Recents tests indicate that the Shroud of Turin was created somewhere between 300 BC and 400 AD.
This places its origin within the time of Christ. That does not mean that the Shroud is the burial cloth of Christ. But it does mean that it could be.
I am not a scientist, so I can’t evaluate the tests which have given us these dates. I can’t read the original documents written by the scientists who performed the tests because they are in Italian.
What I can do is tell you that I have read that the tests were preformed on the same strands taken from the Shroud for the 1988 carbon dating tests that concluded the Shroud originated in the Middle Ages. Scientists who performed the more recent tests which yielded the dates of origin for the Shroud that place it in the time of Christ say that the original samples were contaminated and that this is why they gave inaccurate results. They also say that the technology employed in these new tests yields more accurate results than that used in 1988.
If all this is true — and it has been published widely on various media — then it leaves us with the proposition that the Shroud is either genuine, or it is an extraordinary fake. The questions that come to mind are how someone of this era could have managed to fake something like the Shroud and why, since Christianity was a persecuted sect during much of the latter half of this time, would they do it?
Is the Shroud the burial cloth of Christ? Was the image on it created by the Resurrection?
I don’t know and I don’t think anyone now living does. However, the Shroud definitely is a powerful witness to the ugliness and suffering of the Crucifixion. Whether it received the imprint of the body of Our Lord at the moment of His resurrection, or it is just an incredible and utterly unique piece of art that was created by unknown means, the testimony it gives is still a compelling witness to Passion and death of Our Lord.
From the Washington Post:
New testing dates Shroud of Turin to era of Christ
By ,
New scientific tests on the Shroud of Turin, which went on display Saturday (March 30) in a special TV appearance introduced by the pope, date the cloth to ancient times, challenging earlier experiments that dated it only to the Middle Ages.
… The new test, by scientists at the University of Padua in northern Italy, used the same fibers from the 1988 tests but disputes the earlier findings. The new examination dates the shroud to between 300 B.C. and 400 A.D., which would put it in the era of Christ.
… It determined that the earlier results may have been skewed by contamination from fibers used to repair the cloth when it was damaged by fire in the Middle Ages, the British newspaper reported. The cloth has been kept at the cathedral since 1578.
… The new tests also supported earlier results claiming to have found traces of dust and pollen on that shroud that could only have come from the Holy Land. (Read the rest here.)
(Doug Stanglin writes for USA Today.)
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