Replies

...Then there's the trade in holy relics which became big business during the middle ages, again when the shroud most definitively turns up.

Yet despite the considerable hemming and hawing regarding Carbon-14 dating and contemporaneous textile manufacture, my mind remains open.

I've reserved a couple of volumes from the LA Public Library. Perhaps we can take this up again.

Best, and God's grace to You and Yours.

...Then there's the trade in holy relics which became big business during the middle ages, again when the shroud most definitively turns up.

I will grant you that. However, with the lack of incredulity rampant in the era, a bedsheet with some blood dripped over it would have been sufficient to bring in large amounts of donations from pilgrims... and painted copies of the Shroud did so. A sublime representation of Jesus' burial cloth was not required to extract sous from French peasants and nobles alike.

The earliest C14 test date was 13th Century - 1260 AD (rounded down to the nearest decade) - yet a medallion of known provenance from the 11th Century (c. 1060)shows a depiction of the Shroud (sans burn marks) that shows it was being displayed at least 200 years before the earliest possible C14 date. The Hungarian Pray Codex, created in 1192-1195 depicts the Shroud including distinctive poker burn marks that are found on the Shroud... 90 years before the earliest possible date as determined by the C14 tests.

The peer-reviewed work of Ray N. Rogers has absolutely shown that the material tested in the 1988 C14 tests was NOT exemplar of the Shroud... and chemical tests, physical differences, and photomicrographs show that better than 40% - 60% of the test material was a patch interwoven into original threads by a known technique called French Invisible Reweaving which was used in the 16th - 18th Century to invisibly repair damaged cloths. This later material, when combined with original shroud 1st Century material, would test to the 1260-1390 range reported by the three labs who tested the supposed shroud material. In fact, the 130 year range of lowest to highest results from supposedly homogenously aged material that was supposed to have had only a plus or minus 20-25 year degree of confidence, should have raised a big red flag for scientists. It has been shown that the proportion of the newer material to older material accounts completely for the discrepency with the later dated sample having about 60% new material and the older dated sample having about 40%.

The findings have been duplicated by other scientists using other methods. The C14 tests are invalid.