Date Tests Planned on Shroud of Turin

The Vatican announced Friday that three small pieces have been cut from the Shroud of Turin for carbon-14 dating tests in order to settle a long-standing mystery about the linen believed by some Christians to have been Jesus’ burial cloth.

The separate analyses will be done by scientists at the University of Arizona, Oxford University in England and the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich.

The 14-foot linen is imprinted with the faint image of a bearded man bloodied with wounds described in the Gospel accounts.

Analysis of the linen samples could confirm skeptics’ beliefs that the shroud was a marvelously conceived hoax of the Middle Ages. Its known history dates from that period, a time when Christian interest was high in “relics” from Jesus’ day.

But even if tests show that the flax used to weave the linen was harvested in the early 1st Century when Jesus lived, both scientists and church officials said the finding will not prove that the cloth was that of Jesus. However, veneration of the artifact would undoubtedly increase.

An estimated 3.3 million people viewed the shroud in October, 1978, during a 43-day exposition marking the 400th anniversary of its arrival in Turin, Italy.

The Vatican said that pieces were cut from the linen on Thursday. University of Arizona scientists Paul E. Damon and Douglas J. Donahue, who will conduct the test with the accelerator facility on the Tucson campus, were in Italy Friday and were expected to return shortly, a university spokeswoman said.

The British Museum is providing fabric samples of identical size whose dates are known so that each laboratory will not know which of the numbered pieces is from the shroud. Data will be sent to a British Museum official and a scientist at the Institute of Metrology in Turin. They will discuss laboratory results with the scientists who made the measurements. Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero, the archbishop of Turin, will announce the finding.

A volunteer team of U.S. scientists and photographic experts performed an array of non-destructive tests on the shroud in 1978. Finding no evidence of a hoax and unable to reach a consensus on how the image was formed, the team recommended carbon-14 tests as the next step.