We proved how old the Shroud of Turin really is – the rest is a matter of faith
Story by Nick Squires, The Telegraph, 10/5/24
ince the days of Galileo, science and faith have frequently been at odds with each other. But inside Professor Liberato De Caro’s laboratory, they seem to be in union.
Nestled in an unprepossessing, modern office block on a busy road in the Italian town of Bari, on the Adriatic coast of Puglia, his team of scientists have come up with evidence which they say dispels centuries of speculation on the most disputed holy relic in Christendom. In fact, they claim to have produced evidence which proves what the faithful have long believed – that the Turin Shroud did indeed once cover the body of Christ.
Measuring 4.3 metres (14 feet 3 inches) long and 1.1 metres (3 feet 7 inches) wide, the cloth bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man whom the faithful insist is Christ. It appears to show the back and front of a gaunt, bearded man with long hair and sunken eyes, his arms crossed on his chest. There appear to be blood stains emanating from wounds in his wrists, feet and side.
For hundreds of years it has been regarded by many as a mediaeval hoax. But De Caro’s team have cast new light on the artefact, indicating it dates back 2,000 years after all, to the days of the New Testament.
The hallelujah moment was reached in the humble surroundings of their small, third-floor laboratory, which belongs to the Institute of Crystallography (part of the state-funded Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, or National Research Council). It is here that a tiny fibre plucked from the Turin Shroud – which is kept under lock and key in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin – was placed in an apparatus called an X-ray micro-imaging machine.
The contraption consists of a long steel tube connected to wires, sensors and an ominous looking emergency red light. It also features an incongruous mascot: a tiny soft toy monkey dangling from a key ring. “He’s our lucky charm,” says Rocco Lassandro, the lab’s chief technician. “We’ve had him for years.”
Scientists led by Professor Liberato De Caro decided to subject the tiny Shroud sample, which at 0.5 mm × 1 mm is smaller than a grain of rice, to a new dating method called Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) which measures the structural degradation and ageing of ancient materials.
“It’s a sort of radiography, similar to the type of scan that you would do on a bone to see if there is a fracture. But this X-ray penetrates the material very deeply to analyse it at a microscopic level,” Prof De Caro says.
“Over time, the structure of the material degrades. We can tell from that how much time has passed and therefore date the object.”
Cinzia Giannini, the director of the institute, likens the approach to using “a tiny laser beam”. “It is a technique that has a huge range of applications. But this is the first time that it’s been used on a sample from the Shroud,” she says.
When the fibre was analysed by the powerful X-ray machine, the scientists were astounded at the result that emerged. The Shroud did not originate, as has long been thought, in the 13th century, but from 1,300 years earlier.
In age, it matched a similarly minute shred of linen that came from the Siege of Masada in AD73, when a band of Jews who had sought sanctuary on a sheer-sided outcrop in the desert were besieged by a Roman army. Rather than wait to be chopped to pieces by the swords of the advancing legions, who built a giant ramp so that they could access the cliff-top fortress, they took their own lives en masse. The scrap of cloth from Masada has been dated to 55–74AD.
“There was a sense of joy, of shock,” says Prof De Caro. “Why? Because we had verified that it could be authentic. We know for sure that the sample from the fortress of Masada is 2,000 years old. The results from the Turin Shroud sample were highly compatible. The direct comparison verified that the Turin Shroud sample is 2,000 years old.”
The scientists used slightly more sober language when they announced their extraordinary findings in the peer-reviewed journal Heritage in August. “The degree of natural aging of the cellulose that constitutes the linen of the investigated sample, obtained by X-ray analysis, showed that the Turin Shroud fabric is much older than the seven centuries proposed by the 1988 radiocarbon dating. The experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the Turin Shroud is a 2000-year-old relic, as supposed by Christian tradition.”
The provenance and authenticity of the Turin Shroud have divided opinion for centuries. It first emerges in the historical record in 1354 in mediaeval France. In a tale that could have come straight from the pages of a Dan Brown novel, a knight named Geoffroi de Charny presented it to a church in Lirey near Nantes in northern France. Nobody knows how he acquired it.
Not long afterwards, in 1389, the bishop of Troyes denounced the Shroud as a forgery. Pope Clement VII declared that it was a man-made religious icon rather than a relic. In 1453, the royal House of Savoy acquired the cloth, moving it to a chapel in Chambery, where it was damaged in a fire in 1532. Nearly 50 years later, in 1578, it was moved to Turin, the new Savoyard capital, where it has been ever since. It is exhibited only rarely.
For sceptics, the main scientific evidence that it must be a mediaeval fake came in 1988, when snippets were subjected to radiocarbon dating by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona. The results suggested that the linen cloth dated from sometime between 1260 and 1390AD. They confirmed what many sceptics had long believed – that the Shroud was an ingenious hoax, a manufactured relic that would have been a cash cow for the mediaeval pilgrimage business.
Since then, however, many experts have called into question the accuracy of the dating. They say it was skewed by contamination – either from past restorations that used contemporary materials to repair the cloth, or from microbes, or even from damage caused by the 1532 fire, which could have altered its chemical composition.
It was not the radiocarbon techniques that were at fault, but the fact that the parts of the Shroud that were tested were contaminated, said Jean-Christian Petitfils, a French historian who has studied the relic for more than 40 years.
“Traces of fungus and calcium carbonate were found,” Mr Petitfils, the author of The Shroud of Turin: The Definitive Investigation, told the National Catholic Register. “The sample area corresponded to a darned area: modern threads were inserted in the 16th century, in order to repair this area that had been worn away. The carbon-14 experiment (of 1988) is null and void.”
Prof De Caro also believes that the results of the 1988 analysis are wrong. “The Shroud has been the centre of attention for centuries. It was touched by countless people, displayed during parades, affected by smoke from candles. There was a great deal of contamination. That is why the carbon dating gave a result that suggested that it dated from mediaeval times,” he says.
He points out that tests conducted in 1999 found pollen on the Shroud that were consistent with pollen from plants found in and around Jerusalem. And he suggests that if the Shroud was a medieval forgery, surely it would be easy to replicate? Yet no one has managed to come up with a replica, faithful to every detail.
“With all the technology that we have in the third millennium, we still have not been able to reproduce it. Science has not been able to explain how the image was formed. There is no known physical or chemical process that would enable a corpse to generate an image like this. It’s a total mystery.”
It seems particularly fitting that the research has been carried out in Bari. For centuries, pilgrims flocked here en route to the Holy Land. The labyrinth of alleys and tiny piazzas in the old town are replete with shrines and white-stoned medieval churches, resembling a miniature Jerusalem. The 12th century Basilica of St Nicholas holds the remains of the saint – the inspiration for Santa Claus – and is a focus of devotion both for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians.
Inevitably, the question poses itself. Are the scientists religious? Prof De Caro is. As a young man he was an atheist, but says the wonders of the natural world convinced him that there must be some grand plan behind the creation of the Universe. He is now a committed Catholic and a deacon in his local church.
Personally, he thinks the Shroud is genuine. “If I had to be a judge in a trial, weighing up all the evidence that says the Shroud is authentic and the little evidence that says it is not, in all good conscience I could not declare that the Turin Shroud is mediaeval. It would not be right, given the enormous quantity of evidence in favour of it. It correlates with everything that the Gospels tell us about the death of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Prof Giannini, on the other hand, is not a firm believer. She says she believes in some sort of spiritual dimension to the world, but does not go to church.
Either way, the scientists insist that whatever the outcome of their X-ray examination, they would have published the results anyway, in the interests of academic rigour. “As scientists there are certain standards that we adhere to,” says Prof De Caro.
So having lobbed a grenade into the world of Shroud research, what happens next?
The team in Bari is keen for independent tests to be carried out by other laboratories around the world, so that their findings can be subject to scrutiny. The two samples – the one from the Shroud, the other from the scrap of linen found at Masada – are currently kept at the University of Padua in northern Italy. There they wait to be examined afresh.
“The technique we used is non-destructive, which is a huge advantage. It means the tests could be conducted again by another laboratory,” says Prof De Caro. The X-ray analysis may suggest that the Shroud is 2,000 years old. But, remarkable as the findings may be, they still don’t definitively prove it is the cloth that covered Christ.
“Science can take us only to a certain point,” says Prof De Caro. “Everything beyond that is a matter of faith.”