(ANALYSIS) The Religion Guy’s answer: The Shroud of Turin, the world’s most famous and most-examined artifact, is revered by devotees as the actual burial cloth that covered Jesus Christ’s body after his crucifixion.

Many will consider that inconceivable, but is there reason to accept the claim? Or is this celebrated cloth merely a pious artwork, or a clever fraud, that originated in medieval times?

The Vatican has never ruled on authenticity but encourages Turin devotions to reflect on Christ’s saving sacrifice on the cross. A rare public display of the shroud is likely during the Catholic Church’s 2025 Holy Year observance. The last display drew a couple million pilgrims to Turin, Italy. There’s bound to be increased interest a few years from now when Christians mark the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

The latest scientific research on this question is titillating for sure, but let’s first explain the essential background culled from the immense discussion in print and posted on the Internet.

All four New Testament Gospels specify that upon burial, Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Jesus’ corpse in “linen.” Unlike the other three Gospels, John records that there were “linen cloths” plural, not a single shroud, and adds that a separate rolled-up “napkin” for the head was also found in the empty tomb after Jesus’ resurrection.

13 absent centuries

Since 1578, the shroud has been preserved at Turin’s Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. But its existence has been traced as far back as a 1389 exhibit in France, where the local bishop pronounced the cloth a “cunningly painted” fraud “attested by the artist who painted it.” If the shroud existed during the 13 centuries before that, we lack solid documentation on its historical provenance.

This well-aged linen cloth measures 14 feet, 3 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches. Significantly, it shows two faint, brown images, front and back, of a very thin bearded man 5 feet, 7 inches tall, with wounds and blood stains that would be consistent with crucifixion.

The modern shroud excitement began in 1898, when photographic negative images first defined and dramatized those bodily images for mass audiences to see.

The next landmark was scientific examination in 1978 by the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STuRP). Its leader was Colorado Catholic John P. Jackson, a physicist who taught at the United States Air Force Academy. He recruited a team of 33 researchers and won church permission to subject the shroud to elaborate and varied testing. (The team members and their multiple technical specializations are listed at www.shroud.com/78team.htm).

Blood and pollen

STuRP established that no paint or pigment on the fibrils (micro-fibers) produced the ghostly body images. The stains seen on the body, yes, consisted of the characteristic blood proteins hemoglobin and serum albumin. Pollen samples extracted from the shroud by sticky tape, later subjected to microscopic analysis, were found to stem from plant species native to Israel and vicinity, not Europe.

However, the 1978 researchers were not allowed to conduct all-important testing of carbon-14 decay, the standard method for dating ancient organic objects. But then in 1988 the Vatican approved removal of postage-stamp sized samples that were sent to three internationally recognized carbon-14 laboratories. Their consensus dated the origin of the fabric between 1260 and 1390.

At that point, most observers decided the shroud was a pious medieval artwork or a hoax, but this did not end the scientific debate. Among others, Alan Whanger at Duke University Medical Center theorized the dating was skewed if the samples were contaminated by long-ago fire and water damage or fungi and bacteria in the fibers. Some thought the samples were perhaps medieval material grafted on to repair the original textile. Nuclear scientist Alberto Carpinteri of the Turin Polytechnico thought an earthquake in A.D. 33 could have distorted the carbon-14 dating and produced the mysterious brown images. And there was more.

The most prolific sindonologist (from the Italian for “shroud”) has been  Giulio Fanti, a thermal measurement specialist at the University of Padua engineering department. His shroud team published a claim, disputed by others, that infrared light and spectroscopy tests potentially dated the cloth’s origin in Jesus’ era, between 300 B.C. and A.D. 400.  This past July, Fanti published a highly technical paper in “Archives of Hematology Case Reports and Reviews.” He contended that every imaginable test for the chemistry and structure of the shroud’s blood molecules are “consistent with” what the Bible reports on Christ’s crucifixion.

The big excitement

The big current scientific excitement comes from a team at the Institute of Crystallography at Italy’s National Research Council, led by Liberato De Caro. Their work was published in Heritage journal in April 2022, and was quickly reported  by academic websites and America’s National Catholic Register, but only gained wider media attention last month.

Instead of carbon-14, this team tested deterioration of the shroud’s linen cellulose by examining one thread from eight positions using wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS). The results were compared with a linen sample from the ruins at Masada, Israel, dated at A.D. 55–74, and analyzed in terms of the aging impact of typical temperatures and relative humidity.

The team’s remarkable conclusion: “It is very probable” that the shroud “is a relic of about 20 centuries old” though “systematic X-ray investigation of more samples” from shroud fabric “would be mandatory to confirm the conclusion of our study.” With similar caution, shroud.com said after the 2022 article appeared that “although this technique may prove reliable at some point in the future,” it has not previously been used to date archaeological samples, so science needs “much more testing” to establish it as “a viable dating method.”

De Caro’s report said it’s only “by chance” that the bodily images on the shroud were not erased over the centuries, “thus preserving a puzzle that is very difficult for science to solve.” On that, the STuRP researchers reported that the brown images resulted somehow from oxidation, dehydration and the “polysaccharide structure” of the biochemistry.   But various techniques applied to pieces of old linen have been unable to show, STuRP concluded, “how the image was produced, or what produced the image,” which remains “a mystery.” Believers speculate that it would have resulted from some unexplained phenomenon as Christ was raised from the dead.

Amid this new excitement, Minnesota’s Catholic Bishop Robert Barron told Fox News that “our faith in Christ’s resurrection is in no way dependent on the shroud, but its uncanny power to capture our attention, and many other mysteries,  have strengthened the faith of many.”

This article first appeared at Patheos.

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.