Delving into the chemistry of the Shroud of Turin, Bryan Walsh hopes to reopen scientific inquiry into the world’s most famous religious artifact.
by James A. Bacon
Last month, Bryan Walsh spent the better part of his waking hours holed up a Benedictine monastery outside Richmond, Va. Working in a makeshift laboratory there, he placed swatches of linen fabric in a petri dish with various combinations of wood, silver and water dosed with chemical salts, and then heated his concoctions to a range of temperatures well above the boiling point. Taking careful records of mass and pH measurements, he examined the cellulose structure of the linen under the microscope for evidence of chemical interaction.
Walsh, 57, believes that the Shroud of Turin, which bears a faint image of a crucified man, is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. But in 1988, radiocarbon testing by a group of three laboratories coordinated by the British Museum dated the origin of the artifact to the 13th or 14th century. In the realm of respectable opinion, the finding relegated the Shroud to the status of a medieval forgery. “Since then,” says Walsh, “scholarly discussion of the Shroud has become almost taboo among scientific, historical and religious circles.”
With his experiments, Walsh is probing chemical transformations in the Shroud linen that might have occurred during a 1532 fire. The French noble family which owned the artifact at the time kept it in a silver and wood reliquary, which they stored in a chapel. When the chapel caught fire, rescuers doused the reliquary with salt-rich waters; water leaked into the container and contaminated the cloth. Walsh hypothesizes that heat from the fire interacted with a rich hydrocarbon fog emitted from the wood and metallic salts in the water, contaminating the linen and raising the level of carbon-14, the trace isotope measured in radiocarbon dating. A higher carbon-14 count would have corrupted the results of the 1988 test and made the Shroud appear to be of more recent origin than it really is. If he can demonstrate the mechanism by which the radiocarbon results were skewed, Walsh says, he believes he can make Shroud studies credible again.
But Walsh’s job won’t be easy. Although the semi-retired financier has a background in mathematics and chemistry, he has no standing with an academic institution. And the well-meaning efforts of “shroudies” — true believers in the Shroud’s authenticity — have cast a pall of ill repute over amateur efforts of any kind. Shroud believers have advanced a number of explanations for why the 1988 radiocarbon tests are untrustworthy, but so far none of the theories have gained currency outside a small circle. Indeed, some of it is just bad science, Walsh concedes. “A lot of people wrote kooky books. There was a lot of junk. The Shroud got associated with nonsense.”
After the 1988 radiocarbon tests, the issue seemed settled. Scientists in academic settings halted their Shroud research. Financial support for independent investigators dried up, and even the Catholic Church has been hesitant to associate itself with a movement that might prove to be an embarrassment. By the 1990s, says Walsh, only a small number of people – maybe 50 to 100 – were conducting reputable scientific and historical work on the Shroud, and they were doing it on shoestring budgets.
Even so, serious Shroud researchers – sindonologists, as they call themselves — have kept the cause alive. Plunging into Byzantine iconography, they have developed novel theories of how the Shroud might have traversed from Jerusalem in the 1st century C.E., by way of Constantinople around 1,000 C.E., to France in the 14th century, when more detailed historic documentation begins. Furthermore, scientific measurement devices have increased in sensitivity, enabling researchers to wring fresh data from old Shroud samples. When Walsh began immersing himself in Shroud research in 1998, an assault on the radiocarbon dating was already well underway.
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Walsh and microscope:
Walsh has cobbled together his basement laboratory on a shoestring budget. One piece of equipment, a vacuum aspirator, is an old hospital cast-off.
Born in Ireland, Bryan J. Walsh emigrated with his family to the United States in 1949. He studied in New York City schools. Enrolling in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, he graduated from Manhattan College in 1966 with a degree in mathematics, and then joined the Air Force. Uncle Sam decided that Walsh would make a better meteorologist – every USAF base in the world has one – than a combatant. So, Walsh went back to school to study chemistry and atmospheric physics.
After his stint in the military, Walsh took a job in 1970 at a commercial bank. Rising through the ranks at Irving Trust Co., he managed the bank’s global trading in bonds and foreign exchange. In 1983, he hopped over to Morgan Stanley as Vice President and Treasurer, became a managing director and chief financial officer of the bank’s broker-dealer subsidiary, and then worked on the team that took the bank public in 1986.
The banking business paid well, but the Big Apple lost its allure. “The New York experience just got to me,” says Walsh. Living in Long Island, he tired of the hour-long commute to work and then back again, and he wearied of the hyper-competitive business environment. People were belligerent. Friends got mugged. And there was no indication whatsoever that someone like Rudolph Giuliani ever would turn the city around. In 1990, he moved to Virginia. He didn’t know anyone in Richmond, the historic state capital, but chose the city for its comfortable ambience and the presence of a good Catholic school where he could educate his youngest son. His goal was to slow down, make a little money and pursue his intellectual passions.
Walsh set up a one-man company, Salisbury Research, to investigate the interaction between solar and seismic activity. Observing that flare-ups in solar radiation coincided with increases in the number and severity of earthquakes, scientists had speculated that the sun’s radiation supercharged the magnetic field around the earth, which interacted with the iron core inside the planet, which in turn affected the earth’s crust. Walsh designed and built a variety of electronic devices for detecting extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves. Exploring the connection for two years, he demonstrated that there is a correlation between solar and seismic activity, but he could not find a relationship that was strong enough to predict when or where earthquakes would occur. The research was intellectually enjoyable but it didn’t have a commercial application, so he pulled the plug.
Walsh made some successful real estate investments in Florida, which he has since wound down. In 1996 he signed on as a director chairman of Tridium, Inc., becoming chairman in 2000. The start-up company had developed a software platform for monitoring and administering remote devices and appliances over the Internet. With his background in finance, Walsh is helping raise a second round of outside investment – no easy task in the post-dot.com era – that he hopes will provide enough cash to carry the company to profitability.
Meteorology, banking, astrophysics, the Internet – Walsh has been all over the map. What makes him think he has anything to contribute to the Shroud of Turin and the resurrection of Jesus? “To me, it’s all one big field,” he says. “It’s all connected.” Think about it: The sun throws off a solar flare. That affects the earth’s magnetosphere, which interacts with the molten core, which causes and earthquake, which shakes someone’s house off its foundation. “We’re part of a larger-than-global interconnectivity. There’s still tons to be found out.”
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Devoting considerable effort to discrediting the radiocarbon tests on the Shroud, sindonologists have advanced various hypotheses to explain the 1988 findings. One theory suggests that a coating of mold and other micro-organic material skewed the dating, although skeptics have observed that the volume of organic material would have to be greater than that of the Shroud itself to account for the results.
Another hypothesis is that the radiocarbon dating, conducted independently of any earlier research on the Shroud, was based on a sample from a patch of the Shroud that had been sewn on back in the late Middle Ages. The Medieval repairmen supposedly used a micro-stitch technique that rendered the patch so invisible that it eluded detection by the scientists who selected the radiocarbon-dating sample in 1988. Walsh doesn’t rule out that possibility, but says he finds the evidence less than persuasive. The micro-stitch hypothesis certainly seems less promising than the idea, first posited a decade ago, that the 1532 fire catalyzed a chemical reaction that bolstered the carbon-14 content in the Shroud, or at least the portion of the Shroud where the sample was taken.
Dmitri Kouznetsov, a Russian scientist, published a paper in the early 1990s describing experiments in which he heated up linen in the presence of water and silver. He claimed that the linen absorbed carbon-14 from the atmosphere. Radiocarbon dating measures the presence of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope that appears in all living organisms. When an organism dies, it stops absorbing carbon-14. Because the isotope decays at a predictable rate, the level of carbon-14 normally is a reliable indicator of how long ago the organism died. In the case of the Shroud, the radiocarbon dating measured the antiquity of the flax that was woven into the linen cloth. The labs that dated the Shroud assumed that the relic had been chemically inert, that nothing happened to add or diminish the level of carbon-14 in the linen. Kouznetsov’s results called that assumption into question.
The Russian’s paper caused a stir. But scientists at the University of Arizona failed to replicate his results. Later, Kouznetsov was imprisoned in Connecticut on bad check charges. Although Kouznetsov has been discredited personally and his work downplayed, he sparked a new line of thinking. Now other investigators are focusing on the 1532 fire as a chemical-transforming event that could have elevated the carbon-14 level of the Shroud linen.
In two papers, Remy VanHaelst subjected the 1988 radiocarbon data to a detailed statistical analysis and disputed the British Museum’s interpretation of the carbon-14 measurements. Building on this work, Walsh presented a paper to the 1999 Shroud of Turin conference in Richmond. He showed that the carbon-14 measurements formed a gradient: The presence of the isotope was lowest at the edge of the linen sample but higher at locations closer to the center. The British Museum’s analysis “disguised the fact that there was a radiocarbon gradient on the Shroud,” says Walsh.
Walsh’s re-reading of the data suggested that the chemical characteristics of the linen had undergone some kind of transformation or hydrocarbon contamination. One hint of what could have caused the change came from Alan Adler, now deceased, whom Walsh met at the Richmond conference. Adler, a scientific advisor to the archbishopric of Turin, had conducted chemical analysis of several threads removed from the Shroud. Fibers taken from the linen subjected to the radiocarbon dating displayed the presence of metallic salts in heavy concentrations. By contrast, Adler’s analysis of sticky tape samples taken from other parts of the Shroud in 1978 showed no sign of these salts. Based on these findings as well as FTIR spectroscopy, Adler asserted that the sample used for radiocarbon dating was not representative of the rest of the Shroud. What he did not explain was how the presence of salts might have affected the radiocarbon dating.
“I wondered, how did those salts get there?” Walsh recalls. “The only thing I could think of was, when they put out the fire, they pulled the silver box out of the wall which contained it, and poured water on it. Maybe there were salts in the water.” Conducting some research on the Internet, Walsh discovered that Chambery, the French town where the Shroud was housed in 1532, is located between two limestone massifs. As documented in a number of research papers available online, the water there is high in metallic carbonate salts. “The match between the mix of the salts that Al found and the salts in the Chambery water was pretty close,” he says. The discovery convinced Walsh he was on to something.
The French owners of the Shroud had stored their treasured artifact in a silver reliquary lined with wood, then placed it in a stone slab enclosure in a Chambery chapel. When a fire broke out, the reliquary was exposed to high temperatures for as long as two hours, contaminating the linen with hydrocarbons from the wood and causing some of the silver to melt. Drops of molten silver burned through the Shroud, which was folded inside the reliquary, creating the symmetrical holes whose patches appear so visible in photographs of the artifact. When rescuers doused the reliquary to cool it off, water seeped inside, further contaminating the cloth and leaving prominent stains. Other changes occurred on a molecular level, Walsh surmises. The cellulose in the Shroud linen was exposed to superheated water containing chemical salts, which could have catalyzed a reaction with carbon compounds emitted from the scorched wood. In interacting with those compounds, Walsh hypothesizes, the cellulose absorbed enough of the volatile compounds from the wood – which contained Medieval carbon-14 – to throw off the radiocarbon dating.
Although the research he conducted over the past few months and presented at the 2001 Shroud of Turin conference in Dallas is far from conclusive, Walsh says, it seems to confirm his hypothesis. In the presence of heat and a low-oxygen environment, the wood he placed in the petri dish emitted a variety of compounds which markedly darkened the linen sample. Further, when he added a metallic salt solution, the wood emitted fluid that stained the linen. “I got linen cloth to have the same color you see at the Shroud sample site,” he says. “That could mean a lot of different things. But it suggests that I’m on the right path.”
Walsh made a number of valuable contacts at the Dallas conference that he hopes will help push his research forward. One attendee, a University of Dayton research scientist, has access to far more sophisticated testing and measuring equipment than Walsh does. Another, a Defense Department mathematician, has indicated a willingness to collaborate on more statistical analysis of the 1988 radiocarbon dating.
By demonstrating the flaws in the 1988 radiocarbon dating, Walsh hopes to persuade the curators of the Shroud, now under the care of the Archbishop of Turin, to make the relic accessible again to scientific testing. Portable measuring devices today are far more powerful than any scientific equipment available in 1988. It’s possible now to acquire a wealth of new data without harming the Shroud in the least. Spectrometric measurement systems, ranging from ultra-violet to mid-infra-red, make it possible to ascertain the precise chemical makeup of any object. Walsh would like to create a “digital catalogue” of the Shroud at high resolutions and a variety of wavelengths.
Walsh acknowledges that he’ll have to build a rock-solid case to have a prayer of opening the Shroud back up to scientific investigation, a goal the Shroud Crowd has been seeking for years. In 1998, the Turin chapel where the Shroud is housed today nearly burned to the ground; Italian authorities concluded that arson was the likely cause of the fire. Since then, there have been persistent rumors in Turin that Middle Eastern terrorists were behind the fire. Since the September 11 terror attacks, Walsh says, it will be even more difficult to gain access to the Shroud.
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Though raised a Catholic, Walsh had never taken a strong interest in religion or spiritual matters until one mid-August evening 10 years ago. He was alone in his in-laws’ house in New York, cleaning it up and getting it ready to put on the market. He sat down in the kitchen with some books and popped a Swanson frozen dinner into the oven. Suddenly, a feeling swept over him: stillness, warmth and total acceptance. “It was like a total embrace coming from some place outside, totally unasked for,” he recalls.
Then, in the midst of that embrace, a soft male voice said, “Come back to me.”
“I was floored,” Walsh remembers. “I didn’t know what to make of it.” He handled the incident like he does most things he doesn’t understand, he says: He put it in the back of his mind to deal with later. But the call became a spiritual gyroscope, guiding his subsequent actions
When he moved to Richmond, Walsh became involved in the Catholic Church. Disapproving of the very liberal direction the Richmond diocese was taking, he began digging into church doctrine and history, which he found enthralling. At the age of 50, he began taking his religion very seriously.
One day in the mid-1990s, an old business associate called him out of the blue. The friend mentioned that he was helping out “some guy in Colorado Springs who was doing some work on some cloth that Jesus was wrapped in,” Walsh recalls. Intrigued by the conjunction of science and religion, Walsh called the man, John Jackson, one of the more prominent Shroud researchers active today. Jackson invited Walsh out to his lab and spent three days walking him through the chemistry and science of the Shroud. Fascinated, Walsh was hooked.
Back in Richmond, Walsh formed the Shroud of Turin Center as a vehicle to promote knowledge about the Shroud. The monks of the Mary Mother of the Church Abbey outside Richmond gave him space for an office, a lab and a lecture hall, where he keeps backlit images of the Shroud on permanent display. Along the way, Walsh was joined by an associate, Diana Fulbright. A former instructor of New Testament and second-Temple Judaism at the University of Iowa, Fulbright began investigating the possible influence of the Shroud on early Christian portraiture.
In 1999, Walsh and Fulbright organized a Shroud conference in Richmond, the largest such event held in the U.S. in 20 years. They brought in speakers from 14 different countries and published 26 papers analyzing the Shroud image, its history and its radiocarbon dating. Since then, they have lectured extensively, mainly to church groups visiting the abbey, while both have pursued their research.
The Benedictines have supported the Center by providing free quarters. The Center collects about $1,000 a year in donations, mainly after lectures. Otherwise, Walsh supports his research and the Center’s activities out of his own pocket. The public is fascinated by the Shroud but hasn’t been particularly forthcoming with donations, he observes wryly. “If something’s religious or spiritual, people expect it for free.”
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Though dismissed by mainstream scholars as a bunch of amateurs and cranks, Walsh contends, shroudies have much to contribute to the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. When he’s not working on Shroud chemistry, he’s pursuing research on early Christian relics. Driven by her interest in the Shroud, his colleague Diana Fulbright is cataloguing early images of Jesus and comparing them to the portraiture motifs of the Greco-Roman world. Others have delved into Jewish funerary customs with the aim of reconciling the Gospel of John – which mentions a burial linen for the body and a napkin for the head – with the physical evidence of the Shroud. Yet others have probed early Christian and Byzantine literature for clues to the Shroud’s history.
If Shroud research became respectable again, Walsh says, it could inspire a wave of literary and archaeological progress. Think of the impact that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts – discovered a half century ago — have had on our understanding of the Judaism of Jesus’ era and the Gnosticism of the next generation. Similar caches could be awaiting discovery. Modern-day Turkey and Syria were home to early Christian communities in Ephesus and Antioch, yet as nations with Islamic populations, they have not been as hospitable to New Testament archaeology as Israel has been, Walsh observes. Who knows what literary treasures might have been hidden in a cave, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, during the Iconoclasm controversy in the Byzantine Empire?
Scholars don’t need to become spelunkers to shake the world of New Testament research. Greek and Russian Orthodox monasteries hold storehouses of ancient manuscripts that have never been properly catalogued and reviewed, Walsh says. The countries of the former Soviet Union have preserved a wealth of documents and artwork from the Byzantine tradition. It was never a priority during 70 years of rule under an atheistic state to sort through the material. “They don’t know what they have.”
Marc Guscin, an English ancient-language scholar living in Spain, held the attendees of the Dallas shroud conference spell-bound in October as he described a recent discovery in one of the 20 monasteries near Mount Athos. Located on an isolated peninsula, the monasteries purportedly contain 25 percent of all the ancient Greek manuscripts in existence. Delving into this treasure trove, Guscin discovered a 10th-century manuscript that used the word tetradiplon — folded four times — exclusively in relation to a cloth containing the image of Jesus. The document also referred to the legendary Edessa image as a full-sized picture on a full-length cloth. Such discoveries, suggests Walsh, support other findings identifying the Shroud of Turin with holy images of Jesus displayed in the ancient Byzantine Empire — pushing its documented history to a time well before it was purportedly fabricated by Medieval French forgers.
To Walsh, unraveling the mysteries of the Shroud is the intellectual challenge of a lifetime – a fascinating puzzle that draws from scientific, historical and ancient literary disciplines. What’s more, the implications are momentous. What research could possibly hold greater meaning for the human race than proving that the Shroud of Turin was the authentic burial cloth of Jesus? If the image were created by a burst of radiation emanating from within Jesus’ body, as Walsh believes, the Shroud would constitute physical proof of the resurrection.
Such proof would compel a lot of people to undergo a significant attitude adjustment, notes Walsh, not the least of which are the legion of Biblical scholars who have treated the resurrection “experiences” of Jesus’ followers as either a psychological phenomenon or outright legend. With rare exceptions, questors of the Historical Jesus have totally ignored the Shroud and refused to grapple with its implications for understanding Jesus and his relationship to God. If Walsh’s dream comes true, scientifically documented proof of the Shroud’s authenticity will provide irrefutable testimony of the resurrection — and become the starting point for understanding the historical Jesus.
— November 2001