My underlining. Nothing has been “proven”. This is mere conjecture.
**Many things have actually been proven about the Shroud of Turin:
The blood markings consist of human blood.
The image is not composed of paint or ink.
The body represented therein is a human body in a state of rigor mortis.
The dirt is from the foot, knees, and nose is a type of travertine aragonite that has only been found in Jerusalem.
The pollen found on the linen indicates that the linen spent time in Palestine and Turkey.
The facial characteristics are consistent with images of Jesus dating from the sixth century.
The man depicted on the linen suffered death by crucifixion and was beaten by a Roman flagellum prior to that.
The STURP scientific examination did not find any evidence that would preclude this linen cloth from being the actual burial cloth of Jesus.
The only real question remaining is not “is the 1988 C-14 dating of the Shroud invalid,” but rather exactly why was it so strange.
The Shroud’s sister cloth, the Sudarium of Oviedo dates historically to about 700 A.D. and it’s C-14 dating comes out to that time period.
Therefore any explanation of the Shroud’s strange dating also has to account for the anomalous dating of the Sudarium as well.
The Historically Consistent Hypothesis takes into account the special nature of the Man that was buried within the Shroud.
It states that when this Body disappeared (and it did vanish from this world) a very small percentage of that Body did not exit this dimension, but, instead, dissolved into its elemental nuclear particles: protons and neutrons.
The protons caused the formation of the image while the thermal neutron irradiation had a preservative effect on the linen and also caused some of the nitrogen therein to be converted into carbon 14.
The nearby sudarium would have also been affected by this neutron flux, but to a lesser extent.
“Nuclear engineer, Robert Rucker, has made detailed calculations to compute the age changes as a function of location on the Shroud: …the location at the center of the Man’s back would [be predicted to have] the largest radiocarbon age change; dating into the future to 8400 A.D.”
(TEST THE SHROUD, PG 339)
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testtheshroudonline.com/