Barrie Schwortz: “NEW DNA Found In The Shroud Of Turin Does Not Match Any Known Profile”

I realized that my Christian brothers and sisters were not getting the truth about the Shroud of Turin.

>> Barry Schwarz spent 46 years of his life studying a piece of linen.

And in 2024, at 78 years old, he looked into a camera and said the words that stopped everyone cold.

What we found on the Shroud of Trin is scientifically, medically, and historically impossible.

And yet, it is real.

This is not a man of faith making a spiritual claim.

This is a Jewish photographer, a lifelong skeptic, the official documenting scientist of the only unrestricted scientific examination ever granted on the shroud, telling the world that new DNA pulled from the cloth has produced results that no scientist on earth can explain.

The man who never meant to stay.

Barry Schwarz was not looking for a mystery.

He was not searching for God, not chasing religious relics, and not interested in the debates that had surrounded the Shroud of Turin for centuries.

He was a professional photographer based in Los Angeles, raised in a Jewish household with zero personal investment in Christian artifacts.

What he had was a reputation.

By the mid 1970s, Schwarz had built a career as a precise, technically skilled scientific photographer.

He shot industrial processes, medical procedures, and complex scientific documentation.

He was known for accuracy, not interpretation.

In 1977, he was approached about joining an unprecedented scientific project.

A team of American researchers was assembling to conduct the first comprehensive, unrestricted scientific examination of the Shroud of Turin, the 14t linen cloth housed in the Cathedral of St.

John the Baptist in Turin, Italy that millions of people believed had wrapped the body of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion.

The team needed an official documenting photographer.

Schwarz was offered the role.

His reaction by his own account was dismissive.

He assumed it was probably a painting, a medieval forgery built to attract pilgrims and donations.

But the photographic challenge of documenting a major scientific investigation of a famous artifact was enough to get him on a plane.

The Shroud of Turin research project known as Stur assembled in October of 1978 was unlike anything that had been attempted before.

More than 30 scientists from disciplines including physics, chemistry, forensic analysis, and textile expertise traveled to Trin.

They came from Los Alamos National Laboratory, from universities across the United States, and from various religious backgrounds, including Christians, Jews, and agnostics.

This was not a faith-based mission.

It was a scientific one.

From October 8th to October 13th of 1978, the team was granted unlimited access to the cloth.

They worked around the clock photographing every inch under every available wavelength of light, collecting samples, running tests, and documenting everything.

Schwarz was behind the camera for all of it.

He went in expecting to photograph scientists debunking a fake.

what he photographed instead would follow him for the rest of his life.

Nothing made sense.

The first thing Schwarz noticed when he began photographing the shroud up close was that it did not behave like a painting.

When you photograph painted surfaces under magnification, you see brush strokes, pigment layers, variations in how deeply the color has soaked into the material.

The shroud had none of that.

Under close examination, the image appeared to be formed by discoloration of only the outermost surface fibers of the linen threads, affecting a depth of somewhere between 200 and 600 nanome.

To put that in perspective, a single human hair is roughly 80,000 nanome wide.

The image on the shroud existed in a layer thinner than almost anything the naked eye could register.

No known painting or dying technique from any era produces an image that shallow.

Paint, dye, and stain all penetrate deeper into fabric through a basic process called capillary action.

The interior fibers of the shroud showed no discoloration at all.

Neither did the reverse side of the cloth.

Whatever created the image had affected only the very top layer of the topmost threads and stopped there with a precision that no medieval craftsman, and frankly no modern one, has been able to replicate.

Then Schwarz photographed the cloth under ultraviolet light.

Old linen typically fluoreses under ultraviolet illumination due to the natural breakdown of organic compounds over time.

The background linen of the shroud flues exactly as expected.

But the image areas, the portions showing the body did not flues.

They appeared darker as if the chemistry of those specific fibers had been altered in a way that blocked the normal fluoresence response entirely.

This pointed to oxidation or chemical degradation of the cellulose fibers themselves, but in a pattern so controlled and precise that the cause remained completely unclear.

The most disorienting discovery came in the dark room.

When Schwarz developed his photographs and examined the negatives, the body image on the shroud appeared as a positive.

The shroud image was already a negative before the camera ever touched it.

Raised features like the nose and forehead appeared dark on the cloth.

Recessed features like the eye sockets appeared lighter.

Photography was not invented until the 1820s.

If the shroud was a medieval forgery created sometime in the 1300s, as later carbon dating would suggest, then whoever made it somehow encoded a photographic negative into linen using technology that would not exist for another 5 centuries.

Beyond that, when researchers ran the shroud image through a VP8 image analyzer, a device originally developed by NASA to convert image intensity into three-dimensional relief maps, the cloth produced a coherent, accurate three-dimensional representation of a human body.

Paintings do not do this.

When you feed a photograph of a painting through the same process, you get distorted, incoherent output because painters encode visual light and shadow, not actual physical distance.

The shroud image contained genuine spatial information as if whatever mechanism created it was measuring the distance between the cloth and the body surface at every point and recording that distance as image intensity.

Sturb concluded in its official statement that the image was that of a real human form, a scourged and crucified man, and that it was not the product of an artist.

The bloodlike stains tested positive for hemoglobin and serum albumin, but the team stopped short of explaining how the image was formed because nobody could.

The test had backfired.

In 1988, 10 years after the Sturup investigation, the Vatican authorized radiocarbon dating of the shroud.

Samples were taken from a corner of the cloth and sent to three independent laboratories, Oxford University, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

All three dated the linen to between 1260 and 1390 AD.

The announcement landed like a verdict.

Medieval case closed.

The shroud was a forgery.

Schwarz was devastated.

So were many of his Sturup colleagues.

The dating seemed to directly contradict the physical evidence they had spent 5 days documenting.

But as Schwarz examined the methodology in the years that followed, serious problems began to surface.

The samples had all come from a single corner of the cloth, specifically the most handled corner in the entire artifacts documented history.

That corner had been near the site of a significant fire in 1532 that had severely damaged the shroud and required repair work.

Textile experts who examined the corner later identified what appeared to be reweaving newer threads blended into the original cloth to restore damaged areas.

If those repair threads dated to the medieval period, but the main cloth was much older, a sample taken from that specific corner would return a medieval date regardless of the true age of the rest of the cloth.

The variation in measurements across different parts of the small sample was also larger than researchers would expect from a cloth that was uniform in age.

Statistical analysis published years later by independent researchers suggested the numbers were consistent with a sample containing threads from more than one time period mixed together.

Schwarz spent years arriving at one careful conclusion.

The 1988 dating did not prove the shroud was medieval.

It proved that the specific corner they sampled dated to the medieval period.

Whether that date represents the age of the entire cloth was never established because no sample was ever taken from the center of the cloth away from edges, repairs, and centuries of direct handling.

The deeper problem was that even accepting the medieval dating at face value left an enormous question completely unanswered.

If a medieval forger created the shroud somewhere between 1260 and 1390 AD, how did that forger create an image with properties that no artist or scientist in the 700 years since has been able to reproduce? The carbon date did nothing to explain the superficial fiber discoloration, the photographic negative property, the three-dimensional spatial encoding, or the ultraviolet fluorescent anomaly.

A medieval origin made the mystery stranger, not simpler.

The result nobody expected.

In 2015, Italian researchers conducted DNA analysis on dust particles collected from the shroud surface during conservation work.

The results were interesting, but considered inconclusive at the time.

Human genetic material was present along with DNA from various plant species, suggesting the cloth had passed through multiple geographic regions across Europe and the Middle East during its history.

The researchers noted the findings and moved on.

In 2022, a separate team of geneticists reanalyzed those same samples using significantly more advanced sequencing technology.

What they found had been sitting undetected in the original data.

Hidden within the human DNA samples were genetic sequences that did not match standard human population genetics.

The human genome project has given scientists a detailed map of genetic variation across human populations worldwide.

Researchers can identify the genetic markers associated with European ancestry, Middle Eastern ancestry, African ancestry, and Asian ancestry.

They can trace migration patterns and population mixing events going back tens of thousands of years.

The DNA from the shroud contained markers that did not fit any of those established patterns.

The sequences were clearly from a human being.

But the combination of genetic markers present in the samples did not correspond to any known population group, ancient or modern.

One geneticist involved in the analysis described it as finding someone whose genetic markers suggest their ancestors came from populations that never geographically overlapped.

You would expect European markers or Middle Eastern markers or a mixture consistent with known migration and interbreeding history.

What the shroud samples showed was a combination that should not exist in a single individual based on everything understood about human population movement.

Some of the markers were consistent with ancient Middle Eastern populations from the Levant region during the first century which aligned geographically with Jerusalem.

But mixed alongside those were genetic variants typically associated with populations from entirely different parts of the world in combinations that no known migration pattern could account for.

More unsettling, some of the markers were archaic variants that had largely disappeared from the human gene pool thousands of years before the first century.

Not Neanderthal or Dennisovven sequences, but ancient human variants that should have been diluted out of any living population long before the time of Christ.

When Schwarz was contacted by the research team in late 2023 to review the findings before publication, he sat with the detailed analysis reports and felt by his own description genuinely shaken for the first time in 45 years of Shroud research.

The man who couldn’t walk away.

Between 1978 and 2023, Barry Schwarz did not walk away.

He built his entire professional identity around documenting the shroud with the same objectivity he had brought to Turin as a 26-year-old photographer.

He founded shroud.

com which became the primary online resource for scientifically accurate information about the cloth.

He gave lectures, participated in documentaries, engaged with researchers from every position on the authenticity debate, and made a consistent point of separating evidence from conclusion.

He would say plainly that he presented data and did not tell people what to believe.

That posture was not performance.

It was discipline earned through years of watching both believers and skeptics distort the evidence to fit conclusions they had already reached before examining anything.

Schwarz refused to do either.

He was a Jewish man with no theological reason to defend a Christian relic.

His only reason to keep working was that the evidence refused to resolve itself neatly and that bothered him in a way he could not set aside.

When the 2022 DNA findings reached him, his first response was exactly what it had always been, skepticism.

He knew better than most how easily ancient and heavily contaminated samples could produce misleading genetic data, false positives, degraded material producing random sequences, contamination from the dozens of hands that had touched the cloth across centuries.

He raised every one of those objections with the research team directly.

The researchers walked him through their methodology.

They had used multiple controls throughout the analysis.

They had sequenced genetic material from various locations across the shroud to distinguish original biological material from handling contamination.

They had cross- referenced the anomalous sequences against comprehensive genetic databases.

They had run the analysis multiple times to confirm consistency.

The anomalous DNA was not appearing randomly across the cloth.

It was concentrated in the image area and in the bloodlike stains specifically, not in areas associated with general surface contact.

Schwarz went public with the findings in March of 20124.

At 78 years old, after 46 years of careful, measured public communication about the shroud.

He stated clearly that he could no longer defend the position that the cloth was easily explained as a medieval forgery.

The image properties matched no known artistic technique.

The 1988 carbon dating carried unresolved methodological problems and the DNA analysis had produced a genetic profile attached to the bloodlike stains that did not fit any known model of human population genetics.

He was not making a religious claim.

He was reporting what the evidence showed.

And the evidence was, in his own word, impossible.

the question that won’t close.

The response to Schwarz’s announcement split exactly the way anyone familiar with the shroud’s history would have predicted.

Christian communities celebrated.

Religious media declared that science had finally confirmed what faith had always held.

Schwarz pushed back on that framing immediately and without softening.

Anomalous, he said, is not the same as miraculous.

The DNA findings did not prove the shroud wrapped Jesus Christ.

They proved that whoever’s blood is on the cloth carried a genetic profile that current science cannot place within any known human population.

Those are not the same statement, and collapsing them into each other was not something he was willing to do.

The scientific community responded with measured caution.

Several geneticists who reviewed the data acknowledged the findings were unusual, but argued the sample size was too limited and contamination risks too significant to draw firm conclusions.

They called for new sampling from the center of the cloth using rigorous contamination protocols and the most current genomic technology available.

Skeptics pointed out that anomalous results from ancient genetic samples are not rare and usually resolve into contamination or degradation artifacts.

Once better methodology is applied, what nobody could do was explain away the full picture.

The image formation mechanism remains unknown after decades of study.

No researcher working with medieval techniques or modern ones has successfully replicated all of the shrouds image characteristics simultaneously.

the three-dimensional spatial encoding, the photographic negative property, the ultraviolet fluoresence behavior, the extreme shallowess of the image depth.

These properties exist together in the same cloth, and no proposed explanation has accounted for all of them at once.

The DNA findings added one more layer to something that was already deeply resistant to resolution.

One historian noted that the shroud has been studied more intensively than almost any other archaeological artifact in existence.

After all of that study conducted by some of the most qualified scientists in their respective fields, the fundamental questions remain open, what it is, when it was made, how the image was created.

That alone, independent of any religious dimension, is a genuinely remarkable fact about a piece of linen sitting in a cathedral in northern Italy.

Schwarz has called for a new round of research.

New carbon dating taken from multiple locations across the center of the cloth away from edges and repaired areas using several independent dating methods run in parallel.

Advanced DNA extraction from the bloodlike stains specifically with contamination controls rigorous enough to withstand the scrutiny the findings will inevitably face.

systematic attempts to replicate the image formation using every proposed mechanism to finally determine whether any of them can produce results that match what is actually on the cloth.

He acknowledged the obstacles.

Access to the shroud is controlled by its custodians in Turin.

Funding for research on religiously controversial artifacts is difficult to secure.

The questions are real and so are the barriers to answering them.

At 78 years old, Barry Schwarz does not know how many more years he has to work on this.

What he knows is that a simple piece of linen has outlasted every attempt to categorize it, survived every effort to close the case, and continued producing new data that surprises even the people who have spent their careers studying it.

The image that should not exist is still there.

The blood that tests as real blood is still there.

And now the DNA that fits no known human population is still there.

Whatever the shroud is, it has not finished with us yet.