February 7, 2008

Inaccurate Shroud Dating?


by Rachael Grant

A radiocarbon expert at Oxford University has revealed that techniques used by scientists to date the Shroud of Turin to the middle ages may have been inconclusive.

Christopher Bronk Ramsey, the director of Oxford’s Radiocarbon Accelerator, and the Church official in charge of the Shroud, talking to the BBC, said that radiocarbon dating techniques have come a long way since the original tests were taken, and that skewed results could have been obtained because of the handling, exposure, and time the Shroud spent travelling.

Mgr. Giuseppe Ghiberti, president of the Diocesan Commission for the Shroud of Turin, agreed with Ramsey, and suggested that the long history of the Shroud, that included damage by fire, and travelling between Palestine and Europe, could have changed the results that were obtained.

In the original tests in 1988, three groups of scientists tried to use radiocarbon techniques to determine how old the Shroud was. They concluded that the Shroud could only be dated back to the middle ages rather than the speculated first century. The Shroud, which has been believed by Christians to be the burial cloth of Christ, was then suggested to be either a hoax or a product of an unknown natural process.

However the conclusion hasn’t stopped the belief, and in 2005 another analysis indicated that the sample cloth used by the original team in 1988 had been taken from a part of the Shroud that was not part of the original cloth.

The interview will be broadcast on Easter Sunday by the BBC.

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