The writer Jean-Christian Petitfils puts the Saint Arouse on the profession. Over the course of a work that mixes history, science and esotericism, he aims to demonstrate that the linen has well wrapped the body of Christ after his crucifixion, nourishing, without putting an end to it, an inexhaustible cycle of investigations and counter-investigations Started in the 19th century.
by Laurent Testot
Turin shroud would be a miracle, in the literal sense of the term. In the history of religions, a miracle has a main virtue: irrefutable proof of the sacred, it is used to nail the beak to unbelievers. In his latest book, the Holy Shore of Turin. Witness of the passion of Jesus Christ (Tallandier, 462 p., 26 €), presented as a “final investigation”, the historian Jean-Christian Petitfils traces the course of linen to the way in which the medieval wrote their golden legends, These biographies of saints exalting the purity of men of faith.
For the author, the shroud is a miracle, and science confirms it. Just he admits that on the fringes it existed, and there are still, “positivists, scientists and rationalists, for whom the holy bullshit could by definition only a false, forged by some fanatic Christian of obscurantist time “.
Close the ban, the case is folded. For Jean-Christian Petitfils, the sapling holy would be infinitely more than a rectangular yellowed linen, 4.42 meters long by 1.13 meters wide, showing the blurred image (from the front and back) to a Man with traces of wounds resulting from a crucifixion, preserved in the chapel of Guarini of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Turin cathedral.
Against the Catholic Church, which cautiously ruled that this object was an image or an icon, against a large majority of dating specialists who maintain that this fabric dates from the medieval time, the author defends firmly: 1 ) that we are dealing with a real “relic”, dating from the beginning of the Christian era, 2) that the linen welcomed the body of a tortured which could only be logical Jesus Christ.
This book does not constitute a “coming out” of the author, Catholic assumed, also a historian recognized by his peers. A prolific author, he has published numerous biographies of personalities of ancient regime, from man to the iron mask (Perrin, 1970) to Louis XIV (Perrin, 1995), Louis XV (Perrin, 2014) and Louis XVI (Perrin , 2005), passing through Madame de Montespan (Fayard, 1988). He also wrote some previous works on Jesus, including a dictionary in love with Jesus (Plon, 2015).
Readers who had immersed themselves in his biography of Jesus (Fayard, 2011) also already knew what to stick to the opinion of Jean-Christian Petitfils on the shroud of Turin: “The shroud of Turin is The linen that would have wrapped the body of Christ. It represents the facial and dorsal imprint, headbound, of a semitic type man, flogging, violently struck in the face, bloody, wearing a cap of thorns, crucified According to Roman techniques, with nails on wrists and feet, carrying on the right flank an injury, in other words the wounds of passion. It is an impressive image, finish (not made of human hand), almost indelible, isotropic (that is to say without directional effect), which one has never managed to reproduce, even in the laboratory, by the most varied techniques. “
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