Agreed. I highly doubt the Shroud is authentic. But a certain denomination has a penchant for relics.
Huh? I took Ed’s point to be the opposite. That the susceptibility of carbon 14 processes to contamination renders the medieval dating unreliable. Two samples were supposed to be extracted but they only took one. Bob it’s not that it was taken from a repaired area per se, it’s that the sample contained interwoven threads from a repair. Where the burns took place there are big patches; minor damage was repaired by interweaving threads to build up and fill in the damage. By definition, the presence of Middle Ages repair threads makes the dating useless. This thing has been handled, subject to large amounts of candle and incense smoke, fire,
Smoke and water damage, and stored, until relatively recently, under very adverse conditions for… yes… 2000 years. The testing didn’t follow its own protocol and is essentially not reliable