Radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud

I have been for some time interested in the Turin Shroud. I think it is man made, but the man in the image is Jesus, i.e., that this is not a man made image from the Middle Ages using some method we do not know, but it is a man made image from Antique using some method we do not know. We know more of the technology available to Europeans in the Middle Ages than what we know secrets of some esoteric sects in the first century Middle East. If the image is man made and we cannot figure out the way it was made, it is easier to place it to a time and place that we do not know much of, rather than to Christian Europe to a time from which we have many documents. I also find it strange that a Medieval forger would have made all the trouble of crucifying a real person, because the image is not a painting, in order to create a forget relict when just as good forged relicts could be created in very simple ways: just take some thorny plant and wind it into a crown of thorns, or some rusty nails.

            I do not think the Shroud is actually a result of what should be called forgery. It is much more likely a result of a ritual that served some purpose: like a resurrection ritual. That does not imply that a dead person was resurrected in a real sense by such a ritual, he was resurrected in the ritual sense. My best bet is that the image was created by a very strong flash of light, probably burning magnesium, which went through the linen and reflected from the body. The inside of the cloth would have had some coating, probably by some volatile sap from some local plants, that would have evaporated long ago but at that time it would have made fibers more sensitive to light. I think it was something like this, but I agree that my best bet is most probably not the way that was used. For several reasons I do not believe in a real resurrection, mainly because the words of Jesus and St. Paul indicate that Jesus was a Jewish prophet Messiah of the war of the years 66-73 and not the universal Savior of the Gospels.

            Nevertheless, there is the 1988 radiocarbon dating placing it in the Middle Ages and the always as reliable Wikipedia gives this information:

“Some proponents for the authenticity of the shroud have attempted to discount the radiocarbon dating result by claiming that the sample may represent a medieval “invisible” repair fragment rather than the image-bearing cloth.^{[8][9][16][13][80][81][82][83]} However, all of the hypotheses used to challenge the radiocarbon dating have been scientifically refuted,^[10][11][12] including the medieval repair hypothesis,^[13][14] the bio-contamination hypothesis^[16] and the carbon monoxide hypothesis.^[11]“

            The Wikipedia gives two references that are claimed to have scientifically refuted the present claim that the radiocarbon tests of 1988 gave a false result because of invisible mending in the textile in the place from which the sample was taken. The second reference [14] is:

[14] Schafersman, Steven D. (14 March 2005). “A Skeptical Response to Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin by Raymond N. Rogers”. llanoestacado.org. Retrieved 2 January 2016.

I looked at this reference. It starts like this:

This report is my initial response to the controversy and publicity recently generated by the publication of the journal article by Ray Rogers cited above. It contains my initial thoughts and is subject to change. Please feel free to forward it and cite it using Web citation format, but it is subject to change and will eventually be expanded into a journal article for official publication that will contain references and illustrations. For several reasons, I had to write this present version quickly and informally, and it may contain errors that, if present, will be corrected. Although I point out the errors of logic and scientific evidence in Rogers’ paper, I include my own speculations and suspicions, for which I obviously lack real evidence. It should be clear which is which. Future investigation needs to be conducted.

            This is simply a text one blogger has put on his pages. It is just as scientific argument as any of my posts in my blog and Schafersman seems to be a retired professor just like me. I read his outpouring in this article, but he is writing as an activist, not as a scientist. I could not find any reasonable argument from his text, and in general, a claim is not scientifically refuted by an article in somebody’s blog.

            The first reference is to a peer reviewed journal:

[13] R. A. Freer-Waters, A. J. T. Jull, “Investigating a Dated piece of the Shroud of Turin”, Radiocarbon 52, 2010, pp. 1521–1527.

            The journal Radiocarbon is published by the University of Arizona and the Editor in Chief of the journal is the second author A. J. Timothy Jull. Well, I was a scientific editor in chief of a peer reviewed journal once and as the editor got to review one paper that was authored by my student and me. I sent the paper to good referees, got good reviews and published it, but it is always a question of chosing the referees and also that the referees may be less strict if the manuscript is coauthored by the editor in chief. Had I wanted to get the paper published by chosing like-minded referees, I certainly could have done it. Science works on trust on senior scientists, but nowadays you cannot always have this trust.

            I found an article by Mark Oxley, not a peer reviewed one, which raises serious questions of the article [13]:

https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/oxley.pdf

            Oxley mentions many relevant issues why [13] is not a proof of the validity of the radiocarbon tests of 1988. I had to read [13] myself. It seems to be like this. They had a 0.5*1 cm piece of Turin Shroud that was for some reason saved in 1988, though nobody knew that they were saving it. But there is reason that they did save the piece, and apparently they also saved another piece that nobody knows where that is. For the article [13] the researchers pulled 12 linen fibers from this sample. The sample should have about 600 fibers, so they looked at 2%. They did not find any coating by Madder rood dye, which Raymond Rogers had earlier found and what is strong supporting evidence that there was mending in this part of the shroud. The authors of [13] explain that linen fibers do not easily get dyed by Madder root, which well explains why they found no such dye. Actually Rogers had found this dye from cotton fibers in the shroud. The authors of [13] admit that theis sample had some cotton fibers, but as they did not look at the cotton fibers for Madder root dye, so they naturally did not find any. Besides, as the dye is water soluble, it would very probably have been removed from the sample that [13] used. Thus, they could not find any dye as there very likely was not any dye in the fibers that they looked at. The final conclusion in [13] is that they did not find any evidence to doubt the dating done in 1988. Surely there is some circular reasoning here. 

            So, that’s about it of this topic. No progress here. But the miserable state of science in the USA seems to be more convincingly demonstrated. The problem is not the so called crackpot conspiracy theoreticians. It is the lying skeptics and false debunkers pretending to represent science while having an ideological agenda.