The shroud

Others are suckers for pseudo-historic novels such as the Da Vinci Code. For a very long time, I have been a sucker for news about the shroud of Turin. And the fact that, some 20 years ago, carbon dating "proved" beyond reasonable doubt that it was a medieval fake was enough to set me - a full blooded contrarian - doubting the value of some "scientific" proofs.

There are dozens of websites and hundreds of opinions on the shroud and I think it has something in common with genealogy. Research will never be complete. Even now, there are new angles all the time.

Whether the shroud is "real" or not is not relevant any more and will most probably never be definitively proved or disproved anyhow. The quest has become more interesting than the object.

Now there is another rebound : "A physics professor has persuaded an Oxford laboratory to revisit the question of the age of the Shroud of Turin, the reputed burial shroud of Jesus Christ. The professor argues that carbon monoxide contaminating the shroud could have distorted its radiocarbon dating results by more than 1,000 years.

In 1988 and 1989 scientists at three laboratories drew on the results of radiocarbon dating to conclude that the shroud was a medieval forgery. They dated its creation to between 1260 and 1390 AD.

The Denver Post reports that John Jackson, a physics lecturer at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has hypothesized that even minimal contamination of the shroud by environmental carbon monoxide could have skewed the dating by 1,300 years."

More : http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=12725.

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