The Shroud of Turin

Charles Freeman (click to read the whole article):

No one has found any significant evidence of the Shroud’s existence before 1355, when it appeared in a chapel at Lirey, in the diocese of Troyes, supposedly advertised there as the burial shroud of Christ. Such sudden appearances of cults were common in a Europe recovering from the trauma of the Black Death. They caused a great deal of frustration for a Church hierarchy anxious to preserve its own status. The bishop of Troyes, Henry of Poitiers, whose responsibility it was to monitor such claims in his diocese, investigated the shrine and reported that, not only were the images painted on the cloth, but that he had actually tracked down the painter. After this clerical onslaught, the Shroud was hidden away for more than 30 years. Yet the Church accepted that it was not a deliberate forgery and in January 1390 the (anti-)pope Clement VII allowed its renewed exposure in Lirey. This suggests that the Shroud may have been credited with unrecorded miracles, thereby acquiring the spiritual status to make it worthy of veneration. Doubtless aware of the earlier claims by the Lirey clergy, Clement insisted that it was publicly announced before each exposition that this was NOT the burial shroud of Christ. …

So the argument that the Shroud is a painted linen cloth of the 14th century and that it has decayed significantly seems strong but it is important to see whether there is any evidence that contradicts this. In April 1988 the Shroud underwent a radiocarbon test. The most recent method of dating, accelerator-mass-spectrometry (AMS), was selected as it allowed small samples to be taken. A team of experts met with the Church authorities in Turin to select a suitable sample. It was taken from an area away from the images and the fire damage and inwards from the edge of the cloth. It was divided into three sections on site and then given to three laboratories, in Oxford, Tucson and Zurich, who cleaned each of the samples before testing them. A coordinated result from the three laboratories brought up a date range of between 1260 and 1390, with 95 per cent confidence that the cutting of the flax, the moment when the carbon-14 clock would have started ticking, was within it. Attempts to challenge this result (from those determined to pin down a first-century date), by suggesting that either the samples came from a patch rewoven in medieval times or from contamination, have been unsuccessful. Close examination by textile experts has not shown any reweaving and photographs confirm that the bandings of the weave are uninterrupted throughout. As to contamination, critics cannot even agree what the contaminating substance might be, let alone show that, after cleaning by the laboratories, it was twice the weight of the cloth it would need to be if it really was of first-century origin.