Three-dimensional projection of the facial image on the Shroud of Turin.
Latest scientific discoveries
on the Shroud of Turin –
which the media have not acknowledged
and do not wish to know
Translated from
August 11, 2018
Some 2,500 young people found themselves on pilgrimage from August 8-10 to Turin to pray before the Shroud that wrapped the body of Jesus after He was taken down from the Cross.
But that is not the kind of news that makes Page 1 in any newspaper, and not any page at all, for that matter. Because even the so many reports on scientific studies that have confirmed the authenticity of the Shroud are hardly ever reported.
On the contrary, what makes the news is any study that questions its authenticity. Last month,
La Repubblica headlined that
“Some of the bloodstains on the Shroud are false”. Subtitle: “These are the results of a study done by forensic experts to verify the compatibility of blood traces on the Shroud and the position of the body in the Shroud”.
Corriere della Sera:
“Research on the Shroud: At least half of the bloodstains are false”. Subtitle: “Only some are said to be compatible with those of a man who was crucified, according to an experiment done using new techniques”.
The media attention to this report is inexplicable, both for the tenuousness of the hypotheses reported, and because, as the research writers themselves say, the experiment was done in 2014.
Scientist Pierluigi Baima Bollone, honorary president of the International Center for Sindonology in Turin and author of many publications, demolished the new claims by saying bluntly: “It is work that cost so much more effort than it is worth”.
A leading scholar on the Shroud and author of many scientific publications, Prof. Emanuela Marinelli, wrote an article to comment on the ‘new’ report, saying that
“the two researchers were never among those who had an opportunity to study the Shroud directly and have never even been near it”.
Marinelli disputed the report in detail but her article only appeared in
La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana and was not picked up by any of the important media in Italy. Who are apparently interested in the Shroud only when the story is negative.
Yet in recent days other important scientific studies on the Shroud were also published but were largely ignored by the Italian media. Perhaps because their results do confirm the authenticity of the Shroud?
In particular, a study published in the prestigious scientific journal
Applied Optics, on the result of four years research carried out by a multi-institutional team of reserachers from Italy’s ENEA (the Italian agency for research and development of new technologies on energy and the environment), CNR (the Italian National Research Council) and INRIM (THE Italian national institute for research on meteorology).
The research was coordinated by ENEA’s Paolo Lazzaro, who is deputy director of the International Center for Sindonology, and the scientists who carried out the tests were Daniele Murra of ENEA, Paola Iacomussio of INRIM, Mauro Missori of the CRN, and Antonio Di Lascio, a medical doctor.
Their particular objective was to determine why the bloodstains on the Shroud are red and not dark brown as old blood should be. In fact, the color of the bloodstains has been among the points raised in questioning the authenticity of the Shroud.
Their study confirmed that the stains are old blood.
“We have demonstrated that the stains are genuine blood stains, with hemoglobin that is old, and uncontaminated by any other substance”.
But they also contain ‘a great amount’ of bilirubin, which is characteristic of blood in two cases: if the person has jaundice, or
if the person has been beaten up badly so that his red blood cells shatter, and the liver releases bilirubin in response.” But ultraviolet radiation produces changes in bilirubin which reinforce the color red.
Therefore, the blood on the Shroud is from a man who was tortured, and who did suffer all the wounds evidenced by the bloodstains in the Shroud. Di Lazzaro presented the study at the International Conference on the Shroud of Turin held in Pasco, Washington, in the USA on July 19-22. That symposium significantly demonstrated the authenticity of the Shroud through a number of studies.
In his presentation, Di Lazzaro pointed out that experiments carried out in the past at the ENEA laboratory in Frascati, Italy, proved that ultraviolet radiation on bloodstains resulted in a color similar to the stains on the Shroud, but he said it does not mean that the image on the Shroud was produced by an ultraviolet flash, but only that ultraviolet radiation could have aided in the ‘production’ of the image.
Marinelli added other details:
“Besides an intense supernatural radiation as a cause for the formation of the image during a matter-antimatter annihilation at the moment of the Resurrection, as he has hypothesized, Giuseppe Baldocchini also offered a corollary to his hypothesis, namely that the resulting neutron flow from that reaction falsified the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud in 1988 which said it was medieval and not ancient.”
But we are still left with the mystery of how the image on the Shroud, which is definitely not painted, but the result of a superficial three-dimensional ‘burning’ of the linen cloth, something that is scientifically unexplainable.
However,
science already tells us with certainty that the Shroud did wrap the body of a dead man who did not stay in it longer than 36-40 hours (because the stains show no signs of putrefaction) and who emerged from the Shroud without any physical movement.
These are exactly the supernatural characteristics that the Gospels say Jesus’s resurrected Body demonstrated to those who saw him afterwards.