Scientist re-creates Turin Shroud to show it’s fake

• Story Highlights
• Scientist re-creates Shroud of Turin to support his belief it is a medieval fake
• Many Christians have believed shroud is actual burial shroud of Jesus
• Luigi Garlaschelli made copy by wrapping cloth over student, baking and washing it

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced one of the world’s most famous Catholic relics, the Shroud of Turin, to support his belief it is a medieval fake, not the cloth Jesus was buried in.

Luigi Garlaschelli created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with pigment, baking it in an oven (which he called a “shroud machine”) for several hours, then washing it.

His result looks like the cloth that many Christians through the centuries have believed is the actual burial shroud of Jesus, he told CNN.

“What you have now is a very fuzzy, dusty and weak image,” he said. “Then for the sake of completeness I have added the bloodstains, the burns, the scorching because there was a fire in 1532.”

Garlaschelli says his work disproves the claims of the shroud’s strongest supporters.

“Basically the Shroud of Turin has some strange properties and characteristics that they say cannot be reproduced by human hands,” he told CNN by phone from Italy, where he is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia.

“For example, the image is superficial and has no pigment, it looks so lifelike and so on, and therefore they say it cannot have been done by an artist.”

His research shows the pigment may simply have worn off the cloth over the centuries since it was first “discovered” in 1355, but impurities in the pigment etched an image into the fibers of the cloth, leaving behind the ghostly picture that remains today. ………

The Vatican does not have an official position on whether the relic is genuinely the cloth Jesus was buried in after being crucified.

“Since it is not a matter of faith, the church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions,” the late Pope John Paul II said in 1998.

Carbon dating in the 1990s suggested it dates from the Middle Ages.

But John Paul II insisted it is important to learn lessons from the relic, whether or not it is genuine. …….

The Vatican has not responded to Garlaschelli’s research, which was funded by the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics, he said.

He dabbled on the project for years, he said, starting with handkerchief-size pieces of cloth and different combinations of acid and pigment, before making his shroud this summer.

Now that he knows how to do it, he could make another one in about a week, he estimated…………

Thanks to:http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/07/italy.turin.shroud/index.html
Also see: See the original Shroud of Turin compared to the one created by scientists.