The Shroud of Turin: A Medieval Date, a 2,000-Year Claim, and an Image Nobody Can Explain

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It is a single piece of linen, about 4.4 metres long and 1.1 metres wide, woven in a three-to-one herringbone twill. On it, front and back, is the faint image of a tall, bearded man who appears to have been beaten, crowned with thorns and crucified. Kept in Turin, Italy, for more than four centuries, it is the most studied religious object in the world — and the subject of one of the longest-running arguments in science: is it the burial cloth of Jesus, or a medieval creation?

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The cloth and its documented history

The documented history begins in the small French village of Lirey. In 1353 the local lord, the knight Geoffroi de Charny, endowed a collegiate church there, and around 1355 the church began exhibiting a long linen cloth bearing the image of a mangled body. A lead pilgrim’s badge from the exhibitions, now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, shows a long cloth with a double body image and the arms of the Charny family — confirmation that the object on display was the Shroud as we know it.

The cloth was controversial from the start. In 1389 Pierre d’Arcis, the Bishop of Troyes, denounced it as a forgery in a memorandum to Antipope Clement VII, claiming an earlier bishop had found the artist who made it. Clement allowed the exhibitions to continue only if the cloth was announced as a representation of the true shroud, not the relic itself.

From Lirey the cloth passed to the House of Savoy in 1453. A fire at Chambéry in 1532 burned holes in it; nuns patched it in 1534. It reached Turin in 1578, and in 1983 the last Savoy king, Umberto II, left it to the Pope.

Before Lirey there is nothing: no document refers to this cloth before the 1350s. Some propose it is a cloth seen in Constantinople before 1204, but that is a hypothesis, not a fact.

The 1988 radiocarbon verdict

For decades the Church refused the destructive sampling that radiocarbon dating requires. In 1988 it relented. On 21 April a strip was cut from one corner of the cloth and divided among three independent laboratories: Oxford, Zurich and the University of Arizona. The results, published in Nature in 1989, were unambiguous. The combined calibrated date was 1260 to 1390 CE, with at least 95 per cent confidence. The flax in the linen was harvested in the thirteenth or fourteenth century — the same period in which the Shroud first appears in the historical record. The laboratories continue to stand by the result.

The challenges to the medieval date

The radiocarbon result has been challenged ever since, and some of the challenges come from serious researchers. The most persistent objection concerns the sample itself. The strip was cut from a corner — the most handled edge, and the area most likely to have been repaired over the centuries. In 2005 the chemist Raymond Rogers, a member of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), published a study arguing that the corner was not part of the original cloth at all: it contained cotton fibres and a plant-gum coating not found in the main body of the linen, suggesting a medieval repair woven invisibly into the original fabric. If Rogers was right, the laboratories dated the repair, not the Shroud.

Other researchers have proposed alternative dating methods. In 2022 Liberato De Caro and colleagues at Italy’s National Research Council published a study in the journal Heritage using wide-angle X-ray scattering to measure how the cellulose in the linen had aged. Comparing the Shroud sample with ancient linen from Masada, they concluded that an age of about 2,000 years was “very probable” — a finding that made headlines around the world in 2024.

The X-ray method comes with a large caveat: it depends heavily on assumptions about the temperature and humidity the cloth experienced over its lifetime, and the Shroud’s full storage history is unknown, including centuries in damp chapels and a fire in 1532. De Caro’s own team called for more samples to confirm the findings. Radiocarbon dating remains the most direct and best-understood way of dating linen, and it says medieval.

The image nobody can explain

Set the dating aside, and the Shroud still presents a genuine puzzle: the image itself. STURP, a team of more than thirty American scientists, was given about 120 hours of direct access to the cloth in 1978. They found the image extremely superficial — the discolouration affects only the topmost fibres — with no paint, dye or pigment in the image areas. It behaves like a photographic negative and encodes three-dimensional information about the body.

That does not mean the image is supernatural. The forensic microscopist Walter McCrone, examining STURP’s own adhesive-tape samples, concluded that the image was painted with a dilute solution of red ochre pigment in a gelatin medium — a finding other researchers disputed. The bloodstains are another battleground: some analyses identify real blood, others iron oxide pigment.

No one has produced a convincing full reproduction of the image using medieval techniques, and no one has established a natural mechanism — heat, radiation, chemical reaction — that accounts for all of its properties. The image remains unexplained, which is not the same as inexplicable, and certainly not proof of authenticity.

What the evidence says

Documented: The Shroud is a linen cloth, 4.4 by 1.1 metres, in a 3:1 herringbone twill. Its documented history begins at Lirey, France, around 1353–1355, and it was denounced as a forgery by Bishop Pierre d’Arcis in 1389.
Documented: In 1988 three independent laboratories radiocarbon-dated a corner sample to 1260–1390 CE at 95 per cent confidence, published in Nature in 1989. The laboratories stand by the result.
Documented: STURP’s 1978 examination found the image is superficial, limited to the topmost fibres, with no paint or dye detected in the image areas; the image behaves like a photographic negative and encodes three-dimensional information.
Claimed, not proven: That the 1988 sample came from a medieval repair, not the original cloth (Rogers, 2005). It has not been confirmed by a new dating test on a different part of the cloth.
Claimed, not proven: That X-ray scattering (De Caro, 2022) shows the cloth is about 2,000 years old. It depends on assumptions about storage conditions, and it has not been independently replicated.
Contested: Whether the image is painted (McCrone’s red ochre conclusion) or not; and whether the reddish stains are blood. Researchers who examined the same samples disagree.
Unverified: Any history of the cloth before Lirey in the 1350s, including the proposed link to a cloth in Constantinople before 1204.

What remains unknown

The Shroud is two mysteries in one: its age, challenged by a sampling objection only a new test could settle, and its image, which resists explanation by either account. Until a new sample is taken, or someone reproduces the image convincingly, the Shroud will remain what it has been for seven hundred years: an object that refuses to be settled.