From a review of An Incomplete Curiosity: “Shroud has regained some credibility”
Desmond O’Grady in the Italian Insider: Italy’s first English language daily newspaper (March 22, 2011), in a review of An Irreverent Curiosity by David Farley:
[I]t is too easy to suggest [all relics] have the same standing. Is the Shroud of Turin, which bears the image of a crucified man, the winding sheet of Christ or not? Its status was dented in 1988 when carbon dating showed it was not from the period of Christ’s death. However the shroud’s defenders claimed the test had been done on a patch added to mend the shroud and produced new tests confirming the shroud’s authenticity. The case it still open but the shroud has regained some credibility.
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The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
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