Shroud of Turin sparks centuries of debate

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, November 21st.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the mystery behind an ancient religious relic.

For hundreds of years, the Catholic church claimed to be in possession of the cloth in which Jesus Christ was buried. Many scientists have tried to prove whether the shroud was real or a clever hoax.

Here’s WORLD’s Emma Perley.

EMMA PERLEY: 670 years ago, a large, yellowish piece of cloth first goes on display in a small French church. It’s woven linen with a faint image of a man on it.

The church claims that Jesus Christ was once draped in this burial shroud after his crucifixion and that his likeness was miraculously imprinted onto the surface after his resurrection.

In 1543, the theologian John Calvin argues that the shroud is fake because of widely known Jewish burial customs and he draws evidence from the Bible itself.

The Gospel of John states that Jesus was wrapped in two separate strips of cloth: one for his body, and one for his head. After Jesus rose from the dead, Simon Peter and John found both of these “grave clothes” lying in the tomb. And none of the Apostles mentioned anything miraculous about them.

Even so, many people are convinced that the shroud is real. It’s eventually moved to a cathedral in Turin, Italy, and becomes known as the Shroud of Turin.

And for hundreds of years, its origins remain a mystery.

That is, until 1898.

DOCUMENTARY: He had to get a perfect picture. The church, the king, the world was waiting for it …

Photographer Secondo Pia snaps photos of the shroud for the first time. As he develops the negatives in a dark room, he notices something strange. Audio from The Mystery of the Sacred Shroud documentary.

DOCUMENTARY: His hands shook as he held up the dripping glass. His negative plate contained a positive image instead of the vague impression he had seen on the cross. Here was a complete photographic likeness of a man whose body was covered with clotted blood, whose side showed a large wound, and whose hands and feet showed the marks of one crucified.

The photo is splashed across Italian newspapers. And researchers wonder whether they can use modern science to prove that the shroud is real. Others are skeptical, claiming Pia faked his photograph.

In 1963, a team of researchers start extensively testing the shroud. They realize that there’s no paint or artificial dye on it. And medical examiner Robert Bucklin notes that the wounds on the man are consistent with Jesus’s wounds described in the Bible. He even discovers that the man appears to have at one point carried something heavy over his shoulder.

While it reveals clues to the identity of the man under the shroud, the image itself has puzzled scientists for years—as it’s only 200 nanometers deep into the surface. That’s 400 times smaller than a strand of human hair! In 2015, researcher Paolo Di Lazzaro tests his theory for how the image appeared.

DI LAZZARO: One of the most striking characteristics of the image is the thickness of the coloration. Obviously so thin a coloration that cannot be achieved by any conventional method, painting, drawing…

Di Lazzaro and a team of researchers blast a piece of linen with ultraviolet light. They theorize that the radiation will burn a darker, yellowish color into the fabric.

DI LAZZARO: We started to irradiate several old linen cloth. And after many unsuccessful attempts, we finally obtained a shroud like coloration that reproduces almost the same depth of coloration, like in the image of the Turin shroud.

Di Lazzaro concludes that the image on the shroud could have been produced by a flash of ultraviolet radiation.

A controversial 1988 study dates the shroud to the 14th century using radiocarbon dating. Many have wondered how such an elaborate hoax could have been accomplished during the Medieval period.

But recent testing suggests that the shroud might be much older than that.

In 2022 Italian researcher Liberato De Caro publishes a report that dates the shroud to two thousand years ago, using a method called Wide Angle X-Ray Scattering.

Linen fibers age similarly to the pages of old books. They turn yellow over time as the cellulose breaks down. So De Caro analyzes the fabric by measuring how long it takes for the cellulose to decay. The results produce a date that could be more accurate than radiocarbon methods.

DE CARO: The radiocarbon technique is not suitable for dating textile samples.

More than 400 scientific studies have been conducted on the Shroud of Turin. Many believe that it is one of Christ’s last miracles, out of reach of our modern science toolkit—while others maintain that the shroud is a clever medieval design.

There is still no scientific consensus on the shroud’s origins and it remains one of the most enduring mysteries in our world.

DI LAZZARO: It's likely that is not a fake, but at the same time, is almost impossible to show definitely that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. We have to accept the limit of science, the limit of the of our mind, of our knowledge.

REICHARD: Special thanks to WORLD freelancer Chiara Lamberti for her Italian translations.

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