I'm not a scientist, but I've had my doubts about the radio-carbon dating due to the fact that the shroud was actually in a fire. Wouldn't that have affected the results?
But if the test sample was taken not from the shroud itself but the cloth used to repair it, then what was that supposed to have proved to begin with?
Fire will affect dating, but the more important point about the fire damage, AFAIC, is that the shroud was repaired afterwards, and new cloth was woven in around the edges. The concept of restoration, until the twentieth century, was primarily about making something look "new", not historical accuracy. To the people of the twelfth century, weaving new cloth in seemed a logical way to repair the damage. As this part of the history of the shroud is known, it should have been no surprise that parts of it dated to around 1200 AD. Historical records, in fact, state that part of the cloth was woven into the fabric to repair damage at that time.
Right - the carbon test guys got the results they wanted (to 'disprove,)
- only back to about 1200 - well, duh, yeah, that's when the nuns patched it after the fire - so that's when the patches dated back too - but the Shroud itself - goes back to Jesus' time...
But there is so much evidence from every possible discipline...as far as I believe, the only additional evidence needed would be for Jesus to appear and say "Yes..."
I'm also interested because I am a portrait artist - and have been working on many renditions of "Jesus" for decades...
The fire could not change the amount of C14 enough to alter the age reported by the C14 test by more than a couple of years. Soot from wood cut closer to the fire date would adhere to the cloth a bit but not in a quantity that could skew the reported age by 1300 years.
The problem with the sample was that it APPEARED to be part of the Shroud cloth... however, it has now been conclusively proven to be a combination of original Shroud fibers and 16th century linen invisibly rewoven to patch a frayed area. The combination of old and newer linen resulted in a skewed reported age that varied by the ratio of the new to old. The observed percentage of 16th Century fibers to original fibers would only give the calculated C14 results IF the original fibers were 1st Century!
"Wouldn't that have affected the results?"
Absolutely. So will "bioplastic" a film of organic matter laid down over a surface like cloth over centuries which incorporates more recent carbon into the test samples.