Shroud of Turin carbon-dated

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth about 4.4 meters long that bears the faint image of a man's front and back, with marks resembling wounds. Many Christians have venerated it as the burial cloth of Jesus. In 1988, with the permission of the Church, three laboratories, at the University of Arizona, the University of Oxford and ETH Zurich, each tested a small strip cut from a corner using radiocarbon dating. On October 13, 1988 their results were announced: the linen dated to 1260 to 1390 CE with 95 percent confidence, and the findings were published in Nature in 1989.¹²

The dates match the cloth's first firm record, in the 1350s in Lirey, France, in the possession of a knight, Geoffroy de Charny. In 1389 a local bishop, Pierre d'Arcis, wrote to the pope that an artist had confessed to painting it. The Shroud has been kept in Turin since 1578. Supporters of its authenticity have challenged the result, arguing that the sample came from a medieval repair or was contaminated, and a 2019 re-examination of the raw data suggested the labs' results were less consistent than first reported. The mainstream view of scientists and historians is that the cloth is medieval. The Church has never formally declared it authentic and describes it as an object of devotion.²³