I know of no method for fire to change the C-14 content of anything. To add enough soot contamination to an object to skew the date would require the tested object to be almost completely outweighed by the soot. It would be obvious as hell. There’d be so much contamination from newer material the object you’d want to date would be buried in it.
A similar argument holds against a microbial contaminant that eats the object to be dated, leaving its poop behind as a contamination. Since the source of the contaminated poop comes from the object itself, it’s unlikely to skew the dating of the object so long as that’s all they eat and poop. If, however, the microorganism eats elsewhere and just returns to your dating target as a litter box to poop and perhaps die while grunting out a big one, then you got a problem, but again to skew the date significantly, all that poop and dead bugs have to mass a lot more than what you’re dating to make a huge difference. . . especially if the bugs have been using your target subject as a latrine and a cemetery for its entire existence because the ages of the poop and dead bugs will range from as old as your target to ten seconds from now when you sterilize it by starting the test.
(Still running as fast as I can to stay in the same place!)
Comment 157. Gabrial Vial, Hero Grainger-Taylor and Orit Shamir are the foremost authorities on first century weaving, but all declare that the Shroud shows every sign of having been woven on a four-shaft treadle loom, and not a four-shaft warp-weighted loom, of which there is anyway no evidence whatsoever from the first century. The only examples of textiles showing 3/1 twill from the time are either tablet-woven or damasks, which require equipment or techniques that do not match the Shroud. There are no surviving ancient materials made of byssus, and the word as used by the ancients is usually interpreted as fine linen or cotton. The earliest reliable mention of byssus from a mollusc is in the 2nd century AD.
Comment 159. Very patient of you. I find I no longer have the time to reply to anybody who uses more than one exclamation mark at a time, and an excessive use of capital letters.
Comment 161. The idea that the Shroud and the Image of Edessa are the same has had a good run for its money, in spite of being comprehensively dismissed by almost all leading Byzantine Historians, but is fading in popularity even among authenticists, particularly as more and more witnesses have been discovered claiming to have seen both “the burial cloths” and the image in different parts of Constantinople.
Comment 164. The Mishnah and the Talmud are both online. There is vanishingly little information as to any Jewish burial practice in either of them. Any attempt to reconcile the Shroud, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Torah, and the rather hurried burial of Jesus as described in the bible is doomed to dissolve away in unsubstantiable speculation.
Right, that brings me to date. Now I must go back to your extensive Comment 74, mostly attempting to discredit the radiocarbon date....