They could not have had a worse night for what they were about to do.

 Jewish months begin with the new moon and it was now a little more than half way through the Jewish month of Nisan. The moon would be bright, very bright, dangerously bright.

 " It is time."

 "We must hurry. There are Roman soldiers everywhere. Take full advantage of the dark alleys and recesses. We will meet at the start of the foot path."

 The individual members of the group darted one by one out into the moonlight and moved furtively among the shadows, ducking into this doorway and that alley, as they made their way through the warren of twisting and turning streets that zigzagged through Jerusalem.

 The Roman soldiers were not as much of a problem as they had supposed. The clatter of their weapons and armor signaled their presence but the sharp angular turns and the reflections of the sound off the hard walls sometimes gave the illusion that they were where they were not. One of the group almost stepped out of a dark doorway right into the path of the changing guard but recovered in time. The officer in charge of the guard detail assigned his legionnaires one at the time. Each relieved a soldier who joined others assembling at this location and only when the last guard had been changed did the officer call them to attention and march them off. The figure hidden in the shadows had to wait for the soldiers to clear the area before he could leave his hiding place.  His late arrival at the chosen assembly point at the base of the foot path caused some concern among his group but with his safe arrival, they immediately went about their business.

 They would be exposed, at times, as they climbed the torturous path up the hill but as they got closer to the top their confidence grew. It was not likely that there would be any Roman soldiers up here.

 To what purpose? There would be no need to guard the dead. What could they do?

 Nevertheless, the group moved cautiously, senses acutely tuned to any sign of danger. They conversed only in whispers.

 They reached the spot, finally, and heaved a collective sigh of relief upon finding that there were no Roman guards at the site of the crucifixion.

 They quickly went about the task of taking the body down from the cross. It was not easy. They could have used some more help but a larger group moving about the city at this time of night might have attracted attention.

  This was not a time to reflect on what they had done. There was much still left to do and the return to the city would be much more difficult. They would have to stay together to carry the naked body to its destination. Several times they had to duck into dark recesses and make themselves invisible as the changing guards marched within feet of their hiding places.

 They were out of breath, adrenalin pumping, and hearts pounding as they reached their destination. The door opened to their secret knock and they silently moved inside with their burden.

 The sparse room had been carefully prepared . The only window had been covered with multiple layers of thick dark fabric to prevent the slightest glimmer of light being seen from the outside. A single smoky oil lamp flickered on a sconce mounted on one wall. A long low table was centered in the room and it had a long linen cloth lying on it with one end hanging down to and rolled up on the floor.

 They gently laid the body on the linen with the head toward the long end of the cloth.

 Even in the bad light it was clear what terrible things had been done to this person. There were multiple puncture wounds all over the head where a thorn bush had been brutally jammed on his head, a large wound in the side from a Roman lance, the holes through the wrists and feet made by the nails that had secured him to the cross, and scourge marks cut into the back, sides, buttocks, and legs.

 The scourges used by the Romans had small dumbbell-shaped metal or bone torchillia attached to the end of each thong. The torchillia had sharp projections on them intended to tear and lacerate the flesh and they had done what they were designed for.  Imprints of the torchillia were all over the areas that they had contacted. Those present wept at the sight of the body.

 "We must clean him up and anoint his body with oils."

 "Yes, we should do that but there isn't time. Any moment now, they will discover what we have done. Soldiers will be searching everywhere. We must finish our work and  put him where the Romans can never find him. Hurry."

 Ezra, one of the group, had apparently anticipated this and before dark, had picked a variety of flowers from the area. Almost as an afterthought, he laid the flowers along both sides of the body. The free end of the linen shroud was gently lifted over the naked body and rolled down to the feet. The shroud was then carefully folded around the body and bound in place.

 Ezra went to the door and slipped outside to check for the sound of soldiers in the area. He did not hear any. He came back inside, extinguished the oil lamp, and held the door open. The rest of the group lifted the enshrouded body onto their shoulders and moved out again into the moonlight.

 They silently cursed the moon for the peril that it added to their task that would have been perilous enough under any circumstances. The delays had made it necessary to proceed with less caution than they would have liked. The sky in the east would be lightening soon and the coming of dawn could prove to be a disaster.

 The distant sound of a cock crowing in anticipation of the dawn put an exclamation point on that unspoken thought.

 They quickly made their way through the twists and turns of the helter skelter streets. Tiredness from their earlier efforts and the weight of their present burden coupled with the stress of dodging the roaming soldiers was taking its toll.

 They finally cleared the last buildings and moved across a low stone wall into an olive grove. They were less likely to encounter Roman soldiers here.  Appearing like specters out of the night they were right on top of a pair of lovers lying on the ground under the branches of an olive tree before either was aware of the other. The terrified lovers startled them as they scrambled to their feet, and bolted like a pair of frightened rabbits. The lovers raced back toward the city dragging their blanket behind them.

 They carried their burden through other groves, out into open country, and then into the surrounding hills. There was no path here and the way was covered with small rocks and boulders that cut into their sandaled feet at every step. Exhaustion overcame them but they struggled on until they reached their destination. It was now light enough to find what they were looking for, a large boulder half buried in the side of a hill. They laid the shrouded body on the ground and with their bare hands dug the loose sand and rocks away from boulder. Moving the rock away from the hill was a formidable chore but despite the tiredness of mind and body, and the lack of anything that might be used as a lever, they put their backs into it and the stone moved, almost imperceptibly, but it moved. Redoubling their efforts the stone grudgingly gave up and rolled away from the hillside revealing the entrance to a cave. The opening was small but it widened into a somewhat larger chamber. They could stand up in here.

 Gasping for breath in the stale air, they wrestled their burden into the cave and laid it carefully on a flat rock that was roughly in the center of the chamber.

 There were rituals that should be performed but they had neither the materials nor the will to perform them. They straightened out the shroud as the light of dawn streamed into the chamber through the tiny cave entrance. There was no time for ceremony. They could not, they must not, be discovered after coming this far. The work must be completed, and quickly.

 It was not according to Jewish burial protocol but it was the best they could do. It would have to do.

 Could they muster up enough strength to roll the boulder back into place?

 They must. There was no way that they would let their mission fail after they had risked so much.

 It took all that they had left in them to do it but the stone was eventually back in place. Again, with their bare hands they dug the loose sand and rocks and packed them around the boulder. They ached to the very marrow of their bones and their fingers bled from the task but they persevered until the job was finished. One of the group jerked a bush out of the hillside and used it as a broom to smooth the sand and brush away their hand and foot prints. In the morning light, it did not look quite the way they would have liked, but hopefully, the wind would smooth out the remaining imperfections and in a day or so there would be no telltale signs of what they had done this night. The Romans would never find him here.

 And so it was. Their secret remained hidden for over a hundred years. The body putrefied and decayed to yellow bones, but the dark and the virtually unchanging  temperature and humidity within the cave preserved the shroud and its remarkable image.

 Then the unthinkable occurred.

 An earthquake caused the boulder to roll away from the cave entrance and it was not long before a shepherd, looking for a lost lamb, stumbled upon it and discovered its incredible contents.

 The shepherd took the shroud back to his tent. All of the members of his family were Christians and when they saw the image on the linen, they were bewildered and prostrated themselves before it. The father, eldest member of the family, timidly touched the large blood stain on the side and was immediately cured of a painful and crippling affliction.

 "This is the image of Christ," he cried out, " It is the burial cloth of our Holy Savior," and they all marveled at the miracle of his healing.

 The power of this relic was undeniable so they selfishly hid it and kept it to themselves but the marvelous healing of the father of the shepherd could not be kept secret for long. The members of the congregation asked about it, for nothing like this had ever happened in their community. Eventually, the shepherd could not keep the secret for another second. This was too important. He had to tell someone. He went to the small building where he and other Christians met and blurted out the whole story to all of them.

 Many were dubious but when the father showed up to attend a meeting, apparently in good health, they were amazed because it was known throughout the community that he was a cripple who also suffered great pain at the slightest movement.

 Naturally, they all wanted to see this wonderful linen. Many of the true believers, upon seeing it, were cured of all sorts of illnesses and the shepherd's family agreed that this precious cloth should be shared with all Christians and consented to the display of the Shroud in their tiny church.

 This soon proved to be inadequate as word of the miracles spread about the countryside and pilgrims came from all corners of Israel to see it with their own eyes. Conversions to Christianity occurred in huge numbers. Membership of the congregation exploded accordingly and soon became so large that the elders decided that the small chapel should be replaced with a much larger and more suitable structure in which to display the Shroud.

 The congregation tithed and made special offerings so the Chapel of the Shroud would be a spectacular place in which to display the sacred relic.

 Soon, a special group within the congregation was elected to tend, care for, and protect the Shroud from all who might try to steal or damage it. Only those who had demonstrated holy and virtuous behavior for their entire lives were elected to this elite group. This assignment elevated their standing and placed them among the most respected citizens of the community.

 These men became know as the Holy Order of Defenders of the Shroud. A cult emerged who gradually shifted their devotion from Christ to the Shroud, and gave, to it, the reverence that formerly had been directed toward Jesus. The church built to house the Shroud became the center of activity of this cult in Jerusalem.

 There is no telling where this might have gone but in the year 614 AD an historical event occurred that would change everything forever.

 In this year, the Persians attacked the Christians in Jerusalem. Stories of the rape of Jerusalem abound with terrible atrocities. When the carnage was over, surviving Christians were taken by their conquerors into Persia.

 The surviving members of the Holy Order of Defenders of the Shroud mingled with the other Christians taken captive by the Persians and the Shroud was hidden among the scant possessions that they carried with them to Byzantium.

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 Byzantium was a paradox. While the Persian soldiers had been vicious and  vengeful in the attack on Jerusalem, the Persian leaders of this city were extraordinarily more tolerant of religious diversity than most contemporary governments. They began the system in which each religious group was permitted to govern itself in family and religious matters. This system was continued for a long time, even under the Turks.

 It was in this permissive environment that Christianity gradually recovered, gained converts, and eventually flourished but there were obscure periods in the early centuries after Christ's death in which the Shroud disappeared. Undoubtedly, it had to be concealed from time to time.  Certainly, it would have been hidden during the period in which millions of Christians were killed in the arenas from Rome to Corinth. There were also periods when it had to be protected from destruction by the Romans, Medes, Persians, and Parthians who pillaged and destroyed Christian churches everywhere. It is not a great mystery that there are inconsistencies in the dates of various events regarding the Shroud. During the periods when it was hidden, no records were kept of its whereabouts so much of the story of the Shroud must be classified as legend.

By the year 1074AD, the Saracens had overrun much of Christian Greece, had devastated everything in their path, and were threatening Constantinople. They were tyrannically governing all of the conquered lands. Christians were being slain by the thousands.

 The Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, had sent letters and an ambassador to the West asking for military aid to combat the Turks in Asia Minor.

 While the Emperor's request was relatively modest, it fired a more grandiose plan in Pope Urban's mind. He called a church council for November 1095 at Clermont in southern France and announced that he planned to close the council meeting with an important speech.

 Urban was an eloquent and captivating speaker. He called for all  to embark on a great crusade and indicated that rich and poor alike should do their duty. He charged that poverty should be no excuse for shirking. Surely, he directed this remark, not at the serfs and peasants, but at some of the knights who were not wealthy, and in some cases, literally, penniless. He could not have dreamed that his speech would stir the poorest of the Medieval peasantry to leave their fields and embark on a Crusade of their own.

  Pope Urban's speech resonated through the next half millennium.

 The peasants and commoners did not delay. A large well disciplined army cannot be organized and equipped overnight for such a huge undertaking, but this did not deter the peasants who started out armed only with pitchforks, scythes, woodsmen's axes, and pointed sticks, to walk, in sandals and even barefoot, all the way to the Holy Land to free Christians along the way from the yoke of the infidel.

 One of their most influential leaders of the peasants was a hermit called, appropriately, Peter the Hermit. Peter was a firebrand who roused thousands to his cause. From Flanders his ragtag band marched up the Rhine River valley, gathering strength. They were joined by other preachers with their recruits. By the time he reached Cologne, there were 15,000 peasant Crusaders. A number of poor knights like Walter the Penniless joined his band at Cologne. These knights added a much needed, but inadequate, amount of military skill to the endeavor.

 Poorly provisioned, the People's Crusade was forced to forage and live off the land.

 The largest force in the peasant army was lead by Peter and Walter, and this army entered Byzantine territory in the summer of 1096. It was not at all what the emperor, Alexis Comnenus, had envisioned. Alarmed by reports of looting and pitched battles, Alexius sent an army to escort the Crusaders into the Byzantine capital. Along the way, disagreements escalated to conflict and by the time he reached Constantinople, Peter had lost a quarter of his army.

 Peter tried in vain to gain the backing of Alexius for a march on Jerusalem. In a abortive attempt to capture the city of Xerigordon  Peter's  main army was ambushed by the Turks. Most of the Crusaders were killed. Many more were enslaved, and only about 3,000 out of a force of 20,000 managed to escape.

 Thus ended the so-called People's Crusade.

 The real Crusader army had not yet arrived. They were still getting organized back in Western Europe.

 Alexius Comnenus wanted warriors, but, naturally, he wanted to control them himself. Further, he wanted to employ them in pursuit of his own goals, not theirs.

 For Alexius, the arrival of the People's Crusade had been unfortunate and embarrassing enough, but the arrival of the real Crusaders also did little to impress the emperor.

 When they arrived, the real Crusaders were demanding, loud, unruly, unconscionably rude, They argued with Byzantine merchants and got into fights with the local citizens...... and they were very well armed, a point that could not be easily ignored.

 Alexius needed them, but experienced great difficulty controlling  them without arousing their anger. He had to walk a very fine line.

 Despite the shakiness of the alliance, the campaign to capture Jerusalem continued. The siege started on June 7, 1099 and lasted for more than a month.

 What ensued when the Crusaders finally breached the walls was an orgy of murder. The Crusaders fired by stories of the rape of Jerusalem by the Arabs in 614AD spared no one, regardless of age, sex, or religion. The killing went on all that night , through the next day, and into the following night. Order was finally restored the next day.

  When the slaughter was over, all Muslims and Jews had either been killed or driven out of the city. The Crusaders had liberated Jerusalem, but the streets ran with blood and the entire city had become an empty carcass.

 The Muslims would never forget the sacking of Jerusalem. This was the crowning event in a string of incidents that convinced the Arabs that the European Christians were ferocious barbarians. Any Arab leader seeking to rally his people against the Christians had only to remind them of Jerusalem.

 This was only the first Crusade. Hatred smouldered on both sides. In the next four to five hundred years there would be many more Crusades, eight of them major, some ending in total disaster.

 Despite the virtuous goals of the Crusades, they often degenerated into unconscionable pillaging and looting.

 The Crusaders poured into the eastern Mediterranean regions in waves, and the Crusades lasted for several hundred years. There were good and bad times for those in whose keeping the Shroud had been placed. At times it was openly displayed and venerated. At times it had to be hidden away to protect it from the Saracens. It eventually took its place in the basilica in Constantinople that had been specifically constructed to house it.

 In 1203AD, a French Crusader, Robert De Clari, wrote of seeing the Shroud in the basilica of Saint Mary of the Blachernae in  Constantinople. This is believed to be the earliest known written mention of the Shroud by an eyewitness.

 Unfortunately, some Crusaders lost sight of their lofty objectives and at times the Shroud had to be hidden from marauding Christian Crusaders as well.

 The Knights Templar were prominent in the Fourth Crusade, participating in the looting of Constantinople. In the weeks preceding capture by the Crusaders of the Arab held portions of the city, Templars had been unwelcome guests, roaming the city. They were certainly aware of the great prize, the Shroud, that had been seen by Robert de Clari and doubtless many others, especially the leaders of the Templars.

 According to legend, the holy linen Shroud was seized by the Templars and taken to Athens.

 The significance of the Shroud, to medieval people, cannot be overstated. The Christians of that period would have considered a blood relic of Jesus to contain the essence of His soul. Numerous relics purporting to contain a droplet of the blood of Christ were said to have great, even unlimited, healing power. To see one of these relics was to have direct knowledge of God. Veneration of the bleeding Divine Heart of Jesus led to a cult within the Roman Catholic Church that survives to this day.

 The churches of Europe are full of relics. It is claimed, by some,  that if all of the relics purported to be pieces of the "True Cross"were collected in one spot, they would weigh many tons. Blood relics of Christ similarly abound. Most are in icons containing no more than a tiny droplet of His blood. Nevertheless, droplets add up and soon amount to buckets full.

  However, If one truly believes the story of the loaves and fishes, is it that much of a stretch to believe that the True Cross could yield enough fragments or that Christ's body could yield enough droplets of His sacred blood to go around?

 One of the unfathomable questions is, how could a blood relic as sacred as the Shroud of the Lord Jesus Christ disappear from sight for long periods of time only to emerge in another place and another time with no record of the miracles that surely would have been attributed to it in the interim? It was, obviously, hidden away for protection from time to  time but the fact that there were periods in which no miracles were attributable to it is one of the abiding mysteries of the Shroud.

 It has been conjectured that the Shroud benefitted only those having clean hearts and did nothing for those who would attempt to profit from its possession or use.

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 The Shroud somehow found its way from Constantinople to Athens and hence to Lirey, France. There is no record of how it got there. It may have happened like this.

 There was no honor among the thieves of the Crusades. Réymonde de Sugét, a Knight Templar, was taken with a serious and prolonged illness. He had made his way to Athens and was preparing to return to his home in France. Reymonde had a plan to steal the Shroud and use its miraculous powers to heal his affliction.

  He brought a skin full of wine to the place where the Shroud had been hidden away. After a bout of drinking with the Templars who were guarding the Shroud (during which Réymonde  filled their cups several times to his one) the guardians fell into drunken stupors. Hoping for a cure of his debilitating illness, he folded the Shroud carefully, packed it among his things, and departed.

 It was many hours before the wine wore off and by that time Réymonde  had such a head start that it was impossible for the enraged Templars to catch him. Nevertheless, Réymonde did not tarry, rising early and traveling well into the following night before stopping, primarily to give his horse a rest. He continued this pattern of flight all the way home to Lirey in France.

 It was an exhausting trip and the fear that he might be caught weighed heavily on him. Upon arrival back at his castle, he told no one of his prize but, rather, hid it away among his little-used possessions in the cellars beneath the castle.

 He went straight  to his bed where he developed a high fever and became violently ill.  He cried out about his tormentors who were pursuing him but his family and priest could not make any sense of his ravings. Soon, he slipped into a coma and succumbed during his third night at home.

 His possession of the Shroud certainly did nothing to cure the illness of Réymonde de Sugét.

 Returning Crusader, Knight Templar, Réymonde de Sugét was laid to rest in the family mausoleum. His prize lay unnoticed among his moldy possessions in the dark cellar of Château Sugét for nearly 50 years before it was rediscovered. The Shroud came into the hands of the de Charney family who owned the church at Lirey and who had close ties to the Templars. It was taken to the basilica in Lirey by Geoffery de Charney where it was believed to be an authentic relic.

 Three separate papal bulls recite the fact that Geoffrey de Charny placed the Shroud of Our Lord Jesus Christ bearing the effigy of our Savior in the church of Lirey. Clearly the Shroud was in the church at Lirey before Geoffrey died in September 1356 because on May 28, 1356, Henri de Poitiers, Bishop of Troyes, sent Geoffrey a letter of approval regarding the ceremony of dedication that took place earlier that year.

 While the Shroud was not publicly displayed, word spread throughout the countryside that the sacred linen resided in the reliquary. The presence in the basilica of such a sacred relic drew large crowds of the faithful who paraded past the reliquary. The mere presence of the Shroud is said to have brought about many miraculous healings but the Vatican was skeptical about the reports of miracles.

  While the term "psychosomatic" would not be defined for another thousand years or so, the officials of the Church knew well that many illnesses were imagined and that any charlatan could talk a receptive patient out of an imagined illness. It  happened all the time and, if there were no charlatans around, the psychosomatically ill would often cure themselves in the presence of a "healing power" like the Shroud.

 In 1357AD, the first known public exposition of the Shroud occurred. When shown to the public, It was held full length by the Canons of Lirey. Many who viewed it were awestruck by the image and prostrated themselves before it.  Again miraculous healings were reported.

 Of course, the Church was quick enough to take credit for a miracle if it had happened during some officially sanctioned event. However, the deposition of the Shroud in the reliquary and its subsequent display did not have the full seal of approval of the Vatican, even though the three papal bulls had attested to its presence there.

 A letter from Bishop of Troyes, Pierre d'Arcis, to Pope Clement VII, written in 1389, complained about a scandal uncovered in his diocese at the church of Lirey, France. According to the bishop, the church canons had "...falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for their church a certain cloth,  cunningly painted, upon which by clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold  image of one man, that is to say the back and front, then falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual Shroud in which our Savior Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb."

 In his letter Bishop Pierre d' Arcis stated that, evidently, the cloth had first been exhibited at Lirey some thirty years early by Bishop Henri de Poitiers. But, according to Pierre, Poitiers eventually discovered the fraud. He revealed the fact that the linen had been cunningly painted. An Inquisition had been convened to question the artist who purportedly painted it. He confessed to the Inquisitors that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.

  Nothing is known of the fate of the artist confessor but one can surmise that, at the very least, his hands were in no condition to perpetrate such mischief again.

After the exhibition in Lirey little is recorded about the Shroud for nearly a hundred years. Presumably, Geoffery de Charney did not give the Shroud to the church in Lirey but rather, loaned it to them for display there. At some point in time, perhaps right after the accusing letter of Bishop Pierre d'Arcis,  the Shroud appears to have been recovered from the church by the de Charney family. Geoffrey's son Geoffrey II, had a daughter, Margaret de Charney who inherited it. Margaret and her husband, Humbert de Villersexel,  kept the Shroud at Hippolyte sur Doubs. In her later years, Margaret took the Shroud to Liege, Belgium where it was exhibited to large crowds but, surprisingly, there were no reports of miracles in Liege.

 In 1453 Duchess Margaret de Charney, a childless widow having no direct descendant to leave it to, ceded the Shroud to a relative, Duke Louis of Savoy.

 Roughly 50 years later, in 1502, The Shroud was deposited in the chapel of Chambréy Castle. A beautifully embossed silver box was fabricated for the storage and preservation of the Shroud and it was neatly folded in forty two layers and placed in the container.

 In 1532, a fire in the Castle of Chambréy damaged the Shroud. The Shroud was stored, folded, in the silver box. The fire was so intense that it actually melted one corner of the box and, because of the way the Shroud was folded, caused two long scorch marks that ran essentially the full length of the Shroud. There are patches in several spots where the Shroud was burned through. The Shroud was handled so carefully after the fire that it would have been difficult to obtain a piece of it unless the trusted person chosen to reweave it snipped out an unburned piece and wove a patch there to conceal the removal.

 Here, an individual, Godfrey Du Luc, a "true  believer", had an opportunity to purloin a sample of his Savior's own blood. What power he must have believed that tiny scrap of blood stained linen to possess! The most skilled weaver in the nearby city of Troyes, Godfrey was commissioned to repair the Shroud.

 There was, in Troyes, a sneaky, despicable weasel, a thief named André, whose last name is lost in the cobwebs of antiquity. André hoped to steal the Shroud and obtain a large ransom for it. He thought that his best chance to steal it was while it was in the possession of Godfrey the weaver but Godfrey guarded the Shroud very carefully.

 While André was spying on Godfrey, watching for a chance to steal it, he saw him remove the snippet and reweave the spot with linen thread. André, giving up on the idea of stealing the Shroud, informed on Godfrey,  hoping for a reward. He got no reward, but  Godfrey was accused by the Church of removing a small piece of the original fabric and concealing his theft by weaving a repair over the hole.

  Godfrey was subjected to an Inquisition.

 An Inquisition was supposed to be convened to arrive at the truth but this one was not. It was designed to force the defendant appearing before it to confess to whatever charges the Inquisitors had brought against him. Desecration of a holy relic was a most serious charge.

 Godfrey's eyes were burned out with hot irons. His fingers were chopped off, and he was stretched on the rack, slowly, painfully, and when he asked for water was given vinegar. He fainted when the joints of his arms and legs were pulled apart. They poured buckets of water on him to bring him around. He cried out in agony as his arms were eventually pulled from their sockets. Mercifully, he passed out and never again regained consciousness.

 Godfrey died on the rack but he had so much faith that he and his family would receive salvation through that sample of the Savior's blood that he preferred death on the rack rather than reveal the location of the snippet of linen to the Inquisitors.

 In notes to his family, written before his seizure by the Inquisitors, Godfrey gave cryptic clues as to the whereabouts of the scrap of linen but his immediate family was in mortal fear of the Inquisitors. They should have burned his notes but, inexplicably, hid them and made no attempt to find the relic.

 The scrap of linen would remain hidden for nearly three hundred years before a distant cousin, Francis Halpern, who dabbled in codes, found a note scribbled by Godfrey which contained a veiled reference to its location and Francis figured it out. He recovered the snippet but, being unsure of his rights in the matter, put it in a safe place and waited. He died and the snippet passed from generation to generation but remained safely and secretly hidden away along with a copy of the decoded message left by Godfrey which conveyed the significance of the snippet.
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 Meanwhile, word spread about the miraculous healings associated with the Shroud and on May 4, 1535, it was exhibited in Turin. The sick, the demented, and the lame came from all over the surrounding countryside and once again there were reports of miraculous cures......not everyone, but then not everyone has ever been miraculously cured.
  The Vatican, doubting the authenticity of the Shroud, were suspicious of the alleged miracles and made the local clerics put the cloth back into the reliquary with instructions to keep it there.

 The following year, 1536, the Vatican yielded to public pressure and once again permitted the Shroud to be put on  display, this time in Milan. The streets of Milan were filled with the faithful pressing forward for a look at the image of their Holy Savior and once again, miraculous cures were attributed to the Shroud.

 On September 14, 1578 the Shroud was moved by Louis de Savoy to its permanent home in the Cathedral of John the Baptist in Turin but ownership remained with the House of Savoy.

 The Shroud was handed down through Louis' descendants to Umberto of Savoy who willed it to the Vatican, the transfer of ownership occurring in 1983 after Umberto died. Amazingly ownership had been in private hands up until that time. With this change of ownership, the Shroud began to lose, with amazing rapidity, its fraudulent reputation.

 On May 28, 1898, an Italian attorney, Secundo Pia, a photographic buff, and prize-winning amateur photographer asked for and was grudgingly given permission, By King Umberto I, to photograph the Shroud.

 The equipment that he used was similar to the equipment used by Matthew Brady to make his remarkable photographs of the American Civil War. In this camera, a glass plate coated with a light-sensitive substance was exposed and then developed. The plates were capable of very high resolution but usually required a long time exposure or a flash obtained by igniting flash powder (essentially the same material used in firecrackers) in a long tray often held in the hand of the photographer, at great risk to himself.

 Secundo Pia did not use a flash but, rather, took two very long exposures, late in the day and it was nearly midnight when Pia got back to his apartment and developed the plates. Pia's plates were the equivalent of the negatives of black and white photographs today. On a negative, portions of the picture that will appear dark in the printed positive are light on the negative and vice versa.

 When Pia developed his plates of the Shroud he got a surprise. Instead of a negative image, what he saw was what he would have expected to see on a positive print, not on a negative. The bloodstains, on the other hand, were not part of the image per se. The blood came out as one might expect. On the Shroud, the bloodstains were very dark and on Pia's plates, the stains came out white.

 Pia concluded that, the bloodstains aside, the image on the Shroud was a negative image.

 How could that be?

 Surely, no artist, hundreds of years before the principles of photography were understood, could have imagined how to paint a negative image to be revealed centuries later by photography.

 One of the triggers of the debate was a device known as a camera obscura.

 This is a simple device that was probably discovered quite by accident at some very early date. Camera obscura literally means, in Latin, dark room. In its simplest form it consists of a dark room with a tiny hole in one wall. It was a very large version of the pinhole camera that was popularized in the early 1900s. In the pinhole camera, light from a distant object passed through the pinhole and was projected onto a sheet of photographic film. A tiny aperture behaves like a fixed focal length lens. The smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of field but the dimmer the image and, in the case of the pinhole cameras, the longer the exposure required to activate the photosensitive chemicals on the film.

 In a camera obscura there was, of course, no film. The image was projected onto a white wall opposite the aperture.

 The image on the wall was in full color and had spatial perspective, something that artists of the early medieval periods knew nothing about.

 Unfortunately, the image on the wall was upside down. It is also upside down in a film camera but all we have to do to make that right is to rotate the finished picture 180 degrees. A person inside an early camera obscura would have to stand on his head to achieve the same result.

 Eventually, experimenters learned to use a system of mirrors to turn the image right side up. When lenses were invented, experimenters found that the aperture could be greatly enlarged permitting a much brighter image but a lens was needed to focus the image sharply. In some camera obscuras, the aperture, lens and mirror are mounted in a small cupola atop the dark room. This permits the image to be projected downward onto a white tabletop permitting viewers to stand around the table and look down on the image. Artists, particularly, Vermeer made extensive use of the camera obscura. They stretched their canvasses on the wall or table top, projected the images onto them, and then painted right over the projected images in the colors of the actual subjects. It was in a sense, a "paint by numbers" operation but for the time the results were sensational and Vermeer is ranked as  one of the greatest painters of his or any other time.

 Such devices could be found in many European cities in the late 1800s. A camera obscura was usually situated in a location having a good view of the city or its harbor and was large enough to accommodate a number of tourists at one time. The general public was therefore familiar with them but  these devices were far superior to anything available in  medieval times. The modern camera obscura had a bright image because its wide aperture and lens permitted the collection of large amounts of light that could be focused to produce a sharp image as well. The modern camera obscura also had a mirror system to  turn the image right side up.

 People tended to assume that the camera obscura of their experience was the kind being discussed in scientific circles.

 Not so.

 It is conceivable that a medieval artist of great skill chanced upon a primitive camera obscura. Perhaps, he was in a dark room that had a tiny hole in the wall, and noticed the dim inverted picture on the opposite wall. It is also conceivable that he might have obtained a cadaver and hung it up, feet up, thereby obtaining an upright image on the wall. (But then the hair would have pointing the wrong way, wouldn't it?)

 It is even conceivable that he worked out a means for moving the cadaver forward and backward in order to obtain a full scale image on the wall and, like his counterparts many centuries later, stretched his canvas, or in this case a linen shroud, on the wall and started painting.

 At this point, the argument falls completely apart.  The image projected on the linen would be a color positive.  How could an artist transform this into a monochrome negative painted image? And why? If it was his intention to perpetrate a fraud, couldn't he just as well have done it with a fake positive image .... and a lot easier? If we accept the premise that this was a painted image we must also accept the fact that the painter anticipated by a thousand years the invention of photography and our ability to finally see what his subject really looked like.

 Those who considered the image to be a fake, changed direction and postulated, not a painter, but a primitive photographer, an alchemist who somehow knew a millennium ahead of the invention of the photographic camera that certain chemicals changed when subjected to light and that these changes could be frozen by the application of  other chemicals leaving a permanent record of the recorded light patterns. To these skeptics, it was simple. Someone coated the linen with a light sensitive chemical. The image was projected onto the linen. Other chemicals were then applied to it to develop and fix the image to make it permanent. In their view, the image on the Shroud is truly a photographic negative ...... and that explains everything.

  Attributing this remarkable finding to  the application of some unknown photographic technique in medieval or earlier times seems to be out of the question, but surely scientific tests might be conducted on the Shroud to detect the chemical residue which defined the image. It would be nearly eighty years before such tests could be made.

 Scientific curiosity was piqued at that time and ever since. Arguments, pro and con, raged for roughly forty years. Then Gieuseppe Enria obtained permission to photograph the Shroud with a much more modern camera than the one employed by Secundo Pia in 1898. Enria photographed the shroud in May of 1931 using very fine grain film. His photographs confirmed Pia's earlier findings and were of exceptionally high quality. Enria's photographs have been blown up to produce full size images of the Shroud that show remarkable detail. The Enria photographs settled nothing but yielded enticing details that only served to further stoke the fires of debate.
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 Meanwhile, the drums of war were beating in Europe and the attention of the world turned to more serious matters. When World War II broke out in earnest, the Shroud was removed from the Cathedral of John the Baptist, the only time this was done since it was deposited there in 1578, and stored in a safe place until the end of the war. Europe's recovery from the war's devastation and the Cold War had the full attention of many scientists. The Shroud of Turin was not high on anyone's agenda.
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