Is the Shroud of Turin real: Italian scientists make sensational discovery

For more than a century, scholars have debated whether Jesus Christ was really buried in the Shroud of Turin. Thus, experts have conducted new research on the sacred cloth.

Italian scientists used modern equipment to determine the age of the cloth in which the body of Jesus Christ is believed to have been wrapped. The results of the study confirm the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, writes Daily Mail.

The Shroud of Turin was put on public display for the first time in the 1350s. At that time, it was claimed that it was a real funeral shroud in which the mutilated body of Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion. After all, the Holy Shroud bears an imprint in the shape of a human body, which, according to many believers, belonged to the son of God.

The fabric shows faint, brownish images on the front and back depicting a thin man with sunken eyes who was up to about 1.8 meters tall. These marks are consistent with the wounds of Jesus from the crucifixion mentioned in the Bible - spike marks on his head, lacerations on his back, and bruises on his shoulders.

The Bible tells us that Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus in a linen shroud and put it in a tomb.

In 1988, however, a group of international researchers analyzed a small piece of the shroud using carbon dating and determined that the cloth appears to have been made sometime between 1260 and 1390 AD. That is, it could not belong to the time of Christ.

But since the 1980s, more than 170 peer-reviewed scholarly articles about the Shroud have been published, and many have concluded that it is authentic.

To dispel all the myths and controversies, scientists from the Italian Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council have made a new study of the Shroud of Turin using wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS).

Using state-of-the-art equipment, the team of experts studied eight small samples of fabric from the Shroud. To date it, the researchers used certain parameters of tissue aging, including temperature and humidity, which cause significant cellulose breakdown.

Based on the amount of damage, the researchers found that the Shroud of Turin was probably stored at a temperature of about 22.5 degrees Celsius and a relative humidity of about 55 percent for about 13 centuries before it arrived in Europe.

The researchers then compared the cellulose decay in the Shroud to another fabric found in Israel that dates back to the first century. And they were completely the same.

According to the results of all the analyses, the cloth for the Shroud was made about 2000 years ago, i.e., at the time of Jesus.

The lead author of the new study, Dr. Liberato De Caro, said that the 1988 test should be considered incorrect because "tissue samples are usually subject to various kinds of contaminants that cannot be completely removed from a dated sample."

"If the sample cleaning procedure is not performed thoroughly, carbon-14 dating is not reliable," he added.

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