Is the Shroud of Turin real?

A linen cloth

In a cathedral in Turin, in Italy, there's a linen cloth about fourteen feet long. On it is the faint image of a man with the wounds of a crucifixion. Many believe it wrapped Jesus in the tomb, and there's more evidence for that than you might think.

Start with what the Gospels say. On the Friday Jesus died, Joseph of Arimathea took care of the body:

“So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock.”

Mark 15:46

Mark's word for that linen is sindon. That's where the Shroud gets its Italian name, the Sindone.

Two days later the tomb was empty. Peter went in, and “he saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head” (John 20:6–7). The body was gone, but the linen stayed behind. So could some of it still be here?

Sources:Mark 15:46Mark 15:46 in Greek (σινδών)John 20:1–7Shroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

Where it has been

The cloth we call the Shroud first shows up in history in the 1350s, in a small church in Lirey, in France. Pilgrims came to see it held up. One of the badges they bought was found in the river Seine, in Paris, in 1855. It shows the long cloth, with the front and back of a body on it.

In 1532 it nearly burned. Fire broke out in the chapel at Chambéry where it was kept, and molten silver from its case burned through the folded cloth. Nuns sewed patches over the holes. You can still see them in photos of the cloth: the triangles running down both sides.

Sources:History of the Shroud of TurinThe Lirey pilgrim badge (Musée de Cluny)Shroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

A photograph

For centuries, people saw only a faint brown figure. Then in 1898 an Italian lawyer and amateur photographer named Secondo Pia was allowed to photograph it. When he developed his glass plate in the darkroom, he saw something no one had seen before.

On the negative, where light and dark are swapped, the man on the cloth suddenly looked real: a clear, lifelike face. So the image on the linen works like a photographic negative itself, and no one could see that properly until cameras came along, centuries after the cloth first shows up.

Sources:Secondo PiaShroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

A body in relief

In 1976 two American scientists, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, ran a photo of it through an image analyzer, a machine that turns light and dark into height.

They found that the image's shading tracks how close a cloth would lie to a body: the closer, the darker. Turned into height, it rose up as a body in relief. The picture here does the same with the face: the brightness of the photo, taken as height.

Sources:Jackson, Jumper and Ercoline, Applied Optics 23 (1984)Shroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

No paint

In 1978 a team of American scientists called STURP got five days with the cloth, and they worked round the clock. They looked for paint. In their words:

“No pigments, paints, dyes or stains have been found on the fibrils.”

STURP, summary of the 1978 examination (1981)

And the stains that look like blood tested as blood.

Sources:STURP, summary of the 1978 examination (1981)Shroud of Turin Research ProjectShroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

Only on the surface

Now look closer. Ink or paint is a liquid: brush it onto linen and it soaks down into the thread and into the fibers themselves.

The Shroud's color doesn't. Under a microscope it sits on only the top two or three fibers of a thread, as a coat about two hundred nanometers thin, hundreds of times thinner than a hair, and the inside of each fiber stays white.

So the team's summary reached this conclusion:

“We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist.”

STURP, summary of the 1978 examination (1981)

Sources:Rogers, “Frequently Asked Questions” (2004)Fanti et al., Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 54 (2010)STURP, summary of the 1978 examination (1981)Shroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

What he suffered

And the marks on the image match the Gospels in grim detail. John says Pilate had Jesus flogged, and the soldiers put a crown of thorns on his head. Then a soldier “pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water” (John 19:34). On the cloth there are scourge marks across the back, wounds around the scalp, and a wound in the side.

And the cloth shows how much this man suffered. More than a hundred small dumbbell-shaped wounds from a whip run from his shoulders down to his calves, struck from behind, and punctures go all the way around his scalp, like a crown.

If this is Jesus, we're looking at what he went through for us. As Peter wrote:

“…by his wounds you have been healed.”

1 Peter 2:24

Sources:John 19:1–3, 34STURP, summary of the 1978 examination (1981)Lind and Antonacci, St. Louis Shroud Conference (2014)Robert Bucklin, “The Legal and Medical Aspects of the Trial and Death of Christ”1 Peter 2:24

The carbon date

Then came 1988. With the Church's permission, a strip was cut from one corner, and three labs, in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona, carbon-dated pieces of it. They got AD 1260 to 1390, and in the journal Nature they called their results:

“…conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.”

Damon et al., Nature 337 (1989)

That's just when the cloth first shows up in France. Headlines called it a fake, and for many people, that settled it.

Sources:Damon et al., Nature 337 (1989): the carbon dateShroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

Was the date right?

Not everyone accepted the date. Raymond Rogers, a chemist from the 1978 team, studied threads from that same corner. He found cotton mixed in, and chemistry unlike the rest of the cloth, and argued that the corner was a medieval repair. If he's right, the labs dated the mending, not the original cloth. The lab in Arizona disputes that.

Rogers also tested for vanillin, a chemical that slowly fades out of old linen. On the Shroud there was none left, just as on linen from the Dead Sea Scrolls. He wrote:

“It is thus very unlikely that the linen was produced during medieval times.”

Raymond Rogers, Thermochimica Acta (2005)

Sources:Rogers, Thermochimica Acta 425 (2005)Freer-Waters and Jull, npj Heritage Science (2026)Shroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

The raw data

Then in 2017, after a legal request, the labs' raw data were finally released. Statisticians who studied it wrote:

“…homogeneity is lacking in the data and that the procedure should be reconsidered.”

Casabianca et al., Archaeometry 61 (2019)

In plain words, the pieces disagreed with each other more than they should, and the date needs a fresh look.

Sources:Casabianca et al., Archaeometry 61 (2019)

An X-ray date

In 2022 an Italian team tried another way. They used X-rays to measure how much one linen thread had aged, and it matched linen from Masada, from AD 55 to 74.

They wrote that the results are “compatible with the hypothesis that the TS is a 2000-year-old relic,” if it was kept at ordinary room temperatures through its history. TS is the Turin Shroud.

Sources:De Caro et al., Heritage 5 (2022)

Nobody has copied it

And nobody has fully copied the image. In 2012, physicists at ENEA, Italy's national research agency, came close: short, intense bursts of ultraviolet light colored linen like the Shroud, on only the outermost fibers.

Some believers wonder whether the image is a trace of the light of the resurrection. That's a hope, not something a lab can test. But the experiment is real.

Sources:Di Lazzaro et al., Applied Optics 51 (2012)Shroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

Is it real?

Jeremiah Johnston, a New Testament scholar, used to think it was a fake. As he put it:

“I believe in an evidence-based faith, an evidence-based Christianity, and I did not believe in the shroud. I thought there was no evidence behind it.”

Jeremiah J. Johnston, “Why I Changed My Mind About the Shroud of Turin”

Then he looked at the evidence for himself, and it changed his mind. He's not alone. Many who have studied the cloth up close are convinced it's real, and we think they have good reasons.

The carbon date still has its defenders, so scientists are still split. Still, the case for it is stronger than the headlines said.

Sources:Jeremiah J. Johnston, “Why I Changed My Mind About the Shroud of Turin” (YouTube)Damon et al., Nature 337 (1989): the carbon dateCasabianca et al., Archaeometry 61 (2019)De Caro et al., Heritage 5 (2022)Shroud of Turin (history, dating and image)

What the faith rests on

Now, the Christian faith has never needed a cloth. Go back to that Sunday morning. After Peter, “the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed” (John 20:8). He hadn't seen Jesus yet. All he saw was the linen lying there and no body: an empty tomb.

That's what the faith stands on, and this chapter has shown the evidence for it: a man who really died, a tomb found empty, and hundreds who saw him alive, a skeptic and an enemy among them. Paul staked everything on it: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17). He didn't say a word about grave clothes.

So the Shroud isn't necessary. But if it's real, it's a wonderful bonus: a picture of what John already told us, the cloth left behind by a man who walked out of his grave.

Sources:John 20:3–91 Corinthians 15:3–8, 17John 20:30–31