The bogus relic

The Turin shroud is a forgery. Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich, and Tucson, Arizona “determined that the fibres in the cloth date from the Middle Ages, sometime between 1260 and 1390”. In fact, the shroud was discovered in the French city of Troyes, southeast of Paris in the mid14th century.

Pope Benedict described it as an “icon written in blood”. But he didn’t say whose blood it was. The image on the shroud shows the face of an older man rather than the face of a man in his early 30s, as Jesus is alleged to have been when he was crucified.

If the shroud were genuine, it would produce more “miracles” than the “arm bones” of St Paul and St George combined!

Prof. Luigi Garlaschelli, an organic chemist at the University of Pavia, reproduced the full-size shroud with materials and techniques that were available in the Middle Ages. He said that his feat proved that the Turin shroud was a medieval forgery.

The accuracy of the three independent laboratory tests was challenged by some hard-core believers who claimed that the restoration of the shroud in past centuries had “contaminated” the results. Let them produce the evidence for this contamination, such as, where, when and how was it contaminated?

What these believers assert without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.