The Shroud of Turin, the linen cloth believed by Christians to have been Jesus Christ's burial shroud, may date back to around the time of his death, a new study suggests.
A team of Italian researchers conducted dating work on a sample from the shroud and estimated that it may be a 2,000-year-old relic. This finding contradicts previous research, which suggested that the ancient linen cloth dates back to the Middle Ages.
Highlights
- The Shroud of Turin may date back to the era of Jesus Christ's death, around 2,000 years ago, according to a new study.
- Italian researchers used a new dating technique called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) on the shroud.
- The new study challenges previous findings that dated the shroud to the Middle Ages.
The shroud features a faint image of what some believe is the body of Jesus of Nazareth.
Image credits: Wikipedia
According to the Bible, after Jesus Christ was crucified at the age of 33, his body was wrapped in cloth, which was a typical ritual of the time. The contour of his physique was later imprinted onto the shroud.
The documented history of the artifact dates back to north-central France in 1354, but later that century, it was denounced as a forgery by the bishop of Troyes, Pierre d'Arcis.
Despite this, the cloth became an object of worship. It was kept in a chapel in Chambéry before being moved to Turin in 1578, where it is now housed in a silver box covered by four layers of bulletproof glass at the Chapel of the Holy Shroud.
According to the Bible, after Jesus Christ was crucified, his body was wrapped in cloth. The contour of his body was later imprinted onto the shroud
Image credits: Wikipedia
Image credits: HISTORY
Lead researcher Liberato De Caro from the Institute of Crystallography in Italy employed a new dating technique called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) to examine the natural aging of the cellulose in a small sample of the linen cloth.
"The experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the [shroud] is a 2,000-year-old relic, as supposed by Christian tradition, under the condition that it was kept at suitable levels of average secular temperature and correlated relative humidity for 13 centuries of unknown history, in addition to the seven centuries of known history in Europe," the authors of the study wrote.
The new finding challenges a previous radiocarbon study, which suggested that the ancient linen cloth dates back to the Middle Ages
The results do not agree with a previous radiocarbon study conducted in 1988, which concluded that the shroud dates to between A.D. 1260 and A.D. 1390, corresponding with the artifact's first documented appearance in France at the beginning of the Middle Ages.
However, the conclusions of the 1980s study were questioned by several experts, including the authors of the new study, who argue that the tests on the shroud may have been flawed due to contamination.
"Fabric samples are usually subject to all kinds of contamination, which cannot always be controlled and completely removed from the dated specimen," explained Liberato De Caro.
Given the contamination factor, the authors believe that "a more accurate and systematic X-ray investigation of more samples taken from the Turin shroud fabric would be mandatory to confirm the conclusions of our study."