Textile Evidence Supports Skewed Radiocarbon Date of Shroud of Turin

The most studied artifact in human history is the Shroud of Turin, a 14 by 3.5 foot sheet of linen with lightly-shaded ventral and dorsal images of an apparently crucified man matching the wounds reported to have been incurred by Jesus of Nazareth. In 1988, Carbon-14 (C-14) dating of a corner section of the cloth produced dates ranging from 1260 to 1390 A.D.(1) This paper presents new evidence demonstrating that it is highly probable that the C-14 samples were not characteristic of the main Shroud and were spurious. Introduction On August 28, 2000, at the Worldwide Congress "Sindone 2000" in Orvieto, Italy, the paper entitled, "Evidence for the Skewing of the C-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin Due to Repairs" was originally presented. (2) This paper proposed a hypothesis that a “patch” of material, from the 16th Century, was skillfully spliced into the 1st Century original Shroud cloth in the C-14 sample used by the laboratories for testing; thus, altering the date to make it appear more modern than the main Shroud. Several supporting arguments were provided in this paper. Among these arguments included calculations performed by Beta Analytic, the world’s largest radiocarbon dating service, that the observed proportion of medieval material in relationship to assumed 1st Century material, matches the findings of the AMS Labs in 1988. Second, the paper reported the