The remarkable thing about the Shroud of Turin is that it started out as merely a painting but ended up being treated as a relic—namely a piece of cloth bearing an imprint of Jesus’s dead body.
Church historian Andrea Nicolotti’s tome on the history of the Shroud is a magnificent book with a wealth of interesting and thoroughly researched details. The original Italian edition was quite rightfully awarded two prizes and is recommended by colleague historians. It’s not Nicolotti’s first publication on the subject. In the past ten years, he has published about two dozen scholarly articles and books on the Shroud.
The Shroud, a piece of linen of about four by fifteen feet with a picture of a tortured man’s front and back on it, first turned up shortly around 1355, when it was immediately recognized as a lu- crative fraud. In 1389 it resurfaced, and bishop Pierre d’Arcis complained about the fraud to the pope, referencing the investigations of his predecessor. That’s the very first historical mention of the Shroud: as a fake. Nicolotti tells the history in great detail and explains that there were at least forty shroud relics in those centuries.