The Shroud of Turin

Masterpiece or Miracle?

The Shroud of Turin is perhaps the only object on Earth that can make an avuncular nuclear physicist and a mild-mannered medieval historian lose their respective tempers at the same formal dress dinner party.

At first glance, it hardly looks like much: a long strip of ancient linen, faintly marked with the shadowy image of a man who appears to have been crucified. And yet this quiet, unassuming cloth has been examined, tested, photographed, scanned, and debated more than any artefact in history. As we approach 2026, we are arguably no closer to consensus than when it was first photographed in 1898. In some regards, we’re further away.

That’s because the Shroud refuses to sit still. Just when one side thinks it has won the argument, new evidence seems to pop up.

The straightforward case: A medieval masterpiece

If you’re sceptically inclined, the Shroud looks like a solved problem.

In 1988, three independent laboratories, in Oxford, Zurich, and Arizona, used radiocarbon dating to analyse samples from the cloth. All three placed it firmly in the medieval period, between 1260 and 1390 AD. That date lines up almost perfectly with the Shroud’s first clear appearance in the historical record, in 1354, in the French village of Lirey.

Even contemporaries were suspicious. The local bishop, Pierre d’Arcis, wrote to the Pope claiming the Shroud was a fake and that an artist had confessed to producing it. Medieval Europe, after all, was awash with relics; splinters of the True Cross, drops of holy blood, and saints’ bones by the cartload. Pilgrims meant money, and holy objects meant pilgrims.

Seen this way, the Shroud becomes an extraordinary but entirely human achievement: a brilliantly executed forgery from a period when forgery flourished. Apply the redoubtable Occam’s Razor, and the simplest explanation seems obvious. No miracle required, just a once-in-a-millennium artist.

And yet… the cloth itself won’t cooperate

The trouble is that when scientists actually look at how the image is formed, the neat medieval explanation begins to feel less neat.

In 1978, a team of American scientists was given unprecedented access to the cloth. They arrived expecting to find paint, pigment, or dye. What they found instead was baffling:

• The Photographic Negative: When Secondo Pia photographed the Shroud in 1898, he realised the image works like a negative; the light and dark values are reversed. Only when flipped does it look like a realistic human face. Medieval artists were talented, but deliberately painting a negative image centuries before the invention of photography?

• The Three-Dimensionality: The intensity of the image corresponds precisely to how far the cloth would have been from a body beneath it. Feed the image into a NASA VP-8 image analyser and, unlike any 2D painting or photograph, it produces a coherent 3D topographical map of a human form.

• The Microscopic Surface: The discolouration sits only on the outermost surface of the linen fibres, about 200 nanometres thick. It doesn’t bleed through the cloth. Modern laboratories struggle to reproduce this effect even with lasers. A medieval brush simply shouldn’t be capable of it.

At this point, even hardened sceptics tend to pause. But what about the 1988 studies?

The 2024 plot twist

For decades, the 1988 carbon dating has been the sceptic’s knockout punch. But in 2024, a new study reopened the fight.

Italian researcher Liberato De Caro used Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) to analyse how the linen’s cellulose structure has degraded over time. The results were startling: structurally, the Shroud’s fibres look almost identical to first-century linen recovered from the siege of Masada (c. 55–74 AD).

If this method holds up, it lends significant weight to the “Medieval Repair Hypothesis”. This theory suggests the 1988 samples, taken from a corner that had been heavily handled, burned in a 16th-century fire, and repaired by nuns, were not representative of the cloth as a whole. The date might be correct for the sample, but wrong for the Shroud.

While WAXS is a relatively new technique in the world of archaeology, it has turned what was once “settled science” back into a live debate.

Two explanations, both extraordinary

And so we arrive at an uncomfortable fork in the road.

Option A: The Natural Miracle. The Shroud is the product of a medieval mind with an understanding of anatomy, chemistry, optics, and image encoding that apparently wouldn’t be rediscovered for another five centuries.

Option B: The Supernatural Miracle. It is the physical trace of an unknown energetic event, something closer to a burst of radiation than a brushstroke, leaving behind a microscopic imprint of a body at the moment of resurrection.

Neither option is tidy. Both stretch the sceptical mind in different ways.

Why the Shroud won’t let us go

In the end, the Shroud of Turin may tell us more about ourselves than about the past. For some, it confirms a suspicion that faith manufactures its own evidence. For others, it offers a rare and unsettling hint that reality might be stranger than our models allow.

What seems clear is this: the Shroud does not behave like a painting, a photograph, or any known medieval artefact. It sits stubbornly at the boundary between belief and scepticism, history and physics, the proverbial ghost at the senior common room dinner table.

And perhaps that’s why, as we leave behind the year 2025, it still refuses to be neatly folded away.