In the Cathedral of Turin, it seems, there is a canvas in which the body of Jesus Christ was actually wrapped. The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth 437 centimeters long and 111 centimeters wide. It is kept in the Italian city of Turin in the Cathedral of John the Baptist.
On the canvas there are two negative misprints of the human body with traces of mutilations - in front and behind. Some believe that it was in this canvas that the Savior taken from the cross was wrapped, whose body was imprinted on the fabric in a supernatural way.
Skeptics doubt it. And they suspect that the shroud is still fake. That is, the image on it, if not drawn, is somehow obtained artificially. Both sides have fiercely argued for years.
And now new results have appeared - in favor of those who believe in the authenticity of the Turin Shroud. They were presented by scientists from the University of Padua.
Professor Giulio Fanti, an expert in mechanics and thermal measurements at the University of Padua's Engineering Faculty, assures that the fabric of the Turin Shroud was made during the time of Jesus Christ. And even earlier - about 3 centuries before his birth. But in any case, the shroud is not younger than the 4th century AD.
The professor and his colleagues used forensic approaches to analyze the fibers of the Shroud stored in Turin. Using infrared spectroscopy, they compared these fibers to other ancient designs. And they are 95 percent confident in their results.
Skeptics cite studies from 1988, when three independent laboratories carried out radiocarbon dating of tissue. And it gave a result: the shroud was made in the period from 1260 to 1390.
Giulio Fanti knows about such a "sentence." But he believes that the results of radiocarbon dating were distorted by the effects of fire and water on the tissue - it was damaged in a fire. Moreover, the shroud was boiled in sunflower oil, getting confused to clean it from soot.
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The professor outlined his findings in the book "The Mystery of the Shroud" (Mistero della Sindone), co-authored with the journalist Saverio Gaeta. The publication of the book is timed to coincide with the display of the Shroud of Turin, which will take place on March 30 - on the eve of Catholic Easter. It will be possible to see the relic as part of a group of 300 people, which must include young people, sick and disabled people.
Photo: Vatican
Not the first time
Two years ago, believers were encouraged by the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Enea). It published a report on five years of research on the Shroud of Turin, which was hosted by a group of American scientists STURP (Shroudof Turin Reasearch Project). It was their conclusions and their own analysis that allowed the authors of the report - the scientists di Lazzaro, Murra, Santoni, Nikelatti and Baldacchini - to declare: the Turin Shroud is not a fake.
“The double image, front and back, of a person subjected to torture and crucifixion, which is visible on the linen fabric of the Turin Shroud,” says the report, “has numerous unusual characteristics, chemical and physical, which at present cannot be reproduced in laboratory conditions, cannot be repeated and, therefore, falsify the images on the shroud. But this also does not allow formulating a reliable hypothesis about the mechanism of the imprint formation. Today science is unable to explain how the body imprint was formed on the Shroud. It was only established that the body was on the canvas for no more than two days.
But the origin of the imprint on the Shroud is the main secret. And it remains undisclosed.
