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Scientific interest in linen cloth began in 1898, when it was photographed by lawyer Secondo Pia. The negatives revealed the image of a bearded man with pierced wrists and feet and a bloodstained head.

Jan. 25, 2005 — The Shroud of Turin, the piece of linen long believed to have been wrapped around Jesus’s body after the crucifixion, is much older than the date suggested by radiocarbon tests, according to new microchemical research.

Published in the current issue of Thermochimica Acta, a chemistry peer- reviewed scientific journal, the study dismisses the results of the 1988 carbon-14 dating.

At that time, three reputable laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Ariz., concluded that the cloth on which the smudged outline of the body of a man is indelibly impressed, was a medieval fake dating from 1260 to 1390, and not the burial cloth wrapped around the body of Christ.

“As unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the shroud in 1988 was taken from a rewoven area of the shroud. Indeed, the patch was very carefully made. The yarn has the same twist as the main part of the cloth, and it was stained to match the color,” Raymond Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratories and former member of the STURP team of American scientists that examined the Shroud in 1978, told Discovery News.

p. [ Full Story @ Discovery.com ]

p(small). Source: Discovery.com © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc

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