The Shroud of Turin is a 14.5-foot-long, 3.75-foot-wide linen cloth bearing the faint image of a man who appears to have been crucified. Housed in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, it is one of the most studied and debated artifacts in history. Believers consider it the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. Skeptics argue it is a medieval creation. After more than a century of scientific investigation, neither side has been able to fully prove its case.
What the Cloth Looks Like
The shroud is a single piece of linen woven in a 3-to-1 herringbone twill pattern, meaning each thread passes over three and under one in a zigzag arrangement. This type of weave was uncommon but not unheard of in first-century Palestine, and it was equally rare in medieval Europe. The fabric itself is consistent with a costly burial cloth from antiquity.
The image on the cloth shows both the front and back of a bearded man, roughly 5 feet 11 inches tall, with his hands crossed over his body. The figure displays wounds that correspond closely to a Roman crucifixion: marks from flogging across the back, puncture wounds around the head consistent with a crown of thorns, nail wounds through the wrists, and a piercing wound in the side of the chest. The image is extremely faint in person and was not fully appreciated until it was first photographed in 1898, when the photographic negative revealed a startlingly detailed, lifelike portrait.
Forensic Details on the Body
Medical analysis of the image has identified injuries that go well beyond what a medieval forger would likely have known to depict. The man’s right shoulder shows signs of dislocation, and the left hand appears claw-shaped, indicating damage to a bundle of nerves running from the neck through the arm. This kind of nerve injury would result from violent blunt-force trauma to the neck, chest, and shoulder from behind, consistent with falling while carrying a heavy crossbeam.
The thumbs are not visible on either hand. Forensic researchers attribute this to the tendons of the thumbs being pulled inward as nails were driven through the wrists, causing the thumbs to retract involuntarily. The crossing of the hands sits lower on the body than would be natural for a corpse laid out by hand, which researchers interpret as a consequence of the arms being stretched during crucifixion. A wound in the chest area shows evidence of both blood clots and a clear fluid separating from blood after death, consistent with a post-mortem spear wound draining fluid from the chest cavity.
Blood and Biological Evidence
Testing has identified real human blood on the shroud, type AB positive. This is a relatively rare blood type, found in only about 3% of the world’s population, with the highest concentration in populations from the Middle East, particularly northern Israel. The blood stains test positive for hemoglobin and serum albumin, the major protein in blood plasma. Because the red blood cells on the cloth lack nuclei (as human red blood cells do, unlike those of most animals), the blood has been confirmed as human rather than animal in origin.
DNA analysis confirmed the blood came from a human male. However, extracting useful genetic information has proven extremely difficult. Out of roughly three billion base pairs in a human genome, researchers were only able to recover 700 to 750 pairs from the shroud’s bloodstains. An estimated 95% of the DNA on the cloth may have been replaced over the centuries by fungi and mold. Surface DNA sampled from the linen itself reflects an enormous range of human contact, with genetic signatures pointing to people from the Middle East, North and East Africa, and regions as far east as India, evidence of the many hands that have touched the cloth over its long history.
The Radiocarbon Dating Controversy
In 1988, three independent laboratories performed radiocarbon dating on a small sample cut from one corner of the shroud. The results dated the cloth to between 1260 and 1390 CE, placing its origin squarely in the medieval period. For many scientists, this settled the question. For proponents of authenticity, it raised new ones. Critics of the testing have argued that the sample was taken from a section of the cloth that had been repaired or rewoven in the Middle Ages, or that centuries of contamination from fire, handling, and biological growth could have skewed the results. The debate over the validity of that single test continues to this day.
Historical Record
The shroud’s documented history begins in the 1350s in the village of Lirey in north-central France. A knight named Geoffroi de Charny endowed a small church there, and around 1355, the church’s dean began publicly displaying a long cloth bearing the image of a crucified man. Charny himself died at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 without leaving any record of how he obtained the cloth.
The exhibition quickly drew attention, and not all of it was favorable. In 1389, the local bishop of Troyes publicly denounced the shroud as a fraud, declaring it “cunningly painted” and claiming the artist who made it had confessed. Despite this early skepticism, the shroud changed hands over the following century, eventually coming into the possession of the House of Savoy, the royal family of what would later become Italy. It was transferred to Turin in 1578 and has remained there since, surviving a fire in 1532 that left scorch marks and burn holes still visible on the cloth today.
What happened before the 1350s is a matter of speculation. Some historians have attempted to trace the shroud back through Constantinople and Edessa (modern-day Şanlıurfa, Turkey), linking it to various cloths mentioned in earlier historical records, but no unbroken chain of evidence connects the shroud to the first century.
Pollen and Plant Evidence
Botanical analysis has found DNA from a wide range of plant species on the shroud’s surface. Most of the identified plants, including clovers, ryegrasses, plantains, and chicories, are native to the Mediterranean basin and found from the Iberian Peninsula to Palestine. This is consistent with the shroud having spent significant time in that region. The most abundant plant DNA belongs to spruce trees native to Europe.
The picture gets more complicated with the presence of species from outside Europe. Researchers identified DNA from an Asian pear variety native to northern China, plum species from temperate Asia, and black locust, a tree native to the Appalachian region of the eastern United States that was not introduced to Europe until the 1600s. These findings suggest the cloth has been exposed to plant material from many geographic regions over many centuries, though some of this contamination likely occurred during modern handling and storage.
How the Image Was Formed
Perhaps the deepest mystery of the shroud is how the image got there. The image exists only on the topmost fibers of the linen, penetrating no more than a fraction of the thread’s thickness. It has no brush strokes, no pigment buildup, and no direction of application that would indicate painting. The discoloration appears to result from a chemical change in the surface fibers of the linen itself.
Multiple hypotheses have been proposed. One model, published in the journal Applied Optics, suggests the image formed when sunlight passed through the cloth and reflected off the body beneath it, with compounds used in ancient burial preparation (a mixture of aloes and myrrh dissolved in water or oil) acting as a chemical catalyst that yellowed the fibers. This model requires the cloth to have been in extremely close contact with the body and to have been exposed to sunlight from both sides, accounting for the presence of both a frontal and a back image. Other researchers have proposed some form of radiation burst from the body, though no known natural process produces this effect. Still others have explored whether medieval techniques could have created an image with these properties, with mixed results.
The Church’s Position
The Catholic Church has never officially declared the Shroud of Turin to be the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. It treats the shroud as an object of devotion and meditation rather than a confirmed relic. Multiple popes have venerated the shroud publicly, and the Church permits its display as an aid to faith, but it has consistently stopped short of making any definitive statement about its origins. The shroud is displayed to the public only on rare occasions, with the most recent exhibition in 2015 drawing over two million visitors.