A new book says the controversial Shroud of Turin – said to bear the image of the crucified Jesus Christ – has been wrongly condemned as a fraud and desecrated due to serious errors in its study and conservation."The Rape of the Turin Shroud – how Christianity's most precious relic was wrongly condemned, and violated," by William Meacham, contends the shroud was dismissed as a medieval fake by the general public after poorly planned Carbon-14 dating in 1988.
The linen also suffered major damage in 2002 through what Meacham calls an ill-advised and secretly executed restoration "conducted for cosmetic and misguided conservation purposes."
The author points out that in the early 1980s, the shroud was at the pinnacle of its prestige, as a considerable number of academics and scientists thought it could be the burial cloth of Christ. ...
