By Erik Derr (staff@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Mar 28, 2013 07:00 PM EDT

The Shroud of Turin, believed by at least some to be the burial cloth for Jesus after he was crucified, is coming to television Easter Sunday, compliments of the newly-retired Pope Benedict XVI.

As one of Benedict's last official acts as pope, he approved a 90-minute broadcast about the shroud, which was last seen on the tube about 30 years ago, according to a report in The Guardian.

The broadcast coincides with new claims that the fabric does in fact date back to the time of Jesus and is not a medieval forgery, as previous studies of the artifact concluded.

The new findings, published by Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development Research Centre of Frascati, say the cloth dates back to a period of time between 280 BC and 220 AD.

Giulo Fanti, associate professor of mechanical and thermal measurement at Padua University and the lead researcher for the new study, said the 1988 carbon-14 study, which established the cloth in the minds of many as a medieval creation, "is not statistically reliable."

Fanti's not the first to make such allegations.  

A 2005b study published in Termochimica Acta estimated the Shroud of Turin between 1,300 and 3,000 years old.

Author Raymond Rogers, a retired chemist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, asserted the 1988 study analyzed a part of the cloth that was inconsistent with the main part of the fabric, perhaps a newer piece woven in to repair the shroud.

"The radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic," Rogers said.

He did agree, though, that the part of the cloth sampled in 1988 did actually date back to the medieval period.

"The sample tested was dyed using technology that began to appear in Italy about the time the Crusaders' last bastion fell to the Mameluke Turks in 1291 AD," Rogers told BBC.

Fanti and his colleagues, according to a report by Mail Online, have determined only something similar to ultraviolet lasers --- which, as far as anyone knows, didn't exist in medieval times - could have created the mysterious images on the shoud.

This news has rekindled notions that the imprint was created by a great burst of energy, which maybe accompanied a supernatural event.

"The results show a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin," the scientists said in the study.

Cesare Nosiglia, archbishop of Turin, said the renewed interest in the shroud will serve as "a message of intense spiritual scope, charged with positivity which will help hope never to be lost." 

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