The Shroud of Turin: What's Your Opinion?

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On page 311 of TEST THE SHROUD, Antonacci details C-14 dates that the labs first reported:
Arizona:
May 6th: 574 & 606
May 12th: 753 & 632
May 24: 676 & 540
June 2nd: 701 & 701

Oxford
795 years
730 "
745 "

Antonacci continues:
“However, these ages provided a serious problem for the British Museum for the radiocarbon ages of the samples ranged from 540 to 795 years old. . . .A 255 year range for samples taken less than five cm from each other on the same cloth would be too great for an acceptable degree of accuracy or a 95% certainty in age.”

“…Remi Van Haelst states that the British Museum solved this problem by asking Arizona to combine or to essentially average the two radiocarbon sample ages from each of the four above dates in May and June, which Arizona did. … .This combination was not mentioned in the official NATURE report . . .”

"Archeologist William Meacham has utilized C-14 dating . . .for well over three decades. . . .in 2000 Meacham called the 1988 Shroud dating a ‘fiasco.’ In 1987 he warned that the major problem with the entire C-14 dating issues was, ‘The labs seem to have put themselves in charge of the entire operation.’
"Meacham stated, “Strangely, the C specialists insisted on having splits of the same sample. It appeared as if they wanted above all else to achieve harmonious results among themselves . . .’”

“Suffice it to say that a medieval origin is inconsistent with thousands of other scientific tests, including the recent dating by three new scientific methods in 2013.”
 
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I’m not quite sure what you think to gain by merely repeating popular sources, without explaining how they discredit my comments, when I have already explained how they don’t. Are you in fact only trying to reassure yourself? You mentioned before that “This combination was not mentioned in the official NATURE report”, and I replied that it was indeed mentioned in the Nature paper. "The results of these independent measurements (Table 1) in each case represent the average of several replicate measurements made during each run. " This was true of all the measurements of all the samples by all the labs, not just the Tucson lab, and not just for the Shroud sample.

The stuff about “acceptable accuracy” I’m afraid simply shows a lack of statistical knowledge. All the samples returned absolute ranges of over 200 years. It is counter-intuitive but often perfectly true that the greater the errors quoted in a series of measurements, the greater the (statistical) accuracy of the final results. But let that be. If anyone other than Undead_rat would like that explained more fully, I shall be delighted to do so. In his case, I’m afraid, it would be ignored, even if it was understood.

This is a curious statement, if I may say so: “Strangely, the C specialists insisted on having splits of the same sample.” It is attributed to William Meacham, although I can’t find the source. Still, the fact is, of course, that the sample and how it was divided was determined by officials of the Catholic Church, and not at the insistence of the ‘C specialists’ at all.
 
The idea that it was a legitimate act to average the May 24th dates of 540 years and 676 years is ludicrous. The disparity of these two readings indicates that they were obtained from different parts of the sample.

TEST THE SHROUD, PG 313:
“Riani and his co-authors ran over 387,000 spatial possibilities and concluded that data from Arizona’s second sample was not contained in the final report, which was confirmed by one of the participating scientists at Arizona.”

In any case, since the Shroud had already been proven to be the burial cloth of Jesus, any date other than 2000 years would have to be either caused by contamination or be proof of the vanishing of Jesus’ corpse. The discrepancy of over 1000 years is much too large to have been caused by contamination.
 
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