New examination by a leading expert shows undeniable proof that Jesus was indeed wrapped in the Shroud of Turin, challenging the beliefs of skeptics.

The forensic evidence was bloody and grim. Thick clotted blood scored the bruised face of the corpse, from a multitude of deep, needle-sharp wounds.

More dried blood could be seen on the arms, feet and ankles, blood that had oozed from brutal injuries that punched through the bones.

Expert criminal pathologists have meticulously put together these details, which are all encapsulated in the oldest piece of evidence of a murder in the world: the Shroud of Turin.

The dead man, powerfully built and naked, must have suffered intense agonies… but he did not bleed to death.

Neither was he killed by the deep stab wound in his left side, close to his heart.

There were other wounds too, savage but not fatal – signs of a beating that began at his shoulders and left welts across his back and thighs.

All of these injuries contributed to his death, but the murder weapon was more gruesome still… gravity itself.

The victim was killed by his own body weight. His name, of course, was Jesus of Nazareth.

His death, by crucifixion at a public execution in Jerusalem around 33AD, must have been slow and unspeakably painful.

Slumped forward and suspended by his arms, he suffocated on the blood and pleural fluid that accumulated around his lungs.

After his body was taken down from the cross, it was wrapped in a linen cloth.

According to belief, Jesus’s blood, while still fresh, left its mark on the fabric, and then, through a miraculous event, the image of Christ’s body was imprinted onto the linen.

The earliest definite historical records show a cloth claiming to be the death shroud was given to the Church by a French knight called Geoffroi de Charny in 1354.

How the knight came to obtain it is unknown, though it may have been plunder looted from Jerusalem during the Crusades.

In 1578, it was taken for safekeeping to Turin in northern Italy, where it has been kept ever since.

But its status as a true relic appeared to be utterly discredited in the 1980s by carbon dating analysis.

New science, though hotly disputed, seemed to show the shroud was fake, a forgery – painted with red pigment.

But in 2022 further tests were carried out. And these overturned the previous results, reviving the possibility that the shroud really was Christ’s winding sheet. 

Now Australian researcher William West – who spoke exclusively to the Daily Mail about his findings – has published a definitive account of all the controversies, the mistakes and the unexpected discoveries.

In his new book, The Shroud Rises, he reaches a provocative conclusion: that the Shroud does, beyond question, depict the face and body of Jesus Christ.

It is, West says, marked with his actual blood.

And, more than merely showing what Jesus’ body looked like in the garden tomb, it records an exact 3D image of his features – something that no human technology could do before the invention of computers. (The three-dimensional nature of the image was only discovered in 1976.)

West believes there to be multiple irrefutable proofs that the Shroud is not a fake (more of which later). And he reveals details about the crucifixion that would not be out of place in any ‘true crime’ TV drama.

Since the Shroud was first placed on public display in a tiny French village 670 years ago, it has been surrounded by fierce debate.

It is a strip of flax linen about 14ft 5 inches by 3ft 7 inches, and it bears the imprint of a man’s body, both front and back.

His eyes are closed, his hair is shoulder length, his face is bearded and his hands are folded below his hips.

The image, though faint, can be discerned with the naked eye.

His features are instantly recognizable, because for nearly 2,000 years, this is how Christians have depicted Jesus in art.

The single most important belief in Christianity is that the Son of God gave his life to absolve us all of our sins – and that three days later he rose from the dead.

For centuries the Shroud was accepted as the actual cloth in which Jesus’ body was wrapped after he was taken down from the cross.

How his likeness came to be emblazoned on it was beyond explanation. It had to be the result of some miraculous process.

But as science advanced at the end of the Victorian era, investigators began searching for more prosaic answers.

Could the Shroud be man-made? Was it simply a beautiful piece of religious art?

To unpick these questions, Italy’s last king, Umberto, gave permission in May 1898 for the Shroud to be photographed for the first time.

The job fell to an amateur named Secondo Pia.

Using an electric light (cutting-edge tech at the time) instead of a flashbulb, Pia took a picture and set about developing the photographic plate.

But when he held it up to the light, he almost dropped it in astonishment.

Cameras in the 19th century worked by capturing a ‘negative’ image. Dark areas appeared light, and vice versa.

But the picture on Pia’s plate did not look like a negative. The shadows were dark, the highlights were lightened.

Gradually, he grasped the reason. He was looking at the negative image… of a negative image!

In other words, the Shroud itself acted as a sort of photographic plate, many centuries before the invention of photography.

Pia, West claims, was the first person in nearly 2,000 years to see the actual face of Jesus, instead of a photo negative.

But this raised an alarming question. What if that’s all the Shroud was… a medieval photo?

No one knew how a 14th century ‘photographer’ might have invented a camera that projected indelible pictures onto cloth.

Some sceptics immediately suggested it was the sort of experiment Leonardo da Vinci might have done. They conveniently ignored the fact that Leonardo wasn’t born until a century after the Shroud first went on display.

But if there was any chance it was manmade, the Church wanted to distance itself.

The Catholic Encyclopedia warned in 1917 that the relic should be treated with ‘grave suspicion’ and added that most learned people were now ‘averse to the authenticity’ of the Shroud.

In 1988, carbon dating was done on a small portion of the linen. This process measures the radioactive decay of one element, carbon-14, to calculate the age of organic matter.

The lab results were damning. They showed the Shroud was woven between 1290 and 1360, more than a millennium after the death of Christ.

Professor Edward Hall, then director of Oxford University’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, where the carbon dating facility was based, told a press conference: ‘There was a multi-million-pound business in making forgeries in the 14th century. Someone just got a bit of linen, faked it up and flogged it.’

The professor dismissed anyone who questioned the accuracy of his findings as ‘flat earthers’.

But those findings were conclusively demolished in April 2022 when a team of five scientists from Italy’s National Research Council, led by Dr Liberato De Caro, carried out a series of X-ray tests specifically designed to prove the age of ancient linen.

Their findings were corroborated by more tests done at the University of Padua by Professor Giulio Fanti.

Both showed that the Shroud did not date from the Middle Ages. It was in fact around 2,000 years old.

And though science could not say definitively that what we can see is the image of Christ, it did prove that all the sceptics who said the Shroud was a medieval artefact were completely wrong.

In fact, carbon dating is frequently inaccurate, sometimes wildly so.

William West cites some disturbing examples: ‘A freshly killed seal that was dated as being 1,300 years old, the shells of living snails that appeared to be 26,000 years old, and a medieval Viking horn dated to the year 2006.’

A few simple theories explain how the scientists got it so wrong in 1988.

The tiny sample of cloth they tested probably came from a portion of the Shroud that was repaired in the 13th century – a piece of medieval darning.

On top of that, the cloth might easily have been contaminated, by being handled countless times by worshippers and pilgrims over the centuries.

There is also the depressing possibility that Professor Hall and his team got it wrong because they were actively looking for evidence that discredited the authenticity of the Shroud.

Science has an aversion to miracles.

But it is the things that science cannot explain which make the Shroud such a source of discussion. If we knew the process by which the image was transferred to the cloth, it would no longer seem miraculous.

Whatever the process was, no one has ever succeeded in copying it. Many have tried, using all the techniques known to photography in the past 200 years, but all have failed.

That makes the Shroud unique among ancient artefacts. We have numerous theories for how the pyramids were built, and Stonehenge. We know where Troy was, and Babylonia.

But no scientist has come close to creating a similar image on linen. ‘That’s the mystery of it,’ says West, 69, who lives in the Blue Mountains overlooking Sydney, Australia. ‘A lot of people have tried to replicate it and haven’t come close, even with modern technology.

‘One of the foremost experts on the Shroud is the British television director David Rolfe. He is so confident that the image cannot be replicated on linen using methods available in the Middle Ages that he has put up a million-dollar prize for anyone who proves him wrong. So far, there have been no takers.’

The image on the Shroud is made from tiny discolored fibers in the threads of the cloth. They have yellowed, the way paper does when exposed to sunlight.

But not all the threads are discolored – only the ones that combine to create a picture when viewed from a distance.

It’s the same technique used by modern TV screens, making images from pixels, or old-fashioned newspaper photos, made up of dots.

The coloring affects only the outside layer of the fibers. It does not penetrate the cloth, as a dye would.

In fact, the image is lying on the very surface of the shroud. It could be scraped off with a few strokes of a razor blade.

Contrary to what you might imagine, there is no paint involved. Religious pictures in medieval churches were done with pigments, sometimes mixed with oil or gelatin. None of that can be found on the Shroud.

Neither is there any sign of the silvers or nitrates used in Victorian photography.

Yet it seems designed to be viewed via photography. The negative image on the Shroud comes vividly to life in photos.

In reality, it is quite difficult to see. The faint outline of the face seems to dissolve if you get too close or stand too far away.

The ideal viewing distance is about three to six feet.

Like so much about the Shroud, this is inexplicable to anyone who suspects forgery. Why would a medieval artist use a method that is all but invisible, if the intention was to fool people?

And if the image was created by a man-made technique, why was the method lost? How come no similar cloths exist? Why has no one been able to reinvent and replicate that technique?

Equally baffling: how would a medieval forger have known a trick to map a face in three dimensions? No artist in Renaissance history did such a thing.

Even if we accept that some unknown genius could do it, why would they? Why create a picture that could not be fully appreciated until the invention of computers many centuries later?

It was questions like these that first intrigued West decades ago, as a young journalist working for a Sydney newspaper. His interest was reignited when he saw a replica of the Shroud in a Catholic bookshop four years ago – though at first he was convinced science must have a straightforward explanation.

‘I even joined the US Committee for Skeptical Inquiry,’ he explains, ‘and read everything debunking the idea it was a true relic. But the more I read, the clearer it became that no one has any plausible theory to explain the image. Even if you don’t accept it as miraculous, you have to concede it’s completely mysterious.’

There’s so much that cannot be dismissed, he says, listing the following:

• Blood chemicals showing the man had been tortured.
• Perfect blood flows and clots no artist had ever managed to mimic.
• Microscopic traces of dirt matching the chemical fingerprint of Jerusalem soil.
• Jerusalem pollens that only flower in Spring, when Jesus was crucified.
• Things only an eye-witness could know, like the nails through the wrists rather than the palms, which couldn’t have held the weight of a body.
• Scourge marks matching three Roman whips that a medieval forger wouldn’t have known about, but that modern archaeologists have confirmed.
• Images on first-millennium icons and coins matching the face on the Shroud.
• The impossible photographic image of the face – an image confined to the microscopic surface of the cloth, indicating that no fluid or gas could have made the image. It could only, it seems, have come from a burst of radiant energy.

‘Two or three of these things are impressive,’ West says. ‘Together, I found them overwhelming. And it’s also evidence of a truly brutal crime, the barbaric public execution of a man by his political and religious enemies.’

Which brings us back to the forensic science. We now know that the blood on the shroud is real. The way it has dried is chillingly accurate – unlike fake blood in gory television dramas, which trickles and drips unrealistically, the blood on the Shroud has clotted and dried.

All the injuries and bodily fluids are consistent with the wounds Jesus is recorded as having suffered on the day of his execution. Laboratory tests show this dried blood and fluid on the Shroud to be unmistakably human.

Where Jesus was forced to carry the cross on his shoulder as he dragged it up the hill, the image on the Shroud shows bruises.

We can also see the marks across his back from where he was beaten with scourges, whips with iron beads threaded onto three leather thongs.

On his forehead and all around his scalp are the unmistakable signs of puncture wounds from his crown of thorns.

And, of course, there are the traumatic injuries to his wrists and feet, where he was nailed to the cross, as well as the wound in his side, where a Roman centurion stabbed his body with a spear to check he was dead.

Dried blood marks the cloth where it touched the body’s forearms and wrists, ankles and feet, back and side, as well as the head and face.

If the Shroud is, as the sceptics claim, a forgery, then some other victim must have been murdered to create these stains.

Because here is the clinching piece of evidence, the most gruesome of all: the blood came first, before the rest of the image.

If an artist had, by some extraordinary lost technique, imprinted that picture of Christ onto the shroud, he would surely have drawn the body first, and then added the blood.

But that isn’t what happened.

X-ray examination shows that, wherever there is blood on the linen, there is no image underneath it.

In other words, whatever process caused the discoloration of those microscopic linen fibers, it was blocked by the presence of blood.

Therefore, the blood was there first.

And that means the cloth must have been wound around a bloodied corpse, before the image appeared.

Philosophers and theologists can argue endlessly about the meaning of miracles.

But there’s no arguing with forensic evidence.