Why is the Turin Shroud Authentic?- Juniper Publishers
Archaeology & Anthropology- Juniper Publishers
What is the Shroud
The Shroud of Turin [1-7], the Holy Shroud or simply the
Shroud (Figure 1) is the archaeological object, as well as religious,
more studied in the world. It is in fact the only Relic that boasts
not only dozens of publications in specialized scientific journals,
but also hundreds of books in dozens of different languages; you
cannot count the articles and notes that come out almost daily in
the newspapers and on the web.
The Shroud is an ancient linen cloth, 4.4m long and 1.1m
wide, which enveloped the corpse of a tortured man, scourged,
crowned with thorns, crucified and pierced by a spear in the
chest. Many are convinced that the Shroud is the sepulchral cloth
of Jesus Christ resurrected there after about forty hours from
the wrapping. The double body image there impressed has been
the subject of intense studies especially during the twentieth
century, but even today, it is not technically reproducible and
cannot even be explained scientifically.
On the Shroud, various signs are visible [2,8], important
and not easily comprehensible at first glance, also because
their partial overlap complicates the identification. We can
see: the double mirror image, frontal and dorsal, of a man, the
bloodstains corresponding to the wounds of the Man that was
wrapped, the stains caused by water, the traces and the holes
caused by the fire of Chambéry of 1532 and other minor signs.
The Shroud is an object of great scientific interest for its body
image still unexplainable today, but it is also an object of great
religious interest because many persons are convinced that it
shows some traces of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This fact
has aroused some logical-deductive problem. Unfortunately,
many researchers tend to confuse the religious aspects with
the scientific ones and, if this is the case, it is very easy to find
objective-oriented documents. Believers [2] sometimes try to
find proofs of authenticity even by using facts that are not strictly
scientific and sometimes connected to phenomena of pareidolia;
non-believers [6], on the other hand, seem sometimes blind to
scientific evidence that is not in accordance with their beliefs.
Here we will try to consider only the scientific aspects of
the problem, avoiding the possible interference of other kinds,
especially religious, even to try to dampen the controversy that
has emerged in recent times on this subject. Since many topics
are very complex, we reserve the right to investigate any points
of interest in possible subsequent interventions.
The Authenticity of the Shroud
Very frequently, there is also a heated discussion about the
authenticity of the Shroud, without however clarifying what is
the subject of the discussion, or what is meant by authenticity.
For someone, the authenticity consists simply in the fact that
the Shroud is not of European medieval manufacture, as some
mistakenly speculate, but of Eastern-Middle Eastern manufacture,
executed 2000 years ago. However, other hypotheses could not
be discarded; for example, even the hypothesis that the body
image had been realized by an extraterrestrial intelligence or
that it was the result of a miracle, would lead to the authenticity.
Others intend to authenticate the Shroud only if it has
enveloped the body of a man who suffered all the tortures
inflicted on Jesus. Others still define it as authentic only if it has
wrapped Jesus Christ. Finally, other more demanding define it
as authentic only if it enveloped the body of the Resurrected
who left his body image impressed by rising from the dead and
emanating an energy. Obviously, in the latter case, the answer
goes outside of science, because this discipline is not able to
treat the Resurrection phenomenon that is not reproducible.
By authenticity we mean here a burial sheet, of very ancient
manufacture, about 2000 years ago, which wrapped the corpse
of a severely scourged man, crowned with thorns, crucified and
dead, who could be identified with Jesus of Nazareth. In this case,
the conditional is necessary because it is not currently possible
to identify with full scientific certainty the name of the person
who was wrapped in the Shroud, even if the correlation between
what is detected experimentally on the Relic and what we read
in the Gospels helps a lot to recognize this Man.
A brief Historical Mention
The origin of this linen Sheet is still unclear today,
characterized by a very precious manual weaving of the type 3: 1
that seems to have been built for high-ranking priests with a “Z”
type twist, instead of the normal “S” weaving. Following recent
DNA analysis from the dust aspirated by the Relic, it appears to
be of Indian origin [27]. In the first century AD, trade between
the Palestinian area and India was flourishing and it cannot be
excluded that this sheet was bought by a wealthy Jerusalem
person for burial.
Many historians [2,7], by identifying the Shroud with the
Mandylion, see then the Relic in Edessa, the current Salinurfa
in Turkey in the early centuries until it reached Constantinople
until its fall in 1204. This last fact is shown not only by a rich
iconographic research but also by a recent numismatic analysis
of the Byzantine coins [8] minted from 692 AD, which depict a
face of Christ very similar to that of the Shroud. A probabilistic
calculation that considers a series of details common to the
two representations comes to affirm that the engraver of one of
these coins would have had just seven odds on a billion different
possibilities to spot all the features together, without having
seen the Shroud.
After more than a century of unclear paths, the Shroud
appeared in Lirey in 1353, and it was subsequently kept in
Chambery from 1502. There, in 1532, it suffered the famous fire
that seriously damaged it. In 1578, it was brought to Turin where
it remains until today, except for some sporadic hiding during
the wars; for example, during the last WWII, it was brought to
Montevergine.
Dating
Although the Shroud linen fabric is at first sight very old
because it is yellowed and woven by hand, it is still very well
preserved and resistant. In 1988, a sample of a few centimeters
was taken from a corner and radiocarbon dated by three famous
laboratories [9]: Oxford, Zurich and Tucson in Arizona: it turned
out to be an age of 1325 AD with uncertainty of ±65 years, but
this result was widely criticized [10-13] both for procedural and
statistical problems.
Five different methods, independent of each other, instead
agree with the assignment of the first century AD as probable age
when the artifact was built. A Project of the University of Padua
(CPDA-099-244) has allowed the development of alternative
methods of chemical and mechanical dating. The chemical
methods, based on FT-IR / ATR and Raman spectroscopy, dated
the Shroud at 300 BC ± 400 years and 200 BC ± 500 with a
confidence level of 95% respectively. The high uncertainty
associated with the result is mainly since the Raman spectra are
influenced by the fluorescence while the FT-IR / ATR spectra are
influenced by thermal factors. The linen of the Shroud was in fact
exposed at a temperature of about 200 °C during the fire of 1532.
The mechanical method based on the analysis of some
parameters such as the breaking strength, the Young’s modulus
and the loss factor appeared more promising though more
complex. After an adequate calibration of the method, based on
the results of two dozen samples of known age, a Shroud age of
400 AD ±400 years emerged with a 95% confidence level.
To these three methods, Raman, FT-IR and mechanical the
numismatic method that sees the Shroud before the seventh
century AD must be added. Another chemical method developed
by the chemist Raymond Rogers [14], based on estimates of the
kinetic constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin, sees the
Shroud posed in an ancient period from 1000 BC to 700 AD.
The Blood
On the Shroud, it is possible to observe different blood
drippings:
a. Those due to the insertion of the nails during the
crucifixion,
b. The more than 370 wounds produced by the scourges,
c. The blood wound of the side produced by the spear of
the Roman centurion to verify the death of the Crucifix and
d. The wounds on the forehead, temples and nape due to
the crown of thorns.
Some of these drippings have been analyzed by means of
adhesive tape samples put directly in contact with the Relic.
Samples of blood crust have been analyzed and the blood
resulted considerably deteriorated. The ageing of the blood
material caused part of the deterioration, but the main alteration
derives from the exposure to the sixteenth-century fire that
partly changed the chemical composition; analysis by Raman
spectroscopy [15] in fact confirmed this characteristic with
experimental tests.
The blood so deteriorated is very brittle and easily disperses
into the environment, so it is easy to think that these blood
traces have faded over time, so they almost disappeared at the
sight of the observer. Consequently, it can be thought that in the
past centuries such bloodstains have been reinforced by means
of pigments such as red ochre and cinnabar. Both pigments
were found together [15] with the Shroud blood. Recently,
spectrometric analyses showed the presence of biliverdin [16],
caused by the degradation of hemoglobin in the blood of the
Shroud, typical of a traumatized person.
The Impossible Image
Perhaps the most interesting point from the technicalscientific
point of view of the Shroud research concerns the body
image that to date is neither reproducible nor explainable in all
its very particular characteristics (Figure 2).
Since 1998, when Secondo Pia took the first photographs of
the Relic and allowed scientists to study more closely the body image of the Shroud, dozens and dozens of scholars have tried
to reproduce the Shroud image but without success. As the
scientists of STURP stated, who in 1978 performed the most
detailed scientific analysis on the Sheet, what can be reproduced
from the macroscopic point of view is impossible from the
microscopic point of view and vice versa. This is not the place
to detail these characteristics [17] and the different hypotheses
[18,19] proposed by scholars to explain the formation of the
image. Here we limit ourselves by observing that the explanation
must include a hypothesis of a phenomenon acting at a distance
generated by the inside of a corpse wrapped in the sacred Linen.
Among the hypotheses that seem most promising, there
is that connected to a strong electric field that generates the
so-called corona discharge. Experimental tests carried out in
collaboration with Giancarlo Pesavento [20] of the Department
of Industrial Engineering of Padua University (Italy) have
confirmed the achievement of a good part of the Shroud’s
characteristics reported in the literature, although obviously not
all.
The Shroud Wrapped a Corpse for a Short Time
There are many particularities still not well clarified related
to the Shroud image, one of them is the following. The Shroud
was certainly used as a funerary sheet [21] to wrap a man,
but this Man was wrapped there for no more than forty hours.
Normally, the corpses remained in the wrapping sheet until their
complete rotting, but in this case, the image of the human body
does not show the slightest sign of putrefaction, a phenomenon
that begins about forty hours after death. In addition, the
cadaveric rigidity of this Man, also confirmed by new studies
[22,23] of three-dimensional reconstruction of the human body
wrapped there, is a phenomenon of relatively short duration
that disappears after a few tens of hours.
Therefore, some questions arise that are not easy to
answer from a purely scientific point of view. For obvious
scientific reasons we exclude here to consider the effects of that
phenomenon reported in the Gospels as Resurrection. Why then
the corpse wrapped in the Shroud remained wrapped there for a
few days only? Where that corpse went after the burial, because
of corpse we must talk based on other scientific data found on
the Relic?
In addition to these problems, we must remember that the
blood leaked from the wounds of the Man was dissolved by
fibrinolysis in the damp environment of the sepulcher. Therefore,
any tampering with the corpse would have produced smears on
the imprints of the wounds that are instead perfectly transferred
also in correspondence of the glutei, on the dorsal image, area
where certainly some crawling would have occurred during the
movement of the corpse.
Why is the Turin Shroud Authentic?
If, as discussed above, by authenticity of the Shroud is meant
a funerary sheet, of very ancient manufacture, of about 2000
years ago, that wrapped the corpse of a man hard tortured and
dead on a cross, all the scientific clues considered seem favorable
to this hypothesis.
Six [8, 10-14] out of seven independent dating methods (and
[9] has been widely criticized) indicate that this linen Sheet is
datable to a period including the first century after Christ. The
most important Relic of Christianity wrapped a corpse. The
blood traces correspond to those of a tortured man. The body
image cannot be explained, but the most reliable hypotheses
refer to an intense and probably very brief burst of energy. The
corpse, endowed with considerable corpse rigidity, remained
wrapped in the Shroud for a short period, not exceeding forty
hours. All these clues therefore confirm the authenticity of the
Shroud [27].
As St. John Paul II stated, “The Shroud is a provocation to
intelligence... The Church entrusts scientists with the task of
continuing to investigate”, but for the moment scientists have
not been able to provide definitive answers. We must recognize,
however, that man who is limited produces Science, so Science
is also limited as a result. Will Science be able to explain the
phenomenon of the Shroud in the future?
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