I would agree... IF they had tested the Shroud and not a 16th Century PATCH.
It has now been almost conclusively proven that the Carbon 14 testng was done on material that had been patched in the 16th Century, probaby 1535 or 1552. The C14 sample was taken from an area of the Shroud that was SIGNIFICANTLY different from the rest of the Shroud..
The following table is borrowed from shroudie's Shroud Story website and shows the results of the tests comparing the C14 sample piece with the Shroud itself:
Chemical Differences | Carbon 14 Sample Area | Main Part of the Shroud of Turin |
aluminum as hydrated oxide, common in textile dyeing | Significant (10 to 20 times as much as found on main part of Shroud) | Virtually none |
Madder-root dye (alizarin and purpurin) |
Found | Not found |
a gum medium (probably Gum Arabic) vehicle for dye and mordant | Found | Not present |
Lignin at fiber growth nodes | Very little | Significant |
vanillin in lignin | Found | Not found |
ultraviolet fluorescence |
significant | less |
cotton fiber in thread | Found | Not found |
spliced fibers | Found | Not found |
CHEMICALLY different from the body of the Shroud in that it contained Rose Madder-root Dye, Aluminum Oxide (bauxite), Gum coating on the fibers as a mordant (a chemical to "bite" into the linen to allow dyes to adhere), and Vanillin (a decomposition product of lignin that disappears over time), and other chemicals not found elsewhere on the Shroud.
PHYSICALLY different because the patch fluoresces significantly under an ultra-violet light while the rest of the Shroud material fluoresces dimly, The C14 Sample shows significant differences as a TEXTILE in that the threads of the patch were spun in an "S" (counter-clockwise) twist while the entire rest of the Shroud was spun with a "Z" twist. In addition, the average thread size of the C14 Sample is "significantly" (statistically) smaller than the average thread size of the Shroud. The fibers composing the threads of the patch include WOOL and European COTTON which is found NOWHERE ELSE on the Shroud. Finally, the linen of the C14 sample was "retted" using a completely different process from the rest of the Shroud.
Bryan J. Walsh' statistical analysis of the C14 tests performed by the three laboratories show that given the accepted accuracy of the tests, the test results and the reported ages of the 11 tests (three labs Arizona, Oxford, and Zurich, four samples cut into 11 sub-samples (A-4, O-3, Z-4) for testing) COULD NOT HAVE COME FROM THE SAME HOMOGENOUS POPULATION! In other words, the test results varied so greatly that statistically they could not have come from the same sample! Yet we know they did.
Plotting the age variances in the samples show that the age reported is inverse linear proportion to the distance from the edge of the Shroud toward the center. At the time the statistical analysis was done, the evidence of a patch had not been found.
The data and statistical analysis by Walsh is equally valid if it is not distance from the edge of the cloth but rather proportion of patch to original material in a diagonal change across the flawed sample that results in the statistically anomolous results. This is proof that the samples, although cut from the Shroud, and then further cut from the same sample WERE NOT HOMOGINOUS... and in fact were made up of OLD shroud linen intermixed with NEW patch linen.The distances used were:
Laboratory Distance (in mm)
Oxford 50.0 (the approx. distance from the edge of Shroud cloth to center of Oxford sample)
Zurich 64.0 (the Oxford value plus the approx. distance between the center of both samples)
Arizona 76.0 (the Zurich value plus the approx. distance between the center of both samples)
A regression analysis was then conducted which compared the subsample radiocarbon dates with the corresponding distance from the edge of the Shroud linen. It was determined that there was statistically significant (P>98.8%, r2=0.49) inverse linear relationship between the date measured and the distance from the sample to the edge of the cloth. This finding indicated that there was an apparent gradient of radiocarbon measured on the Shroud sample with higher levels of 14C measured at increasing distance from the edge of the Shroud linen based on the sample measured. This is illustrated on the following chart:
Ergo, the test was flawed from the beginning. It is akin to finding a note on a piece of paper scotch taped to the flyleaf of a book, taking that page, including the scotch taped piece and testing it to find the age of the book. The sample was corrupted by additional anachronistic material, the results are wrong.