Mike Curtiss (28
March 2013)
"New Research; the
Shroud of Turin Dates to First Century"
New experiments on Shroud show it’s not medieval (dates to 1st
century)
Vatican Insider ^ | March 26, 2013 | ANDREA TORNIELLI
Posted on March 26, 2013 10:14:48 PM CDT by NYer
Professor Giulio Fanti and journalist Saverio Gaeta have
published a book with the results of some chemical and
mechanical tests which confirm that the Shroud dates back to the
1st century
ANDREA TORNIELLI
ROME
New scientific experiments carried out at the University of
Padua have apparently confirmed that the Shroud Turin can be
dated back to the 1st century AD. This makes its compatible with
the tradition which claims that the cloth with the image of the
crucified man imprinted on it is the very one Jesus’ body was
wrapped in when he was taken off the cross. The news will be
published in a book by Giulio Fanti, professor of mechanical and
thermal measurement at the University of Padua’s Engineering
Faculty, and journalist Saverio Gaeta, out tomorrow. “Il Mistero
della Sindone” (The Mystery of the Shroud) is edited by Rizzoli
(240 pp, 18 Euro).
What’s new about this book are Fanti’s recent findings, which
are also about to be published in a specialist magazine and
assessed by a scientific committee. The research includes three
new tests, two chemical ones and one mechanical one. The first
two were carried out with an FT-IR system, so using infra-red
light, and the other using Raman spectroscopy. The third was a
multi-parametric mechanical test based on five different
mechanical parameters linked to the voltage of the wire. The
machine used to examine the Shroud’s fibres and test traction,
allowed researchers to examine tiny fibres alongside about
twenty samples of cloth dated between 3000 BC and 2000 AD.
The new tests carried out in the University of Padua labs were
carried out by a number of university professors from various
Italian universities and agree that the Shroud dates back to the
period when Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem. Final
results show that the Shroud fibres examined produced the
following dates, all of which are 95% certain and centuries away
from the medieval dating obtained with Carbon-14 testing in
1988: the dates given to the Shroud after FT-IR testing, is 300
BC ±400, 200 BC ±500 after Raman testing and 400 AD ±400 after
multi-parametric mechanical testing. The average of all three
dates is 33 BC ±250 years. The book’s authors observed
that the uncertainty of this date is less than the single
uncertainties and the date is compatible with the historic date
of Jesus’ death on the cross, which historians claim occurred in
30 AD.
The tests were carried out using tiny fibres of material
extracted from the Shroud by micro-analyst Giovanni Riggi di
Numana who passed away in 2008 but had participated in the1988
research project and gave the material to Fanti through the
cultural institute Fondazione 3M.