Summary: As an update to a previous article, new scientific dating techniques add to the debate by giving a 2,000-year-old date for the Shroud of Turin.
And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away. – Matthew 27:59-60 (ESV)
New Scientific Methods
For centuries, the Shroud of Turin has captivated the minds of the faithful, as well as skeptics. This ancient linen cloth, bearing the image of a crucified man, is believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ himself.
Measuring over 14 ft. long by 3.5 ft. wide, this burial cloth “wrapped the corpse and encoded the image of a tortured man, who was scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified, and pierced by a spear in the chest,” according to Heritage Journal.
As the single-most-studied archaeological object in the world, the Shroud’s authenticity has long been debated. Now, cutting-edge scientific methods are shedding new light on this enigmatic relic, suggesting it is indeed from 2,000 years ago.
Wide-Angle X-Ray Scattering (WAXS)
The Shroud first appeared in the West in 1354. Currently, it resides at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. While analysis from the 1980s dated the Shroud of Turin to the 1300s, new X-ray dating analysis tells a different story.
Recent findings by a team of scientists in southern Italy suggest that the Shroud does actually date back to the time of Christ. The researchers also propose a theory explaining why the previous date assigned to the relic’s origin may be inaccurate.
Dr. Liberato de Caro from Italy’s Institute of Crystallography used a new method known as Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS), which showed that the fabric of the Shroud is a good match for a similar sample confirmed to have come from the siege of Masada, Israel in 55-74 AD. The recent study was published in the Heritage Journal.
Previous Dating Discrepancies
De Caro explained that before his new study, “the only missing piece of the puzzle was dating,” since everything on the Shroud of Turin is “highly correlated to what the Gospels tell about Jesus Christ and his death: ‘crown of thorn’ marks on the head, whip lacerations on the back and bruises on the shoulders from carrying a heavy cross.”
Back in 1978, 33 scientists from the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) analyzed the cloth for five continuous days (120 hours) working in shifts around the clock. After three years of studying the results, all scientists agreed upon the following statement:
“We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist. The blood stains are composed of hemoglobin and give a positive test for serum albumin.”
Then in 1988, the Shroud was carbon dated by three laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona and dated to between 1260 and 1390. These dates implied that it was a Medieval artifact, not the actual burial cloth of Christ.
De Caro cast doubt on the accuracy of carbon dating. “This result has been widely criticized for both procedural and statistical problems, as was recently confirmed by the statistical analyses of raw data made available to the scientific community.” This data was not made public for 30 years and finally, after legal action, it was released for viewing and further scientific study.
STURP Scientist Raymond Rogers wrote, in a peer-reviewed article before his death, that the weave of the edge from which the sample used for carbon dating was taken showed anomalies. The original Shroud is made of linen, but the material tested was cotton and had been colored with agents to match the rest of the cloth, according to Rogers. Most likely the reason for this was due to the edges of the Shroud needing repair over the years.
“The Shroud has been the center of attention for centuries. It was touched by countless people, displayed during parades, affected by smoke from candles. There was a great deal of contamination,” de Caro explained.
“Molds and bacteria colonizing textile fibers and dirt or carbon-containing minerals, such as limestone, adhering to them in the empty spaces between the fibers that at a microscopic level represent about 50% of the volume, can be so difficult to completely eliminate in the sample cleaning phase, which can distort the dating,” he wrote.
Therefore, because of the non-linen sample and carbon contamination of the textile over the years, the 1980s STURP Carbon 14 testing that dated the Shroud to the 1300s is controversial, to say the least. Dating technology has come a long way in the past 40 years.
Measuring Deterioration
Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering, the new advanced method applied to the ancient fabric, penetrates deep into the material to analyze it at a microscopic level and measure the deterioration of the linen threads.
“It’s a sort of radiography, similar to the type of scan that you would do on a bone to see if there is a fracture,” said de Caro. “Over time, the structure of the material degrades. We can tell from that how much time has passed and therefore date the object.”
Working with a minuscule fragment of the relic, de Caro and his team confidently dated the material to around 2,000 years old, suggesting that the individual lived during the era of Jesus. Because the X-ray scattering technique is non-destructive, the same sample could be tested by labs around the world, helping to confirm the findings.
“Moreover, other dating methods agree in the assignment of the Turin Shroud to the first century AD,” said the study. Other ancient fabric found in tombs, which preserved them from environmental contamination, showed evidence that X-ray and Carbon 14 dating agree well.
Trying to Replicate the Shroud
All modern attempts to recreate the Shroud have fallen short. The blood, pollen, fabric weave and image, as well as other factors, are too unique to duplicate.
Tests have shown the Shroud was not painted and the blood on the linen is from a human male with AB+ blood type. Interestingly, this type of blood is rare and most commonly found in the Middle East. In addition, the blood shows high levels of creatinine and ferritin, evidence of severe, multiple traumas.
Pollen grains found within the Shroud indicate that it had been present in the Jerusalem area, then northern Syria, Anatolia, Constantinople, and Europe. Israeli botanist Dr. Avinoam Danin of Hebrew University, Jerusalem verified 28 different pollen species, many from plants that grow only around Jerusalem.
The greatest mystery is the image on the Shroud of a crucified man. After exhaustive scientific study and numerous attempts to duplicate the figure on it, no one has been able to do this at the microscopic level of the linen fibers.
The discolorations which form the human image are only on the outermost fiber layers as microscopic pixels. They penetrate to just a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair. The only way to make an image like this is with a burst of high energy.
In 2011, researchers from the European Nuclear Energy Agency (ENEA) were able to replicate a scorch mark with the shallow depth and coloration of the Shroud image using a 40-nanosecond burst from an ultraviolet excimer laser. “This is the first time any aspect of the Shroud image has been duplicated using light,” remarked de Caro.
Conclusion
This brief article isn’t able to cover all of the information about the Shroud, but I encourage you to do your own research. There is interesting evidence from the unusual three-to-one herringbone weave pattern of the cloth, the specific wounds on the body, the color of the fabric, and manuscripts and art about the Shroud before the 1300s, plus more. There are also recent findings to consider from researchers on the other side of the debate.
Technological advances certainly add credibility to the claim that evidence surrounding the Shroud is consistent with Jesus’ burial cloth, but many Christians point out that faith in the resurrection of Jesus does not hang on that connection.
“If I had to be a judge in a trial weighing up all the evidence that says the Shroud is authentic and the little evidence that says it is not, in all good conscience I could not declare that the Turin Shroud is medieval,” de Caro declared. “It would not be right, given the enormous quantity of evidence in favor of it. It correlates with everything that the Gospels tell us about the death of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Keep Thinking!
TOP PHOTO: (Left): This is the face from the Shroud. This photograph was taken in 1931 by Giuseppe Enrie. In 1898, Secondo Pia had become the first to photograph the Shroud. Both men discovered that their negative plate produced an image which was a positive (Right). Notice that there is no outline to the image. (credit: public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
