Scientific study of the Shroud of Turin

This is probably unjustified.

Personally I've no axe to grind here. I'm pretty much outside of the scope in terms of having a personal interest in whether or not Jesus existed.

However, let's take a different type of example. Let's say someone is accused of a crime. One of the pieces of evidence against the person is found to have been planted so as to incriminate the person. Do we now conclude that the person is therefore innocent? No. The proper course of action is to discard the 'red herring' and move on. The person may nevertheless still have done the crime, misleading evidence doesn't change that.

(I should add separately that I'm not convinced either way about the shroud).

Perhaps.

I've edited my post to add that it is, for me, personally, a bit more evidence against a literal, historical Christ, in relation to some of the lectures by the reasonable Richard Carrier, who takes a mythological approach towards the Bible.

...in relation to some of the lectures by the reasonable Richard Carrier, who takes a mythological approach towards the Bible.

The more I read both Carrier and cogent critiques of his work, the less reasonable he appears. His Doherty 2.0 thesis has significant problems and he is too blinded by his narcissism, e.g., to acknowledge places where he's screwed up in his reading of primary texts. To wit: his "Philo's angel Jesus" hypothesis, his "heretics with the BC chronology" in Epiphanius, and his "heavenly crucifixion" in the "original" Ascension of Isaiah.

It seems a paper on the radiocarbon dating of the shroud by Tristan Casabianca and collaborators was published in the journal Archaeometry in March 2019, and has now been noticed more widely. The authors got access to fuller data from the work done in the 1980s, through a freedom of information request to the British Museum. The conclusion in the abstract is "A statistical analysis of the Nature article and the raw data strongly suggests that homogeneity is lacking in the data and that the procedure should be reconsidered."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full...arcm.12467

The paper is behind a paywall, but there are fairly full extracts in this blog post by Stephen E. Jones, interspersed with Jones's comments (which are anything but objective in tone!). The extracts give a fairly clear idea of the re-analysis of the data:
https://theshroudofturin.blogspot.com/20...arbon.html

Apparently some discrepancies between the published and the raw data were found, together with evidence that the results from the different labs (and the results of the different tests by one of labs?) were inhomogeneous. That may indicate there was a problem with some of the data, but - if I understand correctly - of the 16 different figures produced by the three labs, the very oldest date was still indicated to be in the 12th century. So really all the data would need to be completely wrong for the Shroud to be genuine.

That may indicate there was a problem with some of the data, but - if I understand correctly - of the 16 different figures produced by the three labs, the very oldest date was still indicated to be in the 12th century. So really all the data would need to be completely wrong for the Shroud to be genuine.

I've heard it claimed before that the sample(s) selected for radiocarbon dating may have come from a section which had undergone repairs at some time. Thus it's possible the data only tells us when it was repaired. That is, it neither confirms nor refutes the possibility of the shroud being genuine. (I've not researched this so can't be certain of it).

I've heard it claimed before that the sample(s) selected for radiocarbon dating may have come from a section which had undergone repairs at some time. Thus it's possible the data only tells us when it was repaired. That is, it neither confirms nor refutes the possibility of the shroud being genuine. (I've not researched this so can't be certain of it).

I've also seen that suggestion. But I don't see why, if the sample came from a repaired section, that should give rise to heterogeneity in the carbon dating, as found by this paper, unless the repair resulted in a mixture of old and new threads in the cloth, and the samples that were carbon-dated contained significantly different proportions of old and new.

There's a microscopic investigation here of a sample split from one one used in the radiocarbon dating, and I don't see any indication that there were two different kinds of thread in the fabric - only a small number of cotton fibres that the authors thought might have been the result of the Shroud having been wrapped in cotton at some time, or of contamination during the spinning or weaving of the linen:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2ecd/74...d4b227.pdf

[Ninshub]

The paper apparently can be downloaded here if you have a google or facebook account. I tried google but it wanted to let academia.whatever download "my contacts" and so said no.
https://www.academia.edu/38607635/Radioc...m_Raw_Data

EDIT: Oh, but if you click on "read paper" down on the page, you can do so!

The paper apparently can be downloaded here if you have a google or facebook account. I tried google but it wanted to let academia.whatever download "my contacts" and so said no.
https://www.academia.edu/38607635/Radioc...m_Raw_Data

EDIT: Oh, but if you click on "read paper" down on the page, you can do so!

Thanks for finding that free copy. (I think it's very questionable when publishers charge large amounts for access to a paper when there is a legit free copy available elsewhere.)

On pages 7 and 8 the authors mention that some of the samples were found to contain a few foreign threads (presumably more modern than the Shroud itself). Perhaps such contamination might explain the heterogeneity they found. I still don't see anything in their findings pointing to a first-century date.

[Ninshub]

Thanks for finding that free copy. (I think it's very questionable when publishers charge large amounts for access to a paper when there is a legit free copy available elsewhere.)

Someone on reddit about obtaining free copies says yes really it's the publisher making that demand, but authors are often keen on sharing their work and not necessarily in agreement with the publisher policy, and that we can contact them directly or follow their names on Google and see if a website attached to them or their faculty provides free copies. That was the case here.

Someone on reddit about obtaining free copies says yes really it's the publisher making that demand, but authors are often keen on sharing their work and not necessarily in agreement with the publisher policy, and that we can contact them directly or follow their names on Google and see if a website attached to them or their faculty provides free copies. That was the case here.

So are sites like academia and semanticscholar (and their visitors) breaching the publishers' copyright? I had assumed they were operating within the law.

[Ninshub]

I have no idea.