Shroud of Turin dates from time of Christ, scientists reveal

Italian researchers have used a new X-ray technique to demonstrate that the Shroud of Turin dates from the time of Jesus Christ.

Scientists at the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) studied eight tiny samples of fabric from the shroud, a burial garment which bears the imprint of a man killed by crucifixion, using a method called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS).

They were able to age flax cellulose – long chains of sugar molecules which slowly deteriorate over time – to show that the shroud is 2,000 years old, based on the conditions it was kept in.

They deduced that the shroud was kept in conditions maintaining a temperature around 22.5 degrees Celsius and a relative humidity of about 55 per cent for 13 centuries before it was brought to Chambery, France, in the 1350s; thereby taking the shroud’s chronology all the way back to the time of Christ.

If it had been kept in conditions with a different temperature and relative humidity, the aging of the flax cellulose and resultant dating would have been different too.

“The data profiles were fully compatible with analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, found at Masada, Israel,” said the study in the journal Heritage.

The samples were also compared with similar linens from the 13th and 14th centuries but none was a match.

Dr Liberato De Caro, one of the scientists involved in the study, dismissed a 1988 test which concluded that the shroud was probably a Medieval forgery and only seven centuries old as inaccurate because “fabric samples are usually subject to all kinds of contamination, which cannot be completely removed from the dated specimen”.

He added: “If the cleaning procedure of the sample is not thoroughly performed, carbon-14 dating is not reliable. This may have been the case in 1988, as confirmed by experimental evidence showing that when moving from the periphery towards the centre of the sheet, along the longest side, there is a significant increase in carbon-14.”

The study also noted: “To make the present result compatible with that of the 1988 radiocarbon test, the Shroud of Turn should have been conserved during its hypothetical seven centuries of life at a secular room temperature very close to the maximum values registered on the earth”, thereby different to the temperature and humidity levels that were discovered by the Italian researchers.

The study is the second published this year that dates the Turin Shroud to the time of Jesus – and the fourth study to reach the same conclusion in little more than a decade.

In the other study published earlier this year, isotope tests revealed that the flax used to make the linen was grown in the Middle East.

Fragments of cloth taken from the shroud show that its flax originated in the western Levant, a swathe of land occupied today by Israel, Lebanon and western parts of Jordan and Syria.

William Meacham, the American archaeologist who commissioned that study, said: “With a probable near Eastern origin, new doubts must be raised about interpreting the shroud as simply a fake relic made in medieval Europe, and new questions arise about what the image on the cloth signifies.

“The possibility that this cloth is actually the burial shroud of Jesus is strengthened by this new evidence. In my view, that remains the best explanation for the shroud.”

As a member of the board of directors of the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association (STERA), Mr Meacham obtained permission to test five of seven threads in the possession of the group.

The threads originated from a sample known as the “Raes piece” that was removed from the Shroud in 1973 for textile research.

Fourteen threads were provided by the Turin archdiocese to the physicist Ray Rogers, a member of the American scientific team that had conducted an onsite study of the shroud in 1978, and which were later passed on to STERA.

Testing was undertaken at the Stable Isotopes Laboratory of the University of Hong Kong, which is able to test very small samples of even less than 1mg.

Mr Meacham said the Eastern origin of the shroud is important because “it reinforces other features that point in that direction”.

He said: “Most notable was the pollen. Even though many identifications have since been discounted, certain species taken together still indicate an Eastern Mediterranean presence.

“Similarly, the crown of thorns [on the shroud] in helmet style rather than Roman circlet is a feature characteristic of Asia Minor and the Levant.

“Another is the claim of coins on the eyes in the shroud image that matched a documented instance from a second century burial in Judea.

“This was an impressive confirmation of a hypothesis generated by computer 3D analysis in 1977, at a time when there was no known instance (outside of Israel) of such a practice in antiquity.”

The shroud has been held in Turin, Italy, since 1578 but made a dramatic entrance on the European intellectual stage in 1898 when the first photographs were published, showing a lifelike facial image in the negative.

The shroud was studied in the mid-20th century by the French surgeon Pierre Barbet, who went on to write a book about the injuries of Christ’s passion called A Doctor at Calvary.

In 1988, a sample was taken, divided into pieces and dated by three prominent laboratories to 1260-1390, results which cast grave doubt on its authenticity. Further studies were not permitted by the Archdiocese of Turin.

Studies conducted in 2012 and 2015 on samples taken earlier found, however, that the linen sheet dates probably from the time of Jesus.

In 2017, a team from the Hospital University of Padua, Italy, led by Matteo Bevilacqua, conducted a forensic study of the imprint, and found it was of a person who suffered and died in exactly the manner of Christ as recorded in the Gospels.

Writing in the Open Journal of Trauma, this team speculated that the cause of death was a heart attack complicated by heart rupture with hemopericardium in a subject crucified with the nailing of hands and feet.

They also saw signs of severe emotional stress and depression; severe hypovolemic-traumatic shock, acute respiratory failure at a first stage by crucifixion and causalgia [chronic pain in a limb]; blunt trauma following the fall with paralysis of the entire right brachial plexus [shoulder nerves], right shoulder dislocation, pulmonary contusion with hemothorax [lung injury], cardiac contusion [heart injury]; probable left ulnar proximal paralysis and right foot dislocation from stretching during crucifixion.

The study inspired a 2022 paper by the Rev. Professor Patrick Pullicino, a priest in Southwark and formerly an NHS consultant neurologist, who proposed that the shoulder injury caused a huge internal bleed which resulted in the collapse of the circulatory system of the man being crucified.

Up to three pints of blood spilled out from the cavity where the blood accumulated, he wrote in the Catholic Medical Quarterly, which tallies with when the side of Jesus was speared by a Roman lance, as recorded in the Gospel of St John.

The latest development dating the shroud through the new X-ray technique, coming so soon after the investigation showing that the linen was grown in the Middle East, adds to the increasing bulk of scientific evidence that leans in favour of a very unscientific and miraculous event, the occurrence of which has driven debate for centuries.

RELATED: New evidence indicates Turin Shroud not a European forgery

Photo: The Shroud of Turin or Turin Shroud is a length of linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma in a manner consistent with crucifixion. There is no consensus yet on exactly how the image was created. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images.)

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