Separated at Birth?

The Sudarium of Oviedo, Signs of Jesus Christ’s Death, by César Barta. A Selective Review.

To demonstrate that the Sudarium of Oviedo is the companion to the Shroud of Turin, and that both are described in the Gospel of St John, several pieces of evidence might be adduced, and a new book by Cesar Barta does its best with as many as he can. In his remarkably comprehensive assessment of the research, the author, although clearly persuaded of the cloths’ affinity, is too honest not to present all the evidence fairly, with the result that, in spite of some determined manipulation, none of it really stacks up.

Much of the book is dedicated to a forensic determination of exactly what positions a dead man might have been placed in, and for how long, and exactly what configurations the cloth may have taken, and how it was fastened, to itself or to the hair of the head it may have covered, for the various stains, creases and holes to have ended up the way they have; but I will not discuss any of that here. I think it quite likely that the cloth was fastened around somebody’s head, and perhaps the reconstruction is accurate, but that’s a far cry from placing the Sudarium around the head of Jesus. For that, we need evidence of its antiquity, and its location, and to associate it with the Shroud, we need it to match. That’s what I’ll be reviewing below.

Radiocarbon Dating
Rather to my surprise, we learn that the Sudarium has been radiocarbon dated at least four times, not including an abortive attempt involving phials of carbon dioxide which were not properly sealed. Three samples tested in 1990, although cut from the Sudarium in 1979, were dated 1292 BP, 1300 BP and 1450 BP, the third having been scorched in an attempt to show that burning a fabric makes it date younger than it really was. Finally in 2007, another sample was dated at 1240 BP. Remarkably we note that three laboratories were involved and that there was a small chronological gradient along the line of the samples. Nevertheless, the calendar dates, calibrated from the BP dates above, range from about 600 AD to 800 AD, unequivocally ruling out a first century origin for the cloth. Barta spends the next 46 pages or so bravely trying to find reasons for rejecting these findings, but without, to my mind, any success. The Arabs invaded Spain in 711 AD and fought their way northwards for ten years or so until almost the whole of Spain, apart from a little bubble of territory clinging to the north coast, with Oviedo as its capital, was occupied. During the Christian retreat there was plenty of opportunity for somebody’s blood-soaked bandages to be mistaken, deliberately or accidentally, and probably over several years, for sacred relics.

Pollen
If the Sudarium cannot be demonstrated to be from the time of Christ, perhaps we shall have more success with the place. According to Barta, Max Frei-Sulzer took sticky tape samples from the Sudarium in 1979, found sixteen different types of pollen, and identified thirteen, of which, he said, nine grow in Palestine and four grow exclusively in Palestine. Unfortunately, by checking each of Frei’s species against the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Barta has found only one that doesn’t grow in Spain, and then admits that, since Frei was far too precise in his identification, even that one was only reliably able to be narrowed to its genus, not its species. Although Acacia albida grows in a broad belt across Africa with a north eastern extension into Israel, other species of Acacia genus also grow in Spain. In 1994 pollen vacuumed from the Sudarium were examined by Carmen Gomez Ferreras. She found twenty-five different pollens, and was only able to confirm five of Frei’s identifications. She didn’t find any Acacia albida at all, and none of her pollens suggested a Middle Eastern provenance for the Sudarium.

In 2016, Marcia Boi decided she had found Helichrysum pollen, which she thought was an indicator of an embalming or other funeral ritual, although Helichyrsum is common and widespread, including in Spain.

Limestone
Rocks can sometimes be geographically identified by the proportion of trace elements they contain, and 57 spots on the Sudarium was subjected to X-Ray Fluorescence analysis to identify the elements present. It was possible to distinguish between stained and unstained parts of the cloth, suggesting that some of the elements derive from whatever made the stains, such as potassium and sulphur while others were distributed all over the cloth, such as calcium and strontium.

Limestone is typically contaminated with strontium, among other elements, and the ratio of atoms of strontium to atoms of calcium varies around the world. The ratio is usually expressed as atoms of strontium to every thousand atoms of calcium (Sr/Ca^x1000 or millimolSr/molCa). Rock from ‘Calvary,’ Barta tells us, is noticeably purer than other limestones, having a Sr/Ca^x1000 ratio of 0.24, whereas rock from Oviedo cathedral has a ratio of 2.43, i.e. ten times more strontium. It is unfortunate that no data is given for other parts of Spain, a typical lack of control sample which is all too familiar in sindonological studies. Fortunately, a paper by Heather Stoll, et al. (‘Sr/Ca variations in Cretaceous carbonates: relation to productivity and sea level changes,’ Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology, Vol 168) slightly rectifies the error. Limestone from a quarry in Murcia, south-eastern Spain and exactly the sort of area the Sudarium may have originated, has a Sr/Ca^x1000 ratio of between 0.6 and 1.0.

The unstained areas of the Sudarium showed a ratio of 0.75, which Barta tells us is much closer to the Calvary than to the Oviedo controls. It is, however, even closer to the ratio found in the limestone of Southern Spain.

What’s more, after defending the possibility that the Sudarium could be from Jerusalem, Barta has the honesty to report that further XRF investigation showed that the support on which the samples were lying for examination can affect the measurements of the various elements , so that, because the Sudarium and the control limestones were tested using different substrates, doubts are raised about “the reliability correctness of the comparison between rate Sr/Ca in the Sudarium and in the stones of the Calvary and cathedral.”

History
Both a shroud and a sudarium can be inferred from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s burial and Resurrection, but that’s a far cry from identifying either as the Shroud of Turin or the Sudarium of Oviedo. To identify the shroud as the Shroud, it must be shown to have been known to have an image on it, but the Sudarium does not have such easily identifiable features. One thing it does have is a series of creases converging in one corner, as if that area had perhaps been knotted. And one translation of a paraphrase of the Gospel of St John written in first half of the fourth century reads, “… the cloth that covered his head, with a knot toward the upper back of the part that had covered the hair.” One might think that to be good evidence, until one looks at the Greek text, which says nothing of the kind. It reads, “καὶ κεφαλῆς ζωστῆρα παλίλλυτον ἂμματι χαίτης,” which is translated by Mark Prost as “and tangled ribbons that had once bound up his hair.” The two important words are ‘ζωστῆρα,’ which is usually translated as ‘belt’ or ‘girdle,’ and cannot refer to anything we would call a cloth, ‘παλίλλυτον,’ which means ‘loosened’ or ‘untied,’ and ‘ἂμματι,’ which means ‘knotted’ or tied.’ A little later the same article is referred to as ‘πλοκάμον τελαμῶνα,’ which also means ‘band’ or ‘strap’ for a ‘lock of hair.’ In short, this passage cannot be assumed to refer to a cloth knotted around a head, as implied by the wrinkles in the Sudarium. Barta’s conclusion to this evidence is brave but wholly unsustainable: “we can conclude that in the fifth century the Sudarium […] had a knot just as the Sudarium of Oviedo.” No, we certainly can’t.

[The passage discussed comes from the commentary of Nonnus of Panopolis, which can be found in the Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, by Jacques-Paul Migne]

Burial cloths of Jesus turn up sporadically, according to various pilgrims, in Jerusalem, elsewhere in Israel, and, inevitably, eventually in Constantinople, from where they are dispersed into Europe around the turn of the twelfth/thirteenth centuries. None of them can be the Sudarium of Oviedo, which probably appears in Spain in about 1075, when a ‘Holy Ark’ was opened in the presence of the King, his sister, and the celebrated general Rodrigo Diaz, known to posterity as El Cid. The occasion was reported in some detail, and a list of the relics found inside. The ark was packed with reliquaries, and the reliquaries with relics, including, over successive inspections, several variations on ‘sindones,’ ‘sabanas,’ and ‘sudaria.’ It is unfortunate that in Latin and Spanish there is little distinction between these – or if there is, the distinction varies from author to author. Even today, both Shroud and Sudarium are the same word in Spanish (“El Sudario de Turín – también conocido como la Síndone, la Sábana Santa o el Santo Sudario,” and “El Santo Sudario de Oviedo (conocido también por Pañolón de Oviedo, o Sudarium Domini), as the Wikipedia entries describe them). In the Holy Ark were one or two cloths, either whole or cut from a larger cloth, which are identified as burial cloths, and it seems likely that what we know as the Sudarium of Oviedo was one of them.

Although there is no earlier reference to the Sudarium, it is not unreasonable to investigate the earlier history of the Holy Ark, assuming that at some point along its journey, it acquired the Sudarium among its contents. Unfortunately, there are no mentions of it before it was opened in 1075, and only legends, some conflicting, in accounts of its history before that date. By tradition, Oviedo was founded on an uninhabited hillside in 761 AD, so if the ark was not made locally, it must have arrived some time after that. One legend suggests it was in Toledo, and moved northwards some time after the Arab invasion of Spain in 711, which does not seem unreasonable, but since even this was not recorded until 300 years afterwards, little reliability can be given to any alleged history from before that. The ark itself was restored in the twentieth century, after the chapel in which it was stored was blown up in 1934, and dated at around the turn of the tenth/eleventh centuries, no more than a hundred years before it was opened in 1075. Naturally, this version is considered not to be the original.

A Perfect Match
A last possible reason for arguing that the Shroud and the Sudarium once covered the same dead body is to suppose that certain specific and individual characteristics of the body were transferred so precisely to both cloths that the match between them is undeniable. Unfortunately all the Sudarium contains are some large splodges of blood, which can be loosely matched to almost any head, and no indication of an image to help us locate them more precisely. The Shroud has almost no blood on its face, apart from the distinctive ‘epsilon’ blood mark above the left eye, but it does have some distinctive marks on the back of its neck, and there are some marks on the Sudarium which are in a roughly equivalent place. If a good match can be found for these marks, then some consanguinity might, after all, be determined. The images in Barta’s book are rather small, but they are of remarkably good resolution, so let us do our best, starting, as he does, with the face, and the epsilon stain.

Here is the ‘face’ of the Sudarium. There are, in fact, four ‘faces,’ as the Sudarium was folded in two, and the stains are clearly visible on both sides, and it is not obvious which this is. The clearest and darkest stains are on the side of the cloth which has the hole (the black spot) on the left, not on the right, so either this is the back of that part, or the image has been flipped horizontally to conform to the negative of the Shroud, with which it is compared in the book.

The darkest area, and the dark curves within it, correspond to the ‘tide-marks’ left after successive effusions from the nose and mouth, the dark ‘A’ shaped lines delineate the nose, with small horizontal extensions supposed to be the eyebrows, above which the stain spreads out to the left across the brow and into the hair. An isolated spot between the right ‘eyebrow’ mark and the black hole is supposed to be the clot immediately below the epsilon stain. Considerable manipulation has to be carried out in order to make this image match the Shroud satisfactorily. After sensibly reminding us that any comparison must be carried out with the two images at the same scale, Barta finds that, if the eyes and forehead match quite well, the nose and mouth patch is too low by about three centimetres. His explanation for this is that while the Shroud lay more or less horizontally across the nose to the chin, the Sudarium followed the contour of the nose and mouth more closely.

Sadly, little of this really makes sense. The isolated spot is clearly similar in colour to the “pleural fluid” of the main stain, and not to the “blood spots” found around the back the head. The idea that the lower edges of the nose, moustache and lips should be outlined by darker lines of concentrated fluid is unjustified, and the pattern of light and dark on the Shroud in no way corresponds to the patterns of light and dark on the Sudarium. While it is not altogether improbable that the stains on the Sudarium may correspond to effusions from a wounded man, the idea that they can be matched to the image on the Shroud is only fanciful.

More obvious, to me at least, is a possible correspondence between with the alleged marks of the crown of thorns on the back of the neck.

These are enlargements from the book, and the fact is that however you slide these patterns over each other, they do not match. Here , I think, Barta is a little disingenuous. His image showing what he claims is precise superposition favours the green side over the red, so that although we can see where the two area coincide, we cannot easily see the areas which don’t. In a more balanced view, we can.

From César Barta’s book A clearer view

Sure, there are areas of overlay, as there would be with any two random shapes, but Barta’s claim that “in the crown of thorns, which is an exclusive characteristic of the Passion of Christ, we obtain a 75% agreement between both relics” is wildly over optimistic. A closer view of the largest area of overlap shows this even more clearly.

Another way of looking at it is to identify individual clots. Barta says, “We can count in that area of the Shroud about eight clots of which six have their corresponding in the Sudarium.” Well, no, we can’t.

These are the most important evidences connecting the Shroud and the Sudarium, and they’re not good enough. There’s a lot more, including a report by Ray Rogers attempting to characterise radiation defects and a fairly unlikely scenario in which the Sudarium helps to glue the hair to the side of the face, as is seen in the Shroud, but they are not significant enough to tip the balance in favour of the authenticity of either the seventh century Spanish Sudarium, or the thirteenth century French Shroud.

ADDENDUM

In his posthumous book, The Orphaned Manuscript, Alan Adler sees a much closer similarity between the crown-of-thorns bloodstains than Cesar Barta.

Note that both these images are horizontally flipped compared to Barta’s above. For the sake of the discussion below, I will point out the apparent coincidences, and at first sight, they are compelling.

However, both images have been seriously manipulated in order to make them fit. As they fade into their originals, we can spot the deception quite easily.