Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Imagesīut Rolfe, who is now in his early 70s, was determined to debunk the debunking. A few years later, the verdict made headlines around the world: the cloth dated from the 13th or 14th century, and could not possibly be authentic. In the mid-1980s the Vatican, the owner of the shroud, agreed in principle that it could be dated using the latest technology, and entrusted the British Museum with the task. “It was almost as though it had been created for the photographic age,” says Rolfe. The most powerful moment for him came when he took photographs of the four-metre-long shroud for the first time, and saw that the image of the dead man’s face was much more pronounced in the negatives. “My programme at no point said it was authentic, but it did pose questions, such as how did the image of the crucified man get on to the cloth, and did its provenance fit with the timeline of Christ,” says Rolfe. The documentary he went on to make won a Bafta in 1978, and brought the relic to international attention. Rolfe was not a believer, but he found the history of the shroud fascinating. Rolfe became aware of it about 45 years ago, after he put out a request for ideas for documentaries, and the writer Ian Wilson, who had investigated the shroud – by then being kept at Turin Cathedral – got in touch. Across the centuries, the shroud has been venerated as that very piece of fabric. And if you can, there’s a $1m donation for your funds.”Īccording to the gospel accounts, it was when they discovered Christ’s burial cloth on the floor of his tomb that his followers first believed he had risen from the dead. “They said it was knocked up by a medieval conman, and I say: well, if he could do it, you must be able to do it as well. “Because from all the evidence I’ve seen, if this is a forgery it’s the most ingenious forgery in history – and of course it dates back almost 2,000 years, to a time of far less sophisticated forgery techniques. “If … they believe the shroud is a medieval forgery, I call on them to repeat the exercise, and create something similar today,” he says. So convinced is Rolfe that he’s issuing a challenge worth $1m to the British Museum. This week sees the release of a new film, Who Can He Be?, in which Rolfe argues that, far from the shroud being a definite dud, new discoveries in the past few years have again opened the question of its authenticity. And now he claims he has the evidence to prove it. He was convinced the carbon dating, carried out in 1988 under the direction of the British Museum and Oxford University, had been flawed. So when cutting-edge carbon-14 tests found that the Shroud of Turin was a forgery, it seemed like the final chapter for a relic that had been revered for centuries as the cloth in which Christ’s body had been wrapped when he supposedly rose from the dead at the first Easter almost 2,000 years ago.īut one man – David Rolfe, a film-maker whose documentary The Silent Witness had brought the shroud into the public eye in modern times, and who had converted to Christianity as a result of his research – wasn’t prepared to give up on it. It was one of the most eagerly awaited scientific announcements of all time, and it pitted the world of faith against the world of rational thought, under the glare of the media.
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