The Shroud of Turin: Has the identity of the imprinted face been confirmed as Christ?

Has the Shroud of Turin be authenticated as belonging to Jesus? Vatican researcher Dr Barbara Frale believes so. She says, "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth." She said that she had reconstructed it from fragments of Greek, Hebrew and Latin writing imprinted on the cloth together with the image of the crucified man. The shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral and is to be put in display next spring, is regarded by many scholars as a medieval forgery. A 1988 carbon dating of a fragment of the cloth dated it to the Middle Ages.

However Dr Frale, who is to publish her findings in a new book, La Sindone di Gesu Nazareno (The Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth) said that the inscription provided "historical date consistent with the Gospels account". The letters, barely visible to the naked eye, were first spotted during an examination of the shroud in 1978, and others have since come to light.

Dr. Frale disputes the claims that the shroud was from the Middle Ages because the text written on the cloth refers to Jesus as "the Nazarene" and not the Son of God (which would have been considered heresy in medieval times).

The letter could only be properly deciphered through in negative photographs (sort of like a backwards writing being complete understood when held up to a mirror.

Dr Frale told La Repubblica (the second largest-circulated Italian daily) that under Jewish burial practices current at the time of Christ in a Roman colony such as Palestine, a body buried after a death sentence could only be returned to the family after a year in a common grave.

She says, "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth."

However Dr Frale, who is to publish her findings in a new book, La Sindone di Gesu Nazareno (The Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth) said that the inscription provided "historical date consistent with the Gospels account". The letters, barely visible to the naked eye, were first spotted during an examination of the shroud in 1978, and others have since come to light.

Dr. Frale disputes the claims that the shroud was from the Middle Ages because the text written on the cloth refers to Jesus as "the Nazarene" and not the Son of God (which would have been considered heresy in medieval times).

The letter could only be properly deciphered through in negative photographs (sort of like a backwards writing being complete understood when held up to a mirror).

The death certificate was glued to the face of the deceased so that the body could be later recognized and retrieved.

Dr Frale said that the use of three languages was consistent with the polyglot nature of a community of Greek-speaking Jews in a Roman colony. Best known for her studies of the Knights Templar, who she claims at one stage, preserved the shroud, she further stated what she had deciphered was "the death sentence on a man called Jesus the Nazarene. If that man was also Christ the Son of God it is beyond my job to establish. I did not set out to demonstrate the truth of faith. I am a Catholic, but all my teachers have been atheists or agnostics, and the only believer among them was a Jew. I forced myself to work on this as I would have done on any other archaeological find."