A physics professor here has resurrected the mystery of the Shroud of Turin, the fabled burial cloth of Christ that 20 years ago scientists declared a fake.Millions of faithful believe the shroud's blood-stained image of a battered, crucified man is the miraculous image of Jesus, formed as he rose from the dead.
Scientists at three laboratories using radiocarbon dating in 1988-89 determined the shroud was a medieval forgery, though they could not explain how the image was created.
Now, John Jackson, a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs physics lecturer has done something his colleagues consider nearly miraculous.
Jackson, who is a leading researcher on the 14-foot-long linen sheet, has persuaded the Oxford laboratory that dated the shroud to the 13th or 14th Century to revisit the question of its age.
Professor Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, has agreed to test Jackson's hypothesis that contamination by carbon monoxide could throw off radiocarbon dating by more than a millennium.
It is possible, Jackson said, that even minimal contamination of the shroud by environmental carbon monoxide could have skewed the dating by 1,300 years — making it not medieval but contemporaneous with Jesus's life.
Jackson, who must prove a viable pathway for that contamination, is working with Oxford to test samples of linen under the various conditions the shroud has endured, such as outdoor exhibitions and exposure to extreme heat during a 1532 fire.
"Science still has much to tell us about the shroud," said Jackson, a devout Catholic. "If we are dealing with the burial cloth of Christ, it is the witness to the birth of Christianity. But my faith doesn't depend on that outcome."
Ramsey also acknowledged the need to reconcile radiocarbon-dating results with other forensic and historical evidence, which indicate the shroud is much older than 600 to 700 years old.
Scientists must arrive at a coherent story about the enigmatic shroud, Ramsey said.
The shroud is either authentic or a hoax so ingenious that state-of-the-art scientific analysis has yet to explain how it was done, said David Rolfe, director of a new documentary, "Shroud of Turin."
"The shroud is brilliant and unfathomable," Rolfe said.
The Vatican owns the shroud and keeps it locked away in a special protective chamber of inert gases in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.
The Catholic Church makes no claims about the relic's authenticity.
The first documented exhibition of the Shroud of Turin was in Lirey, France, around 1360, by its former owner, French knight Geoffrey de Charney.
De Charney's descendants sold the relic to the House of Savoy, which later ascended to the Italian monarchy and moved to Turin.
The shroud's last public display was in 2000 in Turin. The next is set for 2010.
Jackson led a research team in 1978 given unprecedented access to the shroud by the church.
The Shroud of Turin Research Project determined the shroud was not painted, dyed or stained.
It is not known how the Shroud's faint brown discolorations, which form a negative image of a man, came to mark the linen, Jackson said.
It was only with the advent of photography, centuries after the shroud's first public appearances, that its clearer positive image could be seen.
Jackson is working on a radiation hypothesis to explain the markings.
His 1978 findings were enough to heighten curiosity about a relic that no modern artist or scientist could reproduce.
Jackson's work is so critical, Rolfe said, "that I sometimes think it should be called the Shroud of Colorado Springs."
In 1988, the church allowed tiny samples of the shroud to be removed for radiocarbon dating by laboratories at Oxford, in Zurich and at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Researchers concluded the cloth was made between 1260 and 1390 and could not have been the burial cloth of Christ.
But Jackson, his wife, Rebecca, and fellow researchers at his Turin Shroud Center of Colorado have assembled, with other scientists around the world, reams of documentary, genealogical and forensic evidence challenging the radiocarbon dates.
Their evidence suggests the shroud is as old as Christianity.
Forensic data shows the blood stains on the shroud are real. Jackson said blood stained the cloth before the body image appeared. This rules out scorching the cloth to produce the image because the blood was not degraded by heat.
Forensic experts have documented that stains around the head are consistent with punctures by thorns. The scourge marks on the back are consistent with those made by a Roman whip called a flagrum.
A large puncture wound to the man's side is consistent in shape and size with a Roman spear of the era.
While medieval paintings and Christian iconography portray Jesus nailed to the cross through his palms and the front of the feet, archeologists have found the bones of a Roman crucifixion victim nailed through the wrists and heels.
The shroud is consistent with the archeological find and not centuries of artwork.
In 2002, renown textile restorer Mechthild Flury-Lemberg went to Turin to help preserve the shroud and found a style of stitching she had only seen once before — in the ruins of Masada, a Jewish settlement destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 74.
The cloth's herringbone weave, while common in the 1st Century, was rare in the Middle Ages, she said.
Historical evidence also suggests that the shroud may be the Shroud of Constantinople, which was displayed in the 1100s but disappeared from that city, now called Instanbul, during the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
Genealogical and literary researcher Alexei Lidov found that the Shroud of Turin's former owner, de Charny, was married to a direct descendant of a French crusader who sacked Constantinople.
The Shroud of Turin also has been linked to the Sudarium, a face covering touted as another burial cloth of Jesus. The Sudarium has been on display in Oviedo, Spain, since the mid-600s.
When researcher Mark Guscin compared the blood stains on the Sudarium and the Shroud of Turin, by laying one over the other, he found a match.
Science has shown the shroud is remarkable, whatever its genesis, Jackson said.
As for his hypothesis on shroud dating, he said that it's going to take months or years to test because of the project's complexity and limits on time and money.
"The shroud doesn't rise or fall on this one hypothesis of mine," Jackson said, "but it's part of a first-class adventure story in science and religion." +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce