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Digital Images of the Turin Shroud

From Scientific American’s Discovering Archaeology Magazine  (March/April, 2000)

Ever since surfacing in fourteenth-century France, the Shroud of Turin has been the subject of hundreds of years of dissension: Is it really the burial cloth of Jesus? Is it a forgery? How old is it?

The shroud, which has been in Turin, Italy, since 1578, is a piece of fine linen roughly one meter (3.5 feet) by 4.2 meters (14 feet) — about the size of a tablecloth. It contains full-length images — one a front view and the other the back — of a man, as though the cloth had been folded lengthwise to cover both sides of a body.

Alan and Mary Whanger, founders and directors of the Council for the Study of the Shroud of Turin in Durham, North Carolina, have dedicated the last 20 years of their lives to scientific study of the shroud, drawing in botanists and scientists from a wide range of disciplines.

The Whangers pioneered a method called "polarized image overlay" to compare the face found on the shroud — referred to as "the Man of the Shroud" — with faces of early Christian icons and images. To highlight hidden features on the Cloth, two images are projected one atop the other and precisely aligned using right-angle polarizing filters. By viewing the two superimposed images through a rotating polarized filter, the images fade into each other, and similarities and differences between the two images become clear.

This method revealed that the image found on the shroud is the same as one widely used in artistic depictions of Jesus beginning in the third century A.D. And some statues from the Middle East are consistent with the shroud image.

The Whangers showed that the shroud contains images —   produced by physical and chemical changes in the linen fibers — not only of a body, bloodstains, scorches, and water stains, but also faint traces of a Roman spear, a sponge on a stick, a crown of thorns, a nail, a pair of pliers, and Jewish phylacteries (a type of small prayer box). These are all objects that were present in first-century Jerusalem.

Several images of flowers, known to exist in that region of the Middle East, are also present on the shroud.

A three-dimensional examination of the face shows the skeletal structure of the shroud face, highlighting the eye sockets, 20 teeth, and nasal bones. See http://dmi-www.mc.duke.edu/shroud/default.htm for the images.

Lisa Parks, Scientific American Discovering Archaeology