By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE
For centuries, Catholics have flocked to the Italian city of Turin to be in the presence of its famous shroud.
The venerated piece of linen, measuring 14ft 5in by 3ft 7in, bears a faint image of the front and back of a man – interpreted by many as Jesus Christ.
Believers say it was used to wrap the body of Christ after his crucifixion, leaving his bloody imprint, like a photographic snapshot.
Despite repeated ‘hoax’ claims, a scientist is now convinced that the object really did wrap Jesus – and says there’s an ‘enormous quantity of evidence’ to prove it.
Professor Liberato De Caro, a committed Catholic and a deacon in his local church, rubbished claims that it was produced in medieval times with his recent study.
Professor De Caro told The Telegraph: ‘If I had to be a judge in a trial, weighing up all the evidence that says the shroud is authentic and the little evidence that says it is not, in all good conscience I could not declare that the Shroud of Turin is medieval.
‘It would not be right, given the enormous quantity of evidence in favour of it.’
Professor De Caro’s recent x-ray study that found the Shroud of Turin does indeed date back 2,000 years – to around the time Christ lived and died.
We also know from the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) in the 1970s and 1980s that the holy fabric was indeed stained with blood.
The STURP found that the stains have traces of hemoglobin – the protein in red blood cells that delivers oxygen.
The stains also gave a positive test for serum albumin, the most abundant protein in human blood plasma.
In 1981, in its final report, the STURP team wrote: ‘We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man.
‘It is not the product of an artist.’
So until his new study, ‘the only missing piece of the puzzle was dating’, Professor De Caro told MailOnline.
He said that everything on the shroud is ‘highly correlated to what the Gospels tell about Jesus Christ’ and his death.
The cloth appears to show faint, brownish images on the front and back, depicting a gaunt man with sunken eyes who was about 5ft 7in to 6ft tall.
Markings on the body also correspond with crucifixion wounds of Jesus mentioned in the Bible, including thorn marks on the head, lacerations on the back and bruises on the shoulders.
Historians have suggested that the cross he carried on his shoulders weighed around 300 pounds, which would have left bruises.
The Bible states Jesus was whipped by the Romans, aligning with the lacerations on the back, who also placed a crown of thorns on his head before the crucifixion.
Research in the 1980s appeared to debunk the idea it was real after dating it to the Middle Ages, hundreds of years after Christ’s death – suggesting it was an elaborate medieval hoax.
But the Italian academics using a new technique involving x-rays to date the material confirmed it was manufactured around the time of Jesus about 2,000 years ago.
Professor De Caro and his team at the Institute of Crystallography in Bari, Italy used a technique called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) on a tiny sample from the shroud, smaller than a grain of rice.
WAXS can date ancient linen threads by ‘inspecting their structural degradation’ at a microscopic level.
Part of the analysis looked at the linen’s cellulose patterns, the long chains of sugar molecules linked together.
These sugar molecules break over time, showing how long a garment or cloth has been around.
Based on the amount of breakdown, the team determined that the shroud was kept at temperatures of about 72.5°F and a relative humidity of around 55 per cent for 13 centuries before it arrived in Europe.
If it had been kept in different conditions, the aging would be different.
Researchers then compared the cellulose breakdown in the shroud to other linens found in Israel that date back to the first century.
They concluded that the structural degradations were ‘fully compatible’ with those of the other linen sample – dated, according to historical records, to AD 55-74.
The team also compared the shroud with samples from linens manufactured between 1260 and 1390 AD, finding none were a match.
The new findings lend credence to the idea that the faint, bloodstained pattern of a man with his arms folded in front were left behind by Jesus’s body.
They also contradict findings in the 1980s that the shroud dates back nowhere near as far as the time of Jesus.
At the time, researchers analysed a small piece of the shroud using carbon dating and determined the cloth seemed to have been manufactured sometime between 1260 and 1390 – during the medieval period.
However, the authors of the new study claim carbon dating would not have been reliable because the fabric has been exposed to contamination through the ages that cannot be removed.
What’s more, there is no way to explain how it could have been forged with medieval technology.
‘While authenticity cannot be established, it should be fairly easy to determine if it is a medieval forgery,’ said Tim Andersen, research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved with the new study.
‘Yet, despite decades of scientific testing and peer-reviewed articles on it, that conclusion has never been demonstrated.
‘Rather, the evidence has continually pointed away from any known forging
