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The Turin Shroud
The best known of all Christian relics, the Shroud of Turin is a burial shroud that carries the faintest negative image of a crucified male whose body bears all the marks, wounds, contusions and blood stains consistent with the records we have of Jesus' scourging and crucifixion of almost two thousand years ago.
Always well known in Christian circles, the shroud attained notoriety when it was subjected to the then new technology of photography for the first time in 1899. To the amazement of the photographer, when he developed his photographic negative what confronted him was not a faint obscure image but the equivalent of a photographic positive with a clear and detailed image of a bearded male who had been crucified.
Detailed studies of this image provided highly convincing evidence of its authenticity as the burial cloth in which the hastily embalmed body of Jesus would probably have been wrapped by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, the two men who carried the body to the tomb.
The cloth covered the whole body, having first been laid underneath it, then brought over the head and down to cover the feet. Most of the image is a faint reddish yellow but on the head, arms and feet are deep red stains consistent with being blood stains originating from the crown of thorns and the nails driven through the wrists and feet during crucifixion. These blood stains have been analyzed in minute detail to check whether the were fakes or whether the angles of flow of blood on the head arms and feet was consistent with the position of a body nailed to a cross during crucifixion. Also medical examination indicated the blood flow from the wound in the figure's side was consistent with expectations if the spear thrust had been made following death.
The image also has a multitude of marks on both front and back that are consistent with the person having been severely scourged prior to crucifixion.
Anybody who examined the detailed evidence accumulated over the years that followed would surely have been justified to conclude that if this was not the burial shroud of Jesus then surely it ought to have been.
The body blow to believers came when, in 1989, samples of cloth from the shroud were examined by three independent carbon-14 dating laboratories who jointly declared the cloth to date at about 1350 AD--along with an announcement by one of the scientists involved that the odds against them being wrong were a thousand trillion to one.
Naturally there followed a spate of books denouncing the shroud as an artist's fake. But there were also counter arguments that were just as adamant that there was no possibility of this shroud image being faked in the manner described or by the particular technique proposed.
One of the most vociferous of those crying fake claimed the image was a simple iron oxide painting using techniques that were well known in the middle ages. For anyone acquainted with the detail of the image, the proposal appears too simplistic. It also fails to account for figures from spectral analysis showing there is not enough iron in the image areas to account for the intensity of the color.
However, despite all the if's and but's, the carbon dating appeared to dismiss the possibility that the shroud dates back to the time of Jesus.
Real doubts on the conclusiveness of the carbon dating perhaps began when information leaked out that the carbon dating of an Egyptian mummy from Manchester Museum had given the peculiar result that the bandages around the mummy body had been dated to be about 1000 years younger than the body. This leakage appears to have generated a spate of conflicting information that has come from other carbon datings.
For example, in 1984 samples of a well preserved body from a peat bog in Cheshire, England, had been sent to three well accredited laboratories with results coming back as 3rd century BC, first century AD, and fifth century AD!!
In 1989 a test was devised by Britain's Science and Engineering Council for inter-comparison of 38 carbon-dating laboratories, all given material from the same sample. Results were considered satisfactory for only seven of these. Among those faring badly were laboratories that used the then new accelerator mass spectrometer methodology as employed for dating of the Turin shroud.
Perhaps the strongest grounds for criticism of the carbon dating of the shroud came from an investigator who had prior experience with Mayan carvings that were initially considered to be fakes. This was because of the presence of a hard, varnish-like coating. However, the coating actually turned out to be a natural, biologically-derived coat caused by the activities of bacteria and fungi.
This investigator, Dr Garza-Valdes, later had the opportunity to examine under the microscope, small pieces of the shroud material that had been cut out for the carbon dating
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