Jim O’Shea promotes his new book over at the American Christian Fiction Writers’ The Voice of Christian Fiction:
My new thriller, “The Linen God”, is focused on mysterious secrets embedded within the most studied and controversial religious relic in human history, the Shroud of Turin. The ancient Jewish burial cloth bears the photonegative image of a crucified man, alleged to be that of Jesus Christ. Although science has been unable to prove how the image was formed (there are no pigments in the cloth), the Shroud has long been considered a Medieval forgery by most scientists and historians.
However, researchers now claim to have scientific evidence that the Shroud of Turin dates to somewhere between 280 BC and 220 AD. Professor Giulio Fanti and his research team at the University of Padua in Italy reports the results of some chemical and mechanical tests they performed which they claim “confirms that the Shroud dates back to the 1st century.” The “Vatican Insider” has chimed in as well. I’ll spare you the bulk of the highly technical statement, and provide just the summary statement below.
“Final results show that the Shroud fibres examined produced the following dates, all of which are 95% certain and centuries away from the medieval dating obtained with Carbon-14 testing in 1988: the dates given to the Shroud after FT-IR testing, is 300 BC ±400, 200 BC ±500 after Raman testing and 400 AD ±400 after multi-parametric mechanical testing. The average of all three dates is 33 BC ±250 years.”
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I’m sorry but I’m confused. Is there FTIR and Raman data that says that the Shroud dates to 33 BC, or is that part of the “fiction” part of the book?