ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997                 TAG: 9704140069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL   PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: JERUSALEM
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

SHROUD'S A FORGERY, SCHOLARS SAY

According to three different radiocarbon tests, it dates from the 14th century.

While Italians rejoiced at saving the Shroud of Turin from a fire, scholars in the Holy Land say the shroud revered by some as Jesus' burial cloth is a crude forgery by someone ignorant of Jewish customs.

Furthermore, they say, a textile such as the 14-foot-long shroud could not have survived for 2,000 years in the wet Mediterranean climate.

Enshrined since 1578 in a cathedral in Turin, Italy, the linen shroud bears the faint yellowish negative image of the front and back of a man with thorn marks on the head, lacerations on the back and bruises on the shoulders.

But Jewish custom in the first century required the head to be left uncovered when a body was wrapped in a burial shroud, said Joe Zias, an archaeologist at Jerusalem's Rockefeller Museum and an expert on ancient methods of crucifixion.

Zias noted that the shadowy image of the shroud suggests that nails were driven through the palms. ``It has been known for centuries that you have to nail high on the arms'' to keep the body upright on the cross, and that nailing the palms would not have sufficed, he said.

Amos Kloner, an archaeologist at the Israeli Antiquities Authority and Bar Ilan University, noted that no textiles from the first century have been found in the Mediterranean region because the climate is too humid.

Both researchers pointed to three different radiocarbon tests conducted by separate laboratories that found the Shroud of Turin dates from the 14th century.

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