Ian Wilson

Ian Wilson (born 1941) is a British author specializing in historical and religious mysteries. Best known for his writings on the Shroud of Turin, he began his writing career in 1978 with the international best-seller The Shroud of Turin and has since written about Biblical and medieval history, William Shakespeare, prehistoric rock paintings in Australia’s Kimberley region, and largely critical studies on paranormal claims. Among his more recent publications is the Book of Geoffroi de Charny, an academic study of a lengthy poem by the eponymous medieval knight. He and his wife Judith have lived in southeast Queensland, Australia, since 1995.

Early life Wilson was educated from the age of eleven at Emanuel School, Battersea, south London, an independent Anglican school for boys founded in 1594. Wilson attended Magdalen College, Oxford, and graduated in 1963 with a bachelor's degree. He became interested in the Shroud after seeing a photograph of it in an article by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire V.C. in the weekly Picture Post.

An agnostic in his youth, Wilson was received into the Catholic Church in 1972.

The Turin Shroud In 1976 the release of fresh scientific findings on the Shroud prompted him to write another article for Britain’s Catholic Herald. The article attracted the interest of Bob Heller, religion editor for the major New York publishers Doubleday. Heller wrote to Wilson from the United States, inviting him to write a full book on the subject. Wilson duly accepted, and in 1978 he published The Shroud of Turin in the US. and UK, using the alternate British title The Turin Shroud. It became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and was met with positive reviews from critics like Magnus Magnusson.

During this same late 1970s period Wilson’s researches had attracted the attention of independent documentary film maker David Rolfe, who secured funding to enable a field trip to Jerusalem and Urfa (formerly called Edessa) in Turkey, where, according to Wilson’s theory, the Shroud was identified for 900 years as the ‘Image of Edessa’ or ‘Mandylion’, normally understood to feature only Jesus’ face. A pilot script written by Wilson and adapted by Rolfe and professional scriptwriter Henry Lincoln became The Silent Witness.

Career as a freelance author Encouraged by his publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, in 1979 Ian Wilson decided to leave the Bristol Evening Post group and work at becoming a full-time author. He decided to branch out from the Shroud by investigating a topic earlier popularized by American hypnotist Morey Bernstein’s best-selling The Search for Bridey Murphy.

Jesus: The Evidence During the early 1980s Wilson’s associate David Rolfe gained backing from British media outlet Channel 4 for a three-part fact-finding documentary series entitled Jesus: The Evidence. Invited to write the book to accompany the series, Wilson accepted the assignment, although he clashed with the TV production team on how certain elements were handled, like an exploding statue staged for the series.

Later career

The After Death Experience Two years later Wilson addressed the topic of life after death, partly prompted by the then-popular Spiritualist medium Doris Stokes claiming to relay messages from the dead. Deciding to investigate her show, Wilson and Rolfe's team booked gallery seats for a London Palladium performance from which they observed that those for whom Stokes produced messages were all seated in the audience’s first three rows. In the interval, Wilson and Rolfe questioned the Palladium manager and learned from him that Stokes regularly reserved the first three rows for her own invitees. The two researchers interviewed recipients of these messages and learned that all had contacted Stokes beforehand to tell her of their loss, following which she had sent them free tickets for her show. Wilson concluded Stokes’ seances were staged and began to compile his findings. However, days after his publisher’s lawyers had cleared his ‘Stokes’ chapter for publication, Stokes died from a brain tumor. His 1987 book The After Death Experience ranged beyond cases such as Stokes and was well reviewed by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian.

Shakespeare: The Evidence Sam Wanamaker’s project to recreate Shakespeare’s Globe theatre then being much in vogue, Wilson turned his attention to the controversies surrounding the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays and poems. Wilson explored the background of the first patron of Shakespeare’s company of actors, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, a powerful northern noble suspected by contemporaries of Catholic sympathies. Wilson opined that it was Strange who influenced the young Shakespeare to write plays subtly conveying his family’s loyalty to the Tudor dynasty, in particular the ambitious Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy in which Strange’s ancestor Thomas Stanley crowns Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry Tudor on the Bosworth battlefield. In 1594 Lord Strange died; Wilson argued this was due to arsenic poisoning at the hands of Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, and argued observing such political machinations helped give Shakespeare his later edge. Wilson claimed to have detected many signs in Shakespeare’s oeuvre of his crypto-Catholic sympathies, though always covert due to Elizabethan government repression; in this conclusion he agreed with the Jesuit literary scholar Professor Peter Milward who had written on this topic. The resultant book Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and his Work, is Wilson’s longest book and received positive reviews.

The Blood and the Shroud In 1988, carbon dating placed the Turin Shroud in the Middle Ages. Wilson refused to accept this finding, insisting that the testing failed to explain how the cloth’s imprints could have been faked by an artist. Ten years later he wrote The Blood and the Shroud, arguing that the corner location from which the dating sample was taken had provided a deceptive date due to the cloth’s prolonged handlings leaving microbiological contamination that Wilson believed would skew any carbon dating result. Fresh public showings of the Shroud during the spring of 1998 renewed public interest and Wilson accompanied both American and Australian TV units to Turin for special programmes. Two years later the Turin ecclesiastical authorities, the Shroud’s custodians, invited Wilson and some twenty other specialists to participate in closed interdisciplinary discussions at Turin’s Villa Gualino. A major conservation project was undertaken in 2002, although Wilson and the other Gualino delegates were not fully satisfied.

Lost World of the Kimberley Not long after moving to Australia, Wilson inquired into an ancient group of rock paintings, the ‘Bradshaws’ (alternatively labelled ‘Gwion Gwion’), notable for their unusually skilled figurative artistry, and located in the remote Kimberley region of Australia’s northwest. Though little was known of them at the time, Wilson considered the most complex of these inscriptions to be those at Doonan, a cattle station privately owned by the affluent Myers family of Melbourne. Wilson's efforts to inspect the site were flatly rejected by the Myers family. Wilson instead sought out the help of local archaeologist Lee Scott Virtue, who arranged an expedition which enabled Wilson and his wife to study and photograph a representative range of "Bradshaw" sites located outside Myers territory which would provide source material for Lost World of the Kimberley.

The Turin Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000 Year Old Mystery In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to approve fresh public showings of the Shroud for that year coincided with Wilson approaching his seventieth birthday. With his London publisher Sally Gaminara also retiring, Wilson wrote The Turin Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000 Year Old Mystery as a follow-up to his earlier work.

The Book of Geoffroi de Charny As a side project, Wilson tried to translate a never-before-translated semi-autobiographical poem composed by Geoffroi de Charny, the French knight in whose care the Shroud was first documented in the mid-fourteenth century. Though this Livre Charny or ‘Book of Charny’ poem did not mention the Shroud, Wilson sought to glean insight into this person closely tied to the Shroud by studying his writings. While Wilson was struggling with the poem’s difficult Middle French, he unexpectedly came across an illuminated original manuscript of the Book of Charny previously obscure in modern scholarship. In the course of publicizing this manuscript, Wilson became introduced to UK-based medievalist Nigel Bryant, a specialist in translating medieval literature. In a 2022 book review Wilson remarked that certain new insights gained in the course of his Charny research have impelled him to embark on some ‘much-needed revisions to current suppositions concerning the Charny and pre-Charny periods’ of the Shroud’s history.

Publications The Turin Shroud: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?New York, Doubleday, 1978, ; The Turin Shroud, London, Gollancz, 1978, Mind Out of Time?: Reincarnation Claims Investigated, London, Gollancz, 1981, ISBN|0575-029968-4; All in the Mind, New York, Doubleday 1982 Jesus: The Evidence, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984.; Jesus: The Evidence, San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1985 The Exodus Enigma, London, Weidenfeld, 1985, The Evidence of the Shroud, London, Michael O’Mara, 1986, The After Death Experience, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987 : The After Death Experience, The Physics of the Non-Physical, New York, Morrow, 1987 The Bleeding Mind: An Investigation Into the Mysterious Phenomenon of Stigmata, London. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988 Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus’ True Likeness, 1991, London, Doubleday, 1991 Shakespeare: The Evidence : Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work, London, Headlne, 1993 ; Shakespeare: The Evidence : Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994, Jesus: The Evidence, 2nd ed. [now illustrated in full colour], London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996. ; Jesus: The Evidence, San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1997. The Blood and the Shroud: The passionate controversy still enflaming the world’s most famous carbon dating test, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, ; The Blood and the Shroud: new evidence that the world's most sacred relic is real, New York, Free Press, 1998 Life After Death: The Evidence, London, Macmillan, 1998 The Bible As History, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999 The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence [with Barrie Schwortz], London, Michael O’Mara, 2000 Before the Flood: Dramatic new Evidence that the Biblical Flood was a real-life event; London, Orion, Nostradamus the Evidence, Orion, London, 2003 Lost World of the Kimberley: Extraordinary New Glimpses of Australia's Ice Age Ancestors, 2006 Sydney, Allen & Unwin, Murder at Golgotha:Revisiting the Most Famous Crime Scene in History, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2007 The Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000-Year-Old Mystery, London, Bantam, 2010 The Book of Geoffroi de Charny with the Livre Charny edited and translated by Nigel Bryant, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2021