The Shroud Codex - Hardcover

Corsi, Jerome R

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439190410 ISBN 13: 9781439190418

Publisher: Threshold Editions, 2010

Synopsis

The priest. . . . Brought back to life on an operating room table after a horrific car crash, Father Paul Bartholomew is haunted by frightening visions—especially the moments when he seems to inhabit the body of Christ at Golgotha. The skeptics. . . . Dr. Stephen Castle, a New York City psychiatrist and renowned atheist, has built an international reputation for his book arguing that religion is a figment of human imagination. Professor Marco Gabrielli, an Italian religious researcher and chemist, has made a career of debunking supposed miracles, of explaining the unexplainable. The miracle. . . . For centuries, however, the Shroud of Turin has defied scientific explanation. Is this ancient remnant that bears such a vividly detailed pictorial representation truly the burial cloth that wrapped Christ after he was taken down from the cross? Or is it the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the Christian community? As Father Bartholomew—newly returned to his parish, the venerable St. Joseph’s Church in upper Manhattan—celebrates Mass, blood starts running down his arm. The horrified congregation watches him collapse to the ground, his vestments soaked with the blood pouring from wounds on his wrists. The phenomenon is known as stigmata, when a person appears to manifest the wounds that Christ suffered upon the cross. But in Father Bartholomew’s case there is a mysterious added dimension: he has been transformed to resemble in almost every physical aspect the Christ-like figure represented on the Shroud of Turin. Worried that Bartholomew’s case could be proved a hoax, the Vatican employs Dr. Castle and Professor Gabrielli to investigate. But for the well-known psychiatrist and the experienced man of science both, Father Bartholomew presents the most perplexing challenge either has ever faced. Dr. Castle watches in person while the priest appears to writhe in agony, blood spurting from wounds identical to those portrayed on the famous shroud, and he wonders if he too can have been sucked into some kind of shared hallucination. Meanwhile, Professor Gabrielli—confident that he can reproduce the shroud by using materials and methods available in the Middle Ages—works frantically to prove that the shroud is a medieval forgery.

But when the priest’s uncanny resemblance to the crucified Christ on the Shroud prompts the two men to investigate the famous artifact itself, each is finally forced to face mysteries that cannot be explained by sheer reason alone. It will be the most unsettling—and eventually soul-wrenching—journey of discovery they have ever undertaken.

From Jerome R. Corsi, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Obama Nation, comes a magnificent, thought-provoking first novel. Grounded in the same kind of in-depth, all-encompassing research that has distinguished Corsi’s nonfiction, The Shroud Codex plumbs the farthest reaches of science and the human spirit.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr. Jerome Corsi received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality and the co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, which was also a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor to WorldNetDaily.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER ONE

Liberated, he felt himself moving free, as a spirit. Easily, he moved upward, leaving behind the police and ambulance sirens below, as rescue workers rushed to the scene.

Ahead of him, he could see the purest of white light streaming from a tunnel that loomed in the sky above him.

In the depths of his soul he felt a peace he had never felt before, a peace he had always longed to feel. He was happy to be free of his broken body and he felt no sorrow at leaving his life behind.

As he entered the tunnel, the luminescence surrounded him. He held his hands in front of his face and turned them so he could see his palms. He was intact. He felt his legs and they too were fine. He was uninjured.

He wondered, Why am I surprised?

Then the car crash flashed back to him in horrific detail.

He had been at the wheel of his car, applying the brakes as hard as he could. He had just come around a sharp curve to find ahead of him two semi-trucks jackknifed together in a multiple-vehicle wreck that blocked both lanes of the interstate.

As if watching a movie, he saw himself behind the wheel of his car, screaming and bracing for the impact. At sixty-five miles per hour, the hood of his car crushed back upon him like an accordion. The impact was a more powerful jolt than he had ever imagined possible.

An unexpected summer thunderstorm had sent a driving rain down on the highway and he should have known to slow down, but he was preoccupied, lost in thought, totally unaware of the oil on the highway that had turned slick in the rain, causing the trucks ahead of him to collide and jackknife, setting off a chain reaction of a dozen more vehicles.

Yes, that afternoon, Father Paul Bartholomew, a Catholic priest, died.

The police report would read that he was killed in a motor vehicle accident at 3:35 P.M. ET on August 15.

He died on the operating room table after the horrific car crash he suffered while driving that Sunday afternoon to the cabin in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where he had spent summers as a boy.

But now all that seemed like a dream. The luminescence in the tunnel surrounded him like a fog and he felt drawn to move forward.

As he approached the end of the tunnel, he could see people milling about. Strangely, they all seemed to be floating with the light and the fog enveloping them. Vaguely he thought he could detect friends and relatives who had been dead now for many years.

Suddenly, he was thrilled to see his mother coming forward to embrace him. His mother had died ten years earlier of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive nerve disease in which the brain loses the ability to move the body’s muscles. The disease took five years to kill her and in the last two months of her life her paralysis increased to near total.

Paul at that time was on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He was the youngest physicist ever to be asked to join the esteemed institute. Before his mother’s illness, Dr. Bartholomew was considered one of the most promising young physicists in the world.

When his mother was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, his life was shattered. Six months before she died, he moved his mother out of the hospital and brought her back home, where he hired nurses around the clock to care for her. As his mother’s paralysis became complete in her final days of life, the institute gave Bartholomew a leave of absence. He never left his mother’s side until she died; he moved a small cot into her room so he could take care of her in the middle of the night. He prayed that God would take him and spare his mother.

Then, as she went into a coma, he spent hours at her bedside, holding her hand, trying to communicate with her one last time. In the middle of the night, as she took her final labored breaths, Bartholomew wiped her brow with a cold cloth, trying to ease her pain. When she died, he felt desolate and abandoned, his tears unable to bring her back or express his pain. At her funeral, Bartholomew wished there was a way he could join her in death, and he would have, except he felt it was against God’s law for him to commit suicide.

The death of his mother marked a turning point in Bartholomew’s life. What kept him going was a determination to understand what his life was about. Why was he here on earth in this here and now? He had no ready answer.

In the depths of his crisis, he railed against God for taking from him the only person in his life who truly understood him. As he grieved his loss, he realized he had gone into physics in an attempt to find God, and now, with the despair he felt with his mother gone, he was ending up with nothing. Regardless of how brilliant he had been in science, having received his Ph.D. from Princeton when he was only twenty-five years-old, the death of his mother made him realize that God could not be found in a particle accelerator or a quantum equation. The head of the physics department was shocked when Bartholomew came into his office and announced he had decided to resign from the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study.

“What do you mean you want to resign?” asked Dr. Horton Silver, himself a renowned physicist and Bartholomew’s most trusted advisor at the university. “Your appointment at the Institute is an appointment for life. Your particle physics work has broken new ground internationally. You can’t resign.”

Dr. Silver was right. Bartholomew was on the verge of a major theoretical breakthrough dealing with one of the most important unanswered mysteries that had eluded the most brilliant minds in physics since Einstein had been at the very same institute. Bartholomew had spent the last three years developing a series of equations that Silver felt were the most promising approach he had yet seen to explain the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a quantum physics problem: if the position of a particle were known, its momentum could not be determined with precision. Dr. Silver believed Bartholomew would solve the problem and that if he abandoned physics now, it might be decades before another physicist emerged who was brilliant enough to tackle the problem and advance beyond the progress Bartholomew had made.

Silver refused to accept Bartholomew’s decision. Instead he insisted that Bartholomew take some time off to get himself back together emotionally. They had known each other since Bartholomew was an undergraduate in one of Silver’s advanced physics courses at Princeton. He encouraged Bartholomew to pursue graduate studies in physics and when Bartholomew was accepted as a graduate student in physics, Silver became his advisor.

“Your leaving physics will be a great loss both to physics and to the institute,” Silver insisted. “Travel. Go to Europe for a few months. You need some time to grieve. When you get back, you’ll be ready to resume your work.”

“I’ve made my decision and it’s final,” Bartholomew explained to Dr. Silver. “I have come to the conclusion that I have made all the contributions to physics that I want to make.”

“What do you mean? You’re already famous and you’re not yet at the height of your career.”

“That may be, but my decision is final.”

Dr. Silver finally had to accept the fact that he could not change Bartholomew’s mind.

“What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” he asked. “You’re a young man, not yet forty years old. You can’t mourn your mother for the rest of your life.”

“I’ve decided to go into the priesthood,” Bartholomew said without hesitation. “I have come to the conclusion that I have to find God and that physics isn’t going to get me there.”

Silver was flabbergasted. “So, you’re dropping out altogether then?”

“No,” Bartholomew protested. “I’m not dropping out. It’s just the opposite. I think for the first time in my life I know what I’m doing. My mother always told me that I had a vocation for the priesthood and I had never believed her. If she communicated anything to me in the last days of her life, even if it was just with her eyes before she went into a coma, she was telling me I had to find God. She always said I was born to do something in my life more important than physics. Now I believe her.”

THE DAY OF the car accident was a Sunday. After saying Mass that morning at his parish, St. Joseph’s on New York City’s Upper East Side, he drove over to his mother’s grave site in Morristown, New Jersey. He brought fresh flowers to place on her grave, as he always did. Kneeling at his mother’s grave that morning, he prayed for her soul and asked God once more that he might join her soon.

Little did Bartholomew realize, as he left the cemetery in Morristown to head up to his cabin, that this was to be the last day of his life.

Now, surrounded by the luminescence in what he imagined must be Heaven, Bartholomew and his mother embraced for what seemed the longest time, thrilled to be reunited.

“Come with me, Paul,” his mother said. “There’s someone else who has been waiting here for you, along with me.”

She took his hand and together they approached a man seated at a table.

Bartholomew felt this man was the oldest and wisest man he had ever seen. His hair and beard were flowing with silver and his eyes were the softest and most understanding blue eyes Bartholomew had ever seen.

Entering the Ancient One’s presence and returning his gaze, Bartholomew felt pouring toward him an unqualified love and acceptance he had never imagined possible. For the first time, he felt at home.

“We have a special place prepared here for you,” the Ancient One said lovingly.

Bartholomew looked around him and he was aware of legions of other souls who were on every side of them, listening and w...

About this edition

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1439190410
• ISBN 13: 9781439190418
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352