In 2,000 years of church history, no relic has been more controversial than the Shroud of Turin, the supposed burial cloth of Christ. During the Middle Ages, King John II gave the shroud to his friend Geoffroi de Charny to use as a devotional image at a church in the French hamlet of Lirey, but it was later misrepresented as a miracle. The question remains: how did the image of a crucified man become part of the cloth? Combining copious research and decades of art world experience, Gary Vikan reveals how a remarkable hoax came into being.