imageAn article, Ten objects that sum up Gary Vikan’s life, by Mary Carole McCauley in The Baltimore Sun reports that he is working on a book about the Shroud of Turin.

Vikan is best known in shroud circles for an article published in Biblical Archaeology Review in the November/December 1998 issue reprinted on shroud.com. (See the article here and read the comments on the same page).

From the Sun:

You can get a pretty good idea of someone’s journey through life by looking at the objects with which he surrounds himself.

For Gary Vikan, who stepped down this spring as the director of the Walters Art Museum, those objects include a pair of tickets to Woodstock, a piece of the gate guarding Graceland, a collection of Russian icons and a miniature replica of the Shroud of Turin.

[ . . . ]

He’s just completed his next big project: a book on the Shroud of Turin, in which he attempts to prove that the linen burial cloth that many believe once wrapped the body of Jesus actually was made in the Middle Ages, around 1350.

"I’ve been working with a scientist who found out how the image on the Shroud was made," Vikan says. "And I think I know when and why. It was made to deceive, at a time in the Middle Ages when relics meant pilgrimages, and pilgrimages meant money."

Vikan said the manuscript could be published as soon as this fall.

Which one of the scientists? And which one of all the many ways it was made?