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Shroud of turin debunked1/10/2024 ![]() (The British Museum also did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.) It was only when Tristan Casabianca made a request under British law that he received a favourable reply. Oddly, though, neither academic institutions involved or the British Museum would respond to requests for the original raw data that were held in their archives. ![]() The fact that testing only used samples from one corner of the cloth makes it impossible to know if this is a claim is correct or not. We know, for example, that efforts were made to restore the Shroud in the 16th century. Some claimed, for example, that the area tested was a portion of the cloth that was repaired and that the tested strands reflect those repairs. Since 2005, however, a growing number of scholars have questioned the results of the now 30-year-old tests. The resulting publication declared that there was “conclusive evidence” that the linen of the shroud dates to 1260-1390 CE with 95 percent confidence in those results. On April 21, 1988, a sample was taken from one corner of the cloth and distributed to the three sets of scientists. Vatican agreement for testing took decades to obtain and then, finally, in 1987, laboratories in Arizona, Oxford, and Zurich were selected to perform independent tests. This is something for which it is difficult to account but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.Įven though it was unlikely to be real, most people thought that the radiocarbon dating would be the silver bullet that would either confirm the inauthenticity of the Shroud or dispel Shroud doubters once and for all. Why would ancient historians have passed over this detail? We have to assume that they didn’t know about it. A considerable amount of attention is paid to the ‘discovery’ of the true cross in Jerusalem. Assuming they knew about its survival, it is somewhat strange that early Christians and theologians don’t mention the Shroud. In any case, there’s a more than 1350-year gap between the use of a burial shroud and its appearance in the 14th century. ![]() Most who find the burial story credible would state that there was a burial shroud, but we don’t know what happened to it. ![]() Some historians, like John Dominic Crossan, think that the whole story of Jesus’ burial is a fiction. Andrew Gregory, author of a commentary on the text, writes that this story was written “to accentuate the wilful unbelief in the resurrection.” In other words, it’s part of an early Christian project against Jewish leadership. This shouldn’t be considered historical, however. There is a reference to (resurrected) Jesus giving the linen cloth to a servant of the Jewish high priest in a second century apocryphal text called the Gospel according to the Hebrews. The fourth, the Gospel of John, describes Peter finding pieces of burial cloth (one for the head and another for the body) in the empty tomb. Three of the New Testament gospel writers mention that Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus in a piece of linen cloth and placed it in his family tomb. The first solid historical evidence of its existence comes from 1390 when Bishop Pierre d’Arcis wrote to Pope Clement VII stating that the Shroud is a forgery and that its creator had confessed to having created it.Ĭertainly Jesus was buried in a burial cloth of some sort. On it you can see the brownish outline of a naked bearded man, who sports long hair and is lying with his hands modestly covering his groin. The Turin Shroud is a piece of linen cloth about 14.5 feet long and 3.7 feet wide. Their results, published recently in Archaeometry, show that the issue of the dating of the Turin Shroud is far from settled. But in 2017, a legal request under the Freedom of Information Act obtained the raw information for the first time. Oddly the original data was unavailable to researchers. The results were collected and collated by the British Museum in London and published in a splashy article in the prestigious Nature magazine that claimed to offer definitive proof that the Shroud was a medieval fraud. Then, in 1988, three laboratories based at top universities performed radiocarbon analysis of some of its threads. For the past 600 years Christians have venerated the Shroud of Turin as a precious relic, a portrait of Jesus, and (perhaps) even proof of the reality of the resurrection.
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