The Shroud of Turin is back in the news after a new research team claims to have dated the alleged burial shroud of Jesus Christ to the time of his life around 2,000 years ago.
The shroud has been considered a holy relic for centuries. First shown in 1350, the fragile cloth has a ghostly negative image of a man on it which many believe was made by the body of the son of God.
In the 1980s, a team of researchers worked on the shroud and claimed to debunk the idea that it would have been in existence at the time of Christ’s life and death. They claimed the cloth had been manufactured in the middle ages, about 1,000 years after the death of Christ. But the new team in Italy claims to have dated the cloth to 2,000 years ago using X-rays. When combined with that they know of the shroud’s provenance, the research team believe there’s a credible argument that the linen cloth is Jesus’ burial shroud.
The cloth has fascinated the devout and skeptics alike since its first known exhibition in 1350. Since 1578 it has been kept as a holy relic in the cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in the town of Turin, Italy. The faint image on the cloth certainly looks like the image of Jesus Christ familiar to most of the world. It depicts a longhaired, bearded man of about five-foot-seven to six-feet tall.
In addition, the image of the body appears to show markings that some say correspond to the crown of thorns placed on Christ’s head, as well as bodily injuries consistent with crucifixion. For example, there appear to be bruises on the shoulders of the image, which would be consistent with someone carrying a wooden cross weighing hundreds of pounds on his back.
There have been other research projects on the shroud, but none of them have come up with the firm, conclusive proof believers hope for. The cathedral in Turin granted researchers permission to take a tiny sample of the cloth for radiocarbon dating. That project claimed that the cloth looked to have been made at about the time the shroud was first shown to the public as a holy relic between 1260 and 1390.
All told there are more than 170 published papers in academic journals concerning the shroud, with some arguing it is authentic with others saying it was faked. A series of tests in the 1970s tried to determine if the image had been made by burning or painting the cloth, but tests were inconclusive.
Then in 2017, a group from the Institute of Crystallography said they had evidence that the shroud had blood on it that came from someone who was tortured.
The latest study of the famous shroud will not likely settle the question.
