Good news from Andrea Tornielli on the Vatican Insider site. New tests have identified the Turin Shroud as being of first century AD provenance. The article is here. An excerpt:
The new tests carried out in the University of Padua
labs were carried out by a number of university professors from various
Italian universities and agree that the Shroud dates back to the period
when Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem. Final results show that
the Shroud fibres examined produced the following dates, all of which
are 95% certain and centuries away from the medieval dating obtained
with Carbon-14 testing in 1988: the dates given to the Shroud after
FT-IR testing, is 300 BC ±400, 200 BC ±500 after Raman testing and 400
AD ±400 after multi-parametric mechanical testing. The average of all
three dates is 33 BC ±250 years. The book’s authors observed
that the uncertainty of this date is less than the single uncertainties
and the date is compatible with the historic date of Jesus’ death on the
cross, which historians claim occurred in 30 AD.
More in the Telegraph.
2 comments:
I note that all the "so-called Experts", who,
in the 1980s, bad-mouthed the idea
that the Turin Shroud actually WAS a miraculous
image of Christ, have gone AWFULLY QUIET !!!
Quelle Surprise.
It would be interesting to look at the original papers (when published). I gather that this current study uses material left over from the last dating in the '80s. It would be good to know how this material was sourced, stored and handled, and with such small samples this is very important. The original carbon dating was always going to be a bit of a gamble, the technique was at that time not good at dates of relatively recent dates, and had large uncertainties.
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