It is a piece of antique linen measuring 4. No one knows how the image was made, although the general view is that the coloration comes from some sort of chemical transformation of the surface fibres of the linen.
On this subject it is only fair to lay your cards on the table at the outset some efforts to defend the traditional interpretation betray an underlying religious agenda.
That puzzle persists largely because there has been so little archaeological research on the shroud. Kept in the cathedral complex in Turin, it is in the charge of the Vatican, which now cautiously refrains from pronouncing on its authenticity but calls it only an object of veneration. And the papal authorities have been unwilling to release samples for scientific study.
That was the big deal about the paper, which analysed small samples taken from one region on the edge of the cloth. The first historical record of the shroud appears too in the fourteenth century. Yet this was not the last word. Some critics claimed that the radiocarbon dating was inconclusive.
They said, for example, that the results might have been distorted by the presence of fungal biofilms on the cloth, or by damage caused by a fire in the 16th century, or that the region sampled was not representative of the whole.
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Paid Content How Hong Kong protects its sea sanctuaries. Forensic scientist Dr Matteo Borrini of Liverpool John Moores University and Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia used a living volunteer and real and synthetic blood to try to simulate possible ways that the apparent bloodstains could have got onto the shroud. This could be consistent with someone who had been crucified with their arms held in a Y shape. Unfortunately for shroud believers, however, the forearm blood stains would require the dead body to have been wrapped in the shroud with their arms in a different position — held almost vertically above their head, rather than at an angle of 45 degrees.
The researchers, whose findings have been published in the J ournal of Forensic Sciences , formed the opinion that the supposed blood spatters seem to have fallen vertically and almost randomly from someone who might well have been standing over the cloth, rather than lying in it. The shroud, bearing what looked like the double image of a man who had been crucified, is now in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin.
Writing in , the bishop said that the cloth first started attracting pilgrims in when it was in the possession of the Geoffrey de Charny, a French knight building a church at Lirey to give thanks to God for a miraculous escape from English imprisonment during the Hundred Years War. They say he just wanted to discredit the shroud so all those free-spending pilgrims would visit his cathedral at Troyes , rather than the church at Lirey.
His conclusion was that the Shroud had been created by a talented artist sometime in the Middle Ages. More recent research indicates that some of the bloodstains are unrealistic for a corpse wrapped laying down.
Additionally, a modern-day team managed to reproduce the image with methods available to Middle Age artists — another blow to the theory that the Shroud could not have been painted. In , a team of scientists carbon-dated several small pieces of the Shroud and determined that it was created between the years of and — more than a thousand years after Jesus is believed to have died.
Those dates also line up well with the first historical mention of the Shroud, in the 14th century, as well as McCrone's findings. Though there have been several attempts to contest the carbon dating results, none of them has stuck. The blood and pollen, meanwhile, do not necessarily indicate the Shroud is real, either. To explain the discrepancy, a paper suggests that the stains are actually a mixture of blood and pigments, the pigments likely having been applied later on.
One physicist, for example, posited in a letter to the journal Nature that the event that created the image involved an outpouring of light and heat, as well as neutrons that could have thrown off the carbon dating result. Logical though that statement may be, the legacy of scientific research on the shroud reveals a curious attempt to marry the rigor of science to the mystery of religion.
There are those who believe religion needs no experiments to prove its worth, and those who hunger for evidence. The devotees of Shroud science seem to fall among the latter.
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