- Tonight,
its haunting images captivated millions around the world.
- Many people believe this is
the cloth that wrapped Jesus of Nazareth
after his crucifixion.
- It is a bloodstained image that is forensically accurate.
It's an anatomically perfect human being.
- But is the Shroud of Turin a genuine holy relic
or something very different?
- The image on the shroud reflects what the Bible says
about the beating, the torture, and the crucifixion of Christ.
- If you look at the image carefully,
you'll see some inconsistencies.
- Millions of people die.
We have nothing else like this for any other human being.
- Now, we explore the top theories
behind the origin of one of the world's
most mysterious objects.
- We don't know how this image was created.
It's not painted.
There's no way to tell how this image ends up on the shroud.
- To replicate the shroud image,
you would need 14,000 lasers
all going off instantaneously at the same time.
- How did this image come to be?
And is it truly an image of Jesus?
(tense dramatic music)
- [Laurence] Jerusalem, 33 AD.
According to the gospels,
after years of preaching and gathering disciples
throughout the Holy Land,
the life of Jesus of Nazareth reaches a pivotal moment.
- For many Christians,
the story of Holy Week begins with Jesus on Sunday
entering into Jerusalem in triumph.
Here he is in the most important city for Jews.
He's in this temple,
the sacred place for Jewish worship,
and he's appalled by what he finds there.
- The gospels have Jesus going into the temple complex
and overturning the tables of the money changers there.
He's condemning the abuse of people that are poor.
He's condemning the abuse of people
that might want to go to the temple to actually worship.
- He says, "You've taken something
that is holy and beautiful,
and you've made this a den of thieves."
- When your control is being threatened, you act.
And so what the aristocratic priest do
is they bring Jesus in for a hearing.
And they're not so much interested
in hearing what he has to say
but imposing charges on him
that he was threatening to damage the temple.
- When Jesus is arrested,
they argue that he has disrupted Judaism,
that he is claiming to be God
and hasn't been mindful of secular authority.
- What Jesus is doing in Jerusalem
is absolutely upsetting the status quo,
and they're just not sure what to do with this guy.
The Jewish aristocratic leadership,
they are not the most senior members
in the status quo power of Jerusalem,
the Romans are,
so they need to take Jesus to the civil authority.
- [Laurence] The Jewish authorities arrest Jesus
and hand him over to the Romans.
The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate,
declares that Jesus's claim to be king amounts to treason
and sentences him to death by crucifixion.
- Crucifixion is not a noble form of death.
Crucifixion is brutal.
He was to carry his own cross
to transport the instrument of his death
to the location where he would die.
His hands are nailed to the cross.
His feet are nailed to the cross.
- Above his head is this phrase,
"Jesus of Nazareth, The King of the Jews,"
crowned not with a crown but with thorns.
This is partly punishment.
This is partly to humiliate Jesus.
- The Romans use crucifixion as a deterrent
and what better deterrent than one that causes death
in a slow, agonizing, and painful way.
For the Romans, this is a public way of saying,
"If you mess with us, if you mess with the Roman Empire,
this is what will happen to you.
You will die and you will die horribly and publicly."
- It takes roughly six hours for Jesus to die.
Once he's dead,
he's taken off the cross and wrapped in cloth
and taken to a borrowed tomb.
- Jesus' death at three o'clock in the afternoon
means that burial needs to occur very, very quickly
because the setting of the sun and the start of Sabbath
is going to be on them very, very quickly.
So there's a sense of urgency about moving Jesus' body
from the execution site to the burial site.
- There could be no work done on the Sabbath,
so there was a rush to get him enshrouded and entombed.
And that is why, of course,
the women were returning on Sunday morning after the Sabbath
so that they could finish the anointing of his body.
- What happens is, of course,
the great event in Christianity, the resurrection.
Jesus isn't there. His body isn't there.
He has been resurrected.
- All that remains is the linen cloth
that once covered the body.
- [Laurence] Jesus's burial cloth
aren't mentioned again in the gospels
and what happens to them is a mystery.
The next chapter in the story of the shroud
doesn't happen for more than a thousand years.
- The next time we see it showing up in history is 1355,
where a Christian knight who has been part of the Crusades
obtains this cloth,
brings it back to his home church,
and he claims that it is the burial shroud
that held the body of Jesus before his resurrection.
- Because this knight fought in the Crusades,
there was reason for folks to believe
that he may have been able to secure this cloth
in the Holy Land and bring it to his church.
- There's no good reason to suspect
he wasn't able to find something
while he was there in Jerusalem, in the Holy Land.
There's obviously a direct connection between this man
and the treasures that he may have discovered
while he was in those Crusades.
- [Laurence] The knight is Geoffroi de Charny
and a close examination of the cloth
seems to confirm his story.
- The shroud is roughly 14 feet long, 3 feet wide,
and it contains the image of a man who has been tortured.
You see his front as well as his back.
And what really captures the imagination of folks
is that the shroud seems to contain
a tremendous amount of blood
in areas that would suggest crucifixion.
The image seems to suggest that this person had been whipped
and the blood around the head seems to suggest
something placed on the head,
perhaps along the lines of the crown of thorns
the Bible says was placed on the head of Jesus.
Wounds on the wrist,
wounds on the feet suggest a narrative very similar
to what we have been told about the crucifixion of Christ.
- [Laurence] The shroud is the subject of veneration
and speculation for many centuries.
- This cloth comes into knowledge in 1355.
It stays in the Charny family for about a hundred years.
Eventually, it's sold to the House of Savoy,
which has jurisdiction ruling
over what is now France and Italy.
- The Savoy family actually provides
the perfect historical construct for us to piece together
most of the documented history of the shroud.
The Savoy family came into possession of the cloth in 1453.
- The Savoy family would take it with them
and display it in different churches over the years,
particularly when they were still in France.
When they moved it to Turin in 1578,
that sort of became the seed of the Savoy family's power.
- When the last of the House of Savoy,
the last king of Italy, Umberto II, dies in 1983,
he wills the shroud to the living Pope,
who was at the time, Pope John Paul II.
It was with the stipulation
that the shroud would be the property of the Pope,
whoever the Pope is, as an individual,
and would not belong to the institutional Catholic Church.
- [Laurence] More than 600 years after the shroud first appears,
scientists are granted a chance to uncover the answers.
- The shroud itself was moved
amidst conditions of great secrecy.
It was done at midnight,
no cameras were allowed in,
and the Roman Catholic priests who are the normal custodians
took a solemn oath afterwards that the cloth,
which was placed in the display cabinet,
was indeed the Holy Shroud.
- The Shroud of Turin Research Project, or STURP,
was a group of 33 scientists and researchers
who came together in 1978
to perform an in-depth scientific examination
of the Shroud of Turin.
- In their report, the STURP team concludes
that there was no scientific explanation for the image
that could be accounted for by any known scientific means.
- [Laurence] In the decades since,
hundreds of scientists have studied the data collected
by the Shroud of Turin Research Project,
but one professor has proposed a unique explanation
for the appearance of the image on the shroud.
- Giovanni Fazio is a researcher out of Messina in Italy,
and in 2015, he comes up
with this really interesting hypothesis
that maybe what's caused the image to appear on the shroud
would've been on the body as it was prepared for burial.
(tense music)
- [Laurence] According to Fazio's theory,
the process begins in the hours after Jesus
is lowered from the cross.
- Jesus was Jewish
and traditionally in Jewish burials,
you should be buried within 24 hours of death.
So what you did was you used substances,
oils, ointments, myrrh.
You wrapped the body in cloth partly to avoid this to smell,
partly to counter the fact you've had a decomposing body
in the hot sun.
- [Laurence] A biblical passage
describes what happened with Jesus's body.
- The gospel according to St. John
is the one that gives us the most detail.
- In John's gospel,
there's an interesting character, Nicodemus,
who brings about 75 pounds of oil, aloes,
to help prepare Jesus's body for its burial.
- This is enough to bury several kings.
- [Laurence] But how could this oil
have created the image seen on the Shroud of Turin?
- It is possible that there can be residues left on cloths
from certain ointments or oils,
particularly ones that are very, very dense,
very thick in their composition.
- One of the really interesting things that Fazio raises
is that if you look at the shroud,
the image on the back is a little bit darker.
This makes sense, according to his theory,
that the person being laid on their back,
the oils on the back would've had a lot more chance
to absorb into the fabric of the shroud.
- [Laurence] It seems like a logical explanation,
but some believe Fazio's theory
contradicts the extensive testing done in the 1970s.
- That Shroud of Turin Research Project
relied heavily upon film photography, use of x-ray,
use of microscopic imaging technologies as well,
to examine individual fibers.
- They were able to say from the x-ray,
from the spectroscopy,
from all the other analysis that they've done,
there's no evidence of any kind of oil or perfume
on the shroud.
In 1532, there's a fire that breaks out
in the chapel where the shroud was held.
This is what Fazio thinks is the reason why there's no oil,
that given the heat, given what happened with the fire,
that those oils and perfumes would've evaporated.
- The fire may have changed the shroud
in ways that are picked up by the scientific testing
and warp the findings.
- [Laurence] Despite Fazio's explanation,
other experts remain skeptical.
- A problem with the theory
is that we do have cloths from that time period
where these oils were used,
but they don't make an image on that shroud.
- [Laurence] The Shroud of Turin has been
an object of fascination since its emergence
in the mid-14th century.
- The Savoy family gets the shroud from the Charny family.
In 1532, there's a fire that breaks out
in the chapel where the shroud was held.
- It was rescued from the fire
and the image itself was not damaged.
But the shroud was folded into a metal reliquary
and so the heat from the fire
left the parallel set of scorch marks
that run the length of the shroud.
(tense music)
And the Savoy family regularly displayed it.
They would hang it from the balcony of their royal palace.
They displayed it at royal weddings.
And more importantly, for the provenance of it,
every time it was publicly displayed,
they commissioned an artwork.
- [Laurence] The Savoy family's involvement
kept fascination with the shroud alive for centuries,
but the origins of its ghostly image remain a mystery.
Burial oil stains could be one possible cause.
But in 2003, one of the scientists
on the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project
suggests a new possibility.
- Dr. Ray Rogers is one of the original STURP team members,
brilliant chemist who was with
Los Alamos National Laboratories,
and he had an interesting theory
that this could be the product of a natural process.
(tense music)
- [Laurence] According to Rogers,
the key is a phenomenon we experience when we cook.
- Dr. Rogers thinks that the image may be caused
by the Maillard reaction,
which has to do with a chemical reaction that happens
when amino acids and sugars interact with heat.
We see an example of the Maillard reaction
when bread is baked,
the sugars, the yeast, the amino acids in the bread
combined with the heat of the baking
to form that nice, crispy, brown crust on the bread.
- The Maillard reaction is very similar
to toasting a piece of bread.
You get a different coloration
on perhaps the very top of the bread.
But you haven't done anything to change,
in a permanent, lasting way, the bread itself.
- [Laurence] According to Rogers,
all the necessary elements would have been present
following Jesus's crucifixion.
- A few hours after death,
the body starts to break down and decomposes,
and there's well over 30 kinds of amino acids
that are released from the body after death.
After you have these amino acid compounds
coming off the body,
what you then need is the sugar
that has to combine to create this reaction.
- [Laurence] Rogers believed that sugar
comes from the cloth itself.
- Rogers and his team,
when they were looking at the composition of the shroud,
realized that in ancient times,
they would've used flowers to make the linen,
and this particular kind of flower, Saponaria,
that has a fairly high sugar content.
So the sugar that the amino acids
would've been in touch with
would've been in the fabric of the shroud itself.
- Rogers had a theory where he suggested that the cloth
was soaked in a solution from the soapweed plant,
and it acts as a preservative and a fungicide
but it would leave a very thin sugar compound layer
all over the cloth.
- [Laurence] With two of the three conditions met,
Roger's next turns to identifying
a possible source of heat in the cave.
- After death, when a body decomposes,
you see a temperature spike.
It may go as high as 106 degrees,
especially if the person has died of dehydration.
What's interesting here
is that we know that Jesus would've been dehydrated
from his time on the cross,
so it makes sense that his body would've been able to reach
that kind of temperature after death.
There would've been just enough heat
combining with amino acids released
from that decomposing body
mixing with the sugars in the shroud
to create that brown image.
- [Laurence] Rogers and his team conduct an experiment
to test the hypothesis.
- Dr. Rogers realized you can't use modern linen,
which is bleached, which is treated,
so he was able to find people who used techniques
that go back 2,000 years
to create the kind of cloth that would've been used
at the time of Jesus's burial.
Using cloth that was made in that traditional way,
Rogers subjected it to ammonia vapors,
which would've simulated gases
that would've been coming off of a body.
They turned up the heat to about 106 degrees
and they were able to get the same kind of darker color
that shows up on the Shroud of Turin.
- [Laurence] Biophysicist John DeSalvo
contends there could be another agent at work:
human sweat.
- John DeSalvo realized
that someone who died in the way that Jesus did,
his body would've been covered with sweat.
And that's where you get the organic compounds
that are able to make these kinds of images.
This also helps to explain
some of the coloration on the shroud,
the darker areas were where the sweat was in direct contact
with the shroud.
- There's a correlation between the density
or the darkness of the image on the shroud
and the distance it would've been from the body.
So whether it was direct contact,
the image on the shroud,
tip of the nose, top of the hands,
the image is darkest.
As the distance increases up to about 3 1/2 centimeters,
the image grows more faint.
- So what you have is the sweat sort of evaporating,
not literally being absorbed into the shroud,
so you have this interesting image
of these light and dark areas.
- [Laurence] But critics say
there are still many unanswered questions.
- The Maillard reaction hypothesis
is interesting and intriguing
in that it can reproduce an image.
It leaves an after effect,
but it does not produce something that is complex
as the image on the shroud.
- On the shroud, you see the detail of the hair,
the eyes, the areas of the face
that weren't directly touching the shroud.
You don't get that kind of detail
with this sort of reaction.
- Millions of people die.
Millions of people have been enshrouded,
their bodies decompose.
We have nothing else like this for any other human being.
their bodies decompose.)
- [Laurence] Jesus's burial cloth is lost for centuries,
until it turns up with Geoffroi de Charny
in medieval France.
- We do not have a record of de Charny acquiring the shroud.
We do not know how he came to possess it.
We know that he comes from a chivalrous family.
There have been a lot of historical assumptions made
that perhaps he had been a crusader.
- [Laurence] For centuries,
it's assumed de Charny found the shroud in Jerusalem.
In 1997, two scholars bring that assumption into question.
- Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight have a theory
that yes, the shroud is evidence of a crucifixion.
Yes, it is a burial cloth,
but not for the figure you think.
(tense music)
- After the Christians reconquered Jerusalem
during the Crusades,
you have the creation of the Knights Templar.
This, in order to help protect Christian pilgrims
as they're going to the Holy Land
to visit these places that are so important to Christians.
- The Templars took their name
from where their barracks were located,
on the grounds of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem.
And after the first Crusade,
they actually became a quite wealthy order.
- They developed a complex banking system
and developed a network of fortresses across Europe.
They were powerful and reported only to the Pope.
- [Laurence] But by the 14th century,
the Templar's power and prestige are declining
and they've made a powerful enemy:
King Philip IV of France.
- King Philip IV, who was indebted to the Knights Templar,
had borrowed money.
Rather than paying it back,
argued that they were heretics
that did not practice the faith properly
and that the Pope should end them.
- Philip is, I think, concerned that the Knights Templar
are so powerful, they're wealthy.
Moreover, he's indebted to them.
He's gone for the Knights Templar to get money
to help support his wars against England.
So he owes the Knights Templar money
and he sees them as a threat.
What better way to get rid of the threat
and also to cancel your debt
than to declare them as heretics?
- [Laurence] In 1307,
King Philip has Templar leader, Jacques de Molay,
arrested on blasphemy and heresy charges.
de Molay is forced to face the French Inquisition.
- King Philip thought
this punishment should involve crucifixion.
- The inquisitors would've done to Jacque de Molay
what had been done to Jesus,
that he's stripped naked, he's scourged, he's whipped,
the crown of thorns put on his head.
- [Laurence] But Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight
see evidence of something different in the shroud.
- The position of the arms is not identical
to the description of how Jesus is hung on the cross.
The legs are also positioned differently.
- The book's authors hypothesized
that the pattern on the shroud
isn't from someone who's crucified
in a normal kind of way,
with their arms stretched outright.
It's someone who's crucified very differently.
And in this case,
the pattern seems to match someone who's crucified
with their right arm above their head bent
and their left arm stretched out on the side
as if they're placed on a door.
And this would be the convenient way to do this
if you don't have a cross.
- The crucifixion of the leader of the Knights Templar
was not meant to kill him.
It was meant to produce enough pain
to get him to admit he was a heretic and to recant.
And it did just that.
- [Laurence] After the confession,
the inquisitors have one final humiliation
left for de Molay.
- For the inquisitor,
wrapping this knight in a shroud
was meant to amplify the embarrassment,
to amplify the humiliation.
He's left wrapped in that shroud for 24 hours,
long enough for the blood and the sweat
to soak in to the shroud
and produce the image that we now see.
- [Laurence] Despite his ordeal,
de Molay lives another seven years,
only to be burned at the stake for renouncing his confession.
But what happened to the shroud?
- Jacques de Molay is tortured in 1307.
The hypothesis from the authors
is that there's a Templar, Jean de Charny,
who takes this shroud and keeps it.
What's interesting is Jean de Charny
is the grandfather of Geoffroi de Charny,
who's the one that we know in 1355,
first brings the shroud to our attention.
- The haunting image on the Shroud of Turin
has been an enigma since the day
it was first publicly unveiled 700 years ago.
And while millions are convinced
it's the imprinted image of Jesus,
the shroud's authenticity remains in debate.
Historians often cite one big question
as a reason for doubt:
why was it missing for so long?
- The 14th century is a long way away from the event itself,
in the first century.
You know, you're talking about 1,300 years.
You would think, if this were important to the story,
it was important to communicating that story,
it would've shown up somewhere.
And it simply doesn't.
- [Laurence] Skeptics also note
that the shroud may not match the description
of Jesus's burial cloth in the Bible.
- In the earliest accounts, we do have cloth mentioned,
and not in the singular but plural.
We have cloths that are mentioned.
- When you're looking at the Shroud of Turin,
you're looking at one long piece of cloth,
14 feet long, that covers the entire body.
But these would've been several pieces of cloth,
according to the biblical accounts.
- [Laurence] And there appear to be inconsistencies
in the imagery itself.
- The front and the back don't line up.
If this were actually the imprint of Jesus,
wouldn't those line up?
- If the shroud was wrapped over Jesus
and you have the image of the front and the back,
why is it these images are two different lengths?
It means that his front side is a different length
than his backside.
- [Laurence] There is one possible explanation,
one that would shatter a long-held illusion.
(tense music)
- The sudden appearance of the shroud
coincides with a period in which relics are important.
You have all sorts of relics,
you have all sorts of churches that have things on display
that they claim to connect back to Jesus
or the early Christian community.
Relics play an important part in the church.
People come to give money to visit these,
people donate for this,
and so this is a source of revenue for the church.
But we know that relics can be faked.
- If you stood to benefit financially
from relics in general,
you stood to benefit extraordinarily
from a relic like the Shroud of Turin.
- I think that it is proper for anyone to be suspicious
about any relic that has a footprint in the Middle Ages.
In an age when you could go into a pasture
and pick up the bone of a cow
and pass it off as the femur of a saint,
I think we are right to be suspicious about anything
that we can even link to the Middle Ages.
- [Laurence] When the French knight, Geoffroi de Charny,
first appears with the shroud about 1355,
it immediately goes on display in his church.
- If you wanted to encourage pilgrims
to come to your church, to come to your abbey,
to come to your village,
it was important that you have a relic.
Hence, the proliferation of relics in an age when perhaps,
I think it's fair to say, that in many occasions,
the supply might have outstripped the demand.
- If relics are like trading cards,
they're not all of the same value.
And there are some relics
that are going to be of minor value
and some that are of extraordinarily major value,
and I gotta put a relic like the Shroud of Turin
at the top of that list.
- [Laurence] Even at the outset,
not everyone's convinced it's the real thing.
- In 1389, Bishop Pierre d'Arcis,
of the Diocese of Troyes in France,
writes to Pope Clement VII in Avignon
that he knows that this shroud
that is being displayed in Liray
is in fact an artwork.
He claims he knows the artists.
He claims that this is an exhibition
that needs to be stopped immediately.
- He's saying that this is a forgery,
that an artist has confessed to painting
this image on the shroud.
d'Arcis is scandalized,
and his letter to Pope Clement talks about
how scandalized he is
by these pilgrims who've been swindled,
where this money has been rung out of them
under false pretenses.
In the 1300s, crucifixion paintings were quite popular,
so there's no surprise here to think
that someone might have painted this image
and that it would've been used
to raise funds for the church.
- [Laurence] Was the Bishop right?
Is the shroud a painting?
It will take nearly 600 years to get an answer.
- The Shroud of Turin Research Project
was given access to the shroud in 1978
and they were allowed to analyze it 'round the clock.
- [Laurence] After a battery of tests,
the research team releases its findings.
- Painting, in the High Middle Ages
and certainly by the time of the Late Middle Ages,
was a highly developed craft
and we know a lot about the pigments and dyes
that were used in those processes.
But the Shroud of Turin Research Project
demonstrated conclusively, in peer reviewed science,
that there is not a trace of a pigment, or a dye, or a paint
on that linen anywhere.
- The research team concluded
that they don't know how this image got there.
It wasn't paint, the bloodstains are real.
They don't know how that image got there.
They don't know how the blood got there.
- In an age when relics did not have to be sophisticated,
in an age when people did not ask the questions
that the modern mind asks,
why did this image have to be that sophisticated?
And how, importantly,
did that image get there in the first place?
- [Laurence] For centuries, visitors to the Shroud of Turin
were only able to see a faint image
of what is allegedly Jesus after the crucifixion.
But with the advent of modern photography,
the shroud would reveal yet another secret.
Barrie Schwortz was the official documenting photographer
for the Shroud of Turin Research Project in 1978.
- So in its early days,
there were people of faith who were aware of the shroud.
Science, on the other hand,
I don't think was very interested
until 1898 when the first photograph of the shroud
was permitted.
Italian lawyer and amateur photographer named Secondo Pia
made this first photograph of the shroud
and that ushered in the beginning
of the scientific era of shroud study.
- [Laurence] When Secondo Pia
develops his photographic plates of the Shroud of Turin,
he's shocked by what he sees.
(pensive music)
- Of course, not knowing that it was
going to spark a controversy,
he went into the dark room to process his glass plate.
This is 19th century photography,
so we're talking about a prolonged process.
- And it was that moment
when he processed that glass plate and held it up
that the image on the shroud itself is a negative
and when inverted, he had a much more
natural-looking result in his hands
than what was on the cloth itself.
- It's one of those really interesting paradoxes
that if you look at the shroud,
you don't see the detail.
If you look in the negative,
you see the detail of the face, of the beard.
It's almost as if this was meant to be seen
in a photograph of the image,
not the image itself.
- [Laurence] It's as if the shroud itself
is a photographic negative,
a concept that boggles the mind.
- There's no precedent for it.
There isn't another image
that I've seen in my 50-year professional experience
that even comes close to having these properties.
(tense music)
We know that photography
didn't exist until about 1826 or 1827.
Consequently, there was no way that someone in medieval times
could have created a photographic image.
On the other hand, artists back in medieval times
did use a technique called camera obscura.
So what they did was they would make a little hole
at one end of the room
and put, say, a canvas at the other end,
and the hole acted like a lens
to focus what was outside that camera obscura onto that
and then the artist could then paint or illustrate
what the camera was pointing at.
- Camera obscura is ancient.
I mean, we do know it from the ancient texts.
It is a very simple principle.
- The earliest evidence we have of a camera obscura
is by a Chinese writer, Mo Tzu.
The ancient Greeks knew about this.
And so in the medieval world,
certainly even in the first century,
people would've known about this.
- [Laurence] In 1993, art historian Nicholas Allen
proposes a radical theory:
a medieval forger could have used an ancient technique
known as camera obscure
to create the world's first photograph.
- In order to make the cloth photo sensitive,
you would have to coat it with silver nitrate.
- You would've coated the cloth with this
and then when light hits the cloth,
it would expose the silver nitrate and leave a dark pattern
like the negative on a photograph.
- [Laurence] Theoretically,
the chemicals needed to produce an image
were available in the Middle Ages.
But when analyzed, the cloth was missing one vital element.
- We were looking for silver nitrate on the shroud,
and we could detect one part per billion,
and we didn't find any silver anywhere on the shroud.
Nicholas Allen says he soaked his cloth in a silver solution
to create his light-sensitive emulsion,
so they would be permeated with silver.
We found zero silver anywhere on the shroud.
- [Laurence] What would prompt a medieval inventor
to create an image like the shroud?
- There's no evidence that anyone used the camera obscura
in the fashion that Nicholas Allen proposes.
And if he had,
I think we'd be seeing a lot more examples of it.
- Art history itself tells us
that this is not something that some medieval artist
would've even thought to do or even cared to do
when a simpler attempt at depicting Jesus on a cross
would've been plenty acceptable
by everybody in the medieval world anyway.
- What's the motivation
for creating something that's a pious fraud on the public?
I can make money from it.
I become more prestigious because of it.
I have a souvenir that no one else has.
There's a lot of things that could motivate
the development of something like the Shroud of Turin.
Did they? That's the question.
- [Laurence] In 1988, the Shroud of Turin undergoes
what many consider to be a definitive analysis.
These carbon dating tests make headlines around the world.
They indicate the cloth was made between 1260
and just before French knight, de Charny,
brought it to his church.
(tense music)
But not everyone believes the findings.
- There was a fire in 1532
and there was repair done to the shroud
by the Poor Clares, this order of nuns.
Could this have contaminated the shroud?
Is this carbon dating not of the actual shroud
but of the material from 1532?
- [Laurence] And in early 2022,
new evidence centered around the age of the cloth
may support that belief.
Researchers present a surprising observation.
- They had about a dozen samples of other linen cloths
dating all the way back to 5000 BC
and they could assess the amount of natural aging
in all these other cloths.
And the only cloth that had a comparable amount
of natural aging as fibers from the shroud
was taken from Masada, which is in Israel,
circa first century.
And so this then becomes a very strong piece of evidence
that suggests, just based on natural aging,
that the cloth is far older than the 700 years
ascribed by the carbon lapse.
- That leaves us with a very real possibility,
we could be talking about a first century cloth.
- [Laurence] And in 2011,
a finding by Italian physicist, Dr. Paolo Di Lazzaro,
may offer believers further support.
- In 2011, he published in a peer reviewed journal
how they've been experimenting with ultraviolet excimer lasers.
These are high powered, these are industrial lasers.
These are not some kind of pointer.
And they determined a 40 nanosecond burst
achieves the very same depth and coloration
as we see on the shroud.
This experimentally shows how the image
could indeed be the result of light.
- [Laurence] But it would take an incredible amount of power
to generate the light needed to create the shroud image
in a split second.
- To replicate the shroud image,
you would need 14,000 lasers
all going off instantaneously, at the same time.
- I have to remind everybody,
lasers weren't invented until about 1946.
So something of that nature in medieval times,
or even in the first century, just couldn't exist.
- [Laurence] But if the shroud is truly
from the first century,
an event from the Bible might reveal an answer.
- Just before Jesus makes his last trip to Jerusalem,
he takes Peter, James, and John with him
up on a high mountain
and is transfigured before them.
- Some turn to the Bible
and point to the transfiguration of Christ
that took place when Christ was praying with the disciples.
They read scripture
and they highlight the passage that indicates
that his face was shining as the sun
and his clothes became bright white.
- In the biblical account,
Jesus is transfigured into a form of energy or light.
His disciples describe him as his face glowing.
His clothes dazzling white.
- [Laurence] Di Lazzaro hypothesizes
that the transfiguration's burst of light and energy
could have repeated itself
during another important event in Christianity.
- Following his transfiguration,
Jesus tells his disciples to not tell anyone
until the son of man has risen from the dead.
So this clearly foreshadows
something that is going to happen,
something that the disciples are going to see again.
- For many believers,
the idea is that this is a snapshot,
this is literally the moment of Jesus's resurrection.
He's wrapped in this cloth, he gets resurrected.
There's this phenomenal amount of energy
that must've been released in that.
Is that what creates this image?
(tense music)
- The marks on the cloth are not the result
of a conventional type of heat
or a light that would generate heat.
For instance, it's not like you would get a scorch
on an ironing board, for instance.
It's more analogous to a light that might be from a laser.
- Now, we know that the burns clearly are the result of heat
because they fluoresce under ultraviolet light.
But the body image does not fluoresce,
so it looks like a scorch but it's not.
- For di Lazzaro,
he stopped short of saying this is a miracle.
But of course, this is extraordinary
because you don't have that kind of ultraviolet
light technology needed in the first century.
So if this actually has happened,
this is inexplicable.
- Christians will argue
that that kind of energy was actually produced
through the resurrection.
For them, the amount of energy needed isn't an issue.
The resurrection was such a powerful event
that it could produce what science cannot.
- [Laurence] For many Christians, the Shroud of Turin
is proof of the cornerstone in their faith,
the death and resurrection of Jesus.
- For Christians, this is an important symbol.
It speaks to the death and resurrection of Jesus,
the center point,
the fundamental meaning of the gospel.
Their argument is, until science can tell them
how this was produced,
there is good reason to believe that it is authentic.
(tense music)
- I don't think we can exclude a physical process,
but it is a physical process that we do not understand
and cannot replicate today.
More academic scrutiny has been brought to bear
on this 14.5 foot strip of linen
than any other object in the world
and we still can't explain the image.
That's a philosophical challenge.
When you confront the limits of your human knowledge,
your human capacity,
where else do you go for an answer?
(rising dramatic music)
- Over the course of many years,
scientists have applied the latest technology
to unraveling the mystery of the shroud.
Yet the question of what the image is and how it was made
remains unsolved.
For the skeptics,
it's an incredibly sophisticated medieval fraud.
For the faithful, it's a miraculous relic.
Maybe one day, the truth will be revealed.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries".