Newspaper Story Stirs New Furor Over Shroud of Turin

A centuries-old furor over whether the Shroud of Turin was the burial cloth of Jesus Christ or a medieval forgery surfaced again Friday after a London newspaper said that Oxford University has determined that the shroud is a fake.

Dr. Richard Luckett of Magdalene College, Cambridge, was quoted in the Evening Standard as saying that a date of 1350 “looks likely” for the age of the shroud. But Luckett is not directly associated with Oxford, one of three institutions that have used sophisticated radiocarbon techniques to date the shroud for the Vatican. Those results are not to be released until next month at the earliest, and all participants in the dating process have signed oaths of secrecy until after the Vatican makes its announcement.

That binding agreement to decline all comment left scientists who are directly associated with the project unable to confirm or deny the report from Luckett, who slipped away for the weekend soon after the story was published. And a series of statements from various authorities could be interpreted any number of ways, deepening the mystery.

Prof. Luigi Gonella, who is chief scientific adviser to the Archbishop of Turin, Italy, seemed to confirm that the shroud is a forgery Friday when he said he was “amazed that there should be indiscretions of this sort from a university like Oxford.”

But Gonella’s boss, Archbishop Anastasio Ballestrero of Turin, who is custodian of the shroud, branded the report “nonsense.”

“It is a blind test,” the archbishop said, and no one at Oxford even knows which of the three pieces of cloth furnished to the university came from the shroud. Thus no one there could possibly determine its age conclusively, he said.

Oxford, like the University of Arizona and the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, Switzerland, was asked to date postage-stamp samples of various pieces of cloth. Some samples are from a wrapping of a mummy from Egypt at the time of Christ, a wrapping from a Christian burial in Nubia of around the 11th Century, some threads of a cape from France dated at 1300, and the shroud. But only the Vatican and the British Museum, which is administering the test, are supposed to know which sample came from which piece of cloth.

However, the shroud is a very distinctive, and very rare, weave. So it cannot be ruled out that some experimenters have figured out which is which.

While refusing to say whether the 1350 date would be consistent with results obtained at the University of Arizona, physicist Paul Damon described the British report as “a cock and bull story.”

There have been a lot of rumors, he said in a telephone interview from Tucson, and “this is just an attempt to pry information out, one way or another.” Damon did confirm, however, that the testing has been completed.

The shroud, which first surfaced in the Middle Ages, is revered by some Christians as a bloodstained relic of the crucified Christ. The 14-foot cloth, kept in Turin Cathedral, bears the image of a bearded, crucified man.

The dating process should tell how old the shroud is, thus possibly proving that it was not the burial cloth, but it could never prove that it is. At best, it could show that the shroud is old enough to have been so used.