Would you stop believing in Jesus if the fibers in the shroud were shown to date from long after Christ?
Is you gone teh shew us, Chaplain?
No. Not at all. Don't forget that has happened. In 1988, when the results were reported from the C-14 tests, it was pretty much definitive. The Shroud was manufactured sometime around 1350AD. It was obviously not the Shroud of Christ.
However, I don't follow the wishful thinking of true believers; I follow the science and scholarship. I accepted the data that was presented but I was puzzled because the 1988 C-14 test was the only piece of evidence that completely flew in the face of all other evidence for a much older provenance than the 14th Century. Except for the claims of Bishop d'Arci of Troyes who, 25 years after its first display in Lirey, wrote that his predecessor had located the artist who "cunningly painted it."
I was still intrigued by the Shroud. if the Shroud had been created in the mid 14th Century, then what great genius had done it - and how? I continued to read all of the scholarship and the scientific reports that came out in the following years. That science and scholarship, more and more, put the C-14 tests in doubt. The C-14 date was NOT consistent with the other science and scholarship. When new discoveries of known provenance were discovered that showed the Shroud in existence hundreds of years prior to the earliest C-14 date, it became more and more necessary to question the C-14 tests,
But, being a follower of the science, I criticized and debunked the various hypotheses of why the C-14 tests were in error... because of the science.
The soot argument fails because it would require better than 50% of the tested Shroud sample to have been soot to skew the dating from the 1st Century. The Bio-plastic, bacteria poop residue hypothesis failed because of a similar but even more exaggerated contaminant weight problem but also because the source of the bacteria's carbon was dietary and their diet consisted of the Shroud fibers and their bodies and waste products would have the same exact C-14 ratio of the Shroud. Heat alteration of the C-14 levels during the 1532 fire fails because chemistry cannot alter atomic isotopes ratios. While radiation from a resurrection miracle could alter atomic isotopes, it fails because it is totally untestable, literally un-falsifiable.
The one hypothesis that finally was proved to be the answer to why all the other evidence pointed to the falsity of the C-14 test, and toward a much earlier date, was the mistaken sampling theory. Because of a breakdown in protocols, the C-14 test turned out to be the bad science, not the other work that had been done. The protocols were broken at the very moment the decision was made by the custodians of the Shroud to ignore the protocols and the advice of the scientists in the selection of the samples.
The agreed original protocols required that eight samples be taken from eight different areas of the Shroud. Instead, only one sample was taken from one area - the one area that all the scientists had said should NOT be a sample site candidate. This decision destroyed any credibility the test results might have. It has been conclusively proved that the sample was a mixture of original and replacement fibers and completely contaminated. Error in, Error Out. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Those advocates that adhere to the original 1988 C-14 test dates are doing so because of wishful thinking and prejudice. If they were truly following the science they would discount the tests as invalid, and thus irrelevant to deciding the age of the main body of the Shroud. All that test provided was the averaged age of the materials that had been added and the original material that was still present in the sample.
actually, the linen has proven to be from Jesus's time, woven in the manner of the time and place, as well as having botanical evidence from the area etc etc