Friday, April 17, 2009

Turin Shroud could be real, says scientist

Nothing particularly surprising in this, first reported a week ago (on Good Friday)

Turin Shroud COULD be real, says scientist who originally said it was a medieval fake
By Niall Firth (Last updated at 1:39 PM on 10th April 2009)
To believers it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, miraculously marked with his image. But the Turin shroud was widely dismissed as a hoax in 1988 when scientific tests found it could not be more than 1,000 years old. Now one of the scientists who first studied 12 foot-long sheet has spoken - from beyond the grave - of how he came to believe that it could be genuine. A video made shortly before Raymond Rogers died in 2005 has been discovered, in which the U.S. chemist reveals his own tests show the relic to be much older - dating back to between 1,300 and 3,000 years ago...(Read the whole article here.)

3 comments:

Canon Tallis said...

I am very glad that you found this, Father. I had scientist friends who at the time of the previous tests were not convinced of their validity when some of the other evidence pointed to a much earlier date.

Now what I am going to wonder is whether the patches were deliberately picked to be tested rather than something clearly part of the original.

Fr. Robert Hart said...

I suspect the whole thing was deliberate to the point of fraud back in '88. The problem is, if it really came from later times, it would still be inexplicable, and most likely a miracle.

Canon Tallis said...

The evidence which they ignored, as I remember it, was that of the pollen found in the fabric which was indicative of an Israeli origin.