Conspiracy theories regarding the 1988 carbon dating is nothing new ! Just after the 1988 result, a conference was held in Paris in september of 1989 and there was some assertions made about a conspiracy to explain the medieval dating…
I’m always skeptical versus those kind of theories. I put them in the same place as the Da Vinci Code. And, for those who believe them, here’s a good question : If the Vatican knows that the shroud is genuine and don’t want the world to ear the news, then why having permit all those direct tests in 1973, 1978 and 1988 ???
Why they didn’t just leave the relic in is reliquary and, in this manner, prevent that the scientific world will ever touch it and find the truth ?
It would have been alot easier and less risky that way, don’t you think ?
Last comment from me : As I know, those testings from the 70s and 80s were made by honest scientists, who were independent of the Vatican. I think this fact alone prove that the conspiracy theory don’t ring true.
B&B texts a single word message with 3 exclamation marks:
Bull!!!
Another reader writes:
Ever since the results were announced there have been allegations of some conspiracy to fix the results. There has been the rumor that Michael Tite [pictured, center] of the British Museum received one million pounds, sterling, and an Oxford professorship from unknown admirers for his commitment to a fake dating result. Maybe or maybe not. The money was to build a lab and he was fully qualified and deserving. Was it for making sure that the carbon dating results were in the middle ages? I doubt it.
Another reader opines:
I imagine this has to do with the Turin Protocol of 1986 which eliminated STURP and threw caution to the wind by leaving everything to the testers and Tite. Luigi Gonella’s [pictured] explained. “The Church must respond to the challenge of those who want it to stop the process, who would want us to show that the Church fears the science.
“We are faced with actual blackmail: unless we accept the conditions imposed by the laboratories, they will start a marketing campaign of accusations against the Church, which they will portray as scared of the truth and enemy of science. . .
“The pressure on the ecclesiastic authorities to accept the Turin protocol have almost approached illegality.”
Gonella was right. Let’s see if this documentary goes there.
Right now, I want to see The Night of the Shroud (in English)