Miracles

[Sethomas]

There was a Carbon-14 test done on it in the 80s that said it was made around the turn of the 14th century, which led to some pretty rediculous conspiracy theories involving Jacques de Molai. As a follow-up, though, research concluded that heating up cloth hundreds of degrees causing free-floating C14 to bond to the fibers, which means that carbon dating is completely irrelevant unless we know precisely how long it was exposed to heat. Since nobody was around with a stopwatch when the shroud was burnt in the 18th century, there's no possible way to get an accurate date.

The reason why I choose to believe in the authenticity of the Shroud is the great unlikeliness of casting a forgery. It's simply impossible that the image could have been painted, because no school of painting could come remotely close to depicting its detail when the known historical record of the shroud began. Furthermore, it wasn't discovered until the late twentieth century how to create 3-d negative imagery on a flat medium, and even still we can't do by hand it to the precision seen in the shroud. The only possible explanation for it is that it was wrapped around a body immediately after the body was heated up several hundred degrees, and this obviously didn't happen because the image portrays hair intact and there are no signs of burning. (Hence my main disproof of the Jacques de Molai theory.)

To consider the possibility that maybe someone crucified a fresh body just to create the fraud in medieval France, the main argument against that is that the pollens in the cloth are indigenous to Judea, and the wounds in the shroud image go through the wrist, whereas medieval art always depicts the nails through the palms.