Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 12:15:19 EST
From: SHnSASSY1@aol.com
To: SHnSASSY1@aol.com
Subject: [SO] Fresh Evidence Could Date Turin Shroud to Christ

From: SHnSASSY1@aol.com

http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/03/12/stifgneur03010.html
Fresh evidence could date Turin shroud to Christ
John Follain, Rome 
 
A SWISS scientist claims to have found new evidence suggesting that the Turin 
shroud, the venerated relic dismissed a decade ago as a medieval fake, might 
be genuine after all. 
Carbon dating tests carried out in 1988 indicated that the shroud, revered by 
many Christians as the winding-sheet in which the body of Christ was wrapped 
for burial, had been made between 1260 and 1390. 

However, Mechthild Flury Lemberg, a leading authority on the history of 
textiles who helped to restore the relic, said last week that she had found a 
strong similarity between the shroud and fragments of cloth produced in the 
Middle East about 2,000 years ago. Her claim prompted demands for the Vatican 
to order new tests. 

In a report presented to a conference organised by the Catholic church, 
Lemberg likened stitching on both hems of the shroud and on a lengthy seam 
down one side to that on cloth found in the ruins of Masada, a mountain 
stronghold overlooking the Dead Sea and Jordan. These have been dated at 
between 40BC and AD73. 

"The seam is very well done, in such a way that you can only see it on the 
reverse side of the cloth," said Lemberg, a former curator of the Abegg 
Foundation textile museum in Switzerland. 

"In my opinion, the shroud is not a medieval fake. The parallels I have found 
indicate that it could have existed at the same time as Jesus Christ and in 
what is now Israel." 

Believers and non-believers alike have long been fascinated by the origins of 
the cloth, which bears the ghostly imprint of a bearded, long-haired man with 
markings that correspond to the stigmata. 

Pressure for a new carbon-14 dating test has grown since Israeli scientists 
claimed last year that the most common pollen found on it comes from a plant 
that could have been used to weave the crown of thorns placed on Christ's 
head. The plant, described in the Bible as tumbleweed, grows only in the 
Middle East. 

"Scientists have been divided on the value of carbon-testing ever since the 
first test was carried out," said Ian Wilson, author of several books on the 
shroud and one of the experts summoned by the church. "But the Masada and 
pollen studies have helped build a new consensus in favour of a fresh test." 

It is up to the Vatican to decide whether to go ahead. Although it has yet to 
respond officially to Lemberg's analysis, church organisers made her paper 
the first to be heard at the conference in Turin, where the shroud is kept. 

The first documented display of a burial shroud bearing the features of 
Christ dates back to 1389 after Geoffroi de Charnay, a French knight, wrote 
to Clement VII, the Avignon anti-pope, to tell him of the cloth he had 
inherited from his father. 

The shroud will go on public display in a bullet-proof case from August to 
October as part of the church's celebrations of the 2,000th birthday of 
Christ. It is expected to attract more than 3m people. 

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