Can you spot the flaw in yesterday’s posting, Carbon dating and the Shroud of Turin, by John Leonard?
But then a pair of amateur detectives/scientists named Joe Marino and Sue Bedford published a peer-reviewed research paper suggesting that the carbon dating test results for the Shroud of Turin were incorrect — not because the tests were flawed, but because the sample itself was flawed.
Bedford and Marino claimed that the sample that was carbon-dated came from a section of the shroud that had been expertly repaired to be undetectable by the naked eye.
Ray Rogers, one of the lead research scientists involved with STURP, became furious when he found out the integrity of his work product had been challenged by amateurs in a published, peer-reviewed paper. He said the claims of Benford and Marino were absurd and promised to prove they were wrong by testing material from the original sample still in his possession.
Instead, Rogers found powerful evidence suggesting Benford and Marino had been absolutely correct in saying the material for the original carbon dating tests had been taken from a contaminated section of the shroud, identifying cotton fibers in the sample not found in the rest of the shroud.
The paper linked to by John Leonard in his posting, the paper that he says made Rogers furious, refers to the late Ray Rogers.
Recently, additional information has been discovered strongly supporting, if not verifying, the validity of the invisible patch theory. In addition to the recent publication of a peer-reviewed article by former Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) chemist, the late Ray Rogers …
Wrong paper! Leonard might have read WRAPPED UP IN THE SHROUD, Chronicle of a Passion by Joe Marino and gotten the right paper. In fact, he could have found the citation he needed by just reading the description of Joe’s book on Amazon:
Joseph Marino, a former Benedictine monk, has been studying the Shroud of Turin, believed by many to the burial cloth of Jesus, since 1977. He and his late wife, M. Sue Benford, presented a paper at the Sindone 2000 World Congress in Orvieto, Italy, hypothesizing that the reason the 1988 C-14 dating of the Shroud resulted in a date range of AD 1260-1390 for the cloth was because of a sixteenth-century repair in the sample area. Raymond Rogers, one of the scientists from the Shroud of Turin Research Project who studied the Shroud in 1978, thought the hypothesis was nonsense at first but later concluded that Benford and Marino were probably correct. Other scientists have independently verified Rogers’ findings, which were published in 2005 in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal, Thermochimica Acta.
Marino and Benford had not published in a peer reviewed journal when Rogers first read their work. They had given a presentation in in Italy which was published on Shroud.com. Later they did publish in a peer reviewed journal but that was after Rogers’ death.
Thanks for calling the error to my attention. Mea culpa.
However, Mr. Klotz is incorrect, I do believe — Marino and Benford had published the paper in 2000 now linked to in the edited version of my published article.
The “error” aside, you article was an excellent presentation of the issues and their resolution by the pioneering work of Sue Benford and Joe marino.
“Discrepancies in the radiocarbon dating area of the Turin shroud” was published in Chemistry Today, vol 26 n 4, July-August 2008. Rogers died in March 2005. By the way, the 1st 2 times that Benford is mentioned it is misspelled as “Bedford.”