Twenty years after radiocarbon dating supposedly proved once and for all that the Shroud of Turin was a medieval hoax, scientists are revisiting their research to see if the tests were erroneous and the shroud really dates back to the time of Christ.

“The result of the first test done in 1988 was almost an embarrassment at some point,” Barrie Schwortz, the photographer who documented the original Shroud of Turin Project, told TODAY’s Matt Lauer in a Good Friday interview in New York. “Now that we’re 20 years later, the technology certainly has improved.”

The long strip of tightly woven linen that bears the ghostly image of a bearded man who had apparently been crucified has been venerated since the Middle Ages as the burial shroud of Jesus. And written references to the existence of such a cloth date back to the first century.

No new tests will be done on the shroud, which is rarely displayed publicly, Schwortz said. Rather, in a yearlong project being documented by the BBC, scientists at Oxford University, where the original tests were done, will revisit the data and the methodology of the original tests to determine if mistakes were made and if the shroud could actually date back to the time of Jesus.

photo & story courtesy msnbc.msn.com, 3/21/08