Professor Frale has published a new book, The Shroud of Jesus the Nazarene, which claims an archaic script that appears on parts of the material was written by low-ranking Roman officials or mortuary clerks on a scroll or piece of papyrus to identify Christ's corpse.I will look at the evidence with great interest when it becomes available and will maintain a skeptical open mind in the meantime. But I do note the rule of thumb that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't so, which is widely applicable in life if you want to stay out of trouble.
Such a document would have enabled the relatives of a dead person to retrieve a body from a communal morgue, she suggested.
Scholars first noticed that there was writing on the shroud in 1978 but when the radiocarbon tests a decade later suggested that the shroud was a forgery, historians lost interest in the script, Dr Frale said.
She claimed the text also partially confirmed the Gospels' account of Jesus' final moments. A fragment in Greek that can be read as "removed at the ninth hour" may refer to Christ's time of death reported in the holy texts, she said.
On an enhanced image studied by Frale, at least seven words can be seen, fragmented and scattered on and around the face, criss-crossing the cloth vertically and horizontally.
The text also mentions that the man who was wrapped in the shroud had been condemned to death, she believes.
Professor Frale said the hidden text was, in effect, the "burial certificate" for Christ.
"I tried to be objective and leave religious issues aside," she said. "What I studied was an ancient document that certifies the execution of a man, in a specific time and place."
However Antonio Lombatti, anther historian who has written books about the shroud, said: "People work on grainy photos and think they see things. It's all the result of imagination and computer software."
Background here.