With science and technology advancing rapidly in today’s society, mysteries of the past are solved more accurately and easily than ever before. Portraying a man who appears to have been scourged and later crucified, the Shroud of Turin, however, continues to perplex scientists and historians as new scientific testing proves to be inconclusive in verifying the authenticity of the Shroud as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
As a religious artifact, Shroud of Turin has a history that is about as intriguing as the famous burial cloth itself. Measured to be 4.37 meters long and 1.13 meters wide, the Shroud of Turin contains the imprint of a man who appears to have been scourged, and shortly after, crucified (Freeman). This image coincides with the Biblical account of Jesus Christ’s Passion found in the Gospel of John; when after his crucifixion his body was …show more content…
After Jesus’s resurrection, the whereabouts of the burial cloth became unknown. One legend explains how one of Jesus’s apostles, Thaddeus, traveled to King Abgar V of Edessa with Jesus’s burial cloth and cured the king of an illness, possibly leprosy (Picknett and Prince 45). Afterwards, the Shroud was supposedly brought to Byzantium in 944 A.D. and later vanished in 1204 when Constantinople was captured during the Fourth Crusade (“The Turin Shroud”). However, the first proven historical reference of the Shroud of Turin dates back to 1354, when Geoffroi de Charny, a prominent knight, displayed the shroud in Lirey, France. Despite continuously being “denounced as fake” by clergies in the region, the Shroud was displayed in the chapel of the de Charny family, and the Shroud was then passed on to de Charny’s granddaughter Margaret, who then sold it to the Dukes of Savoy in 1453. In 1532, a