Odd how the shroud suddenly popped up in Europe after more than a thousand years. Where had it been all that time?
Someone thought of a great money making idea just before it appeared. It's been around THAT long. This is all just too much.
There is actually a history that tracks it under different names. . . And an inventory of it in the relics at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople from 944AD onward, after the Sermon of Grerory Referendarius of August 15, 944, in which the Image of Edessa was first brought there, after it had been in kept in Edessa since it was found walled up in the Eastern Gate for four hundred years. It was purported to have been carried there by Thaddeus to cure Abgar V before he died in 40AD of a severe skin disorder in response to a letter he had sent to Jesus before the crucifixion. It was walled up to protest the image and lost for a couple of hundred years when Edessa was over run by a horde of iconoclastic Arabs had conquered the city.
We know the Shroud existed a couple of centuries before the 1988 C14 dating puts its creation due to the existence of an image of it in an illuminated Hungarian Prayer Codex with a known providence showing the Shroud with its distinctive twill weave and the distinctive “poker holes” that predated the 1532 fire and the first known copies. There is also an eleventh century coin with an image of the Shroud on it. . . Putting it three centuries before the C14 date. . . And its appearance in Lirey France in the possession of a Geoffrey de Charny, grandson of another Geoffry de Charney, (note the difference in spelling, which were a matter of opinion in that era) who was the co-leader of the 4th Crusade which sacked Constantinople and would have had ample opportunity to claim the Shroud as spoils of war, something not looked down on in that era.
That Geoffry de Charney would be later burned at the stake in Paris along side Jacques De Molay, then head of the Knights Templar, when the King and the Pope seized their treasuries (the Knights Templar were the banking system in medieval times— one could safely deposit gold at one temple and with a letter of credit safely withdraw it at another temple). . . Who were said to worship a disembodied head, but were also said to kiss the foot of an image of the Crucified Jesus, neither of which has ever been found. However, an image of the head was found in Knights Templar building which bears a striking similarity to the Shroud being used as a door.