The most famous of them all, the Turin Shroud, is widely regarded as a Middle Ages forgery, and even the Catholic Church does not insist the shroud was actually used to wrap the body of Jesus himself.
So when Bulgarian archeologists announced in 2010 that they had found the bones of John the Baptist, Tom Higham was skeptical.
He got a surprise.
Higham, an Oxford University scientist and an atheist who doesn’t believe in “any kind of religion or God or anything like that,” was asked to test six small bone fragments found on an island named Sveti Ivan – St. John.
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“We have a complete genome. It’s possible that we could step this a step further and see if there is any similarity,” in the genetic material of all the relics.
“We’ve sort of got interested in this. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility, and we know that there were relics moving out of the Middle East in the fourth and fifth century,” he said.
But for him, the project remains a purely scientific one.
“I’m an atheist,” he said. “I perceive this as an archeological dating problem. We have some bones and we’re trying to get as much information out of them as we can.”
