Father Kelly unpacks its history

The Dowry was actually worth a lot. It was sold by Jeanne de Vergy's granddaughter who was Margaret von Habsburg, a Savoy Princess, for two Castles to the Duke of Savoy. The Duke of Savoy moves it to Chambéry in France about the mid 1400's and then in the following century it's moved to Turin where it is still today. That's a basic overview of the shroud.

The link between the Mandylion to Sindone to the shroud is obviously not definitive; it's a hypothesis, but it is based on the relationship between Jeanne de Vergy and Otto de la Roche.

Paul: Where does carbon dating place the shroud?

Father Kelly: The carbon dating test was done about 25 years ago. It used a part of the cloth on the top right hand corner as we look at it; a strip that was cut out and burned to produce the carbon-14 dating test. The results of which were published as placing the flax plants from which the linen was produced between the years 1260 and 1390. That has become the dominant sound bite in all the media reports to the present, despite the fact that early on but particularly in the last number of years there has been very strong scientific consensus that the cloth has another date.

The carbon-14 dating test may even have worked well, but what's known for certain now is that in that top right hand corner, threads were introduced by Marguerite de Charney. These threads that were extracted were replaced by cotton and that is known and established today scientifically and so we have a piece of the cloth that has younger tissue introduced. Obviously this would skew the dates of the test of the linen in general. It's also a little bit strange that the scientists didn't realize this and hadn't done the biochemical testing to ascertain the exact nature of the stuff that they were testing for the carbon-14 dating, which would be a normal protocol.

Therefore the carbon-14 dating test that was done can no longer be considered to be the definitive reference point on the age of the shroud no matter how many media articles continue to use it as such. It's really now just a footnote in the history in the research of the shroud.

Many people ask if it will be done again. I think there will be a great reluctance because it uses a lot of material that is then completely lost for further investigation research. There will be other means surely in time which will also be able to give accurate dating that won't need to be so invasive and destructive of the material of the shroud. There are so many other scientific quandaries with the shroud now that are amazing and intriguing, that really there is no urgency to do it because the shroud is revealing qualities and riches for the latest highest technology and nobody is able to reproduce, so it becomes a huge challenge to the mind of the researcher and his life.

Paul: There have also been tests about the flowers on the shroud. What results did they bring up?

Father Kelly: Professor Avinoam Danin is a retired botany professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has published something like 14 different books in Hebrew and English; he has some in Spanish and Italian and his name is on 42 different plant taxa sub species of plants. He is a very qualified botanist and is internationally recognised with high esteem. Avinoam Danin followed up an initial discovery made by two professors at Duke University North Carolina and discovered hundreds of images of flowers.

We have the image of the body on the front and back, but also other images are reported such as the flowers, rope and coins. The coins are from the time of Pilate.

Let's come back to the flowers. The flowers that Danin studied and mapped he sorted according to different categories. One category he selected for our museum here. He has actually prepared it as a book on the botany of the shroud. There is a plant that grows exclusively in the areas of Turkey and across Mesopotamia and as far south as Jerusalem. Then he has a second plant, which only grows in the Sinai a little bit, across the entire Negev, a little bit into Jordan and it extends only as far north as Jericho. There is a third plant which also reaches the major Jerusalem area. When Danin looks at this as a Scientist and he puts them together, he says there is only one place in the world where you can find these three plants growing together in nature and remember he has identified fresh blooms of these plants imaged on the shroud. The only place where this can be found is between Jerusalem and Hebron.

The second thing that Danin points out is that these three plants and an additional six plants have a common blooming period in March and April. Professor Danin who is a regular secular Jew says that the flower evidence on the shroud confirms for him that the imaging process that put the body images; that put the flower images, the coin images and so on, on the cloth had to happen on location between Jerusalem and Hebron and specifically in the months of March or April.

Paul: Do you believe it is the shroud of Jesus?

Father Kelly: I have presented the shroud here definitely over 1000 times in the last five years I've been working in Jerusalem. It's a privilege to be serving here and I have always resisted speaking on this question. I prefer to leave the viewer of the shroud museum to themselves to make up their own mind and there is tons of evidence. You will find studies on the internet; probability studies that make it impossible that it's not from the tomb of Jesus. You will find people who will say that even with a fraction of the evidence that we have about the shroud any other scientific object would have been decided based on a fraction of that evidence and the shroud is the most scientifically studied object in history at this moment. It's been studied for many disciplines. The most I will say is that Avinoam Danin says that he thinks that the shroud is from the tomb of Jesus.