Scientists are calling for a new analysis of the Shroud of Turin amid a growing body of evidence challenging the idea that it is a forgery.
There are also claims that faulty data was used in a landmark study in the UK in 1988 which found the shroud was a medieval forgery and not the cloth in which Jesus was buried.
A new review by researchers in France and Italy has revisited those 50-year-old findings and says it has uncovered discrepancies in the data that have not been made public and that raise questions about the definitiveness of the results.
Tristan Casabianca, an independent French researcher who made the discovery, told DailyMail.com that his findings do not confirm that the shroud is older or that the cloth used to bury Jesus is older.
But Casabianca – who was an atheist until he began researching the shroud 20 years ago – said those factors could not be ruled out “without further analysis.”
The research in question is a 1988 study that performed radiocarbon dating on a piece of the shroud. Pictured are the sample containers that held strips of cloth.
Graphic designer Otangelo Grasso created a progression of what Jesus may have looked like based on the image on the Shroud of Turin.
The 1988 study used a technique known as carbon dating to determine the age of the controversial Shroud of Turin.
The team determined with “95 percent confidence” that the relic was made sometime between 1260 and 1390 AD, long after Christ’s resurrection.
This conclusion was reached after analyses carried out on a corner of the ancient fabric in three different laboratories: at the universities of Arizona, Zurich and Oxford.
But after getting the raw data, Casabianca found that the results varied over decades.
One of Zurich’s estimates in the Nature study was that the cloth was up to 733 years old, but 595 years old in the raw data.
The Oxford shroud sample was between 730 and 795 years old, but the raw data contained estimates that were in error by up to 55 years.
The Arizona flax was between 591 and 701 years old, and the raw data show a difference of up to 59 years.
While that would still place the cloth in the Middle Ages, hundreds of years after Jesus, Casabianca said it raises questions.
He went on to explain that “the lack of precision seriously affects the 95 percent reliability,” suggesting it was no more than 41 percent.
Any value below 60 percent suggests that there is a lot of disagreement or inconsistency between the results.
“We can safely say that the 1988 radiocarbon dating process was a failure,” said Casabianca, an independent researcher in France.
“It was supposed to close a book, but it only opened a new chapter. This failure could have been avoided with better protocol.”
The raw data obtained by Casabianca show that the dating varies by decades from what was published in the Nature paper. The data in red are the changes made by the laboratories between their raw radiocarbon dates and the radiocarbon dates mentioned in the Nature paper.
The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long piece of linen that features a faint image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe to be Jesus.
The 1988 research was conducted in three laboratories: the University of Arizona, Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of Oxford (UK). Each laboratory received a strip of the original cut piece, which was then reduced to smaller sizes for research.
But Dr AJ Timothy Jull, who worked on the 1988 analysis, told DailyMail.com that even if the teams were to re-run the analysis, “the results would be the same, but the data would be less dispersed”.
Dr. Jull was part of the University of Arizona team.
“Zurich was close to ours, but Oxford was a bit different,” Dr Jull said.
“But that doesn’t change the results. Others use this argument to say that there is something wrong with the measurements, Casabianca tries to do that.”
The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long piece of linen that features a faint image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe to be Jesus.
The cloth was first introduced to the public in the 1350s, when it was displayed in the small collegiate church of Lirey, a village in northern France.
Christians believe these wounds were miraculously imprinted on the shroud after Jesus rose from the dead, burned into the fibers by a blast of energy as he came back to life.
Some believe it to be a medieval forgery, something Dr. Jull and his team determined in the 1980s.
The piece was cut from the lower corner of the back of the shroud, which experts say was not repaired in the Middle Ages.
However, research related to the 1988 study said the radiocarbon dating of the shroud was done correctly.
The cloth was first introduced to the public in the 1350s when it was displayed in the small collegiate church of Lirey, a village in northern France.
In the 1988 study, scientists took a 10 mm by 70 mm piece of the corner shroud, which was cut into smaller pieces and distributed to different laboratories.
Co-author Emanuela Marinelli, an independent researcher in Italy, told DailyMail.com: ‘The sample was not representative of the entire fabric because it is different (from one corner to another).
‘The (1988) study found the date to be about 150 years old, so it is impossible to say the full age of the 14-foot cloth.
“But for us, statistical analysis is the reason to reject carbon dating.”
This technique estimates the age of organic materials based on the amount of radioactive carbon isotopes they contain.
The results were collected and collated by the British Museum in London, which held onto the raw data until Casabianca and his team issued a legal request under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the raw information for the first time.
“I received a response from the British Museum with more than 200 pages of documents,” Casabianca said.
‘Our access to the documentation held in the archives of the British Museum showed that the statistical analysis is supported by the documentation.
‘In it, we found that the samples were contaminated (including cotton and unwanted fibers), suggesting that sampling was suboptimal, to say the least.’
