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. 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. 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,