A new report finds the Shroud of Turin dates back to the era of the earthly ministry of Jesus, contradicting 1988 evidence that dated the cloth as being centuries newer.
A new scientific procedure says fabric in the shroud is about 2,000 years old, according to a Christian Broadcasting Network report last week.
The study also analyzed traces of pollen on the shroud.
“The pollen samples that were gathered they, a lot of them, are from plants that are native to not just the Middle East, but specifically the area around Judea, Palestine, and Syria and stay where it was in that time period,” said Brian Hyland, an exhibit curator at the Museum of the Bible, according to CBN.
“There’s also pollen from the area around Constantinople. There’s a lot of pollen from Europe,” he said.
Trending:
According to CBN, that suggests the shroud had traveled from the Holy Land through what are now Turkey and France to its current home in Italy, where it has been since the 16th century.
Hyland noted that the Shroud of Turin has been controversial ever since the world became aware of its existence. The shroud first came to attention in 1354, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
“There have been questions about the veracity of this image ever since its first documented appearance in the late 14th century,” he said.
Carbon testing in 1988 claimed the shroud was a medieval creation, but that ruling has skeptics.
Do you think the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus?
“The only single sample they took did not represent anywhere else on the cloth because it had been manipulated,” said Barrie Schwortz, a photographer who had taken images of the shroud in the 1970s, according to CBN.
Schwortz, who is Jewish, pushed back on claims the shroud was a creation of Leonardo DaVinci.
“The Shroud has been publicly shown 100 years before da Vinci was born. He was a good artist, but it wasn’t that good,” Schwortz told CBN.
Schwortz said that until he saw the shroud, he was “biased against it.”
“I even said, somewhere along the line to somebody that, you know, we’ll get to Turin, we’ll give it five minutes, we’ll find the paint, we’ll come home, we’ll be done,” he said.
There is no paint on the cloth, however.
British filmmaker David Rolfe said that in a new film, “Who Can He Be,” his team produced a 3D image from data that was pulled from the fabric.
“We can see what I believe to be the body of the crucified Jesus in front of us,” he said, according to CBN.
“The only way that the image could’ve got on to that cloth is a miraculous one. A miracle that emanated from the body with unbelievable amounts of energy but within an infinitesimally short space of time,” he said.
