CAMBRIDGE -- In 1978, scientists from some of the most renowned laboratories in the U.S. and Europe petitioned the House of Savoy to offer them its most priceless artifact.

For centuries, the royal house owned the legendary Shroud of Turin, purported to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ and venerated by Catholics worldwide. Scientists from the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) received permission to spend five days studying every aspect of the shroud to determine its origins. One of the scientists on the team was Barrie Schwortz. Schwortz was Jewish, but he believed that the Shroud of Turin was an authentic depiction of Jesus. The smoking gun for him was when test results found that the blood stains on the shroud were real, belonging to a human male with AB blood type. An excess of bilirubin was found in the blood, suggesting that the "Man of the Shroud" had experienced extreme physical trauma before his death. It was the bilirubin that kept the blood red over the next two millennia.

When the internet was in its infancy, Schwortz created the website Shroud.com to compile peer-reviewed scientific studies attesting to the Shroud of Turin's authenticity. One of Schwortz's students was Legionary of Christ Father Andrew Dalton, a professor of theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome.

This past week, Father Dalton came to Boston to give a presentation entitled "Who is the Man of the Shroud?" at the Harvard Catholic Center on March 26. He provided evidence, which he said proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Shroud of Turin bears an image of the face of Jesus that was not created by human hands.

"I want to look with the eyes of a scientist," Father Dalton said. "I want to see with faith as we receive revelation, but I know the end is not merely a matter of knowing. It is a matter of loving and following."

"Shroud science," formerly known as sindonology, began in 1898 when Secondo Pia took the now-iconic photograph of the shroud. The photographic negative revealed a much more detailed image of Jesus's face than the naked eye had been able to observe.

"So many details we're going to see, that with regard to the morphology of the body, its shape, its proportions, anatomically accurate, the pathologies that the man suffered," Father Dalton said. "It's anatomically accurate in so many ways that are hard to imagine, even in the modern era."

When laid horizontally, the Shroud of Turin is almost four feet high and 14 feet long. The weave is reminiscent of a priest's liturgical garment, and would have been an immense luxury in Jesus's time. The Man of the Shroud died like a criminal, Father Dalton said, but was "buried like a king."

"If we're to make a list of all the people who were crowned and crucified, exactly one person in the annals of history is known, and that's Jesus," he said.

The image of the body on the shroud shows evidence of Jesus's passion -- the "excoriations" on his shoulders from the cross he carried, the crown of thorns, and 372 marks from his scourging. The bloodstains correspond perfectly with human anatomy. Father Dalton said that this disputes the idea that the shroud is a medieval forgery or a work of art.

"Are we to believe that in the 12 or 1300s, someone had the knowledge of the circulation in our circulatory system, or the musculature that surrounds a vein, as opposed to an artery, or the way the brow furrows?" he said. "And when the head is tilted, blood flows in this way, just to name a few of these details."

In 1976, two U.S. Air Force Academy scientists used a VP8 Image Analyzer to investigate a photo of the shroud. They found that the contours of the shroud are perfectly aligned with the shape of a human body. They did not find any evidence of brush strokes, pigment, dye, or ink. The imprint of the Man of the Shroud's face is only 200 nanometers thick, one-half the thickness of a human hair. The scrape of a razor blade could make one of the most sacred objects in Christianity disappear forever.

"And so how did it get there?" Father Dalton asked. "It did, and when it got there, it left a trace of an accurate, anatomically accurate, body as a photo negative and encoding three-dimensional information."

Also found on the shroud were signs of its long history. There are burn marks from when the chapel housing the shroud in Chambery, France, caught fire in 1532. There are also water stains. None of these defaced the image of the Man of the Shroud. There is no evidence that the shroud came in contact with a decomposing body.

British documentary filmmaker David Rolfe has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can replicate the Shroud of Turin in a laboratory. So far, no one has been able to do it. There is still no conclusive explanation for why the shroud looks as it does. Father Dalton said that carbon dating tests, which purported to show that the shroud was medieval in origin, were flawed and that the data is no longer trustworthy.

"Let's imagine, just for the sake of argument, that we did prove that it's from the Middle Ages," he said. "We would still have the question of, 'How is this enigmatic image made?' It seems to me, we'd have to look to, is there someone resurrected in the 1300s that was also crucified and scourged and pierced with, in other words, all of the data harmonized with? Lo and behold, we have independent historical witness of all of those things in the first century."

Every pope in modern times has visited the Shroud of Turin. Pope Leo XIV has said that he plans to do so in the future. However, the Catholic Church has never officially commented on the shroud's authenticity.

"The magisterium doesn't pontificate on historical questions," Father Dalton said. "As you know, the magisterium is for matters of faith and morals and the historical question, it leaves to historians. The scientific questions, it leaves to scientists."