Modern science has completed hundreds of thousands of hours of detailed study and intense research on the Shroud of Turin. It is, in fact, the single most studied artifact in human history, and we know more about it today than we ever have before. And yet, the controversy still rages.
The Shroud has been publicly exhibited only rarely, as, in recent times, on the marriage of Prince Umberto (1931) and on the 400th anniversary of its arrival in Turin (1978). In 1998 and 2000 Pope John Paul II arranged for public viewings; he called the shroud “a mirror of the Gospel.” Pope Benedict XVI similarly arranged a public display in 2010, and Pope Francis made a pilgrimage to see it in 2015.
Can science prove that this burial shroud, imprinted with marks that reflect the wounds of crucifixion, was used to cover Jesus of Nazareth? On October 4, two renowned experts on the Shroud of Turin will explore that very question with compelling presentations.
In his presentation on the Shroud of Turin, Father Spitzer will skillfully point out a significant flaw in the 1988 carbon testing that dated the origin of the Shroud to the middle ages. He then discusses new data that strongly suggests that not only is the Shroud a first century artifact but quite possibly a relic of the resurrection.
Joseph Marino, a former Benedictine monk, has been studying the Shroud of Turin since 1977. He presented a paper at the Sindone 2000 World Congress in Orvieto, Italy, hypothesizing that the reason the 1988 C-14 dating of the Shroud resulted in a date range of AD 1260-1390 for the cloth was because of a sixteenth-century repair in the sample area. Marino is the author of “Wrapped in the Shroud: Chronicle of a Passion.”
Full story at the OC Catholic.
Have two separate scientific tests come to the same conclusion regarding the age of the shroud? Good science requires that repeat tests should get [essentially] identical results.
The article is very unclear what is happening Oct 4. A private presentation to select dignitaries? A public lecture?
Here’s a link to the announcement with more details. https://www.rcbo.org/events/science-and-the-shroud-of-turin/
The Sudarium of Oviedo, known to be in Spain from the early 600s, corresponds to the Shroud, and is strong countervailing evidence to early Shroud carbon dating tests now acknowledged to be flawed.