Shroud of Turin

The Shroud of Turin is a rectangular linen cloth about 4.4 metres long that carries the faint image of a man, seen front and back as though the body had been laid on one half and the other folded over the head. The marks read as wounds to the wrists, feet, side, scalp and back, matching the Gospel description of scourging and crucifixion. Because the image behaves like a photographic negative, tonal values reversed, it became famous only after 1898, when the first photographs made the figure legible. For believers it is a witness to the passion and possibly the burial cloth of Christ; for the Catholic Church it is officially an aid to devotion rather than an authenticated relic. Whatever its origin, the Shroud has generated a substantial scientific literature and remains the most examined single artifact associated with Jesus.

The 1988 radiocarbon study that dated the cloth to AD 1260-1390 used accelerator mass spectrometry at three independent laboratories, Oxford, Zurich and Arizona, from a single sample cut from a corner of the cloth, publishing its result in Nature the following year with a stated ninety-five percent confidence range. Defenders of an earlier date have proposed the sample was contaminated by centuries of handling or by material from the 1532 fire repair, arguments the testing laboratories and most conservators have not accepted as sufficient to overturn the result. Independent of the dating question, pigment analysis by the chemist Walter McCrone argued for iron-oxide consistent with a painted image, while STURP, the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, argued against paint, and no single explanation commands full agreement.

The documented history of the cloth begins in the 1350s at Lirey in France, where it was displayed by the family of the knight Geoffroi de Charny. Within a generation the bishop of Troyes reported to the Avignon pope that a local artist had confessed to making it, and it was allowed only as a representation. In 1453 it passed to the Dukes of Savoy, who kept it at Chambery, where a fire in 1532 scorched the folded cloth and left symmetrical burn and water stains later patched by nuns. The Savoys moved their capital to Turin in 1578 and brought the relic with them. It survived a second fire in 1997. In 1983 the last Savoy heir left it to the Holy See, and the Archbishop of Turin serves as its appointed keeper under the Pope as Pontifical Custodian. Public expositions are infrequent and draw very large crowds.

Geoffroi de Charny, the knight who first publicly displayed the cloth at Lirey around 1354, died at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, and it was his widow, Jeanne de Vergy, who continued the expositions that drew the attention of Bishop Pierre d'Arcis, whose 1389 memorandum to the Avignon pope Clement VII is the source for the claim that an earlier bishop had identified the artist responsible; no corroborating record survives independently of d'Arcis's letter, written decades after the events it describes amid a dispute over the shrine's revenues. Clement VII's ruling permitted continued display but required it be presented as a representation rather than the authentic burial cloth. The 1532 Chambery fire, survived folded inside a silver reliquary, burned through multiple folded layers, producing the paired scorch marks visible today, and Poor Clare nuns patched the damage the following year with triangular cloth inserts still visible on the Shroud.

Tradition holds the Shroud to be the burial linen of Jesus, and some researchers point to features they consider hard to fake: the anatomically consistent bloodstains, pollen and limestone said to match Jerusalem, and the image's superficial, directionless quality. The decisive scientific test came in 1988, when laboratories at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich independently radiocarbon-dated sample threads; their combined result, published in Nature in 1989, placed the linen between AD 1260 and 1390 at 95% confidence, squarely in the period of its first appearance at Lirey.

Defenders have argued the sample came from a medieval repair or was contaminated, and later work has re-examined the fragments, but no result has overturned the medieval date to general satisfaction. The Church has never declared the cloth authentic. On the present evidence the object's identity with Jesus is unproven and actively disputed, which is why it is classed here as debated with the radiocarbon finding cited alongside the tradition.