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Hungarian Pray Codex
In the Budapest National Library there is an ancient codex, known
commonly as the Hungarian Pray Manuscript or Pray Codex,
named for György Pray (1723-1801), a Jesuit scholar who made
the first detailed study of it. Written between 1192 and 1195, the
codex contains an illustration, one of five in the manuscript,
showing Jesus being placed on his burial shroud. The shroud is
drawn with the same herringbone weave and identical patterns of
small burn holes found on the shroud. (These are not the large
burns caused by the fire of 1532. The artist included a number of
other graphic characteristics consistent with the shroud. Jesus is
shown naked with his arms modestly folded at the wrists. The
fingers are unusually long in appearance as they are on the shroud.
There are no visible thumbs just as there are no thumbs visible in
the images of the man of the shroud. In the drawing, there is also a clear mark on Jesus'
forehead where a prominent 3-shaped bloodstain is found on the forehead of the man of
the shroud.
THE STRANGE SHADOW SHROUD IN THE NEWS
Researchers cringed when the late Peter Jennings, on ABC World News Tonight (Mar 22, 2005), in a segment entitled,
“Shrouded in Mystery No More,” stated: “The Shroud of Turin has mystified scientists for years. Now a literature professor from
Idaho says he can prove it's a fake.”
Nathan Wilson, who teaches literature at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, ingeniously created an image that to the
untrained eye looked something like the shroud. He wrote an article for Christianity Today.
Wilson did not claim that he “can prove it's a fake.” What he said, as reported by the Discovery Channel, which also carried
the story, was that it “could have been easily forged by painting an image on glass.” The glass was then used as a negative to
selectively sun bleach a piece of unbleached linen, creating an image by making some areas lighter rather than darkening
other areas.
The Discovery Channel went on to report: “Venerated by many Catholics as the proof that Christ was resurrected from the
grave and dismissed by some scientists as a brilliant medieval fake, the shroud features the image of a man that is both three-
dimensional and a photonegative.” This gives a completely false picture of the controversy as being between Catholics and
scientists. Who are these scientists? What about the scientists who think it might genuine? What about the Anglicans, the
Protestants and the Evangelical Christians?
The Discovery Channel did report on the Thermochimica Acta article by Rogers that “argued that the 1988 carbon-14 dating
actually used a sample cut from a rewoven portion of the shroud and not the original.”
This prompted an interesting conspiracy theory by Wilson that the new dating did not rule out his hypothesis of a forgery.
According to Wilson. “It is extraordinarily unlikely that a forger would use a cloth fresh off the loom. If I was some villainous
Crusader, hoping to fake the burial shroud of Christ, the first thing I would do is obtain a burial cloth. And the best place to get
one, as well as the cheapest, is from a tomb.” Wilson never mentions how it might be that a shroud would not have
decomposed in a tomb after several centuries. Nor did Wilson explain where a medieval forger would have obtained the 7 foot
long panes of glass his forger needed. Such pieces of glass did not exist before the nineteenth century.
The Discovery Channel also reported that, “Wilson's experiment is also consistent with a 1970s analysis by the late Walter
McCrone, a Chicago chemical microscopist, who maintained he had identified the pigment red ochre, and tempera, as the
shroud's paint medium, placing it as a medieval painting created around 1355.” But it is not consistent. McCrone argued that
the images were painted. Wilson argued that they were not.
It is moot. The chemistry of the shroud images is well understood. The image on the shroud, while it can be cleared with a
reducing agent, it resists bleaching. By definition, Wilson’s images could be bleached away. What Wilson created was
chemically unlike the images on the shroud. Frank Chin, a chemistry professor at the University of Idaho, said of Wilson’s so-
called Shadow Shroud, “You can make a glass of nerve toxin look like lemonade. That doesn't make it lemonade.”
Hungarian Pray Codex
ca. 1192-1195 showing
details that are consistent
with the shroud.
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