The Shroud Codex (39 page)

“Makes sense to me,” Rothschild replied, very happy to hear the news. “Take my cell phone number with you. I want to be the first to know when you find the codex you’re looking for.”

My interest in the Shroud of Turin dates back four decades, when I first learned about the Shroud while attending St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1998, I traveled to Turin, Italy, where I had the opportunity to view the Shroud in person multiple times over several days. That Exposition that marked the hundredth anniversary of the 1898 exhibition of the Shroud, when Italian amateur photographer Secondo Pia took the first photographic images of the Shroud.

In researching this book, I was greatly assisted by John and Rebecca Jackson in Colorado Springs, Colorado. John, as mentioned in the novel, was a principal organizer of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project.

Rebecca graciously provided many excellent comments in reading an early version of the manuscript. John and Rebecca run the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado and edit the extremely valuable ShroudofTurin.com website.

Barrie Schwortz provided the photographs used in the novel. Barrie was the official photographer of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project. He edits another extremely valuable website, Shroud.com.

In writing this novel, I took the necessary liberties of fictionalizing events of the book and may well have represented the science about the Shroud or the photographic evidence in a manner John and Rebecca Jackson or Barrie Schwortz would dispute.

Neither should John and Rebecca Jackson or Barrie Schwortz be seen as endorsing the novel or the views expressed in the novel.

I am indebted to Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, for his continued friendship and his support for my efforts to write a novel about the Shroud of Turin.

The novel benefited greatly from the insightful comments and suggestions of my close personal friend Dr. Stephen Friefeld, M.D., an accomplished surgeon in Springfield, New Jersey, as he closely read the manuscript throughout the drafting process.

Again, any limitations in telling the medical part of this story are entirely my own, given that my graduate academic training is as a political scientist, not as a medical doctor.

Several books were extremely helpful in conducting the research.

Frederick T. Zugibe’s
The Crucifixion of Jesus
is an invaluable forensic inquiry into the ancient Roman practice of crucifixion, but also a key treatise on the medical examination of the Shroud of Turin.
ⁱ

Equally important was the two-volume treatise by Raymond E. Brown titled
The Death of the Messiah,
an indispensable biblical analysis of the account of Jesus Christ’s death as told by the New Testament gospels.
ⁱⁱ

Among Ian Wilson’s many important books on the Shroud of Turin, I found myself relying upon his 1998 book,
The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World’s Most Sacred Relic Is Real.
ⁱⁱⁱ

The 2000 book
The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence
^iv
, resulting from Barrie Schwortz’s collaboration with Ian Wilson, was also extremely useful.

For the theory that Leonardo da Vinci created the Shroud of Turin, I found most useful Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s 1994 book,
Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Truth Behind the Centuries-Long Conspiracy of Silence.
^v

Two books by Michio Kaku, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretic Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, provided an excellent introduction to particle physics: his 1994 book,
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension
^vi
, and his more recent 2005 book,
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos.
^vii

Of the many video presentations available on the Shroud of Turin, the one I found the most useful was the 2007 DVD
The Fabric of Time.
^viii

My wife, Monica, and my daughter, Alexis, graciously tolerated the countless hours I spent working alone, writing this book.

Finally, I want to thank my parish priest in New Jersey, Father Hernan Arias, in Morristown, New Jersey, who encouraged me to complete this book upon seeing the very first pages I had drafted.

ⁱ
Frederick T. Zugibe,
The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Forensic Inquiry
(New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc., 2005).

ⁱⁱ
Raymond E. Brown,
The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave
(New York: Doubleday, Two Volumes, 1994).

ⁱⁱⁱ
Ian Wilson,
The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World’s Most Sacred Relic Is Real
(New York: The Free Press, 1998).

^iv
Ian Wilson and Barrie Schwortz,
The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence
(London: Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2000).

^v
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince,
Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Truth
Behind the Centuries-Long Conspiracy of Silence
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994).

^vi
Michio Kaku,
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

^vii
Michio Kaku,
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos
(New York: Doubleday, 2005).

^viii
Executive Producers Vance Syphers, Paul Schubert, and Joe Call; and Senior Producer David W. Balsiger,
The Fabric of Time: Are the Secrets of the Universe Hidden in an Ancient Cloth?
(Baker City, Oregon: Grizzly Adams Productions, 2007).