(Note this article is three years old but just surfaced in Yahoo as news).

“There’s only one answer: This cloth wrapped the body of Jesus.”  — Barrie Schwortz

imageIn Denver’s Westward, Patricia Calhoun writes: Jesus! Was the Shroud of Turin Created by a Supernatural “Flash of Light”?:

According to Vatican Insider, experts at Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Development have concluded that what’s been billed as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ could not have been faked:

“The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining which is identical in all its facets, would be impossible to obtain today in a laboratory … This inability to repeat (and therefore falsify) the image on the Shroud makes it impossible to formulate a reliable hypothesis on how the impression was made.”

Their study involved a lot of technical use of laser lights — pulses in short-term duration — and also name-checks some of the research done by the Shroud of Turin Research Project headed by John Jackson, who led a STRP team of researchers to Italy back in 1978, and still runs the Turin Shroud Center in Colorado Springs. “It seems as though they’re cueing off a paper that I did about twenty years ago on image-formation mechanism,” Jackson says. “There’s some essential physics here. I’ve thought for twenty years that ultra-violet could create a vision.”

[…]

Jackson has been trying to solve that puzzle for decades….

“Coloradans have played an important role in Shroud research,” notes Barry Schwartz, publisher of the Colorado-based shroud.com. He was part of the team that went to Italy in the ’70s (he only moved to this state five years ago) and has done much of the photographic documentation.

The Italian research, he says, “further supports the scientific data that the image on the Shroud is neither a painting or art or a hoax from the medieval times to fool us.”

Jackson will continue to push for more proof of what, exactly, the Image is. “We keep pressing forward as best we can,” he says. “I would commend the Italian researchers. They’re trying to understand the shroud using a radiation model…I’m pleased that they’re using capabilities that they have to try to explore that type of a hypothesis.”

But Schwartz, who is Jewish and says he was “the biggest skeptic on the team,” is ready to make a more definitive pronouncement: “There’s only one answer: This cloth wrapped the body of Jesus.”