I am generally skeptical of such things. I agree that it does not change a person’s faith or beliefs no matter what it is.
I have never really studied it but I remember when the first carbon dating was done at Oxford, it seemed to me that they were about as unscientific about it as they could be. The results were preordained.
There are some really odd things about it and no one has explained what it really is.
It was actually tested at three different C-14 labs. Oxford, Arizona, and Switzerland. All three were given samples cut from a single master sample cut from the Shroud in contravention of the agreed protocols that required no fewer than six samples from six different areas of the Shroud. . . but at the last minute, it was decided by one man to cut the sample from the worst possible area of the Shroud, one that had been agreed was probably not chemically the same as the rest in that it did not react physically (it fluoresced under ultra-violet light while the main body of the Shroud did not) and seemed different to the naked eye. The STURP scientists had stated that in their reports that area should be avoided for C-14 testing.
That single sample was a strip about one centimeter wide and about seven centimeters long, stretching from the short side of the end of the Shroud in toward the body of the dorsal side of the image at the lower corner. A portion of the sample toward the end was cut off and discarded because they noticed that some of the threadsdid not match the rest of the threads in the sample, leaving a strip about 1 centimeter by five centimeters. This strip was cut into about five equal sized pieces. For the sake of keeping track of them, let's label them A through E. A and E were sent to Arizona, B to Switzerland, and D was sent to Oxford. C was retained for reference and control. A. B, D, and E would be destroyed in testing.
Strangely, the flawed C-14 test provides evidence of the authenticity of the true age of the main body of the Shroud. When the referees at Oxford reported the results they gleefully reported the average of all three labs' tests as 1350 AD. . . but the Devil was in the details.
Statistical analysis of actual data data from each lab found that devil. The scientists conducting the tests accurately tested the samples given them and each lab got varying dates from 1260 AD to1390 AD each with a degree of confidence of plus or minus 25 years. Notice that the date of 1390 AD, minus 25 years is 1365 and that 1260 AD plus 25 years is 1285. They don't overlap! Now add in the fact that the lab who dated both of those samples was the SAME lab, the Arizona C-14 lab. In fact, not a single sample, not A, B, D, or E, over lapped the adjacent sample within the 25 year plus or minus degree of confidence. This should have been a humungous, gigantic red flag to the referees running the tests that the samples being tested were not homogenous with one another!
This statistical anomaly gave rise to many theories how this could possibly happen from fire changing the nature of the C-14/C-12 mixtures, to deliberate cheating on the tests, to bacteriological contamination from bacteria poop from 2000 years of microbes eating the linen and excreting the waste (ignoring the fact that if they are eating C-14/C-12 from the Linen, it would still have the same C-14/C-12 ratio in the bacteria poop as the Linen), to radiation from the Resurrection changing the amount of C-12 to C-14 by irradiation. All of these failed for various reasons. The prime one of contamination being that to skew the date from 1st Century to 14th Century requires more than HALF of the tested material has to be contamination, and the tested samples obviously did not have 50% plus contamination! Or did they?
Fourteen years later, Susan Benford and Joseph Marino proposed that the reason the C-14 test had come up with a date that seemed so conveniently medieval, when all other evidence pointed to an older creation date was that it was a patch made with a technique called French Invisible Reweaving. This seemed like a "Hail Mary" play to many, including Pyrolosis Chemist Raymond Rogers who thought it would be easy to falsify.
Rogers got hold of threads from Sample C from the guardian of the Shroud, the control from the 1988 Carbon test, and started looking at it under a phase contrast and polarized microscope and found, much to his surprise, the Benford and Marino theory was correct! Threads from the C sample showed that the threads on one sid'e were distinctly different from the threads on the other side. On the right side (as they would have been oriented originally on the Shroud) they were original Linen. On the left side, they were cotton which was never used in the middle east, dyed to match the original Linen with a madder root Alizarin dye, retted with Alum (an aluminum compound used originally from the 1200s on), and the dye fixed with a plant gum arabic, all late 16th century technics used in the French Invisible reweaving. This was all reported in the Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the shroud of turin" — Thermochimica Acta 425 (2005) 189–194, a peer reviewed Scientific Journal.
Another scientist confirmed the findings working with a thread from the Raes sample taken in 1984 from the same area. . . that thread fell into two halves where it had been skillfully intertwined into a single thread. One half was dyed cotton, the other half original Flax Linen.
The conclusion of this is that the bifurcating line between the two types of material on the samples ran at a slight angle through A to B, through C, D, and E, with A having about 60% cotton 40% Linen to E with about 40% cotton 60% Linen. Sample A was the sample that test at 1390 AD, the youngest of the samples, the sample with the greatest proportion of newly added cotton, while Sample E which had only 40% cotton reported the 1260 AD date, the oldest of the samples, and therefore the most original Shroud Linen. . . cotton that was estimated to have been added about 1652 AD. Thus the Benford and Marino theory was probed true and accounted for the contamination of 50% by weight to skew the date to the 14th Century from the 1st Century.
Harry Gove, the inventor of the C-14 testing method used on the Shroud samples, when asked what date the original material would be if contaminated with 1650 AD material at 50% to return a 1350 result, did some calculations and came up with FIRST CENTURY give or take 100 years, given the lack of precision.
As I said when I started this treatise, the C-14 test actually provided evidence for the age of the main body material. Ray Rogers also proposed another test that proves the Shroud is at least 1300 years old. . . because the vanillin in the plant fibers in the Shroud's flax is entirely missing. Vanillin has a known half life. The cotton fibers vanillin was present in the expected amounts for a 1650 harvesting. All vanillin in a plant material will have been absorbed into the atmosphere by the time 1300 years have passed. . . but not by 700. Ergo the Shroud could not have been made from Flax harvested in 1350.