Little-known study of Shroud of Turin supports theory it was used to wrap the body of Jesus

As calls for a re-analysis of the Shroud of Turin mount, more research claims to support the theory it may have actually been the very cloth Jesus was buried in.

A study quietly published by researchers in Italy saw the team digitally restore parts of the body depicted on the fabric's imprint, revealing never-before-seen details.

They found the right-hand thumb in an unnatural position, indicating that the hand was likely in a 'stressed' position that may have resulted from nerve damage caused by crucifixion. 

They say their findings suggest 'important indirect proof that the Turin Shroud wrapped the body of a man who was crucified alive.'

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long piece of linen featuring a faint image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe to be Jesus.

The cloth was first presented to the public in the 1350s when it was exhibited in the small collegiate church in Lirey, a village in northern France.

Christians believe those wounds were miraculously imprinted on the burial shroud after Jesus was resurrected from the dead, scorched into the fibers by a burst of energy when he came back to life.

Experts have long debated the legitimacy of this claim, with a landmark 1988 study dating its creation to the middle ages, hundreds of years after the birth of Christ. 

But recent studies have raised doubts about the accuracy of those findings and offered indirect evidence in the other direction. 

The little-known Italian study was published in 2017 in the Journal of Cultural Heritage but was not publicized at the time. 

The research team from the Institute of Crystallography performed an 'intensity histogram transform' - a type of digital analysis that improves the quality of an image - to restore and analyze the hands region of the Shroud's imprint.  

This brought new anatomical details into focus, and revealed that the right hand's thumb was in an 'unnatural' position, lying adjacent to the palm of the hand but  positioned below it.

Consequently, the thumb is almost completely missing from the imprint except for its protruding end. 

This is important because scientists consider the absence of the thumbs to be one of the main indirect proofs that the Shroud was used to wrap the body of a man who was crucified alive, the researchers stated in their report.

That's because crucifixion would have caused injury to the hands' median nerves, forcing the thumbs into this an unnatural, hidden position. 

But crucifixion isn't the only possible explanation for the missing thumbs. 

Other experts believe that the thumbs are not visible in the imprint simply because their natural position is in front of and slightly to the side of the index finger, which would create more distance between the thumbs and the Shroud.

That would mean that the imprint could have been made by a body lying in a relaxed, supine position - no crucifixion necessary. 

But based on their analysis, the study authors state that the thumb does not appear to be in its natural position. 

Rather, it appears in a non-relaxed inside the palm of the hand and almost fully hidden by the index finger except for its end - strong evidence for injuries consistent with crucifixion. 

But still, many believe the Shroud is not actually a biblical relic.

A landmark 1988 UK study determined with '95 percent confidence' that the Shroud was made sometime between 1260 and 1390 AD, long after the time of Christ's resurrection.

This suggests that the Shroud is actually a Medieval piece of artwork. 

The conclusion was reached after analyses performed on a corner of the ancient fabric by three different labs - at the universities of Arizona, Zürich and Oxford. 

But a more recent analysis has brought their results into question, reigniting the theory that the Shroud's biblical significance could be legitimate.

A new review by researchers from France and Italy has revisited those 30-year-old findings and claims to have discovered discrepancies in the data which were not made public and raise doubts about the definitiveness of the results.

Tristan Casabianca, a French independent researcher, who made the find, told DailyMail.com that his findings do not confirm the shroud is older or the burial cloth used to lay Jesus to rest.

But Casabianca - who was an atheist until he began investigating the shroud 20 years ago - said those factors could not be ruled out 'without a re-analysis.'

After obtaining the raw data from the 1988 study, Casabianca found that the results varied by decades.

One of Zürich's estimates in the Nature study said the cloth was up to 733 years old, but 595 years in the raw data.

Oxford's shroud sample was between 730 and 795 years old, but the raw data featured estimates that were off by up to 55 years.

Arizona's linen was between 591 and 701 years old, with the raw data showing a difference of up to 59 years.

Even though that would still places the cloth in the Middle Ages, hundreds of years after Jesus, Casabianca said it raises doubts.

He continued to explained that 'the lack of precision seriously affects the reliability of the 95 percent,' suggesting it was no more than 41 percent. 

What's more, an engineer from the University of Padua in Italy recently used modern technology to reanalyze samples taken from the cloth in the 1970s, and found tiny blood particles showing signs of organ failure, trauma, disease and radiation.

This would be consistent with the agonizing story of Jesus' crucifixion from the bible, which details how he endured severe beatings, punctures and nails driven into his hands and feet. 

Materials that were typical in ancient Jerusalem were also said to be discovered, suggesting that the shroud may have originated in the region and not in Europe where many skeptics think it was created as a medieval forgery.

This growing body of evidence has raised doubts about skeptics' claims that the Shroud is fake, reawakening a long-standing debate about one of the most significant relics in biblical history.