Some men have hobbies. Others have obsessions. And with enough money, an obsession can turn into a museum and let the whole world in for a peek. Which is why on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Fountain Valley, sandwiched between bicycle shops, sits the Shroud Center of Southern California.
The name doesn't do it justice. It misses the point, and the sign probably wouldn't pull in anyone off the street. What's the big deal about shrouds?
But mention the Shroud of Turin, and eyes widen, and interest is piqued. Is it, as some of the faithful claim, Jesus' burial cloth with an imprint of him made during the Resurrection? Or is it an elaborate fake from the Middle Ages?
Dr. August Accetta, the founder and director of the center, stands on the side of divinity.
Accetta has plowed hundreds of thousands of dollars into the museum and has written four papers on the shroud.
His dismay is obvious when he tells of three preachers who during Easter sermons spoke of Jesus' rising from the dead but didn't mention the Shroud of Turin.
Believers say the shroud, a piece of linen 14 feet, 3 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches -- or the more biblical two cubits by eight cubits -- shows a bearded man with markings that correspond to Jesus' injuries: wounds on his head, stigmata on his wrist and feet, and a severe wound on his right side.
Accetta uses a phrase coined by a physicist colleague to explain how the image got onto the cloth. He calls it a "mechanical transparency." Accetta says the body changed into "organized energy," and at the moment of Resurrection, the shroud fell through what was the body, picking up the energy that corresponds to the body.
Others offer a simpler answer: It's a fraud. And it wouldn't be the first time a religious relic was exposed as fake.
The shroud is generally thought to have first appeared in the 14th century when Geoffrey de Charney, a French knight, returned with it from the Crusades.
About 40 years later, a French bishop became the first of many religious officials, including a pope, to declare the shroud a fake. It was during a period when many people claimed to have unearthed religious relics, such as pieces of the original cross and bones of the disciples.
Just last year the Israeli Antiquities Authority said that a box that supposedly held the bones of "James ... brother of Jesus" was phony.
