Pause for Thought – How you can find the Turin Shroud in a Cardiff church

Glamorgan Star news 23/04/2024

2 minutes read

IN Turin Cathedral in northern Italy, they have a remarkable artefact – a shroud which bears the faint image of a crucified man.

When the image is seen in photographic negative it is much clearer. Pathologists have been able to study the image to determine the cause of death of the victim. Believers in the shroud say it is an image of Jesus, miraculously impressed upon the cloth at the moment of his resurrection.

But in 1988 three independent carbon-dating tests dated the cloth to between 1260 and 1390. So, it was a medieval forgery after all. Some believers in the shroud have suggested that the portions of the cloth used in the tests had become contaminated over the centuries, skewing the results.

I find the image on the shroud (however it was produced) a moving depiction of the sufferings of Jesus. But I don’t think God provides us with miraculous proofs to prop up our faith. “Happy are they who find faith without seeing me”, said Jesus. Perhaps the Turin shroud should be seen as an icon, rather than a miraculous image. If you would like to see a full-size copy of the shroud, the Catholic church of St Alban’s, Splott (also known as the Cardiff Oratory) has one on permanent display.

Over the centuries, there have been other apparently miraculous images of Jesus. The story of one is enshrined in the Catholic devotion called the stations of the cross, which consists of 14 paintings of Jesus on his way to crucifiction displayed around the walls of churches. The sixth of the paintings is named ‘Veronica wipes the face of Jesus’.

According to a medieval legend, a woman wiped the face of Jesus with a cloth, and was rewarded with a miraculous imprint of his face on it. I’m not suggesting that Catholic churches drop the Veronica painting because it isn’t in the Bible. Rather, the story can be seen as a parable: that Jesus should be impressed on all our hearts, so that we can become ‘true images’ of his love to the world.

Christians desire miraculous images of Jesus because the Bible doesn’t tell us what he looked like. We think we know what he looked like: a tall, white European man with long hair and a beard. But that image of Jesus only became standardised after the Roman Empire became Christian, three centuries after his death. In order to assist the acceptance of the new Christian religion, Jesus was portrayed as looking like the old gods, Zeus and Neptune, who were always depicted with long hair.

So what did Jesus really look like? The average Jewish man of his time was about five and a half feet tall, brown eyed, olive skinned, with short dark hair. That is as close as we are going to get. Some of you may be thinking, ‘But Jesus appeared to the saints in visions, and he always looked like he does in paintings.’ But if he hadn’t appeared like that, they wouldn’t have known it was Jesus! Perhaps God accommodates our expectations; and what Jesus actually looked like isn’t that important. As St Paul said, ‘Even though we knew Christ as a man, we do not know him like that any longer.’

By Rev Robert Parrish

The views expressed by columnists of this newspaper do not necessarily reflect the views of the Glamorgan Star, its employees or its proprietors.