A historian has recently revealed that the medieval Shroud of Turin was likely to be created as a prop for Easter rituals.
Turin Shroud, a four-metre length of woven cloth in which Jesus Christ was allegedly wrapped after his crucifixion, and on to which was transferred his ghostly image, would be exhibited in 2015 in Turin, for the first time in five year, the Guardian reported.
Two million people are expected to pour into the city to venerate the Shroud, which was radiocarbon-dated to the 14th century in 1988.
Charles Freeman, the author of 'Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe,' studied early descriptions and illustrations of the shroud. None predates 1355, the year of its first documented appearance in a chapel in Lirey near Troyes in France, before it was acquired by the House of Savoy in 1453 and "converted into a high-prestige relic" to shore up the power base of the insecure Alpine dukedom.
Freeman said that on Easter morning the gospel accounts of the resurrection would be re-enacted with "disciples" acting out a presentation in which they would enter a makeshift tomb and bring out the grave clothes to show that Christ had indeed risen
The study is published in the journal History Today.
His idea was shored up by his study of the earliest illustration of the shroud, on a pilgrim badge of the 1350s found in the Seine in 1855. On it, two clerics hold up the shroud, and beneath was an empty tomb.
The church officially regards the shroud with an open mind: as a object to be venerated as a reminder of Christ's passion, rather than, necessarily, the physical imprint of his body.
In 2015, millions of pilgrims would beg to disagree, as they would with Freeman's argument that places the shroud at the birth of northern European drama rather than at the dawn of Christianity, and that identifies the images on it as traces of a "crude and limited" painting of the 14th century.
