Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Speaker 2: David Wolf with Us is one of the foremost British
Speaker 2: experts on the Shroud of Turin. He's an Academy Award
Speaker 2: winning producer and director with a long career in British
Speaker 2: television and film. His website is who caneb dot com.
Speaker 2: It's an amazing say David, you do a great job.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the program.
Speaker 3: Thank you, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2: How did you get involved in the Shroud of Turin?
Speaker 3: Well, I suppose in a kind of miraculous way. Really,
Speaker 3: I was a graduate of the London Film School way
Speaker 3: back in the last century, and back in those days,
Speaker 3: most of the work I could get with corporate work.
Speaker 3: It was interesting. It was people building great civil engineering
Speaker 3: projects around the world, and I enjoyed that. But I
Speaker 3: wanted to get my teeth into something a little more interesting,
Speaker 3: and I sent out a press release to all the
Speaker 3: local newspapers in the UK saying that independent producer looking
Speaker 3: for ideas, and frankly I was deluged. I mean people
Speaker 3: had gone up into their attics and dusted off things
Speaker 3: that they taught about ages ago and I, and I,
Speaker 3: of course, having advertised for them, I had to that
Speaker 3: was obliged to wade through them all. And there was
Speaker 3: nothing really inspiring until one envelope I opened had a
Speaker 3: photograph of the face and it was purported to be
Speaker 3: the face of Jesus, and it was sent to me
Speaker 3: to buy a a historian called Ian Wilson. Now I
Speaker 3: wasn't religious, but I had been, being a photographer and
Speaker 3: a filmmaker. I was aware that this image that was
Speaker 3: on a linen cloth was really something quite unusual. Fact,
Speaker 3: when you saw it in the naked eye, it looked
Speaker 3: a bit like a negative, and sure enough, when you
Speaker 3: actually turned it into a negative by reversing light and shade,
Speaker 3: it suddenly became extremely vivid, and it was an image,
Speaker 3: unmistakably of a crucified man. There was only a history
Speaker 3: of the cloth back to the Middle Ages, and so
Speaker 3: one was obviously a bit suspicious that this might have
Speaker 3: been some medieval fake. But it turns out that once
Speaker 3: the investigation underway, what the most important thing is. Of course,
Speaker 3: as an independent producer, that will tell you have an
Speaker 3: idea but an idea is no good without the money
Speaker 3: to make it. And I had located a priest in
Speaker 3: New York who had actually had was brought up in
Speaker 3: Turin and emigrated to New York, and I was put
Speaker 3: in touch with him. I said, look, I've come across
Speaker 3: this shrowd. It's insuring. No one's really ever heard of it,
Speaker 3: but it sounds fascinating. And he said to me, just
Speaker 3: come and see me. Well, i'd never been to America
Speaker 3: at that time, and it was nineteen seventy eight. It
Speaker 3: was quite an expensive thing to me. Anyway, we got
Speaker 3: there and he put me in front of somebody who
Speaker 3: had inherited a huge fortune from one of the brewing companies.
Speaker 3: And I was one of several people who had who
Speaker 3: made a pitch that day to this gentleman over lunch.
Speaker 3: And again, luckily for me, the other guys that were
Speaker 3: pitching didn't really inspire this chat. But when I started
Speaker 3: talking about the Shroud of Turin, this multi millionaire got
Speaker 3: very interested and said to me, well, mister Wolf, how
Speaker 3: much money do you need? And I actually hadn't done
Speaker 3: a budget at that time. Was it was still early stages.
Speaker 3: But when you asked the question like that, and you
Speaker 3: have to come up with something.
Speaker 2: You need a quick answer, right, don You need a
Speaker 2: quick answer?
Speaker 3: When he does that, I need a quick answer. And
Speaker 3: I said the three hundred and fifty thousand pounds and
Speaker 3: that was the equivalent back then of about a million dollars.
Speaker 3: And this sentlement said hmm, and he sort of scratched
Speaker 3: his chin for a moment and said, okay. I walked.
Speaker 3: I walked. I walked away from that meeting with a
Speaker 3: million dollars. And the time I was thrown back to
Speaker 3: London that the money had reached my bank account and
Speaker 3: I was away for the film who can he be?
Speaker 2: It's an amazing thing that.
Speaker 3: For the first film. I'm going back now to nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy eight. That first film was called The Silent Witness
Speaker 3: and it won a British Academy Award and it set
Speaker 3: my career on the path. And I then made lots
Speaker 3: of documentaries for TV. And then in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: the Shroud had got so famous that the the Vatican
Speaker 3: decided that it needed it could be very useful. And
Speaker 3: you may have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These
Speaker 3: were papyrus that were found in the desert and they
Speaker 3: had been accurately dated using a new technique where you
Speaker 3: could you could measure the ratio of carbon fourteen in
Speaker 3: something like that and get an accurate age. And it
Speaker 3: turns out that Sea scrolls were actually two thousand years old,
Speaker 3: and that was a huge of an interest to Israel.
Speaker 3: And if you go to Jerusalem now you'll find their
Speaker 3: biggest exhibition is of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Well, I
Speaker 3: think the Vatican thought, well, if you can date the
Speaker 3: Dead Sea scrolls, if we could date the Turian shild
Speaker 3: and that turns out to be two thousand years old,
Speaker 3: what will that do for us? And so the process
Speaker 3: started and I was because of my interest in an
Speaker 3: association with it. I was there following the whole process,
Speaker 3: and quite rightly, the Turing authority says, well, we can't
Speaker 3: be seen to be presiding over this because we've obviously
Speaker 3: got a vested interest in it being authentic, and so
Speaker 3: they decided to give responsibility for organizing the test to
Speaker 3: the British Museum, probably one of the most august bodies
Speaker 3: then that they could think of. However, the British Museum
Speaker 3: is made of beautiful stone and solid but inside it
Speaker 3: our people and the people there have their own hopes
Speaker 3: and fear them ambitions. And it turns out that there
Speaker 3: were two individuals at the British Museum who had their
Speaker 3: own motivation for financing their own institution, the Oxford Radio
Speaker 3: Carbon Unit, and they were desperate to actually get the
Speaker 3: job of dating the Turin trail because they knew the
Speaker 3: publicity that would be given to them, and so they
Speaker 3: ended up presiding over the tests. Now it's a very
Speaker 3: human thing. The day came for the test to be
Speaker 3: carried out on this trail, which only used to come
Speaker 3: out every ten years or so for people to see,
Speaker 3: was taken into the room prepared for it, and the
Speaker 3: individual scientist in Turin when it came to it, and
Speaker 3: even though the protocols have said you've got to take
Speaker 3: you've got to take samples from least six or seven
Speaker 3: different parts of the shrowd, they didn't need much. Just
Speaker 3: a sort of square inch or so. You need to
Speaker 3: take it from different areas of the shroud and then
Speaker 3: average out to get an.
Speaker 2: Accurate because some sections could have been tainted with earlier
Speaker 2: or later materials.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, you had to average it out. But when
Speaker 3: it came to it, the the person presiding over it
Speaker 3: insurance said, look, you know this is this is the
Speaker 3: shround that wou cross. You don't need to take you
Speaker 3: only you only need to take one sample. But unfortunately,
Speaker 3: instead of the British Museum saying no, no, no, no no,
Speaker 3: we've agreed this protocol. We've got to take protocols from
Speaker 3: every part of the cloth, they abandoned that and agreed
Speaker 3: and agreed that they would just take one sample from
Speaker 3: a corner of the cloth to day, and that's where
Speaker 3: it always another expression. But that's what's went badly wrong.
Speaker 3: We now know that the corner that they dated because
Speaker 3: the shroud was such a well known object in the
Speaker 3: Middle Ages and in every religious festival it was held
Speaker 3: up in the hot Mediterranean heat by by those bishops
Speaker 3: selected to the honor, and they gripped it closely. You
Speaker 3: have to remember, back back in then, relics were so important.
Speaker 3: The closer you could get to a relic, the more
Speaker 3: religious value you got from it. And the same applied.
Speaker 3: The tighter this cloth could be gripped, the more value
Speaker 3: they get from it, and the corners from which it
Speaker 3: was held up got worn out. And because textiles were
Speaker 3: so valuable back in those days they could be repaired
Speaker 3: with beautiful skills, so that you could not see from
Speaker 3: the other side that something had been repaired. And what
Speaker 3: happened was the corner was repaired in the Middle Ages,
Speaker 3: and it came to it with all the all the
Speaker 3: attention on it and so on, and with with the
Speaker 3: decision to say, just take one sample from a corner
Speaker 3: that they took the example from there, and we now
Speaker 3: know that the sample that they cut and dated was
Speaker 3: a medieval repair.
Speaker 2: It was, it was accurate, but it was medieval by.
Speaker 3: Mistake, absolutely, and the British Museum couldn't bring themselves to
Speaker 3: to say, oh, no, well we made a mistake, and
Speaker 3: they stuck to there and they stuck to their death
Speaker 3: their finding that it was medieval. And unfortunately, from that
Speaker 3: moment on, the shrouds represent reputation dipped. And if anyone
Speaker 3: has seen Mark filming, the image itself is encoded with
Speaker 3: three dimensional information. So when you scan it are doing
Speaker 3: the climact of this film, the body of Jesus can
Speaker 3: put with CGI just from the data on that cloth
Speaker 3: can be completely realized. And the other thing, of course,
Speaker 3: is is that CRUCIFIXI, all the all the depictions of
Speaker 3: crucifixion down the ages were done in much later times,
Speaker 3: long after the Romans had stopped crucifying people, and the technique,
Speaker 3: for want of a better word, had become unknown. But
Speaker 3: when you were crucified, and please forgive me that this
Speaker 3: you know it's not the most persant thing to hear,
Speaker 3: but the actual way you finally died was a suffocation.
Speaker 3: They were once once you run the cross, you pushed
Speaker 3: down on your feet in order to be able to breathe,
Speaker 3: and you could see on the blood flows of the
Speaker 3: shell there's two body positions where were raised up the
Speaker 3: blood went one way and down in the other. So
Speaker 3: every forensic detail was accurate.
Speaker 2: And David inteen In twenty twenty two, Italian researchers used
Speaker 2: a technique called wide angle X ray and that showed
Speaker 2: something dramatically different, didn't it.
Speaker 3: That the various because of the shu represents such a
Speaker 3: significant thing. If it's authentic, which I believe it is,
Speaker 3: it's not only an image of Christ but itself. It's
Speaker 3: miraculous because the only thing that could explain them is
Speaker 3: because it's it's encoded with three dimension information, so that
Speaker 3: the tip of the nose for example, is more dense
Speaker 3: than the eye socket because there's a difference between them.
Speaker 3: The only thing that can explain the image is that
Speaker 3: at some point there was an incredible burst of energy,
Speaker 3: energy that could would, under normal circumstances have blown the
Speaker 3: cave that the tomb a part. But this energy was
Speaker 3: released for such a short milli second of time that
Speaker 3: what it actually did was just scorch the cloth, and
Speaker 3: it did so in such a way that whichever part
Speaker 3: of the cloth was closer got slightly more scorched, so that,
Speaker 3: as I said, the typical nose is darker than the
Speaker 3: eye socket. So as seen in the climax of this film,
Speaker 3: with modern technology, we scan the image and take that
Speaker 3: three dimensional information and you can actually recreate the body
Speaker 3: that's lying there using nothing more than the data that's
Speaker 3: on the cloth. And we're two thousand years on now
Speaker 3: from the actual moment of the crucifixion. I've come to believe,
Speaker 3: and a lot of people who've seen the film now
Speaker 3: share that belief, is that somehow, as we reached the
Speaker 3: two thousandth anniversary of the of the Crucifixion and the resurrection,
Speaker 3: this shroud and the modern technology now available has given us,
Speaker 3: gives us the opportunity to witness for ourselves exactly what
Speaker 3: happened in that tomb.
Speaker 2: Do you believe that the burst of energy that left
Speaker 2: the shroud the way it is was done on purpose
Speaker 2: to leave it behind for us to see this as
Speaker 2: a witness, or do you think it just was something else?
Speaker 3: No, No, this, this is such a phenomenon. And we
Speaker 3: know I mean the thing about the Gospel and Jesus,
Speaker 3: I mean he turns water into wine. He's capable of
Speaker 3: doing these things. But this ultimate miracle, we know, crucifixion,
Speaker 3: and it was a common thing that the Romans used,
Speaker 3: but we didn't really understand the technique of it. And
Speaker 3: please forgive me. Your readers might find listeners might find this,
Speaker 3: But I think what you actually died of was suffocation,
Speaker 3: because in order to breathe, you had to push down
Speaker 3: on your nailed feet and put yourself up with your
Speaker 3: hands just in order to be able to take the
Speaker 3: weight off your chest so that you could breathe. So
Speaker 3: the whole process was one ghastly sea sort of rising
Speaker 3: and falling. And you can see the way the blood
Speaker 3: angles go on the arms and legs. It depicts those
Speaker 3: two positions of the body on the cross, every possible
Speaker 3: detail you could think of on this image on the closs.
Speaker 3: No artist in the Middle Ages could have done it,
Speaker 3: because no one knew how to crucify anybody in the
Speaker 3: Middle Ages. Thank God they'd stopped doing it. But the images,
Speaker 3: the evidence on the cloth takes us right back to
Speaker 3: that moment, the pivotal moment really if you like, the
Speaker 3: Western civilization, because it was the belief, it was the
Speaker 3: belief that even the disciples themselves suddenly realized just how
Speaker 3: Jesus significance was. That they went then off around the
Speaker 3: world and spread Christianity. So that was the pivotal moment,
Speaker 3: and it's captured for us on this cloth. And so
Speaker 3: one of the most powerful sequences I think in the
Speaker 3: film is I found a forensic pathologist in Los Angeles
Speaker 3: who somebody who has examined more dead bodies, probably than
Speaker 3: anybody else, and he lays out the film, He lays
Speaker 3: out the full length image of the body and carries
Speaker 3: out an autopsy on it effectively, and we suddenly discover
Speaker 3: through the autopsy and the marks on the cloth, exactly
Speaker 3: what happened during the process of crucifixion.
Speaker 2: David, do you follow this story of Veronica when Christ
Speaker 2: was carrying the crucifix the cross with Simon of decree
Speaker 2: and then she ran up to him and put a
Speaker 2: cloth on his face and he left an imprint on that.
Speaker 3: Yes, and as famously it exists, it does not stand
Speaker 3: up to the same close close examination that the shild does.
Speaker 3: Now I wouldn't I wouldn't want to write it up
Speaker 3: altogether because I haven't really studied it that closely. But
Speaker 3: as far as I'm aware, the actual comparison, listen to
Speaker 3: the image on the show itself does not stand up.
Speaker 3: But please, I'm not an expert on the Veronica. I
Speaker 3: am on the Shroud of Turin. The first film I
Speaker 3: made about it was in nineteen seventy eight. That's the
Speaker 3: one I want a British Academy Award, and I've just
Speaker 3: made what as I've got to my retirement. Really, I
Speaker 3: wanted to do something to restore its its status after
Speaker 3: that rogue carbon fourteen test, and that's what the new
Speaker 3: film Who Can He Be? I think achieve?
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