrist (a tell-tale sign, since people in the Middle Ages assumed the nails were in the palms) to the blood trickling along the arms.

But Lavoie wondered if the stains on the shroud were too perfect. His own attempts at making blood transfers had ended up much messier -- until he realized that the clots needed to be placed vertically, so as to allow blood-clotting serum to drip out.

The non-blood areas, the body image, involved an entirely different process, in Lavoie's view.

"It couldn't have been a contact process, because if it were, the face would have been grotesque and distorted. Instead, it's more like what we'd get out of a camera. In this case it's as if a photographic negative were projected onto the cloth -- long before the camera was invented."

What it all really means, he says, is that the theories advanced by both friends and critics who think the image was produced by contact with micro-organisms on the body, or from an artisan's placing the cloth over a statue covered with acid or powder, don't really understand the process.

"All of those are a contact process, and a contact is not going to produce this sort of image.

"However, I must tell you it is true that if you put some acidic liquid on a flat surface and put a cloth over it, the fibers will yellow. But remember that the image on the shroud is just one fiber deep. Making such an image that thin would be incredibly difficult. People have tried, and to my knowledge no one has succeeded. All they get are mushy pictures."

And what does Lavoie think produced the image on the cloth? Some people have suggested that it was produced by a flash of light coming from a resurrected body, but Lavoie won't engage in such talk.

"I go for facts, not theories," he says. "I will, however, say it doesn't appear to be the work of a human hand."

The physician does say that his research has led him to some unexpected discoveries about the shroud and events and customs of Jesus' time.

For example, he says:

--Placing Jesus in the tomb without washing the body first was actually in keeping with Jewish burial customs. That's because Jewish law specifically forbade washing when the man suffered a violent death and lost at least "an egg and a half" of blood in the process, since the "mingled blood" would have rendered his body ritually unclean.

--By noting the position of the feet and hair, one can surmise, says Lavoie, that the man in the shroud is not lying down but is erect, and in fact suspended in air.

--Not only that, but the shroud portrait shows a man with either blond or white hair. While such a picture may startle many people, says Lavoie, it would be in keeping with a passage in the Book of Revelation, where John speaks of the resurrected Jesus as having white hair.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN TRIM HERE)

Speaking of John, Lavoie finds what he thinks is an allusion to the Shroud in the Gospel of John, in the scene where Peter and John come upon the empty tomb: "He (Peter) saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple (John), who reached the tomb first, also went in, and saw and believed."

Lavoie notes that the scripture goes on to say that neither disciple was aware at that point that Jesus had risen from the dead. If that were the case, he says, it's legitimate to ask what it was that John "saw" that made him "believe."

The physician thinks that John looked at the shroud, and seeing the image of his Jesus on it, instantly concluded that Jesus was the Son of God.

"The Jews at that time believed that only God could make an image, because anything else would have been idolatry. Seeing the image of his friend Jesus made him think this was someone who had to be special."

Lavoie believes the questions surrounding the shroud make it important that scientists have a chance to test the shroud again, perhaps this time using more than one sample.

As for the impact that the study has had on his own life, he puts it this way: "When I first approached the shroud I did so skeptically. I wanted to be very careful. For me it was more a visual experience and had nothing to do with my faith.

"But once I became convinced that this is what it is, my faith deepened. It caused me to study the Bible, and to look for answers for the things that I found."

(c) 1998, The Providence Journal-Bulletin.

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