Turin Shroud

Research Starts....

The world's most famous piece of linen cloth shows a faint , dark image of a bearded man bearing the same wounds as a person who has been crucified (nailed to a wooden cross and left to die). Some say it was the actual cloth that covered Jesus following his crucifixion , others claim it is just a medieval hoax.

But no one knows how the image was made. what is remarkable is that when the cloth is looked at as a photographic negative , as shown above , the image shows up even more clearly. The Turin Shroud has been kept in the Cathedral of St. John in Turin, Italy, since 1578 and has been shrouded in mystery ever since.

The exact origins of the Shroud remain unknown. Its first certain appearance was in 1357, when the widow of the Templar knight Geoffroy de Charnay displayed it in a church in France. Some people believe the image dates from this time and shows the Templar knight himself. There are legends of an image of Jesus on a cloth in places such as Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) long before, but they are unproven. In the 6th century, a similar image was described in Edessa (now part of Turkey), but it showed only a face.

How the image was made is one of the Shroud’s great mysteries. The image is strange because it looks like a black (or rather brown) and white photograph, yet it was made long before photography was invented. Computer reconstruction reveals that the marks on the cloth make up a three-dimensional image, as if they were made while the cloth was resting on a real body, not drawn on flat cloth. A high-powered microscope shows the image is not paint or dye, but a microscopic layer of caramelized sugar. To this day, no one really understands how the image was produced. 

In 1988, the pope let scientists take a fragment of the Shroud for radiocarbon dating. The scientists agreed that the Shroud dated from 1260–1390. If so, the cloth could not possibly be the burial shroud of Jesus. However, US professor Raymond Rogers showed that the sample material used came from a piece of the cloth that was likely to be a medieval patch different from the rest. Microchemical tests showed traces of a natural substance called vanillin in the sample patch, but not in the rest of the Shroud. Vanillin decomposes with time, and is found in medieval materials, but not older ones. As a result, the main Shroud could be much older.

1354
The first historical mention of the Shroud, when it is recorded as being in the hands of Geoffroy de Charnay. After his death three years later, Geoffroy’s widow displays the cloth for all to see in Lirey, France.

1389
The image on the Shroud is denounced as a fraud by Bishop Pierre d’Arcis in a letter to the pope. The bishop claims a painter admitted to making the Shroud, but he does not name the artist.

1453
Geoffroy’s granddaughter, who has inherited the Shroud, sells it to Louis of Savoy, who displays it in many cities all around Europe.

1532
Unfortunately, the Shroud is burned in a fire at the house of Savoy. A group of nuns tries to repair the damage to the cloth and use patches to rectify some parts.

1578
The Shroud is moved to Turin Cathedral, where it has stayed to this day. In 1978, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of its move to Turin, the Shroud is put on display
for the public to see.

2002
During restoration work, a mysterious second image of a face is discovered on the back of the cloth. Are there yet more mysteries to the Turin Shroud?

Time has to decide!!