Turin Shroud Back Side Shows Face

[DC09]

April 11, 2004 — The ghostly image of a man's face has emerged on the back side of the Turin Shroud, the piece of linen long believed to have been wrapped around Jesus's body after the crucifixion, according to new digital imaging processing techniques.

The discovery adds new complexity to one of the most controversial relics in Christendom, venerated by many Catholics as the proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave and dismissed by some scientists as a brilliant medieval fake.

The study, which will be published on Tuesday by one of the journals of the Institute of Physics, the Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics, examined the back surface of the famous handwoven linen.

The front side of the shroud, on which the smudged outline of the body of a man is indelibly impressed, has been investigated by a multitude of scientists. But the reverse side has remained hidden for centuries beneath a piece of Holland cloth that was sewn by nuns in 1534, after a fire had blackened parts of it.

The cloth's back surface was fully scrutinized only in 2002, when the 14-foot-long linen was completely unstitched from the Holland cloth during a restoration project.

To the naked eye, the back surface of the shroud showed almost nothing, apart from a peculiar stitching which Mechtild Flury-Lemberg, the Swiss textile expert who performed the restoration work, identified as a style seen in the first century A.D. or before.

The back surface, however, was photographed in detail and the pictures published in a book by Mons. Giuseppe Ghiberti, one of the church's top Shroud officials. At the end of the restoration, a new reinforcing cloth was sewn back in place, hiding again the shroud's reverse side.

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[DC09]

Heres a pic.