click on pics for a larger image
Go to Here and HERE for even more analysis on this cloth
The most controversial
relic in Christendom, the Shroud of Turin - the linen cloth that covered Jesus
when he was entombed and resurrected, made its first documented appearance some
years after the suppression of the Knights
Templar. The biggest discovery didn't come until the age of cameras
when a "negative" of a picture taken of the shroud provided
incredible details never before seen by just looking at the cloth. The dispute over the
authenticity
of this oddly stained cloth dates from its
first public exposition
Many theologians and other persons
have stated that this
could not be
the real
Shroud of Our Lord
having the Saviour’s likeness thus imprinted
upon it, since the holy
Gospel made no mention
of such imprint, while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely
that the holy
Evangelists would have
omitted to record it, or that the fact should
have
remained hidden until
the present time.1
The earliest reference
to what could be the Shroud dates from
1203, when Robert
de
There are historians
who claim that folded and framed, the Shroud may have been the
object
exhibited as the Mandylion, the imprint of the face of Jesus on a cloth which,
legend
tells us, Jesus sent to King Abgar of Edessa. Linking the Shroud of
Turin and the Mandylion
is the consistent and powerful literary tradition that
neither image was ‘made by the hand of
man. Is it simply coincidence that
the known and provable history of the Mandylion completes
, with one short gap,
the earlier missing history of the Turin Shroud? Were they one and the
same?
The
last member of the de Chamey line, the 72-year-old Marguerite de Charney, was
childless when, in 1453, Duke Louis of Savoy ceded to her the Castle of
Varanbon and the revenues of the estate of Miribel in return for certain
‘valuable services’, which included Marguerite’s gift to the duke of the
Shroud. Geoffrey II de Chamey and Marguerite’s second husband, Humbert de
Villersexel, had both been created knights of the Order of the Collar of Savoy
by earlier dukes 2 Marguerite de Chamey had found a noble and trusted
family to ensure the preservation of this remarkable relic, as the House of
Savoy were Rex Deus.
By the 15th century, Church authorities had begun to refer to the relic as Jesus’ ‘burial shroud’. The theologian Francesco della Rovere wrote, in 1464, ‘This is now preserved with great devotion by the Dukes of Savoy, and it is coloured with the blood of Christ’.6 Within five years della Rovere became Pope Sixtus IV. His treatise on The Blood of Christ, published in 1468, was the first time that the Shroud was recognized as genuine by the papacy and the relic was even given its own feast day, 4 May.
Some
time in the early 1500s, the Shroud suffered a degree of damage which appears
to have been made by a red-hot poker being thrust through the folded cloth.
Ian Wilson claims that ‘it seems very likely that they are the scars of some
primitive “trial by fire” ceremony. .
In
1532 the cloth was damaged still further by a fire in the building which
caught one edge of it and scorched all 48 folds before it could be
extinguished. Fourteen large triangular-shaped patches and eight smaller ones,
made from altar cloth, were sewn over the worst of the damage, and it was
backed with a simple piece of holland cloth.
In
1578 the Duke of Savoy had the Shroud brought to Turin, where it has rested
ever since. In the final decade of the 17th century a magnificent Baroque
cathedral, dedicated to St John the Baptist, was commissioned from the
architect Guarino Guarini. The relic took up its new abode on 1 June 1694,
being carried into the building and locked behind a grille in the place of
honour above the high altar and only exposed publicly at very special events
such as important weddings in the House of Savoy, papal visits or great Church
occasions.
THE
RELIC ITSELF
The
Shroud of Turin measures 14ft 3m (4.36m) long by 3ft 7in (1.lm) wide and
consists of one single piece of cloth with the addition of a full length strip
3 .5in (8.5cm) wide joined by a single seam on the left-hand side.
Imprinted in an almost pure sepia monochrome, like a stained shadow on the
cloth, is the faint outline of the front and back of a bearded, long-haired
man laid out as if dead.” The image is subtle and, except when viewed from a
distance, very difficult to discern. Despite the poor quality of the image
there is sufficient detail in the blood-like stains to convince the devout for
many centuries that this is the burial cloth of Jesus.
The Shroud was
photographed during the 1898 exposition by an amateur photographer, Secondo
Pia. In those early days of photography nothing was ever certain until the
plates had been developed and Secondo admitted to considerable relief when he
first saw the image appear. His relief soon turned to wonder, for he was not
looking, as he had expected, at a negative version of the shadowy figure he
had seen on the cloth, but at an unmistakable and highly detailed photographic
likeness, the light and shade of which gave the figure an almost
three-dimensional quality, with the blood flows from the head, hands, feet and
side showing up with magical realism. The overall impression was of a tall,
impressively built man with a strikingly life-like face. The photographs
caused a worldwide sensation and sparked in-depth investigations that have
continued ever since. The Shroud was photographed professionally in 1931 and
this time the results were even more remarkable, for considerable advances had
been made in photographic techniques. Since then it has been photographed
twice more, in 1969 and 1973.
The
first photographs stimulated the curiosity of the medical profession,
particularly that of forensic pathologists and anatomists. Yves Delage,
Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Sorbonne in Paris, was the first to
announce his findings publicly. On 21 April 1902 he gave a lecture entitled
‘The image of Christ visible on the Holy Shroud of Turin’. Not
surprisingly he had an unusually large and attentive audience. The professor
explained that, from a medical point of view, the wounds and anatomical data
recorded on the Shroud were so accurate that it seemed impossible that they
could be the work of an artist. He continued by explaining how difficult and
utterly pointless it would have been for an artist to depict such a figure in
a negative manner and that, furthermore, as there was no trace of any known
pigment on the cloth, he was convinced that the image found upon it must be
that of Jesus, created by some physio-chemical process that had taken place in
the tomb.
Ber here - it is MY opinion , having a degree in physics and having been heavily involved in nuclear physics as well, that when God resurrected Jesus; a great burst of electomagnetic radiation emanated from all parts of his body, through the cloth, which made the imprint on the cloth that no one could really see until a photographic negative was taken of it in 1898. Electromagenetic radiation is just like light coming from a light bulb, the microwave energy that cooks your hot dog or delivers signals to your cellphone; differing only in frequency, wavelength, source and of course energy level. Electromagnetic radiation is a photon of energy traveling the speed of light in a sine wave through space with no mass. The X-Ray your dentist uses to search for cavities which marks the photographic plate is a good example of electromagnetic radiation in the form of x-rays, created by a beam of electrons striking a tungsten surface. Notice that your dentist looks at a negative to discern the cavity. It is strange God didn't allow such details to be seen and witnessed before the advent of the camera. But then, many things are being revealed by Him today that were unknown yesterday.
Delage’s lecture
caused an uproar and Marcelin Berthelot, the secretary of the Academy, refused
to publish the text of it in full. With the publication of the second set of
photographs, the Shroud’s authenticity began to gain far wider acceptance
among the medical profession. Research by Dr Pierre Barbet of St Joseph’s
Hospital in Paris led to the conclusion that the wounds depicted on it were
genuinely those of a crucified man.
These results were confirmed
by the Cologne radiologist Professor Hermann Moedder and Dr JudicaCordiglia,
the professor of forensic medicine of the University of Milan. In the United
States further study was made on the bloodstains by Dr Anthony Sava of
Brooklyn. Most of the present-day medical opinion rests on research carried
out by Dr Robert Bucklin of Michigan who now resides in California.
From Ber again - It should be noted that the latest DNA analysis of the
bloodstains found on the shroud of Turin also came up with only 24 chromosones
(23 from Mary and a y to make him a him) which coincides with the blood
testing done of the dried blood found on the mercy seat of the ark of the
convenant, which was found 25' under the crucifixion post. Remember the
earthquake that occurred as Jesus was near the end; it opened up a crack in
the rock beneath the crucifixion post and when the Roman soldier speared Jesus
in the side; his blood and bodily fluids fell down the 25' crack and landed on
the ark of the convenant that had been placed there almost 600 years
beforehand. It appears the immaculate conception holds more truth that the Rex
Deus theory that Mary was impregnated by the high priest Gabriel at the Temple
School before being handed over to Joseph for marriage. God makes these things
known in due time.
A life-size model of the head portrayed on the Shroud was made by the British photographer Leo Vala, who produced a three-dimensional image. The distinguished ethnologist, Professor Canton S. Coon of Harvard, who studied these photographs, described the face as that ‘of a physical type found in modern times among Sephardic Jews and noble Arabs’ The wounds depicted on the head, according to Dr David Willis, cannot be described except in the context of the crown or cap of thorns described in the Gospels. Marks on the back and front of the body from the shoulders downwards, found in groups of three, have been described by doctors as being physiologically accurate representations of flogging. Bruising which is consistent with carrying the crossbeam of a cross has also been identified. Professor Judica-Cordiglia has classified the damage to the knees of the man in the image as being the result of repeated falls.
THE
EVIDENCE OF CRUCIFIXION
The
wounds deriving from the crucifixion itself have naturally attracted
considerable attention. The flow of blood originating from the wound in the
left wrist indicates that at the time of bleeding the arm must have been
raised at an angle between 55 and 65 degrees from the vertical. This is
consistent with crucifixion, as in order to maintain his breathing the victim
would have flexed his elbows to raise his body and so bring relief to his
labouring lungs. Contrary to many medieval depictions of the crucifixion, the
nail wounds on the Shroud are on the wrist and not the hand. This above all is
a further indication of authenticity, as nailing through the hands would not
have supported the weight of the body. According to Dr Pierre Barbet, who
studied the wounds in the 1930's, the soldiers who had nailed the victim to
the cross were experienced men who knew their anatomy. Barbet had experimented
in reproducing the wounds by nailing a recently amputated arm at the same
point as that on the Shroud image. The nail passed through a gap in the bones
of the wrist known as ‘the space of destot’.
The
most unexpected proof that derived from Barbet’s work was the contraction of
the
A
clear wound is visible on the left-hand side of the image between the fifth
and sixth rib which, due to mirror image reversal, would have been on the
right side of the victim. The blood flow from the wound, which must have been
inflicted when the body was erect, is broken by some clear areas which are
believed to show the mixture of a clear fluid with the blood24 which,
according to the German radiologist Professor Moedder, emanated from the
pleural sac. Dr Anthony Sava noted that there is often an accumulation of
fluid in the pleural cavity as a response to injury. He is of the opinion that
the scourging which is indicated by the marks on the back, shoulders and front
of the body were the most probable cause of the accumulation of fluid in the
pleural cavity and this trauma-induced pleurisy was the principal cause of
death, which was only exacerbated by the crucifixion. The consensus that
arises from the medical experts who have examined the photographic evidence of
the Shroud is that the cloth was, beyond all reasonable doubt, in contact with
a victim of crucifixion.
Jewish
custom and the Gospels show that the body of Jesus would have been laid out
full-length in the tomb prepared by Joseph of Arimathea. The position of the
body with the hands crossed over the pelvic area is identical to that
discovered by Father de Vaux of the Ecole
THE
FORENSIC TESTS
In
June 1969 a commission of specialists studied the Shroud so that they might
recommend suitable tests in order to establish its nature and provenance. The
commission was convened in secret, but the news leaked out and the cardinal
and the custodians of the Shroud were accused of acting ‘like thieves in the
night’ The commission reported on 17 June, noting that the Shroud was in an
excellent state of preservation, and recommended tests which would require
minimal samples of the cloth. The arrangement for taking samples was kept
secret and was conducted on 24 November 1973, after a two-day exposition for
the television cameras.
Seventeen
samples of thread were removed from different areas on the Shroud, with great
care being taken to avoid the slightest possibility of contamination. An
expert from the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology, Professor Gilbert Raes,
had joined the team and for his benefit, two samples, one of 1/2 x 1 3/4in (13
x 40mm) and the other of 1/3 x 1 3/4in (10 x 40mm), were taken from one side
of the cloth. To add to these the professor had been given two individual
threads to examine. One of 12 mm in length was taken from the weft and the
second of 13 mm from the warp. The overall style of weave of the cloth was
that of a three-to-one herringbone twill, which was used at the time
The
Swiss criminologist, Dr Max Frei, took samples of some of the particles
adhering to the cloth and was able to identify small particles of mineral,
fragments of hair and fibres deriving from plants, bacterial spores, spores
from mosses and fungi, and pollen grains from flowering plants. Some of the
pollens were halophytes from desert varieties of tamarix, suaeda and artemisia,
which are to be found almost exclusively growing around the shores of the
Dead Sea. Frei stated simply:
These plants are
of great diagnostic value for our geographical studies as identical desert
plants are missing in all the other countries where the Shroud is believed to
have been exposed in the open air. Consequently, a forgery, produced somewhere
in France during the Middle Ages, in a country lacking these typical
halophytes could not contain such characteristic pollen grains from the
deserts of Palestine.
Pollen
from the surface of the Shroud includes six species of plant that are
exclusively Palestinian in origin. He also states that there is pollen from a
significant number of plants from the Anatolian Steppes of Turkey, as well as
eight species of Mediterranean plants that are consistent with the Shroud’s
admitted exposure in France and Italy.
In March 1977 the United States hosted a scientific conference of research on the Turin Shroud which was attended by clergy from different denominations and a large number of scientists, including Dr Robert Bucklin, the pathologist, and Professor Joseph Gambescia.
The
majority of the scientists were from a diverse range of backgrounds, which
included the US Atomic Energy Commission, the Pasadena Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, the Albuquerque Sandia Laboratory and the spectroscopy division of
the Los Alamos Laboratory Bishop John Robinson was deeply impressed not only
with the calibre of the scientists involved but also with the seriousness with
which they approached the question of the authenticity of the relic. He
stated:
‘There is no one in this thing who is being either gullible or just
dismissive.’ The physicist Dr John Jackson and the aerodynamicist Dr Eric
Jumper reported that the image had not been created by direct contact but by
some form of emanation from the body and that there was a precise relationship
between the intensity of the image and the degree of separation between the body
and the cloth.
Dr
Jackson then used a 3 x 5in (7.5 x 12.5cm) transparency of the Shroud in
a modern Interpretation Systems VP-8 Image Analyzer to display a figure in
perfect three-dimensional relief. An ordinary photograph analysed by the same
machine simply does not carry sufficient information regarding distance and
proportion to create such an accurate image. However, there was one strange
anomaly in this image; the eyes displayed a curious unnatural bulge as if
something had been laid upon them. Jackson discovered that it was a
long-standing Jewish custom to lay coins or a broken potsherd over the eyes of a
corpse prior to burial. He realized that a coin laid over the eyes in this way
would exactly match these unnatural bulges.
As a result of the
American experiments, the hardened sceptic, Dr John Robinson, was moved to claim
that with the accumulated evidence
THE
CARBON DATING
After
the death of ex-King Umberto of Italy in 1983, the Shroud of Turin passed into
the hands of the Vatican, who gave permission for carbon dating as a result of
intensive lobbying from a wide spectrum of interested parties. Three
laboratories were involved, the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and the Oxford Research Laboratory.
The
samples were taken in total secrecy, but the Church did allow representatives
from all three laboratories to be present. One 2 3/4in (7cm) sample was cut from
one corner and divided into three. Each piece was sealed in appropriate
containers, one for each of the laboratories concerned. The whole process was
videotaped. The results of the carbon dating were announced by Cardinal
Anastasio Ballestrero in Turin on 13 October 1988 and later the same day by Dr
Tite of the British Museum Research Laboratory, who had supervised the entire
process. The results disclosed that it was 99.9 per cent certain that the Shroud
of Turin had its origins in the period from 1000—1500 CE and 95 per
cent certain that it dated from somewhere between 1260 and 1390. The world
reeled with shock from the announcement that the Shroud of Turin had been
scientifically shown to be a fake. The papal hierarchy’s attitude was oddly
ambivalent. Professor Luigi Gonella, the scientific adviser to the Vatican, made
a strange comment: ‘The tests were not commissioned by the Church and we are
not bound by the results.’
Journalists
and fantasists had a field day; articles on the dating of the Shroud were soon
replaced by multiple allegations of conspiracy concerning the tests. Brother
Bruno Bonnet-Eymard, the extreme
The
German authors, Holger Kersten and Elmar Gruber, wrote that the carbon-dating
results were rigged by the scientists acting in collusion with the Church. For
reasons that are completely unexplained, the video cameras had been switched off
after the samples had been taken and were not switched on again until after they
had been sealed into their containers. Thus there was ample opportunity for a
deliberate breach of protocol and for Tite to have switched the samples as has
been alleged by Brother Bonnet-Eymard. They also allege that there are serious
discrepancies between the descriptions of the samples that were taken and those
made by the scientists in respect of the samples that they had received. Viewed
from the perspective of the hidden streams of spirituality, the motivation they
ascribe to the Church to explain this alleged conspiracy is particularly
interesting, for they assert that the Church wished to discredit the Shroud
because it proves that Jesus was still alive when he was taken down from the
cross.39
THE
CONTROVERSY REOPENS
The
validation of the carbon dating by three leading laboratories of international
repute should have put an end to the argument over the authenticity of the
Shroud once and for all. However, an American scientist made a discovery which
appears to discredit the results. Carbon dating techniques are subject to
massive distortion by extremely minute amounts of contamination, which is why
the samples used for dating the Shroud
Many
commentators, including Ian Wilson, have described the holy relic as having ‘a
damask-like sheen’.41 This shiny appearance has recently been discovered to
arise from a natural growth of microbiological organisms which completely
envelop each constituent thread of the cloth. The extent of this contamination,
which has been proven to be completely resistant to the cleansing methods used
by the three authorized laboratories, is such that what was in fact being tested
was slightly less than 40 per cent Shroud material and more than 60 per cent
living organism. Recent tests have proved that the cleansing agents
used by the laboratories doing the carbon dating were completely ineffective in
respect of the microbiological organisms coating the Shroud, but do tend to
dissolve part of the cellulose from the flax, thus increasing the distortion
created by the microbiological coating. The end result is that
there is such a gross distortion of the results that the whole question of the
age and authenticity of this controversial relic is still wide open.
The
existence of a microbiological coating of living organisms has already been
demonstrated on jade and stone carvings from the Mayan civilization in
Mesoamerica and on mummy wrappings from ancient Egypt. The initial discoveries
that led to this re-evaluation of carbon dating techniques were made by Dr
Leoncio A Garza-Valdes from San Antonio, who held the chair of microbiology at
the Health Sciences Centre of the University of Texas. He noticed that jade and
stone carvings of the Mayans all had a particularly lustrous sheen. He found
that the carvings had been coated by millions of bacteria which produce a
pinkish pigment and also by some fungi which varied in colour from dark brown to
black. This strange mixture combined to form a yellowish ‘plastic coat’ over
the entire surface of the carving and the resultant lustrous gloss he called a
‘bioplastic coating’. One of the artifacts he
He
then proceeded to study the textile wrappings on two very different Egyptian
mummies, one of a 13-year-old girl which was found during excavations by Sir
Flinders Petrie and which now rests in the Manchester Museum in England, the
other of an ibis from his own private collection. Both the mummy and the
wrappings of the girl were carbon dated by the University of Manchester with
disturbing results. The bones were dated to 1510 BCE but the wrappings to 255
CE — a discrepancy of more than 1,700 years. In January 1996
Dr Garza-Valdes discovered that the flax fibres making up the cloth all carried
a thick bioplastic coating similar to those he had found on other ancient
textiles. Similar tests were performed on the mummified ibis and the presence of
a bioplastic coating on the fibres of the bird’s wrapping was also clearly
established. When both the ibis mummy and the wrappings were carbon dated the
age discrepancy between the wrapping and the bone was 400—700 years.
The
samples of the Shroud taken for radio carbon dating in 1988 were cut by
Professor Giovanni Riggi Numana who showed small fragments of the original
samples to Dr Garza-Valdes as well as pieces of Scotch tape with blood samples
taken from the back of the head of the image. Riggi removed a thread from one of
the original samples which Dr Garza-Valdes placed under the microscope and
immediately discerned bioplastic coating completely covering the fibres.46 He is
of the opinion that if the carbon dating tests were to be repeated today, in
exactly the same manner as they were conducted in 1988, the results would
indicate an even later date because the bacteria have multiplied considerably in
the last 12 years and will have skewed the date even further. He has been able
to culture the bacteria from the Shroud and prove that they are still
There
are already conflicting scientific reports in this respect. The Italian
scientist Dr Bauma-Bollone reports that these stains were human blood of the AB
group. Drs Adler and Heller, examining the same tapes used by Dr
McCrone, supported the statements of their Italian colleague, that these were
indeed bloodstains. Dr Garza-Valdes examined the sample given to him by
Professor Riggi and proved that it contained human blood of the AB group, which
has historically been the most common blood group found amongst Jewish people.
He was able to state that the bloodstains were ancient because of the degree of
degradation in the small amount of blood he had found on his sample. He also
examined everything else that could be found on the samples and Scotch tape
provided by Riggi. In the sample taken from the occipital area of the image he
found several microscopic tubules of wood which, if the Shroud is authentic,
could only have come from the part of the cross that Jesus carried to Golgotha.
These tubules proved to be of oak.
Dr
Garza-Valdes’ research was published early in 1996 in an article which
described his work on the Mayan artefacts and the Shroud of Turin, including the
results of the DNA testing of the blood samples. The front cover of the journal
carried the facial image of Jesus taken from the Shroud over the caption
‘Secrets of the Shroud — Microbiologists discover how the Shroud of Turin
hides its true age’. The article concluded that the Shroud of Turin is many
centuries older than its carbon date would suggest. Even Dr Harry Gove of
Rochester University in America, the prime inventor of the methodology used to
carbon date the Shroud, was quoted as saying ‘This is not a crazy idea’.
Thanks to the immaculate research by the American microbiologist the
THE
HIDDEN MESSAGE OF THE SHROUD
If
we first assess the scientific comment in chronological order we start by
considering the words of Professor Yves Delage of Paris, who claimed in 1902
that the wounds and anatomical data recorded on the Shroud are so accurate that
it seemed impossible to conceive that they could be the work of an artist. The
research by Dr Pierre Barbet concluded that the wounds depicted on the relic
were genuinely those of a crucified man and these results were confirmed by
Professor 1-Iermann Moedder of Cologne, Dr Judica-Cordiglia, professor of
forensic medicine, Dr Anthony Sava of Brooklyn, and Dr Robert Bucklin of
California. Then we have to include in our deliberations the views of the
ethnologist Professor Coon of Harvard, who described the three-dimensional image
derived from the face on the Shroud as ‘of a physical type found in modern
times among Sephardic Jews and noble Arabs’. The professional opinion of Dr
David Willis and Professor Judica-Cordiglia in respect of the wounds depicted on
the Shroud are given further credence by the work of Dr Pierre Barbet, whose
experimentation on amputated limbs replicated many of the depicted details which
could not possibly have been known by any artist of the medieval era.
The comparative studies of the weave of the cloth indicate that the cotton used derived from the Middle East, not Europe. Dr Max Frei’s analysis of the small particles found on the Shroud indicate that the relic had been exposed to the air in the desert areas near the shores of the Dead Sea. The experiments in technological image processing conducted in 1976 moved Dr John Robinson to state unequivocally that the burden of proof had shifted and that it was now up to those who doubted the Shroud’s authenticity to prove their case rather than the reverse.
We believe that it is now almost certain that the Shroud of Turin
is genuine, that it IS the shroud or cloth in which Jesus was wrapped
when he was taken down from the cross nearly 2,000 years ago or used to cover
him with when he was entombed and resurrected.
The resurrection, in my opinion, is the only means by which such detailed
imagery of Jesus could have been transferred to this cloth. There are
those in the Rex Deus lineage who claim Jesus was NOT dead when taken down from
the cross; and the anointment with oil was to bring him back to health, but it
does not account for the details found upon the cloth which could only have come
from an intense radiation occurring during the resurrection; and certainly no
one would get up and walk away from that ordeal a couple days later.
– Matthew 27:57-60
With Easter and Passover just two months away, the Shroud of Turin is getting more attention than ever before, with many converts to the belief it may indeed be the burial cloth of Jesus.
What is the shroud? It is an ancient, sepia-colored, rectangular, 14.3 by 3.7-foot linen cloth woven in a three-to-one herringbone twill composed of flax fibrils with the front and the back image of a naked man with his hands folded across his groin.
While some consider it to be the burial cloth of Jesus left behind following His resurrection, others deny Jesus, arguably the most famous character in history, even existed.
For many years, some dismissed the shroud as a medieval forgery. That possibility becomes more remote with every scientific test to which the artifact is subjected, leaving researchers baffled about how it could have been created, aside from the supernatural power of a resurrection.
Here then are nine reasons the shroud is gaining more currency as the real deal:
1. Last summer, researchers from the Institute of Crystallography said they experimented with blood serum extracted from the cloth that suggests the person was suffering before death. They concluded it was the funeral fabric of a tortured man. Researchers there said these particles, called “nanoparticles,” were a “peculiar structure, size and distribution,” according to University of Padua professor Giulio Fanti. Tests on the nanoparticles reveal that they are not typical of the blood found in a healthy person. Instead, they show high levels of substances called creatinine and ferritin. Both are found in patients who suffer severe and forceful traumas such as torture.
“Hence, the presence of these biological nanoparticles found during our experiments point to a violent death for the man wrapped in the Turin Shroud,” Fanti said.
Fanti said the latest discovery debunks the age-old claim that someone simply painted the image on the shroud. The characteristics of these nanoparticles “cannot be artifacts made over the centuries on the fabric of the shroud,” he said.
“These findings could only be revealed by the methods recently developed in the field of electron microscopy,” said Carlino.
He said the research marked the first study of “the nanoscale properties of a pristine fiber taken from the Turin Shroud.”
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