The Shroud of Turin, also known as Sacred Shroudis one of the most discussed artifacts in the history of Christianity. According to tradition, this fragment of linen fabric preserved in the Cathedral of Turin in Piazza San Giovanni would be the shroud used for Wrap the body of Jesus Christ After his crucifixion, and on which his image would have impressed. The Shroud, a sheet of about 4 meters length and 1 meter of width, is kept in the last chapel of the left nave of the cathedral, under the royal tribune and is enclosed in the Storagein turn placed within a large metal case. Normally it is not visible to the public, except on the occasion of the rare ostentionsduring which it is exposed. However, its appearance is well known: the song of worn fabric bears a weak image of a man with a beard, and exhibits bloodstains. But is it really the image of Christ and his wounds?
What science on the Sacred Shroud says: carbon dating
The most famous investigation in this regard is the Dating to the radiocarbon 14 of linen fabric, made in 1988, and whose results were published on the prestigious scientific journal Nature. The experiments involved three of the major specialized workshops in the world, who deducted independently of the samples of the fabric and indicated that it would go back to a period between 1260 and 1390 after Christas the dating obtained from historical sources also indicates: therefore the artifact would be medieval origin. This important study is the main proof of his Not authenticityand the dating was accepted by the scientific community in the following decades (we see it in publications of prestigious university researchers such as Oxford and Cambridge), only to be then contested by people like the scholar Rmi van haelst and Ernesto Brunatiwhich would have detected errors in the statistical calculations published in the original article, which would have brought the reliability under the minimum threshold.
The theories of the conspiracy on the Shroud of Turin and the reaction of the Church
Numerous theories of the conspiracy released in those years and in the subsequent ones who suggested phantomics replacements of the sample in order to affect the holiness of the relic. In the meantime, given the media impact of the study, the church acknowledges the results without changing its position on the cult of the Shroud, and the then custodian of the Shroud, the cardinal Anastasio Ballestrerosaid:
Nobody will make me tell me that I accept these results, the Church reiterated that the cult of the Shroud continues and that the linen remains one of its treasures. Science goes on its way.
The latest scientific research on the Holy Shroud
More recently, in 2022a group of Italian scientists led by Liberato De Caroresearcher of the crystallography institute of the National Research Council, used a different technique for dating, the Wide Angle X-Ray Scattering (Waxs) which is measured by thenatural aging of linen cellulose. By their data, described in the magazine Heritagehave calculated that the fabric could actually have about 2000 yearsand not the approximately seven centuries calculated in Nature’s study. These results, the scholars said, would be compatible with the hypothesis that it is a relic. At one condition: that the Shroud was “maintained at adequate levels of average secular temperature and relative humidity related for 13 centuries of unknown history, in addition to the seven centuries of history known in Europe”.
