Original subtitles

- 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".