The Shroud of Turin: What the Evidence Shows

The Shroud of Turin is a long linen cloth bearing the faint front and back image of a man who appears to have been scourged and crucified. Millions of people have stood before it, and many believe it is the "clean linen cloth" in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus (Matthew 27:59). Others are certain it is a medieval artwork. Few objects have drawn so much science, so much history and so much argument.

For an apologetics site the temptation runs in two directions. Believers can be tempted to treat the Shroud as scientific proof of the Resurrection; skeptics can be tempted to treat a medieval date as a blow against Christianity. Neither is honest. This article sets out what the evidence actually shows, grades the main claims on both sides, and explains why the Orthodox Church, while honouring holy objects, does not rest the faith on this cloth.

In brief

The cloth now in Turin is first securely documented at Lirey in France in the 1350s. In 1389 the local bishop, Pierre d'Arcis, told the Avignon pope that an artist had confessed to painting it. In 1988 three laboratories (Arizona, Oxford and Zurich) radiocarbon-dated samples from one corner and reported in Nature (1989) a date of AD 1260-1390 with at least 95% confidence, calling this "conclusive evidence" of a medieval origin. Critics have since argued that the sampled area was not representative (Raymond Rogers, 2005) and that the raw data are statistically inconsistent (Casabianca and colleagues, 2019); Arizona researchers replied in 2010 that their sample showed no dye or coating and came from the main cloth. How the image was formed is still argued: the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project found no paint, while the microscopist Walter McCrone found pigment, and later experimenters have produced partial replicas. The Orthodox Church honours the ancient Image of Edessa (the Mandylion) on August 16, but the theory that the Mandylion was the Turin Shroud is a modern hypothesis. No Orthodox council has made the Shroud a matter of faith.

Thesis: The best present evidence points to a medieval origin, with real but unproven questions about the 1988 sample, and the Church's faith in the risen Christ rests on the apostolic witness, not on this or any relic.

What the Gospels say about Christ's burial cloths

The Gospels describe the burial briefly. Joseph of Arimathea "wrapped it in a clean linen cloth" (Matthew 27:59). St John says that Joseph and Nicodemus "bound it in strips of linen with the spices, as the custom of the Jews is to bury" (John 19:40), and that on Easter morning Peter saw "the linen cloths lying there, and the handkerchief that had been around His head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded together in a place by itself" (John 20:6-7).¹ The Synoptic Gospels speak of a single linen cloth (Greek sindon), while John uses a plural word and mentions a separate head cloth. How these descriptions fit together, and whether they fit a single large sheet, is debated by both supporters and critics of the Shroud. The empty grave cloths mattered to the evangelist as a sign, "and he saw and believed" (John 20:8), but nothing in Scripture says the cloths bore an image or were kept.

The documented history

Lirey in the 1350s

The 1989 Nature report summarises the agreed history: the Shroud "was first displayed at Lirey in France in the 1350s and subsequently passed into the hands of the Dukes of Savoy," was brought to Turin in 1578, and was photographed by Secondo Pia in 1898, when the image was found to resemble a photographic negative.² The knight Geoffrey de Charny placed it on show at Lirey, and a pilgrim's medallion from that period, now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, shows the cloth with its double image and Charny's arms. Even the writer Jack Markwardt, who argues for the Shroud's authenticity, describes these points as undisputed.³ In 1532 a fire at Chambéry charred the folded cloth, leaving a regular series of burn marks.⁴

The d'Arcis memorandum of 1389

The strongest historical evidence against authenticity is a memorandum attributed to Pierre d'Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, addressed to Clement VII, the Avignon pope then recognised in France. The Catholic priest and historian Herbert Thurston summarised it in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912): the bishop declared the Shroud "the work of an artist who some years before had confessed to having painted it." According to Thurston, the pope allowed it to be shown but ruled that the priest should declare "that it was not the real shroud of Christ, but only a picture made to represent it."⁵

Defenders of the Shroud dispute this evidence. Markwardt argues that the nineteenth-century scholar Ulysse Chevalier combined two distinct draft memoranda into one text and dated it "end of 1389" without giving a reason.⁶ The memorandum also reports the artist's confession at second hand. Still, a contemporary bishop's claim that an artist confessed is serious evidence, and it fits the cloth's sudden appearance in the 1350s.

Before Lirey: Constantinople and Edessa

Those who believe the Shroud is ancient must explain where it was for thirteen centuries. The most cited text is the chronicle of Robert de Clari, a French knight of the Fourth Crusade. Describing the wonders of Constantinople in 1203-1204, he mentions a church of the Theotokos at Blachernae "where there was the sydoines in which ... Our Lord had been wrapped, which every Friday, raised itself upright, so that one could see the form of our Lord on it." He adds that "no one, either Greek or French, ever knew what became of" it when the city was taken.⁷ The philologist Peter Dembowski argued that Robert's word means a burial shroud bearing the form of a whole body, not a face. That is a real piece of evidence that a cloth believed to be Christ's shroud, with an image, existed in Constantinople. It does not show that this cloth is the one at Turin, and nothing documents its journey to Lirey.

{{debated: That the cloth Robert de Clari saw in Constantinople in 1203-1204 is the same cloth that appeared at Lirey in the 1350s.}}

The radiocarbon dating

In April 1988, in Turin Cathedral, a strip was cut "from a single site on the main body of the shroud away from any patches or charred areas," and pieces were sent to laboratories in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich along with three control samples of known age. The results, published in Nature in February 1989 by Damon and twenty other authors, gave "a calibrated calendar age range with at least 95% confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of AD 1260 - 1390," and the authors concluded that "the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval."⁸

{{strong: Three independent laboratories dated the sampled linen to AD 1260-1390, a range that matches the cloth's first documented appearance in the 1350s.}}

The same paper recorded a point critics later stressed. The agreement for the control samples was "exceptionally good," but "the spread of the measurements for sample 1 is somewhat greater than would be expected from the errors quoted," so the team gave the three laboratories equal weight and estimated the uncertainty from the scatter of results.⁹

The critiques

Rogers (2005). Raymond Rogers, a chemist at Los Alamos who had worked with the 1978 research team, argued in Thermochimica Acta that the radiocarbon area was "uniquely coated with a yellow-brown plant gum containing dye lakes" and concluded that "the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth." From the loss of vanillin in the linen's lignin he estimated that the cloth is "between 1300- and 3000-years old," and he called for new radiocarbon tests.¹⁰

Freer-Waters and Jull (2010). Rogers worked partly from the "Raes" threads, taken from the same corner in 1973, material the Arizona team called "less-documented." Rachel Freer-Waters and Timothy Jull of the University of Arizona examined a fragment of the actual 1988 Arizona sample, kept in Jull's custody since it arrived in Tucson. They found "no evidence for either coatings or dyes, and only minor contaminants," and concluded that the sample came "from the main part of the shroud." They also recommended that any future sampling include "another sample of the shroud away from the previous area sampled."¹¹

Casabianca and colleagues (2019). After a legal request in 2017 released the raw data held by the British Museum, T. Casabianca and three colleagues re-analysed them in Archaeometry. They concluded that "homogeneity is lacking in the data and that the procedure should be reconsidered."¹² This does not show that the cloth is ancient. It shows that the 1988 result is less tidy than "conclusive" suggests, and that different parts of the sample may have dated differently.

{{debated: Whether the 1988 radiocarbon samples were representative of the whole cloth.}}

How was the image made?

Here the claims most often repeated in popular books need the most care.

The 1978 investigation. The Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), a team of scientists, examined the cloth in 1978. Its 1981 summary stated that "No pigments, paints, dyes or stains have been found on the fibrils," that the image is a chemical change (oxidation and dehydration) in the linen fibrils themselves, and that it contains "three-dimensional information." It concluded: "the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist," and it called the image "an ongoing mystery."¹³

McCrone's dissent. The microscopist Walter McCrone, who examined STURP's sticky-tape samples, reached the opposite conclusion: that the image consists of "red ochre and vermilion" pigment particles "in a collagen tempera medium," painted in the fourteenth century. The rest of the team rejected his findings, and he rejected theirs.¹⁴

Replicas and blood patterns. In 2009 the University of Pavia chemist Luigi Garlaschelli announced a full-size reproduction made with techniques he argued a medieval artist could have used; in his 2010 paper he reported that it matched many of the original's visual and spectroscopic features; the Shroud researchers G. Fanti and T. Heimburger published comments in reply.¹⁵ In 2018 M. Borrini and L. Garlaschelli used a living volunteer to test the blood patterns and concluded that the stains on the back from the lance wound are "totally unrealistic" for a body lying on its back; again, Shroud researchers published a reply in the same journal.¹⁶

The fair summary is this. No one has yet produced a copy that every specialist accepts as matching all the cloth's features, and no one has shown that the image could not have been made by human means. "Unexplained" is an honest word for parts of the image. "Unexplainable," and still more "miraculous," go beyond the evidence.

{{debated: That the image's formation cannot be explained by any natural or artistic process.}}

The Mandylion and the Orthodox tradition

The Orthodox Church does have an ancient tradition of a cloth bearing Christ's image: the Image of Edessa, or Mandylion, the "Icon Not-Made-by-Hands." Its transfer from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 is kept as a feast on August 16. The Church's synaxarion tells how King Abgar's painter could not capture Christ's likeness, how Christ washed His face and dried it on a cloth on which His face was imprinted, and how the icon was later placed in the Pharos church of the Theotokos in Constantinople. It also records that "There are several traditions concerning what happened later" to it.¹⁷

Historians have also traced how the written accounts of the image developed. The Syriac Doctrine of Addai, which the historian J. B. Segal dates in its present form no earlier than about 400, says the king's secretary Hannan "painted a portrait of Jesus in choice paints." Segal also notes that Procopius, writing about two years after the Persian siege of Edessa in 544, describes the city's deliverance "factually," while Evagrius, fifty years later, credits it to the sacred image.¹⁸ Evagrius calls it "the divinely wrought image, which the hands of men did not form."¹⁹

In 1978 the writer Ian Wilson proposed that the Mandylion was the Turin Shroud folded so that only the face showed. That theory has been criticised in detail by the historian Andrea Nicolotti, whose study From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin (Brill, 2014) concludes that they were different objects, and even Markwardt, who defends the Shroud, rejects the identification.²⁰ The Orthodox tradition itself remembers the Mandylion as the imprint of Christ's face on a cloth, not a full-length burial sheet. Orthodox Christians can honour the feast of the Image Not-Made-by-Hands without accepting a modern theory about Turin.

{{debated: That the Mandylion of Edessa and the Shroud of Turin are the same object.}}

What the Churches have said

The Roman Catholic Church, which has kept the Shroud in Turin, does not define its authenticity. In Turin in 1998 Pope John Paul II said: "Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions," and called the Shroud, for the believer, "a mirror of the Gospel."²¹

This article found no synodal ruling by any Orthodox Church on the Shroud's authenticity, and Orthodox bishops and writers have held different views. In 2009 a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, Priest Georgi Zavershinski, told Interfax that "the Church is not in the position to approve or disprove anything" in such research, while saying that the Russian Church's attitude, which took earlier research to show that the Shroud "is not a fake," was unchanged.²² That is a press statement, not a synodal definition. The Church's devotion to Christ's burial, kept every Holy Friday, has never depended on a single relic.

Objections and replies

"The radiocarbon date proves Christianity false."

It does not. At most it shows that one linen cloth was made in the Middle Ages; the skeptic who treats that as a refutation of the Resurrection has confused a relic with the Gospel. The Church's faith in the Resurrection was preached in Jerusalem centuries before Lirey, on the testimony of named witnesses; see The Historical Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. A medieval cloth tells us about the Middle Ages, not about whether Christ rose.

"Science cannot explain the image, so it must be the Resurrection."

This is an argument from ignorance, and a risky one. If someone later reproduces the image, faith built on the gap will suffer. The Church does not build on gaps; on miracles and evidence see David Hume and Miracles and Can Miracles Really Happen?

"If the Shroud is medieval, venerating relics is foolish."

The Church distinguishes genuine relics from doubtful ones, and the misuse of a doubtful object does not discredit the practice. Honour paid to holy things passes to Christ and His saints, as the Seventh Ecumenical Council taught about icons; see the guide Do Orthodox Christians Worship Icons? But honour requires honesty, and the Church is not served by claims the evidence does not support.

What we can say confidently

• The Shroud is securely documented from the 1350s at Lirey, and in 1389 the local bishop reported that an artist had confessed to painting it.
• In 1988 three laboratories dated samples from one corner to AD 1260-1390 (95% confidence).
• The 1989 paper itself noted that the Shroud results scattered more than expected; later critics have pressed this point.
• Scientists disagree on how the image was formed; partial replicas exist, but none is universally accepted.
• The Orthodox tradition of the Mandylion concerns an image of Christ's face; its identification with the Turin Shroud is a modern theory.
• Neither the Orthodox nor the Roman Catholic Church makes the Shroud's authenticity a matter of faith.

What remains disputed

• Whether the radiocarbon samples represent the whole cloth, and whether new sampling would change the result.
• The authority and dating of the d'Arcis memorandum drafts.
• Whether the cloth Robert de Clari described in Constantinople has any connection with the Turin Shroud.
• The mechanism that produced the image and the blood marks.

Conclusion

The honest verdict is that the weight of present evidence points to a medieval origin for the Turin Shroud, while serious questions about the 1988 sample mean the matter is not closed. Christians should neither stake the faith on the cloth nor fear the laboratory. Truth cannot contradict truth, and the Lord who called Himself the Truth (John 14:6) asks nothing of His people that requires them to overstate their evidence.

The Resurrection does not hang on a piece of linen. It rests on the testimony of the apostles, kept by the Church and confirmed in the life of every generation of believers. To St Thomas, who wanted to see and touch, the risen Lord said: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29). Whatever the Shroud is, the tomb it may or may not recall is empty, and Christ is risen.

Notes

1. Matthew 27:59; John 19:40; John 20:5-8 (NKJV). Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version.
2. P. E. Damon et al., "Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature 337 (16 February 1989): 611-615, doi:10.1038/337611a0; full text at https://www.shroud.com/nature.htm.
3. Jack Markwardt, "Modern Scholarship and the History of the Turin Shroud" (2014), https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/stlmarkwardtpaper.pdf, p. 1 and note 1.
4. Herbert Thurston, "The Holy Shroud (of Turin)," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13762a.htm.
5. Thurston, "The Holy Shroud" (see note 4).
6. Markwardt, "Modern Scholarship," pp. 2-3 and notes 6-9 (see note 3).
7. Robert de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople XCII, in the literal translation of Peter F. Dembowski, "Sindon in the Old French Chronicle of Robert de Clari," Shroud Spectrum International 2 (March 1982): 13-18, https://shroud.com/pdfs/ssi02part5.pdf.
8. Damon et al., Nature 1989 (see note 2).
9. Damon et al., Nature 1989, "Results" and Table 2 (see note 2).
10. Raymond N. Rogers, "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin," Thermochimica Acta 425 (2005): 189-194, doi:10.1016/j.tca.2004.09.029.
11. Rachel A. Freer-Waters and A. J. Timothy Jull, "Investigating a Dated Piece of the Shroud of Turin," Radiocarbon 52, no. 4 (2010): 1521-1527, doi:10.1017/S0033822200056277.
12. T. Casabianca, E. Marinelli, G. Pernagallo and B. Torrisi, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data," Archaeometry 61, no. 5 (2019): 1223-1231, doi:10.1111/arcm.12467 (abstract).
13. "A Summary of STURP's Conclusions" (October 1981), written by John Heller, https://www.shroud.com/78conclu.htm.
14. McCrone Research Institute, "Shroud of Turin Research at McCrone," https://mccroneinstitute.org/research/shroud-of-turin-research-at-mccrone; Walter C. McCrone, "The Shroud of Turin: Blood or Artist's Pigment?" Accounts of Chemical Research 23, no. 3 (1990): 77-83, doi:10.1021/ar00171a004.
15. L. Garlaschelli, "Life-size Reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and its Image," Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 54, no. 4 (2010): 040301, doi:10.2352/J.ImagingSci.Technol.2010.54.4.040301 (abstract); G. Fanti and T. Heimburger, letter to the editor, Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 55, no. 2 (2011): 020102. The 2009 announcement from Pavia is the occasion of the Moscow comment in note 22.
16. M. Borrini and L. Garlaschelli, "A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin," Journal of Forensic Sciences 64, no. 1 (2019): 137-143, published online 10 July 2018, doi:10.1111/1556-4029.13867 (abstract); reply by Bevilacqua, Concheri, Concheri and Fanti, Journal of Forensic Sciences 64, no. 1 (2019): 329-332.
17. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, August 16, "Transfer of the Icon of our Lord Jesus Christ Not-Made-by-Hands from Edessa to Constantinople," https://www.oca.org/saints/all-lives/2020/08/16.
18. J. B. Segal, Edessa, "The Blessed City" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 76-78, online at https://www.knanayology.org/2-community/2b-books/edessa/files/basic-html/page89.html (and following pages).
19. Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History IV.27, trans. E. Walford (1846), https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/evagrius_4_book4.htm.
20. Andrea Nicolotti, From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin: The Metamorphosis and Manipulation of a Legend (Leiden: Brill, 2014), doi:10.1163/9789004278523; Markwardt, "Modern Scholarship," on Ian Wilson, The Shroud of Turin (1978) (see note 3).
21. John Paul II, Address in Turin Cathedral, 24 May 1998, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/travels/1998/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_24051998_sindone.html.
22. Interfax-Religion, 6 October 2009, as reproduced in "Moscow Patriarchate's Position on Shroud," Mystagogy, https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2009/10/moscow-patriarchates-position-on-shroud.html.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Evagrius Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History. Trans. E. Walford. London, 1846.
• Damon, P. E., et al. "Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin." Nature 337 (1989): 611-615.
• Shroud of Turin Research Project. "A Summary of STURP's Conclusions." 1981.

Orthodox and church sources

• Orthodox Church in America. Lives of the Saints, August 16 (Transfer of the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands).
• Interfax-Religion report on the Moscow Patriarchate, 6 October 2009.
• John Paul II. Address in Turin Cathedral, 24 May 1998.
• Thurston, Herbert. "The Holy Shroud (of Turin)." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13. 1912.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Rogers, Raymond N. "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin." Thermochimica Acta 425 (2005): 189-194.
• Freer-Waters, Rachel A., and A. J. Timothy Jull. "Investigating a Dated Piece of the Shroud of Turin." Radiocarbon 52 (2010): 1521-1527.
• Casabianca, T., et al. "Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data." Archaeometry 61 (2019): 1223-1231.
• McCrone, Walter C. "The Shroud of Turin: Blood or Artist's Pigment?" Accounts of Chemical Research 23 (1990): 77-83.
• Garlaschelli, L. "Life-size Reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and its Image." Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 54 (2010).
• Borrini, M., and L. Garlaschelli. "A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin." Journal of Forensic Sciences 64 (2019): 137-143.
• Dembowski, Peter F. "Sindon in the Old French Chronicle of Robert de Clari" (with a literal translation of Robert de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople XCII, ed. Lauer, 1924). Shroud Spectrum International 2 (1982): 13-18.
• Markwardt, Jack. "Modern Scholarship and the History of the Turin Shroud." 2014.
• Nicolotti, Andrea. From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
• Segal, J. B. Edessa, "The Blessed City". Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.