I believe in Jesus regardless of the shroud, but didn’t carbon dating show it was made in the middle ages.
I have saved the article as I got a little tired after 4 paragraphs. But I look forward to finishing it.
Could the carbon dating be fallible? I know nothing about the process.
The shroud had been damaged in a fire and repairs were made to it. IIRC, the test samples were taken from a repaired area and so reflected the age of the repairs, not the shroud.
They tested a piece that had been seared in a fire and had been repaired.
The samples were taken from the edges...the shroud was damaged by fire and the edges were rewoven...quite possible those were the sames that were taken...
The carbon dating is meaningless. IIRC, the part of the Shroud tested wasn’t even from the original material.
Anyone who denies the authenticity of the Shroud has to explain the unexplainable: The fact that the image exists only on the surface of the fibers. No pigment of any sort is present. The image is a negative. The image is composed entirely of distance information. The concept of a negative, and the concept of an image made of distance information (distance of the skin from the cloth), were both inconceivable to anyone in the 13th-14th century, and the Shroud’s exact whereabouts are known even before that.
It is simply preposterous to assert that the cloth was not wrapped around the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth, and that it does not bear (as a result of a mysterious event) an image of him, beaten with a Roman instrument, crowned with thorns, crucified, dead of asphyxiation caused by hanging on a cross, and pierced with a lance. It’s all there on the cloth.
The carbon dating done in 1988 was quite accurate on what they dated. . . the problem was NOT with the carbon dating technique of the theory of carbon dating.
The problem in 1988 started right at the beginning. The original sampling protocols called for eight samples to be cut from eight different areas of the Shroud. This would have guaranteed getting good representative samples of the original Shroud. The samples would have been taken from image and non-image areas including some with blood and some without. One area of the Shroud was to be excluded from these samples because in the 1978 STURP examination it reacted chemically and physically differently than the main-body of the Shroud and the scientists decided it should be avoided for those reasons. This was the lower left corner which fluoresced under ultra-violet light and appeared to be chemically different. It was thought to be somewhat different than the main-body. . . and may have undergone some treatment in the past.
At the literally the last minute, the protocol was changed unilaterally by person taking the samples. He decided on his own to take only ONE single sample and took that sample from the lower, left hand corner that all the STURP scientists had said should be avoided because it was NOT representative of the main-body of the Shroud. The corner was NOT damaged in any fire, but rather a corner that had been handled too much and probably used to tie the Shroud to ropes and frayed. It was also a corner in which other pieces had been cut in the past and patched before, poorly. These cut outs were made to give small pieces of the Shroud to friends of the Savoys and others. It is the most repaired corner of the Shroud, by means of visible patches and otherwise. It should have been avoided at all costs and was NOT. The sample was cut from an area of that corner that appeared to be main-body, but it was a critical mistake, a breaking of the agreed protocols.
From that single sample five sub-samples were cut with four being sent to three C-14 labs with one from the center, between two on either side, being retained for later study. It was these four sub-samples cut from the one single main sample, that were burned in the 1988 C-14 tests that when averaged resulted in the infamous date of 1350 AD!
However, it has been proved, by three independent scientists, in three separate independent peer-reviewed studies, published in peer-reviewed independent scientific journals, that although the C-14 aging tests were done accurately on what was tested, the samples tested were compromised by being polluted with NEWER material from the 16th Century, to wit, a very skillfully woven in COTTON PATCH, intermixed in part with the original FLAX threads of the main-body cloth of the Shroud, using a technique called French Invisible Reweaving.
Dr. Harry Gove, the inventor of the C-14 testing process used on the Shroud materials, when asked how old the original material would have to have been when mixed with 60% 16th Century material to report a result date of 1350. . . did some calculations and came up with FIRST CENTURY. That was the approximate mix of the COTTON mixed in the C-14 tested materials in 1988. The Main-body of the Shroud is 100% linen made of FLAX with no cotton at all. . . yet what was tested ranged from 40% - 60% COTTON. . . and the tested sub-samples varied in age according to the percentage of newer cotton material mixed with the older original material.
This should have been a HUGE red flag for the scientists coordinating the test result from the three labs. . . and especially for the Arizona lab who got the sub-samples with the least and most original material. . . because not a single sub-sample's test's range of confidence overlapped the next closest sub-sample's range of confidence! And Arizona's two samples, the one's that were cut farthest apart from one another were dated 1390AD and 1140AD, both with ranges of confidence of +/-25 years. Statistically, they could NOT have come from the same sample at all. In fact, NONE of the four tested samples statistically could have come from the same sample, they were so far out of compliance. . . so the scientists in charge at Arizona AVERAGED their results—they fudged their results—they lied. To compound this scientific fraud, the scientists at Oxford, in charge of the whole fiasco took the non-compliant results from all three labs and did the SAME THING!
Because of the breaking of the sampling protocols, the experimental bias of the C-14 referees, and the averaging of data that should have instead raised red flags that something was drastically wrong with their samples, and the now proof that there WAS something wrong with their samples in that they were NOT representative of what they thought they were testing, the fact is that the Shroud itself has NOT been C-14 tested. . . officially.