Shroud of Turin

The Cloth, and Where the Record Begins

The object is a single piece of linen a little over four metres long, carrying the faint, straw-coloured image of a man laid out as if in burial, seen from the front and from the back, with marks that have been read as wounds of scourging, of a crown of thorns, of nails and of a spear thrust. It is kept in the cathedral of Turin, in the last chapel of the left aisle, and is not normally on view; the public expositions are occasional and announced by the archdiocese.

Its documented history begins in France, at Lirey in the diocese of Troyes, where it is first heard of in the middle of the fourteenth century. It was at Chambery in Savoy from 1453, survived a fire there in 1532 which charred the folds and left the row of burn marks still visible on either side of the image, and has been at Turin since 1578. That documented history carries an objection from within the church almost from the start. In 1389 the bishop of Troyes appealed to Clement VII, the Avignon pope then recognised in France, to stop the exhibitions at Lirey: the cloth, he said, was the work of an artist who had some years earlier confessed to painting it. The pope did not prohibit the exhibitions, but ruled that whenever the cloth was shown the priest must announce aloud that it was not the true shroud of Christ but a picture made to represent it. That account is not a sceptic's reconstruction — it is how the Catholic Encyclopedia itself reports the matter. There is no documentary record of the cloth before Lirey, and every proposal about the preceding thirteen centuries is a reconstruction rather than a record.

The image is why the object has not simply been filed away. When the cloth was photographed for the first time in 1898 the negative turned out to give a more lifelike face than the cloth itself does, and that is what first drew scientists to it. The team of American scientists who examined the cloth directly in 1978 published a summary of their conclusions in 1981 which said that no pigments, paints, dyes or stains had been found on the fibrils, that the image is not the product of an artist, and that how it was produced remains a mystery. The microscopist W. McCrone, working with tape samples lifted during that same examination, reported the opposite: red ochre on the body and blood image areas and vermilion on the blood areas in a collagen tempera medium, and a cloth painted in the fourteenth century. The institute he founded still publishes that conclusion in detail. Two accounts of what is on the same tapes, and they have never been reconciled. How the image formed is a genuinely open technical question, and it should not be dressed up as more than that, or less.

1988, and the Objections to It

In 1988 a sample was cut from one corner of the cloth and divided between three accelerator mass spectrometry laboratories at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich, with the British Museum coordinating and with three control samples of independently known age included alongside. The result, published in Nature in 1989, gave a calibrated calendar range of AD 1260 to 1390 at 95 per cent confidence, and the paper stated its conclusion in one line: the linen is mediaeval. That range brackets the cloth's first documented appearance almost exactly.

Two lines of objection followed and both deserve to be stated properly. The first is about the sample. R. Rogers, a chemist who had worked on the 1978 examination, published an argument in Thermochimica Acta in 2005 that the corner sampled was not representative — that it contained cotton spliced in with the linen and a dye, consistent with a mediaeval repair to a much older cloth. The second is about the statistics of the three laboratories' results, which several published analyses have argued are less mutually consistent than a single-age sample should produce.

That case has been tested rather than ignored, which is what should happen. R. Freer-Waters and A. J. T. Jull — Jull of the Arizona laboratory, and one of the authors of the 1989 paper — examined retained material from the 1988 sampling and, in a paper published in April 2026, reported that the fragments are consistent with the main body of the cloth and show no evidence of the contamination or repair the objection requires. They add their own caveat, and it should be carried with the finding: the fragments are a small and possibly non-uniform subset that may differ from other parts of the cloth. So the reweaving proposal has been examined by the laboratory that holds the material and has not been supported — which is not the same as the argument being over.

What a Protestant Reader Should Notice, Including About Itself

The first thing worth noticing is that the institution most often assumed to be defending the cloth is not doing what people assume. Speaking in the cathedral at Turin during the 1998 exposition, Pope John Paul II said that since the shroud is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on the questions it raises, and that she entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate; he urged that it be studied without pre-established positions that take for granted results that are not results. The Catholic Church has never made the shroud's authenticity an article of faith, which is not the same as never having assumed it: the Catholic Encyclopedia cited above says plainly that authenticity was taken for granted in pronouncements of the Holy See from the sixteenth century. What the Church commends it as is an object of devotion and, in that same address, a mirror of the Gospel. What is not correct is the common assumption that Catholic teaching stands or falls with this linen. It does not, and the pope who spoke in that cathedral said so in as many words.

The second is that this app's own tradition has an old and mostly unexamined instinct here, and it is worth being honest about it. Protestant readers are inclined to dismiss relics quickly, and there are good historical reasons for the reflex. But a reflex is not an argument, and it is not why the 1988 date should be taken seriously. The date should be taken seriously because three independent laboratories, working separately and against independently dated controls, all returned a mediaeval result. The paper is candid about the one soft spot in that, and an honest article has to be too: the three laboratories agreed almost exactly on the controls, and their spread on the shroud sample itself was wider than their quoted errors would lead you to expect. The stronger form of the counter-argument, though, is not that the labs were biased or sloppy but that the sample may not have represented the cloth — which is a testable claim, and has been tested, with the caveat its testers attached to their own result.

The third is what the Gospels do and do not give us to work with. They describe a linen cloth, spices, and — in the Gospel of John, at the empty tomb — the linen cloths lying there with the head cloth folded separately, which is a detail hard to square with a single unbroken sheet bearing a full-length image, though defenders of the shroud read those verses differently. That is a real exegetical question and it is not settled by either side asserting it. The deeper point is the one Jesus makes to the disciple who needed to see and touch before he would believe: blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed. A church that had the burial cloth would not be better off than one that does not, and the question the cloth finally puts to a reader is what they were hoping to find in it.

Scripture references

• John 19:40 — They bound the body in linen cloths with the spices, as the custom of the Jews is to bury
• Matthew 27:59 — Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth
• John 20:6 — Peter enters the tomb and sees the linen cloths lying
• John 20:7 — And the cloth that had been on his head, not with the linen cloths but rolled up by itself
• John 20:29 — Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed

Sources

• ScholarshipP. E. Damon et al., "Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin" — P. E. Damon and colleagues at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich, coordinated by the British Museum · Nature 337 (1989), 611-615. The abstract is open; the full paper is paywalledSupports: The 1988 test, the three laboratories, the three independently dated control samples, the paper's own note that the spread of measurements on the shroud sample was greater than the quoted errors would predict, and the conclusion that the linen is mediaeval
• ScholarshipR. Freer-Waters and A. J. T. Jull, "Analysis of textile fragments from the 1988 radiocarbon samples of the Turin Shroud" — Rachel Freer-Waters, unaffiliated, and A. J. Timothy Jull, University of Arizona · npj Heritage Science 14, article 263; published 18 April 2026. Open accessSupports: The finding that retained fragments from the 1988 sampling match the main body of the cloth and show no evidence of contamination or repair
• ScholarshipR. N. Rogers, "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin" — Raymond N. Rogers, formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a member of the 1978 examination team · Thermochimica Acta 425 (2005), 189-194. The publisher's site refuses automated requests, so no link is given. The strongest published form of the argument that the radiocarbon sample was not representative · paywalledSupports: The mediaeval-repair objection, stated by the scientist who made it
• Holding institutionPope John Paul II, address in Turin Cathedral before the Shroud, 24 May 1998 — The Holy See · The Catholic Church's own position in its own words: the shroud is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on the scientific questions, and it entrusts them to researchersSupports: That the Catholic Church has not defined the shroud as authentic and does not claim competence to do so
• Primary textSummary of STURP's Conclusions (October 1981) — The Shroud of Turin Research Project, written up by J. Heller and distributed at the team's final press conference · The 1978 examination team's own official summary, in non-technical language: no pigments, paints, dyes or stains found on the fibrils; not the product of an artist; how the image was produced remains a mysterySupports: The 1978 team's published findings, stated by the team
• Holding institutionMcCrone Research Institute, "Shroud of Turin Research at McCrone" — McCrone Research Institute, Chicago - the institute founded by W. McCrone, publishing his conclusion · The painted-image case in its own advocates' words: red ochre and vermilion in a collagen tempera, identified by polarised light microscopy from 1979 and by electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction from 1980, with the papers listedSupports: The specific findings behind the conclusion that the image is a fourteenth-century painting
• Primary textH. Thurston, "The Holy Shroud (of Turin)", Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) — Herbert Thurston, Catholic Encyclopedia volume 13, 1913, public domain, hosted at Wikisource · A Catholic reference work reporting the 1389 appeal of the bishop of Troyes to Clement VII, the artist's confession, and the pope's ruling that the cloth be shown only as a picture; also the cloth's movements from Lirey to Chambery to TurinSupports: The fourteenth-century documentary record and the objection raised inside the church at the time
• Holding institutionSanta Sindone, official site of the Archdiocese of Turin — The Shroud site of the Diocesan Commission for the Shroud, Archdiocese of Turin - the custodian · Gives the cloth's resting place, the terms of access, and the schedule of expositionsSupports: The current location of the shroud and the fact that it is not normally on view

Further reading

• Santa Sindone — the official site of the Archdiocese of Turin

Reflect

If the cloth were proved genuine tomorrow, what would change for you? If it were proved a forgery, what would change? An honest answer to both is worth more than a settled opinion about the linen.