The Sudarium of Oviedo is a small, blood stained, head cloth revered as a relic that details much of the sufferings of a Man who died of asphyxiation after having a cap of thorns thrust onto his scalp.
The wounds on this cloth, when compared to those of The Shroud of Turin match precisely indicating that both cloths covered the same crucified Man.
But suppose one chooses to believe the carbon dating of The Shroud done in 1988…it was reported to have a date of between 1260 and 1390 A.D.. Surely, the fact that the Sudarium has been in Oviedo, Spain since 1095 would prompt one to question the accuracy of the carbon dating…would compel a retest of a different sample from The Shroud…especially when Dr. Libby, who discovered carbon 14 dating has stated that the process cannot be applied to The Shroud due to contamination.
Perhaps, despite all of the scientific evidence, one chooses to believe that these two cloth have nothing in common…that neither ever touched the body of a Man crucified long ago. Why not grant them this belief?
Doing so, though, as expert Mark Guscin writes, entails a belief that a medieval artist/forger is responsible for both cloths.
“If so,‘the following story would have to be true.
Sometime in the seventh century, in Palestine, after reading the gospel of John, a well known forger of religious relics saw the opportunity of putting a new product on the market…a cloth that had been on the face of the dead body of Jesus.
The forger was also an expert in medicine, who knew that a crucified person died of asphyxiation, and that when this happened, special liquids filled the lungs of the dead body, and can come out through the nose if the body is moved. The only way he could get this effect on the cloth would be to re-enact the process, so this is exactly what he did.
He crucified a volunteer, eliminating those candidates who did not fulfill the right conditions…swollen nose and cheeks, forked beard to stain the cloth, etc. When the body was taken down from the cross, he shook it around a bit with the help of a few friends, holding the folded cloth to the dead volunteer’s nose so that future generations would be able to see the outline of his fingers.
He even stuck a few thorns in the back of the dead man’s neck, knowing that relic hunters would be looking for bloodstains from the crown of thorns.
Being an eloquent man, he convinced people that this otherwise worthless piece of cloth was stained with nothing less than the blood and pleural liquid of Christ, and so it was guarded in Jerusalem with other relics, and considered so genuine and spiritually valuable that it was worth saving first from the invading Persians and later from the Arabs.
A few hundred years later, some time between 1260 and 1390, another professional forger, a specialist in religious relics too, decided that the time was ripe for something new, something really convincing. There were numerous relics from various saints in circulation all around Europe, bones, skulls, capes, but no, he wanted something really original. Various possibilities ran through his mind, the crown of thorns, the nails from the crucifixion, the table cloth from The Last Supper, and then suddenly he had it—-the funeral shroud of Jesus.
And not only that, he would put an image on the Shroud, the image of the man the Shroud had wrapped!
The first step was difficult. Being an expert in textile weaves, (one of his many specialties, the others being pollen, Middle East blood groups, numismatist of the years of Tiberius, photography, Roman whips, and electron microscopes) he needed linen of a special kind…typical of The Middle East in the first century. Once this had been ordered and specially made, he folded it up before starting his work, as a neighbor had suggested that such a cloth would have been folded up and hidden in a wall in Edessa for few hundred years, so the image would be discontinuous on some of the fold marks.
Leaving the cloth folded up, he traveled to Oviedo in the north of Spain, where he knew that a forerunner in his trade had left a cloth with Jesus’ blood stains. On gaining permission to examine the Sudarium, he first checked the blood group…AB of course, common in The Middle East but scarce in Europe—then made an exact plan of the blood stains (carefully omitting those that had clotted when the Sudarium was used) so that his stains would match exactly.
After his trip to Oviedo, he went on a tour of what is now Turkey, forming a composite picture of Jesus from all the icons, coins, and images he could find. After all, he needed people to think that his shroud had been around for over a thousand years, and that artists had used it as their inspiration for painting Christ.
He didn’t really understand what some of the marks were, the square box between the eyes, the line across the throat, but he thought he’d better put them on anyway. He didn’t want to be accused of negligence, because he was an internationally famous forger and had a reputation to maintain.
Once he was home, he somehow obtained some blood (AB naturally) and decided to begin his work of art with the blood stains before even making the body image. Unfortunately, he miscalculated the proportions, and the nail stains appeared on the wrist instead of on the palms of the hands, where everyone in the fourteenth century knew that they had been.
”Well” he thought, “it’s just a question of a few inches, nobody will notice.”
Now, even the omniscient author is forbidden to enter into in the secret room where the forger ‘paints’ the image of Christ, a perfect three dimensional negative, without paint or direction. His method was so secret that it went to the tomb with him.
”What do you think?”
”Not bad. But you’ve forgotten the thumbs.”
”No, I haven’t. Don’t you know that if the nail destroys the nerves in the wrist, the thumbs bend in towards the palm of the hand so you wouldn’t be able to see them?”
”But didn’t the nails go through the palms?”
”Well, yes, but I put the blood on first, and didn’t quite get the distance right.”
”Oh, in that case, what about the pollen
”What pollen”?
”We’ll, if this Shroud has been in Palestine, Edessa, and let’s suppose it’s been in Constantinople too, it’s going to need pollen from all of those places.”
Our forger loved the idea, got the pollen from all the places his wife had indicated, and delicately put it all over his Shroud.
And then, the final touch. Two coins from the time of Christ. minted under the emperor Tiberius, to put over the man’s eyes.
The forger had quite a sense of humor too—-he decided that the coins would be included in the image in such a way that they would only be visible under an electronic microscope.
Anyone who declares the Shroud to be medieval is under the obligation of explaining why all of the other tests and experiments are mistaken.
The only possible explanation for the remarkable coincidences between the blood stains and other details on the Sudarium and The Shroud is that both cloths covered the same face.”
*** there are seventy points of congruence between the face images on the two cloths and fifty on the back side and the wounds from both cloths match precisely.
*** To this day, no scientist can explain how the image was transferred to The Shroud. As it is said…it was not formed by human hands.
***It was customary for the Jews to put a face cloth over the face of crucified relatives so as not to witness the facial agony of rigor mortis. Little did they know what modern scientists could learn from examining both cloths.
Someone knew that science would one day discover the true story.
The fictitious forger story is from The Oviedo Cloth by Mark Guscin
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