Scientists are calling for a new analysis of the Shroud of Turin as mounting evidence casts doubt on the idea that it is a forgery.
It is also alleged that a groundbreaking 1988 study in the UK used flawed data to show that the shroud was a medieval forgery and not the cloth in which Jesus was buried.
A new study by researchers from France and Italy has revisited these 50-year-old findings and claims to have discovered discrepancies in the data that have not been made public and that raise doubts 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 burial cloth on which Jesus was buried is older.
But Casabianca — who was an atheist until he began examining the shroud 20 years ago — said these factors could not be ruled out “without a new analysis.”
The research in question is a 1988 study that performed carbon dating on a piece of the shroud. Pictured are the sample containers that held strips of the cloth
Graphic designer Otangelo Grasso created a progression of what Jesus might have looked like based on the image on the shroud
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 certainty” that the relic was created sometime between 1260 and 1390 AD, long after Christ’s resurrection.
This conclusion was reached after analyses were performed on a corner of the ancient tissue by three different laboratories: at the universities of Arizona, Zurich and Oxford.
But after Casabianca obtained the raw data, he discovered that the results varied by decades.
According to an estimate from Zurich in the Nature study, the cloth was up to 733 years old, but in the raw data it was 595 years old.
The Oxford Shroud sample was between 730 and 795 years old, but the raw dates contain estimates that are off by up to 55 years.
The Arizona linen was between 591 and 701 years old, with the raw data showing a difference of as much as 59 years.
Even if this would mean that the cloth was made in the Middle Ages, hundreds of years after Jesus, it raises doubts, according to Casabianca.
He further explained that “the lack of precision seriously affects the reliability of the 95 percent,” suggesting it was no more than 41 percent.
Anything below 60 percent indicates significant disagreement or inconsistency in results, according to the 2019 study published in Archaeometry.
“We can say with certainty that the 1988 carbon dating was a failure,” said Casabianca, who works as an independent researcher in France.
“The intention was to close a book, but it only opened a new chapter. This failure could have been avoided with a better protocol.”
The raw dates obtained by Casabianca showed that it differed by decades from what was published in the Nature study. The red ones are changes that the labs made 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 with a faint image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe is Jesus
The 1988 study was conducted in three labs: the University of Arizona, Zurich in Switzerland, and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Each lab received a strip of the original piece that had been cut, which was then reduced to smaller sizes for the study
But Dr AJ Timothy Jull, who worked on the 1988 analysis, told DailyMail.com that even if the teams were to redo the analysis, ‘the results would be the same, but the data would be less scattered.’
Dr. Jull was part of the team at the University of Arizona.
“Zurich was close by, but Oxford was just a little bit different,” said Dr Jull.
“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 four-meter-long piece of linen with a vague image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe is Jesus.
The canvas was first shown to the public in the 1350s, when it was displayed in the small collegiate church of Lirey, a village in northern France.
Christians believe that these wounds were miraculously left in the shroud after Jesus rose from the dead. When he came back to life, the fibers of his body were seared by a blast of energy.
Some believe it is a medieval forgery. Dr. Jull and his team discovered this in the 1980s.
The piece was cut from the lower back corner of the shroud, which experts say was not repaired in the Middle Ages
However, a study involved in the 1988 study indicated that the carbon dating of the shroud had been performed correctly
The canvas was first presented to the public in the 1350s, when it was displayed in the small collegiate church in Lirey, a village in northern France
In the 1988 study, scientists removed a 10 by 70 mm section from the corner of the shroud, cut it into smaller pieces and distributed them to different laboratories.
Co-author Emanuela Marinelli, an independent researcher in Italy, told DailyMail.com: ‘The sample was not representative of the whole fabric because it is different [from one corner from another].
‘The [1988] Research has shown that the dating is approximately 150 years. It is therefore impossible to determine the age of the entire 4.2 meter long cloth.
“But for us it was the statistical analysis that was the reason to reject carbon dating.”
This technique estimates the age of organic materials based on the amount of radioactive carbon isotope they contain.
The results were collected and compiled by the British Museum in London. The museum retained the raw data until Casabianca and his team filed 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 over 200 pages of documents,” Casabianca said.
‘Our access to the documentation in the British Museum archives showed that the statistical analysis is supported by the documentation.
‘We find that the samples were contaminated (including cotton and waste fibres). This suggests that sampling was suboptimal to say the least.’
Dr Jull told DailyMail.com that in 2010 he conducted another examination to characterise the shroud samples, during which he found ‘strange bits of cotton’.