The Shroud of Turin

Summary

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing faint front and back images of a crucified man, venerated by many Christians as the burial cloth of Jesus. Radiocarbon dating in 1988 placed the linen between 1260 and 1390, matching its first appearance in the records in the 1350s, but how the image was formed has never been established.

The date has been challenged repeatedly since 1988: on the sample, on the statistics and with other dating methods. None of the challenges has produced a competing radiocarbon result, and two examinations of the dated fragments, in 2010 and 2026, found them consistent with the main cloth.

The Catholic Church, which has owned the Shroud since 1983, has never pronounced on its authenticity. In 1998 Pope John Paul II called it "a mirror of the Gospel" and left the scientific questions to scientists.

What is documented

The cloth. The Shroud is a linen sheet woven in a herringbone pattern. The Archdiocese of Turin gives its size as 442 by 113 centimetres, with an 8-centimetre strip sewn along one side. It carries the faint frontal and dorsal image of a man who appears to have been scourged and crucified, with red-brown stains at the wounds. The image behaves like a photographic negative: its light and dark values are reversed. It also bears scorch marks from a fire in 1532.

The first record. The French knight Geoffroy de Charny placed the cloth in the church he had built at Lirey, founded in 1353. It was on show there in the 1350s. Nothing earlier in the documentary record can be securely identified with it.

Two medieval objections. In 2025 the historian Nicolas Sarzeaud published a passage from the Problemata of the French scholar Nicole Oresme, written between 1355 and 1382 and most likely after 1370. In Sarzeaud's translation, Oresme warns that many clergymen "deceive others, in order to elicit offerings for their churches", and gives as a clear case a church in Champagne where it was said the shroud of Jesus was kept. It is the earliest known written rejection of the cloth. In 1389 Pierre d'Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, wrote to Clement VII, the pope at Avignon, asking him to stop the Lirey exhibitions. The cloth, he said, was the work of an artist who had confessed some years earlier to painting it; the artist is not named. Clement did not forbid the exhibitions. He ruled that the clergy must declare aloud, whenever it was shown, that it was not the real shroud of Christ but a picture made to represent it.

The House of Savoy. Marguerite de Charny, the last of Geoffroy's descendants, removed the cloth from Lirey in 1418, and in 1453 it became the property of the House of Savoy. On 4 December 1532 a fire in the Sainte-Chapelle at Chambéry damaged it, and the Poor Clare nuns repaired it in 1534. In 1578 Duke Emanuel Philibert moved it to Turin.

The photograph. In May 1898 the amateur photographer Secondo Pia photographed the Shroud during an exhibition. On his glass negative the image appeared as a positive, a likeness far clearer than the cloth shows to the eye.

Ownership and keeping. Umberto II, the last King of Italy, died on 18 March 1983 and left the Shroud to the Holy See. The Archbishop of Turin keeps it as papal custodian. In April 1997 a fire swept the Guarini Chapel of the cathedral; firefighters broke through layers of bulletproof glass to carry the Shroud out. It is now kept in a conservation case inside a metal box, in the last chapel of the cathedral's left aisle, and is shown only when the Pope decides.

The 1978 examination. In October 1978 the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), a team of mainly American scientists, examined the cloth directly. Its 1981 summary stated that "no pigments, paints, dyes or stains have been found on the fibrils", that the image is of a real human form and "not the product of an artist", and that the blood stains are composed of haemoglobin. It called the image "an ongoing mystery". The microscopist Walter McCrone, who analysed sticky-tape samples lifted from the cloth in 1978, reached the opposite conclusion: he reported red ochre and vermilion in a gelatin medium, no blood, and a painted image. John Heller and Alan Adler of STURP published evidence for blood. The dispute was never resolved.

The radiocarbon dating. On 21 April 1988, in the cathedral sacristy, a strip about 10 by 70 millimetres was cut from one corner of the main cloth, away from patches and charred areas, and divided among laboratories at the University of Arizona, the University of Oxford and ETH Zurich. Each also received control textiles of known age. The British Museum's Michael Tite coordinated the work. The results were announced at press conferences in Turin and London on 13 October 1988 and published in Nature on 16 February 1989: a calibrated age of AD 1260 to 1390, with at least 95 per cent confidence. The 21 authors called it "conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval".

The challenges. In 2005 Raymond Rogers, a STURP chemist, argued in Thermochimica Acta that threads he had received from the sample area carried a plant gum and dye, and that the dated sample "was not part of the original cloth". The provenance of his threads has been questioned. In 2010 Rachel Freer-Waters and Timothy Jull of Arizona examined a piece split from their laboratory's 1988 sample and found no coatings or dyes and no evidence that it came from anywhere but the main cloth. In 2017 a Freedom of Information request obliged the British Museum to release the laboratories' raw data. Tristan Casabianca and colleagues (2019) and a team led by Paolo Di Lazzaro (2020) argued that the measurements are statistically heterogeneous and that the 1989 claim of conclusive evidence should be reconsidered. Bryan Walsh and Larry Schwalbe (2020) also found the data heterogeneous, proposed two possible causes, variation along the sample or differences in cleaning, and suggested experiments rather than rejecting the date. In April 2026 Freer-Waters and Jull reported that two further fragments of Arizona's 1988 samples matched the weave and fibre of the main cloth, with no cotton, no contamination and no sign of repair, while cautioning that they are a small subset.

The X-ray claim. In 2022 Liberato De Caro and colleagues measured the structural ageing of the cellulose in a single thread, taken according to the authors from near the 1988 sample area, using wide-angle X-ray scattering. They reported it compatible with an age of 2,000 years, on condition that the cloth had been kept at 20.0 to 22.5 °C and 55 to 75 per cent relative humidity through 13 centuries of unknown history. The method is new and has not been independently replicated on the Shroud.

The image studies. In 2010 the chemist Luigi Garlaschelli published a full-size reproduction made with simple materials, which he said had the Shroud's visual and spectroscopic properties; others have disputed how close it comes. In 2025 the 3D designer Cicero Moraes reported in Archaeometry that, in digital simulation, a cloth laid over a low relief produces a contact pattern more like the Shroud's image than a cloth wrapped around a body. A published critique and a reply followed in 2026.

Leading explanations

A fourteenth-century artefact. Supported by the radiocarbon date and the documentary record; the method is not established. The 1988 date, the first appearance at Lirey in the 1350s, Oresme's dismissal and d'Arcis's report of an artist's confession point the same way. How the image was made remains unsettled. Proposals include painting (McCrone), a simple pigment technique available to a medieval artist (Garlaschelli), and contact with a low relief (Moraes). Each has supporters; none is accepted as explaining every property of the image.

An ancient burial cloth. Held by many believers and by some researchers; requires the 1988 date to be wrong. This view rests on the image's unexplained properties, on the blood evidence, and on the challenges to the dating. It has not produced a radiocarbon result that competes with 1988. The historian Ian Wilson has argued since 1978 that the Shroud is the Image of Edessa, or Mandylion, a venerated cloth normally understood to have shown only the face of Jesus; this is a hypothesis connecting different objects, not a documentary chain.

The image-forming process. Not established. STURP's finding of no pigment and McCrone's finding of pigment were never reconciled. Experiments have reproduced some features of the image. None has won general acceptance as the method used.

Current status

Partially explained. The age of the linen is as well established as radiocarbon can make it, and it agrees with the documentary record: the cloth appears in the 1350s, and two fourteenth-century churchmen dismissed it as a deception. The statistical objections are real but have not produced a different date, and the dated fragments that survive have twice been found consistent with the cloth. How the image was formed is not established.

The age question would reopen only with a new radiocarbon test on fresh, independently documented samples, which the Holy See as owner would have to permit. The image question would close if a method were shown to reproduce every property of the image and gained general acceptance.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.