Shroud of Turin

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the full image of a crucified man widely believed to be Jesus of Nazareth. The popular narrative surrounding the cloth asserts that it is the burial shroud used to wrap the body of Jesus after his death in the 30s CE. Positive images of the shroud do not display much detail of the body, but negative images reveal the figure of a man with wounds consistent with Gospel accounts of the torture and crucifixion of Jesus.

Millions of Christians around the world have believed the Shroud of Turin to be the true burial cloth of Jesus since it first appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century. Twentieth-century carbon dating, however, confirmed the shroud to have originated between 1260 and 1390 CE, while other research has insisted it dates to ancient times. The shroud's authenticity as Jesus's burial cloth remains contested.

Background

Unreliable historical accounts claim the Shroud of Turin originated in the Judea region of ancient Israel in the 30s CE, the alleged place and time of Jesus of Nazareth's crucifixion and death. The accounts assert the shroud was stored in Turkey and Greece for safekeeping over the next approximately 1,200 years.

The shroud's verifiable history, however, begins in about 1353, when the Roman Catholic Church recorded that a cloth purported to be the burial shroud of Jesus was displayed in a church in Lirey, France, by a knight named Geoffrey de Charny. It was rumored that Geoffrey had obtained the shroud in Constantinople in modern-day Turkey. The fourteen-foot tan cloth appeared to show the darkened shape of a man's body. In 1389, Pierre d'Arcis, a Catholic bishop based near Lirey, declared the cloth to be a fake due to an anonymous artist having admitted creating it.

The shroud was removed from the church in Lirey in 1418 to protect it from the violence of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) then being waged by France and England. The cloth was safeguarded in a series of castles across Europe over the next several decades before passing to the dukes of Savoy in the early 1450s. Savoy was a region of Western Europe encompassing eastern France, southwestern Switzerland, and northwestern Italy. In 1502, the Savoy royal family installed the shroud in the city of Chambéry in southern France, the Savoy capital at the time.

In 1532, a fire at the city castle's chapel burned through part of the folded cloth. This created numerous triangular gaps in the shroud that appeared symmetrically when it was unfolded. In 1578, the Savoy family relocated the shroud to Turin, Italy. It was housed in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, where it remained into the twenty-first century. The cloth thereby became widely known as the Shroud of Turin. The Roman Catholic Church took legal possession of it in 1983.

Overview

The Shroud of Turin earned little attention until 1898, when it was photographed by Italian photographer Secondo Pia. His photographs showed the shroud as it normally appeared, a sepia-toned cloth with the darkened, blurry shape of a man located between the linen's burn marks. Pia later examined the negative images of the same photographs in a darkroom and observed that the human figure was now depicted on the cloth in stunning detail.

The fourteen-foot-long cloth shows the deceased man's front and back. He has long hair and a beard. The man's face displays signs of having been severely beaten, as it is bruised and swollen. Bones in the cheeks and above the eyebrows are broken, and a reddish substance believed to be blood is located around the mouth and on the forehead. The forehead lacerations appear to correspond to the wounds one would suffer from wearing a crown of thorns, as Jesus is alleged to have worn at his death. The figure's left hand is folded over the right one. A large oval wound is located in the left wrist, from which blood had seeped out. Each foot also bears a large hole, suggesting that a single nail pierced both of them. The figure's back exhibits more than one hundred bruises and lacerations, indicating the man had been whipped before he died. All these wounds are consistent with those a person would suffer if flogged and crucified in the Roman fashion in the first century.

Until the 1970s, scientists who wanted to prove the Shroud of Turin's authenticity could only examine Pia's negative photographs. In 1978, however, the American Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) was permitted to study the shroud intensely for five consecutive days. The thirty-three researchers worked continuously in shifts, testing the cloth's fibers and red stains for legitimacy. STURP's 1981 report confirmed the image was truly that of a crucified man and that the red stains were indeed blood, which contained real hemoglobin and was the rare type AB. This discredited claims that the stains were simply paint.

In 1988, the Vatican allowed the Shroud of Turin to be tested using carbon-14 dating, which would determine the approximate age of the fabric itself. Separate laboratories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland tested samples of the cloth, and each independently concluded that the material dated to between 1260 and 1390 CE, whereas Jesus lived and died in the first century CE. The carbon dating upheld the scientific theory that the Shroud of Turin was a fabricated relic from the medieval era. The theory was strengthened further in light of the fact that the year 1353, when the Catholic Church's records reveal the cloth first appeared, fell perfectly within the laboratories' proposed range of years for the creation of the shroud.

Still, scientists in the twenty-first century remained perplexed by how exactly the man's image had been conveyed onto the shroud at all, whether in medieval or ancient times. Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) spent five years in the late 2000s trying to replicate the physical and chemical properties of the Shroud of Turin by firing ultraviolet light at lengths of linen. The ENEA's researchers could not do this, nor even burn a complete human image into the fabric. The scientists claimed that several billion watts of ultraviolet light would be necessary to ingrain the full image of a human into cloth fibers as on the shroud.

The authenticity of the Shroud of Turin therefore remained disputed. The Catholic Church, although it did not claim the shroud was truly Jesus's burial cloth, encouraged its members to venerate it as a symbol of Jesus's suffering and death.

Bibliography

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Ghose, Tia. "Is It a Fake? DNA Testing Deepens Mystery of Shroud of Turin." Live Science, 23 Oct. 2015, www.livescience.com/52567-shroud-of-turin-dna.html. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Goodacre, Mark. "'Finding Jesus': Shroud of Turin Q&A." CNN, 9 Feb. 2017, www.cnn.com/2015/03/03/living/finding-jesus-q-a-shroud-turin/. Accessed 24 May 2017.

"How Did the Turin Shroud Get Its Image?" BBC, 19 June 2015, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33164668. Accessed 24 May 2017.

Siddiqui, Nina. "A Brief History of the Shroud of Turin." National Post, 29 Dec. 2011, news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/a-brief-history-of-the-shroud-of-turin. Accessed 24 May 2017.

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Viviano, Frank. "Why Shroud of Turin's Secrets Continue to Elude Science." National Geographic, 17 Apr. 2015, news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150417-shroud-turin-relics-jesus-catholic-church-religion-science/. Accessed 24 May 2017.