The Shroud: photo of the face, positive (left): digitally processed image (right)
Jesus Christ:
Jesus Christ lived ~2000 years ago. He died after being whipped, crowned with thorns, crucified and pierced in his side by a lance.
The Shroud of Turin:
The Shroud of Turin [TS] “…is an ancient linen cloth, 4.4 m long and 1.1 m wide, which wrapped the corpse and encoded the image of a tortured man, who was scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified, and pierced by a spear in the chest.” It has now has been dated as 2000-years old—again!
The Shroud shows a man calculated to have been between 5 ft 7 in & 5 ft 9 in tall. (Linen is made from flax: the cloth of the Shroud was woven in a “herringbone” pattern.)
What is not known?
Science cannot explain how the image was transmitted to the cloth.
Science cannot tell us that the body covered by the Shroud was indeed the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The 2022 Study:
Curiously there is a spate of articles on social media discussing a 2022 research article from The Italian Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council investigating the age of the Shroud: “X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample.” (I cannot explain the media’s delay in reporting such an important discovery.)
It was published in the Heritage journal and can be downloaded as a PDF for free HERE:
(click image to link to the article on-line where it can be downloaded.)
The Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council carried out the analysis: the Abstract from the article is below. [My bolding.]
On a sample of the Turin Shroud (TS), we applied a new method for dating ancient linen threads by inspecting their structural degradation by means of Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS). The X-ray dating method was applied to a sample of the TS consisting of a thread taken in proximity of the 1988/radiocarbon area (corner of the TS corresponding to the feet area of the frontal image, near the so-called Raes sample). The size of the linen sample was about 0.5 mm × 1 mm. We obtained one-dimensional integrated WAXS data profiles for the TS sample, which were fully compatible with the analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55–74 AD, Siege of Masada (Israel). The degree of natural aging of the cellulose that constitutes the linen of the investigated sample, obtained by X-ray analysis, showed that the TS fabric is much older than the seven centuries proposed by the 1988 radiocarbon dating. The experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the TS is a 2000-year-old relic, as supposed by Christian tradition, under the condition that it was kept at suitable levels of average secular temperature—20.0–22.5 °C—and correlated relative humidity—75–55%—for 13 centuries of unknown history, in addition to the seven centuries of known history in Europe. To make the present result compatible with that of the 1988 radiocarbon test, the TS should have been conserved during its hypothetical seven centuries of life at a secular room temperature very close to the maximum values registered on the earth.
The age of the Shroud has been assessed several times with the outlier being the radiocarbon dating. The procedural and statistical problems with that study are mentioned in the Heritage report:
however, in 1988, the Shroud was radiocarbon dated by three famous laboratories and attributed to the year 1325 Anno Domini (AD), with an uncertainty of ±65 years, implying that the TS should be a Medieval artifact. This result has been widely criticized for both procedural and statistical problems, as was recently confirmed by the statistical analyses of raw data made available to the scientific community after only about thirty years and a legal action. A regression analysis of data on the TS carbon dating has shown their statistical heterogeneity, together with the implausibility of the spatial allocations of some measurement samples. Moreover, the 14C dating results remain controversial, especially because of the likely non-negligible carbon contamination of the textile. This contamination could be due to many factors, including environmental ones.
They go on to list the several other studies which suggest the age of the Shroud at least spans the Life of Christ:
Moreover, other dating methods agree in the assignment of the TS to the first century AD. Spectroscopic methods, based on Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy/Attenuated Total Reflectance [10] and Raman spectroscopy, date the Shroud to 300 Before Christ (BC) ± 400 years and 200 BC ± 500 years, respectively. The mechanical multi-parametric method, based on an analysis of five parameters, including the breaking load and Young’s modulus and the loss factor, after an adequate calibration based on the results of two dozen samples of known age, dates TS as 400 AD ± 400 years old. Estimates of the kinetic constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin suggest that TS has an age range from 1300 to 3000 years. A recent numismatic analysis proposes that TS was already present in 692 AD.
(NOTE: references have been removed but are available in the original article.)
To re-iterate: "The data profiles were fully compatible with analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, found at Masada, Israel". WOW!
More Information
Many will want to research the Shroud further. There are many references on the Shroud’s web-site at: https://shroud.com/
Curious Conversions!
Atheists researching the Shroud have converted to Catholicism!
These include Tristan Casabianca and British filmmaker David Rolfe: “I started off as an atheist, and then became an agnostic. And I'm now a Christian, because I cannot possibly understand anything else that could have produced that image."
Pure Coincidence?
The weight of evidence is that the Shroud of Turin is—in all probability—from the same era as Jesus Christ. It holds the image of a man who was crucified in an identical way to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Could this be a pure coincidence and the image is just some other poor soul? Perhaps…but what are the odds? (Remembering that the image is still unexplained, so is possibly miraculous.) Taking the scientific evidence together, this is as close to proof as it gets. I am convinced.
I hope to see the Shroud of Our Lord Jesus Christ in my lifetime.
Kevin Hay.
You can follow Kevin on 𝕏 / Twitter @ kevinhay77