The Turin Shroud has been a subject of debate for decades. Some believe it to be the original cloth used to cover Jesus Christ after his crucifixion, while others dismiss it as a clever forgery created by an unknown artist in the 1300s.

But a team of scientists in southern Italy recently found that a fragment from the cloth could date back around 2,000 years – to the time of Christ. They also have a theory explaining why the previous date given for the mysterious relic’s origin might have been incorrect. Professor Liberato De Caro, who works for Italy’s National Research Council, said: “The Shroud has been the centre of attention for centuries. It was touched by countless people, displayed during parades, affected by smoke from candles. There was a great deal of contamination. That is why the carbon dating gave a result that suggested that it dated from medieval times.” Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Professor De Caro explained that the advanced technique he used to date the Shroud wasn’t available in the 1980s when the previous tests were conducted. “It’s a sort of radiography, similar to the type of scan that you would do on a bone to see if there is a fracture,” he sai.

“But this X-ray penetrates the material very deeply to analyse it at a microscopic level. Over time, the structure of the material degrades. We can tell from that how much time has passed and therefore date the object.”, reports the Express.

Working with a very small piece of the relic, less than a millimetre square, De Caro’s team say they’ have conclusively dated the age of the fabric to about 2,000 years. He can’t definitively say who is is pictured on the Shroud, simply that they lived at around the same time as Jesus. Modern attempts to duplicate the image have largely been unsuccessful, although Shroud expert Russ Breault previously told the Express that a 40 nano-second burst from a high-powered ultraviolet laser had left a scorch mark on a test swatch of fabric that was uncannily similar to the Shroud image. “This was the first time any aspect of the Shroud image has been duplicated using light,” he said.

Professor De Caro is convinced that the mysterious relic is genuine: “If I had to be a judge in a trial, weighing up all the evidence that says the shroud is authentic and the little evidence that says it is not, in all good conscience I could not declare that the Turin Shroud is medieval,” he said.

“It would not be right, given the enormous quantity of evidence in favour of it. It correlates with everything that the Gospels tell us about the death of Jesus of Nazareth.”