Mark Antonacci on Testing the Shroud of Turin Again

Mark Antonacci talks to Alexander “The Engineer” Lim, host of AuthorStory by alvinwriter.com about his book, Test the Shroud.


“This evidence is relevant to everyone.” ~Mark Antonacci on proving the Shroud of Turin is the real deal.

Mark got interested in the Shroud of Turin some 35 years ago when, while still an agnostic, he read the summary of scientific articles written by scientists who had studied the shroud in 1978, and he had been interested in the topic since then. Test the Shroud covers the various pieces of relevant evidence regarding the Shroud, as well as the questions related to the relic.

Shrouds have been used as linen burial garments in the Middle East for centuries, and unlike other such shrouds there are two images and some 130 blood marks noticeable in these. The wounds are consistent with the descriptions of the injuries Jesus suffered during his crucifixion, and Mark noted that, while the Shroud has had a history in Europe since the 1300s, but a cloth reportedly with the same images on it have been mentioned up to the first century ACE. He also noted that the use of modern technology has enabled more evidence to be gathered, particularly where resolution of images are concerned. Mark also noted that there have been no other shrouds which have exhibited this kind of imagery. 

With regard to the scientific controversy about the cloth, Mark noted that, of the 26 areas in which the tests were comprehensively done, all were consistent except for the carbon-14 dating area, and it was this result that the media and public opinion jumped on. Mark explained how the dates from the carbon-14 dating, at one of the facilities which did the carbon-dating, covered a very wide spread of ages, and that what the facility did, rather than just release the data, was to average the ages, which Mark noted wasn’t a valid procedure. Mark then gave some technical details on how carbon-14 could have been impregnated into the cloth by particle radiation from the environment and from the body that the cloth was wrapped in.

The tests Mark proposes would enable confirmation of the increase of carbon-14 the closer one gets to the image of the body and that this would add greater weight to the supposition that the body wrapped in the shroud was that of Jesus Christ. The molecular tests would be nondestructive, and the atomic testing, while destructive, would require only an extremely small part of the Shroud; and Mark doesn’t propose that atomic testing be done until molecular tests have been done repetitively to ensure consistency.

Mark advises for people to inquire into the central tenet of their faith and see what scientific evidence for these premises, noting that humanity has not had any extensive scientific evidence for these, particularly when it comes to the matter of life after death.

Purchase from Amazon: Test the Shroud by Mark Antonacci