Springs prof revives shroud riddle

By Electa Draper
The Denver Post
05/20/2008

COLORADO SPRINGS — A physics professor here has resurrected the mystery of the Shroud of Turin, the fabled burial cloth of Christ that 20 years ago scientists declared a fake.

Millions of faithful believe the shroud's bloodstained image of a battered, crucified man is the miraculous image of Jesus, formed as he rose from the dead.

Scientists at three laboratories using radiocarbon dating in 1988 and 1989 determined the shroud was a medieval forgery, though they could not explain how the image was created.

Now, John Jackson, a physics lecturer at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has done something his colleagues consider nearly miraculous. Jackson, a leading researcher on the 14-foot-long linen sheet, has persuaded the Oxford laboratory that dated the shroud to the 13th or 14th century to revisit the question of its age. the rest image