by James A. Bacon

Late last year, Bryan Walsh spent the better part of his waking hours laboring at a hobby that might be called offbeat for a veteran business executive. He holed up in a Benedictine monastery outside of Richmond and, working in a makeshift laboratory, conducted scientific experiments on swatches of linen. He placed them in a petri dish with various combinations of wood, silver and water dosed with chemical salts. Then he heated the concoctions to temperatures above the boiling point and examined the linen's cellulose structure under the microscope for evidence of chemical interaction.

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Thus, Walsh, 57, pursued his stubborn, contrarian quest. The semi-retired financier who serves as chairman of Tridium Inc., a Richmond area technology company, believes that the Shroud of Turin, which bears a faint image of a crucified man, is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. But in 1988, radiocarbon tests dated the origin of the artifact to the 13th or 14th century. In the realm of respectable opinion, the finding relegated the shroud to the status of a medieval forgery. "Since then," says Walsh, "scholarly discussion of the shroud has become almost taboo among scientific, historical and religious circles."

With his experiments, Walsh is probing chemical transformations in the shroud linen that might have occurred during a 1532 fire. If he can identify a chemical mechanism that might have skewed the radiocarbon results, he believes he can make shroud studies credible again and could land a major place in religious history.
It's a tall order. While "shroudies" - true believers in the shroud's authenticity - have advanced a number of explanations of why the radiocarbon tests are untrustworthy, none has gained wide currency. Walsh's fascination with the shroud arose in a round about way. The former chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley's broker-dealer subsidiary in New York moved to Virginia in 1990 to enjoy a slower pace of life. Tapping his college training in science, he spent a year researching solar flares and seismic activity.

A few years later, the conservative Catholic found himself drawn to speculation that the shroud sample used in the radiocarbon dating more than a decade before had been contaminated. Walsh helped organize a Shroud of Turin conference in Richmond in 1999. He presented a statistical analysis of the earlier Carbon 14 result, suggesting that the chemical characteristics of the linen had undergone some kind of transformation or hydrocarbon contamination. Other research showed that the linen had been impregnated by heavy concentrations of metallic salts. "The only thing I could think of was when they put out the fire, they pulled the silver box out of the wall which contained it and poured water on it. Maybe there were salts in the water," says Walsh. One possible explanation is that the ground water near Chambery, the French town where the shroud was housed in 1532, was high in metallic carbonate salts. "The match between the mix of the salts [in the shroud] and the salts in the Chambery water was pretty close," he says.

The discovery convinced him he was on to something. As Walsh reconstructs events, the French owners of the shroud stored their treasured artifact in a silver reliquary lined with wood, then placed it in a stone enclosure in a chapel. An accidental fire contaminated the linen in the relic container and melted some of the silver, which burned through the folded shroud and created the symmetrical holes whose patches appear so visible in photographs of the artifact. When the fire was put out, cellulose in the shroud linen was exposed to superheated water containing chemical salts, which could have catalyzed a reaction with carbon compounds emitted from the scorched wood. In interacting with those compounds, Walsh hypothesizes, the cellulose absorbed enough of the volatile compounds from the wood to throw off the radiocarbon dating.
If he can prove that the 1988 dating is flawed, Walsh hopes to persuade the curators of the shroud, now under the care of the Archbishop of Turin, to make the relic accessible again for scientific testing. Portable measuring devices today are far more powerful and less destructive than equipment available in 1988. If the shroud is genuine - and the image on the shroud is really that of Jesus - it could amount to scientific proof of Jesus' resurrection. What other avocation, he asks, could be more meaningful than that?

Return to Virginia Business - February 2002