Using new scientific method, Italian researchers date Shroud of Turin to the time of Jesus Christ by Patrick Delaney for Life Site News
Italian scientist Liberato De Caro explained the X-ray method behind their peer-reviewed study, which measured the age of the Shroud’s fibers to the first century.
A recently developed scientific method revealed that the Shroud of Turin originates from the first century around the time of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Discussing the findings of their peer-reviewed study, Italian scientist Liberato De Caro told the National Catholic Register (NCR) that utilizing a technique he and his colleagues call “Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering” (WAXS), the fabric of the Shroud is about 2,000 years old.
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
This finding contradicts a well-known 1988 carbon-dating study that reported the cloth to be around 700 years old, apparently undermining the testimony of Catholic tradition that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
Having training in physics and being a researcher at Italy’s Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council in Bari since 2001, De Caro told the NCR’s Edward Pentin that the new method of evaluation involved measuring the impacts of temperature and humidity on fabrics as a means of discovering their approximate ages.
In an initial published study from 2019, the researchers “demonstrated the reliability of the new X-ray dating technique on a series of samples, taken from linen fabrics ranging in age from 3,000 BC to 2,000 AD,” De Caro explained.
The recent paper, published April 11, dated a linen sample from the Shroud by this method and placed it within the dating previously established to arrive at the first century time period.
The reliability of the new X-ray dating technique on a series of samples, taken from linen fabrics ranging in age from 3000 BC to 2000 AD (see black, red, green and blue curves in the figure below). These curves show that the sample of the Shroud of Turin (orange curve in the picture) should be much older than the approximately seven centuries indicated by the radio-dating carried out in 1988. (Photo: Liberato De Caro)
