It is getting yellower with age and some of the details of the image are fading fast The circus is far from over.. I THINK Sheikh Sobhi Tofeili knew the end was coming. “Whether my struggle ends in my arrest or my assassination, I do not care,” the former Hizbollah leader told me a few hours before his dreams of a “Revolution of the Hungry” were destroyed in a barrage of Lebanese army and militia gunfire yesterday that left at least eight people dead. They included an army officer, a former Lebanese MP and a 17-year-old girl. Sheikh Tofeili must have appreciated the irony; although the founding father of Hizbollah was expelled only four days ago from the powerful pro-Iranian guerrilla force he helped to create, his final battle was fought within sight of the Roman temples of Baalbek, monuments to the greatest empire of antiquity.
He had given no sign at our meeting that his own militiamen – who broke away from the Hizbollah last week in the movement’s first serious split – were about to occupy a religious school on the outskirts of Baalbek. When I arrived to talk to the man held chiefly responsible for the taking of Western hostages in the mid-1980s, his security guards politely searched my camera bag before ushering me into a room where the bearded and bespectacled sheikh sat in a brown robe and white turban.

Some of it seems only to deepen the mysteries of the Shroud, while other parts seem suspiciously unscientific (so-called dating experts working only from photographs, for example). The Church appears to encourage a certain degree of obfuscation, no doubt because it is terrified of another 1988-style debacle. The new Cardinal Archbishop, Giovanni Saldarini, says, cautiously, that the Shroud “is not Christ but a sign pointing to Him”.Since last year’s fire, it has been kept in a secret location, but is due to go on public display in Turin Cathedral from 18 April to 14 June this year. After that, Cardinal Saldarini says, he would not be against new forensic tests. Biochemical analysis has revealed real blood – group AB – mingled in with myrrh and aloe.It is hard to say how reliable this research is.

They still don’t know how a three-dimensional photographic image could have been imprinted on to it. They don’t even know for sure where the Shroud came from, except that it passed into the hands of the Dukes of Savoy sometime in the mid-15th century.Their work, nevertheless, remains intense. Computer technology has intensified their reading of the three-dimensional image, including the stigmata that are invisible to the naked eye. In recent years they have claimed to have found traces of first-century pollen, and even the imprint of a first-century coin. Last week, the non-religious Giovanni Agnelli Foundation organised a meeting of academics in Turin to discuss the issue, and the different specialists were remarkably uniform in their verdict.

“The carbon-dating test is far from definitive,” reported Piero Savarino of Turin University. “There are many well-known cases of relics whose real age differs significantly from the result of a carbon-dating test.”He and others pointed out that woven materials are prone to atmospheric contamination. And nobody should forget that the Shroud has twice been exposed to fire – once in the House of Savoy’s palace in Chambery in 1532, when it was scorched and then doused in water, and a second time nine months ago, when the glorious baroque chapel housing the Shoud burned out and the cloth only survived thanks to the heroic intervention of a local fireman.So the Sindonologists, as the near-fanatical scholars of the Shroud are known after the Italian for shroud,”sindone” – are back to square one They still don’t know how old the cloth is. Ever since that dark day in 1988, the whole Roman Catholic Church has endeavoured to explain away the carbon-dating results and cling to the mystery of the Shroud.