Whether the bishop or Pope examined the issue properly back then is unknown – and we do not have information regarding whether anyone had biased reasons for making the assertions they made. Around 30 years later, the bishop of Troyes, France, reported to the Pope that an artist had forged the Shroud, so the Pope declared it to be a fake “icon” rather than an authentic religious relic. De Charney has quiet about where he sourced the Shroud, but his son claimed it was a gift while his granddaughter claimed it was a spoil of war.

The 14 th century dating in the 1989 study coincided with the presentation of the Shroud around 1356 by the family of a French knight named Geoffrey de Charny to a church in Lirey, France. This article will expand on this point and its sources. The dating of the tiny corner portion of the Shroud sampled for carbon dating appears medieval, but the medieval portion was sewed into the original by master craftsman after the original had been damaged in medieval times. But beyond their flawed methodology, recent academic studies have found a much more important source of the problem. See below for an image, courtesy of Walsh and Schwalbe (2020).įor this reason and many others, recent scholars have called the dubious methodology of the 1989 carbon dating study into question. They showed that the distance from the edge of the cloth made a difference in the radiocarbon dating estimate. In other words, the samples between the three labs were very different. The tiny sample, which three global labs in Tucson, Oxford, and Zurich cut up in varying ways, exhibited “egregious heterogeneity.” See below for an image, courtesy of Riani and colleagues (2013). The Shroud of Turin was based on a tiny sample from the bottom corner of a large 14 x 3 feet linen cloth.

On September 22, 1988, the New York Times dealt a death blow to Christians with the headline “Tests Show Shroud of Turin to Be Fraud, Scientist Hints.” The following February, Nature published research by Damon and colleagues, which declared they had “conclusive evidence” based on carbon dating that the Shroud of Turin was medieval and “not from the time of Christ.” The authors dated the Shroud to between 12 with “at least 95 percent confidence.”Īs an academic, I’ve been instructed to be very careful in making statements about my research findings, so I’d never state that I had “conclusive evidence” of anything based on population sampling techniques. The controversy regarding the Shroud of Turin is far from resolved.” While Jim Majors responded to my tweet with an indication that the jury is not out, many other academics believe the Shroud is the most controversial artifact and most studied relic in history and we have an impossible consensus. When I watched the video and posted the tweet, I believed the jury was out, but I decided to look into the academic research to let the evidence lead me where it would, rather than take an obstinate, close-minded stance. Is the Shroud of Turin holy or a hoax? I posted a tweet with a reference to an interview on the Non sequitur channel with Frank McEvoy who believes the Shroud is holy.

Shroud of turin 3d comparison