Turin “Shroud” Still a Fake | Center for Inquiry

In 2005, Turin Shroud proponent Ray Rogers claimed that earlier carbon-14 tests of the shroud linen—showing it to date from between 1260 and 1390 and to thus be a fake—were invalid because, he hypothesized, the samples must have been taken from a “medieval patch.” Rogers and I had an exchange of arguments in the Skeptical Inquirer. But a new paper by three Italian chemists, in the same journal in which Rogers published, shows who was right.

Rogers had claimed that his analysis of two pyrolysis spectra showed a difference between the area selected for C14 dating and the remainder of the cloth—a finding that led some to suggest the C14 sample must have come from an area of “invisible reweaving.” This was hypothesized to have been done in the Middle Ages, thus invalidating the C14 tests, but I concluded that Rogers’ claims were “cut from whole cloth.” (Sadly, Rogers died while our latest exchange was in press.)

Now, chemists Marco Bella, Luigi Garlaschelli, and Roberto Samperi have published a paper that concludes (with its title), “There is no mass spectrometry evidence that the C14 sample from the Shroud of Turin comes from a ‘medieval invisible mending.’”

Turin “Shroud” Still a Fake | Center for Inquiry