The Turin Shroud

The Turin Shroud is a religious relic of great fame and much contention.  It bears the image of a crucified man thought by some to be Jesus Christ; others believe it to be a mediaeval hoax painted to look like it was the cloth Jesus was buried in after the crucifixion.  The cloth is kept at Turin Cathedral in Italy and is only exhibited very occasionally.  

The truth of the shroud is yet to be decided and there are many arguments both for and against it being genuine.  Below I have outlined the main cases for and against, and looked at the controversy surrounding the carbon dating.

The Shroud is Genuine

• It is thought to be impossible to have painted such an image in mediaeval times.                                                       
• The cloth contains three dimensional  information - it is darker the closer it would have been to the body.                                                    
• The image is very faint to look at - infact it can hardly be seen but in the negative of a photograph the image is incredibly lifelike.  Since photography had not been invented in mediaeval times it is hard to work out why an artist would consider this in his work.
• The body stains only affect the top layers of the linen whereas the blood stains permeate right through the cloth.  The blood stains occurred first, and prevented the body stains in some areas - an artist could not have accurately painted on blood stains before the image of the body.
• Even when examined microscopically no brush marks are present.
• The blood marks were caused by real blood.
• The anatomy of the body is exceptionally good and would require a deep knowledge of the human body.
• The details of crucifixion shown by the shroud, the position of the nail wound etc were not widely known in mediaeval times.

The Shroud is a Fake

• The history of the shroud dates back to 1350, before this time there is no clearly documented evidence for its existence.
• A letter suspecting the cloth to be a forgery was written by the Bishop of Troyes in 1389.
• During mediaeval times many religious relics where being produced, at any one time there may have been many fake shrouds around, this is just one of many
• The carbon dating carried out in 1988 found the shroud to have been made between 1260-1390, with a 95% degree of accuracy.  They used the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) method of Carbon-14 dating.

The Carbon Dating

This was carried out by three laboratory's, one in Zurich, Switzerland, one in Tuscon, Arizona and one in Oxford, England.  They all used the AMS technique and each had a similar sized sample taken from the same area of cloth.  They all also had two control pieces, one which was 2000 years old from Egypt and one which was from 1100-1200 AD from Nubia.  At the time AMS was a comparatively new technique which was not often applied to linen.  The cloth was cut in front of many scientists and television cameras and placed in steel containers before being given to the labs.  There was however a half hour period where the cloth was taken away to be prepared and no outside representatives were present.  This leads to some claims that a switch may have been made.  Suggestions for why the dating could have been wrong include microbiological contamination from the handling of the cloth and the occurrence of a bioplastic coating of microbes.  This last has occurred in Egyptian mummy cloths which have been dated wrong by the AMS technique.

Fake or Genuine?

This is still a hotly debated topic, listen to anyone who has a particular bias and you soon feel convinced they are right, but then spend some time reading about the opposing view and you are equally sure they are also right.  As usual with a matter of such great importance there are other issues to consider.  Access to the shroud is granted sparingly and a repeat of the experiments is unlikely at present.  Mistakes can and have been made in many supposedly fool proof scientific techniques and many explanations for the shrouds existence, history and origins have been put forward.  For an in depth impartial view of the shroud and all matters surrounding it visit www.shroud.com.