Death Certificate is Imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, Says Vatican Scholar

Teresa Neumann : Nov 27, 2009
Richard Owen - Times UK

"In the year 16 of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius Jesus the Nazarene, taken down in the early evening after having been condemned to death by a Roman judge because he was found guilty by a Hebrew authority, is hereby sent for burial with the obligation of being consigned to his family only after one full year."

(Rome, Italy)—Regardless of what one may think about the Shroud of Turin, it continues to generate debate, albeit controversial, and last week it again made news around the world. (Photo: Claudio Papi/Reuters)

Many scholars regard the shroud as a medieval forgery, but Dr. Barbara Frale, a scholar and researcher in the Vatican secret archives, claims to have deciphered the "death certificate" imprinted on the Shroud of Turin. According to a La Repubblica report, Frale said that under Jewish burial practices current at the time of Christ in a Roman colony such as Palestine, a body buried after a death sentence could only be returned to the family after a year in a common grave. A death certificate was therefore glued to the burial shroud to identify it for later retrieval, and was usually stuck to the cloth around the face. This had apparently been done in the case of Jesus even though he was buried not in a common grave but in the tomb offered by Joseph of Arimathea.

Dr. Frale was quoted as saying many of the letters were missing, with Jesus for example referred to as "(I)esou(s) Nnazarennos" and only the "iber" of "Tiberiou" surviving. Her reconstruction, however, suggested that the certificate read: "In the year 16 of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius Jesus the Nazarene, taken down in the early evening after having been condemned to death by a Roman judge because he was found guilty by a Hebrew authority, is hereby sent for burial with the obligation of being consigned to his family only after one full year." It ends "signed by" but the signature has not survived.

A report in the AP said the "faint writing emerged through computer analysis of photos of the shroud, which is not normally accessible for study."