BY TIM CALLAHAN
IN THE JULY 26, 2019 ISSUE OF PATHEOS, AN ONLINE newsletter on religious issues, Gene Veith argued that recent scientific studies have provided strong evidence that the Shroud of Turin was not, after all, a medieval forgery and that the radiocarbon tests on the Shroud, conducted in 1988, dating it between 1262 and 1384, were flawed. It cited a 2005 article by the late Raymond Rogers in Thermochimica Acta to the effect that the collection of samples from the Shroud was faulty, and cited this statement by researcher Tristan Casabianca:
Our statistical analysis shows that the 1988 carbon 14 dating was unreliable: the tested samples are obviously heterogeneous [showing many different dates], and there is no guarantee that all these samples, taken from one end of the sheet, are representative of the whole fabric. It is therefore impossible to conclude that the shroud of Turin dates from the Middle Ages.1