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In the Middle Ages, you could sell any bone as a relic of some saint and people would believe it. WHY would ANYONE go to such lengths to fabricate an image as accurate as this one? And, as you say, the anatomical knowledge involving the image was beyond the ken of Medieval Man anyway.

The carbon 14 test were discredited based on the sampling methods and the issue of bioplastic. Since the Shroud was damaged in a fire and subjected to recent carbon 14 contamination in the Middle Ages from that fire, a false recent date would be expected anyway.

And of course, they didn't have Pizza ovens in the 1300’s.

The Shroud, when folded for storage, presents the face of the image forwards. The individual who originally brought the Shroud to the attention of the Medieval World was Geoffrey De Charney. He was related to an officer of the Knights Templar who was martyred under Philip the Fair. One of the charges against the Templars by Philip was they worshipped the image of a face. And the Templars of course were involved in the Holy Land going back to the 1100’s as well as in the capture of Constantinople. The Byzantine Emperors were pretty active collectors of religious relics - fraudulent and genuine.

ALL of this creates very compelling circumstantial evidence regarding the authenticity of the Shroud.

. . .and the issue of bioplastic. Since the Shroud was damaged in a fire and subjected to recent carbon 14 contamination in the Middle Ages from that fire, a false recent date would be expected anyway.

Sorry, Zulu, but these hypothesis have been disproved. There is no "Bioplastic coating" on the fibers... and the chemical process of fire cannot change the atomic molecular composition of the Carbon. IF either of these were true, to distort the date from the first century to the 14th, would require that the polluting factor whether bioplastic or Carbon soot, would have to outweigh the original material by 60%. It's simply not there.

There was sampling error... but the reason for the dating error is that the C14 labs tested a sample that was a mixture of older and newer material that was deliberately added to the Shroud sometime in the 16th Century.

Statistical analysis of the C14 test results of the samples—which were all taken from the same piece—shows that sub-sample from one end of the sample are NOT statistically the same as the sub-sample from the other end, a distance less than 1 inch apart, and that the two sub-samples could not have come from the same piece of cloth!!! Yet it is obvious that they were from the same sample. This should have been a red-flag for the testers. They ignored it... and in fact fudged their results to obscure the data.

The reason for this inexplicable statistical aberration is that the damaged original FLAXEN cloth was very skillfully, invisibly interwoven with a COTTON reweaving to repair the damaged corner where the C14 test sample was taken. The percentage of new to old material varied with distance from the center of the Shroud toward the bottom edge. The more new material found in a sub-sample the younger it tested... the more old material, the older it tested.