'The imprint left by the tortured body of the crucified one, which attests to the tremendous human capacity for causing pain and death to one's fellow man, stands as an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age,' he said in an address at Turin Cathedral, the home of the shroud. 'Since it is not a matter of faith, the church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions,' the late Pope John Paul II said in 1998.Ĭarbon dating in the 1990s suggested it dates from the Middle Ages.īut John Paul II insisted it is important to learn lessons from the relic, whether or not it is genuine. The Vatican does not have an official position on whether the relic is genuinely the cloth Jesus was buried in after being crucified.

'The imprint shows the peculiar characteristics that usually belong to a photographic negative,' says the Web site of the shroud, which is maintained by the archdiocese. The Shroud of Turin is a linen sheet more than 14 feet long and 3 feet, 7 inches wide that carries an imprinted image of the front and the back of a crucified man, according to the Catholic Archdiocese of Turin. If the church would like to fund me (to do research), I am ready.'

'It's not my fault if in Italy most of these paranormal facts are related to religion. 'I am not a believer, but I am first of all a curious person, and I like to investigate these mysteries, not necessarily related to religion,' he said. He described himself as a rationalist, but said he is not specifically anti-religious. 'As a hobby I am interested in mysteries, and the Shroud of Turin is obviously a very mysterious object,' he said. He undertook the research out of personal interest, he said. 'His good idea was to wrap the sheet over the person underneath because he didn't want to obtain an image that was too obviously a painting or a drawing, so with this procedure you get a strange image,' said Garlaschelli. The artist took this sheet and put it over one of his assistants,' he said. His research shows the pigment may simply have worn off the cloth over the centuries since it was first 'discovered' in 1355, but impurities in the pigment etched an image into the fibers of the cloth, leaving behind the ghostly picture that remains today. 'For example, the image is superficial and has no pigment, it looks so lifelike and so on, and therefore they say it cannot have been done by an artist.' 'Basically the Shroud of Turin has some strange properties and characteristics that they say cannot be reproduced by human hands,' he told CNN by phone from Italy, where he is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia. Garlaschelli says his work disproves the claims of the shroud's strongest supporters.

'Then for the sake of completeness I have added the bloodstains, the burns, the scorching because there was a fire in 1532.' 'What you have now is a very fuzzy, dusty and weak image,' he said. His result looks like the cloth that many Christians through the centuries have believed is the actual burial shroud of Jesus, he told CNN. Luigi Garlaschelli created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with pigment, baking it in an oven (which he called a 'shroud machine') for several hours, then washing it.

Shroud of turin debunked 2010