Twice, in the last few months, some rather ill-informed authenticists have turned their attention to Dan McClellan, a biblical scholar with a PhD from Exeter University, and his discussions of various claims made by popular popularisers of the authenticity of the Shroud. McClellan’s podcasts are around 5 to 15 minutes long, and consists of a series of succinct, accurate, well-researched counter-claims to factual inaccuracies, nearly all of which I thoroughly endorse myself. His critics reply in huge rambling perorations lasting hours, rather desperately trying to defend the subjects of his original criticism with inaccuracies of their own, mostly predictably ill-remembered memes with minimal reference to actual research. Bad move from an authenticist point of view, as this kind of thing discredits authenticity even more thoroughly than the actual research that I and like-minded medievalists publish ourselves.
On 9 January last year (2025), Joe Rogan published a long interview with Mel Gibson (‘Joe Rogan Experience #2254 – Mel Gibson’) in the course of which (for about three minutes, starting 50 minutes in) they discussed the Shroud, mentioning several specific points. The following day, Dan McClellan published a nine-minute commentary on that discussion, called ‘Did they verify the Shroud of Turin is ancient?’
More recently, McClellan has turned his attention to Jeremiah Johnston, a much sought-after, prolific but wildly inaccurate prognosticator on the Shroud, and called him out in four short podcasts focussing on some of his particularly egregious claims.
Enter the authenticists, and exit all hope of authenticism ever being accepted by academia and the fields of scientific, historical and theological research. Part 1, here, will look at the criticism of McClellan’s commentary on Mel Gibson, and Part 2, later, of his commentaries on Jeremiah Johnston.
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On 13 March this year, a team calling themselves ‘No Apologies’ (Phill Chambers and Harvey Ward) devoted over an hour to McClellan’s nine-minute post about Mel Gibson, under the heading ‘Is the Shroud of Turin a Fake?; Taking Out The Trash; Debunking the Debunker.’ Chambers acts like Sagredo in Galileo’s Two World Systems, keeping an approximately neutral, but inquisitive, viewpoint, while Ward pontificates, like Simplicio, with his version of the facts, which he seems to have half acquired while pursuing a course by the “Institute of Science and Faith, which is part of the Vatican University in Rome.”
They focus on various aspects of the Shroud which I have already reviewed, and I don’t want to go over it all again. My purpose here is to explore how authenticists go about refuting their opponents, in contrast to my own approach to refuting mine.
McClellan mentions that a) the WAXS dating method was developed for the Shroud and has never been used for any other object, b) that some of the authors had a paper retracted by PLoS One, and c) that at least one of the authors has personal revelation as his principal reason for his belief in authenticity. All these are demonstrably true, so let’s see how the debunkers debunking the debunker discuss them, and learn from their mistakes.
1). Try to get names right. The French family who first owned the Shroud were not the de Clireys, Giulio Fanti is not an “Art Historian in Turin”, the Pray Codex is not called the “Payes painting,” and (towards the end of the video) no numismatist called Roger has published on coins associated with the relic. And then there’s Michael Wolf, who offered a million pounds, 50 years ago [worth ten times less today unfortunately] to anybody who could reproduce the image. An ‘oral typo’ here and there is quite natural and excusable, but Ward doesn’t really remember these details, and hasn’t troubled to refresh his memory before embarking on this podcast, even though he has a computer in front of him to refer to.
2). Don’t re-interpret someone’s statement to soothe your own sensibilities. Fanti has published this: “From a scientific point of view both my researches and the studies performed by the students (of Mechanical Engineering) in thesis with me ALL lead to a confirmation of the authenticity of the Shroud even if, up to now, no sure proof has been evidenced. From a religious point of view, I am sure that the Holy Shroud is authentic and it is the most important Relic of Christianity. This is because, following a precise question of mine, I had a personal ‘answer’ in 1998 in front of the Relic.” Ward hopes that although Fanti “certainly had some revelation while he was looking at the Shroud and felt that it was genuine, that may not have been a trick of the senses or a hallucination.” [Eh? Nobody has ever claimed that it was.] “It may have been a cumulative position he came to with his expertise.” This is the reverse of what Fanti actually said. Chambers says that McClellan is stating that “this fellow had ‘special revelation,’ something akin to a vision, a spiritual knowing…” [which is exactly what Fanti says he had] which Ward dismisses as “all he’s simply done is attach an emotional response to the facts that he brings up.”
3). Don’t muddle your science. In his podcast, McClellan says “these five authors [of the paper describing the dating of the Shroud by WAXS] claim that this new technology, Wide Angle X-ray Scattering, is a more reliable means of dating fabric than things like carbon-14 dating. This is not a widely agreed upon methodology.” Ward objects, but completely confuses the WAXS procedure itself, which is well known, well tested, well verified and well used, with the method of using WAXS to date textiles, which, as McClellan correctly says, has never been used for anything except the Shroud. Chambers tries to confirm this by clarifying with Ward: “He [McClellan] is saying that the paper putting forward the methodology used was actually used only on the Shroud of Turin, and I think you were saying before now the methodology’s been tested on many other fabric types that we actually know rock solid where [they came from].” Ward agrees, and they move on, missing the point entirely. The “methodology” McClellan refers to is the method of dating fabrics of unknown date using WAXS. The fact that fabrics of known date have been analysed by WAXS (used here as a means of producing a calibration curve for unknown samples) in no way contradicts that.
Ignoring McClellan for a while, Ward goes on to misquote Ray Rogers (although at least he gets his name correct), and Joe Marino (who he doesn’t mention by name), attempting to establish that it is confirmed that the radiocarbon corner was unrepresentative of the main body of the cloth, and that consequently no date derived from it can be relied upon. Neither Ward nor Chambers realise that the samples used to date the Shroud by WAXS came from exactly the same place that Ward, quoting Rogers and Marino, so confidently repudiates as worthless.
4). Get the person you’re trying to debunk accurate. Chambers says “if I have understood this right, he [McClellan] is saying that there’s really only one main paper that talks about this particular methodology, and that methodology was based on doing work on the Shroud of Turin, so it was like this self-aggrandising, self-appreciating circle.” Actually Chambers has not “understood this right,” and to be fair to him, he apologises to McClellan for not being sure, but Ward, who surely ought to know better, agrees with his colleague. But no, that’s not McClellan’s point at all. The reason WAXS fabric dating hasn’t attracted a following is because the degradation of textiles depends far more on environmental factors than it does on the simple passage of time, so that unless you know exactly the conditions under which your unknown has been kept – which intrinsically you can’t if you don’t know how old it is – you can’t interpret the WAXS results as any kind of ‘clock.’
5). Don’t muddle your history. McClellan’s next claim is that the first written record we have of the Shroud is by a bishop who says that the Shroud is a fake. To which, even after Chambers has warned him to step carefully, Ward says, “No, that’s false. That’s a completely false statement.” This is deliberately misleading. McClellan’s statement is not false at all, as Ward knows perfectly well.1 It is Bishop d’Arcis’s statement that that Ward tries to denounce as false, a common enough authenticist trope which I have discussed elsewhere. Ward goes on to guess that there were public expositions of the Shroud in Lirey as early as 1348 [where does he get that date from, I wonder?], apparently without being aware that his only evidence for that comes from the very bishop whose memorandum he repudiates!
Ward goes on to claim that Pierre d’Arcis wanted to take the Shroud to his own cathedral at Troyes, so that he could attract more pilgrims whose donations would help repair damage to the cathedral roof. This is ludicrous. Nobody wanting to claim a relic was genuine for his own purposes would so fiercely and so publicly denounce it as a fake before it got to him.
6) Don’t conflate your sources. Going on to discuss the pre-history of the Shroud, McClellan says, “For the thirteen hundred years before [1350-ish] we have no idea where it’s been or if it even existed.” To be honest, I think the term “no idea” is rarely useful or accurate. Almost everybody has at least one ‘idea’ and often more about just about everything. Medievalists have very good ‘ideas’ about “how it was done,” and Authenticists have very bad ‘ideas’ about “where it has been,” but good or bad, they’re certainly ideas. Even so, Ward is able to claim that at least one acheiropoietos cloth containing an image was “purported to be the burial cloth of Jesus” before the Middle Ages. This is untrue. Some cloths bore images, and some cloths were purported to be burial cloths, but they were always distinct from one another, and never conflated. And no, Eusebius never wrote about an image in Edessa; and no, Movses Khorenatsi never alludes to a shroud in Edessa either.
7) Quote accurately. McClellan mentions that the WAXS paper is slightly tarnished by the reputation of some of its authors, a previous paper of whose was published and then retracted by PLoS One. I won’t go into that here, and only mention it because it leads on to a mention of the Shroud blood, and specifically a presentation by Kelly Kearse at the 2025 Conference at St Louis, described by Ward. “Professor Kearse has done investigations on this. This PCR technique overview for small fragments of DNA which have been isolated is able to show large amounts of haemoglobin that appears to be of human origin, but not exclusively. […] The control fibres where there was no obvious evidence of bloodstains showed negative for human blood components, but the bloodstained fibres contained human blood components.” For a man – a surgeon, no less – who claims to have been there, it is astonishing that what he says is completely untrue. In fact, what Kearse said was “There’s no evidence in [the DNA studies by Garza-Valdes in ‘The DNA of God,‘] that the DNA signal is truly coming from blood cells.” And, “as far as human species determination, no-one has really done the DNA route for the Shroud.” So the “small fragments of DNA which have been isolated” do not show “large amounts of haemoglobin” and it does not appear “to be of human origin” at all. Kearse goes on: “They took unstained fibres from the Shroud without blood, and bloodstained fibres from the Shroud, and they reacted them with these anti-human antibodies labelled with a fluorescent tag. […] The control fibres were negative, the bloodstain fibres were positive, so they concluded from this: human blood components are present in the bloodstain fibres of the Shroud. Now an immunologist is going look at this, and they’re going to say, well, I think you’ve shown that blood components are present in these fibres, but I’m not really convinced that you’ve demonstrated that they’re human blood components.” Kearse sums up: “Cross-reactivity precludes a definitive assignment of human or even primate blood being present on the Shroud.” The opposite, in fact, of what Ward thinks he said.
The next few points mostly consist of McClellan disagreeing with Mel Gibson and Ward disagreeing with McClellan all rather conventionally. The image was/wasn’t/was produced by a flash of light; the man in the Shroud does/doesn’t/does look like a first century Jew (which Ward tries to verify with reference to images made three hundred years after Jesus died), the blood flow is or isn’t realistic. Ward claims that the position of the arms on the body reflects the position they were in when rigor mortis set in on the cross, which cannot be true, and repeats the idea that damage to the median nerve causes the thumb to retract across the palm, which it doesn’t. Then there’s the alleged pollen, the alleged coins, the weave pattern – it’s obvious that McClellan has at least read both sides of the story, and Ward hasn’t. Delightfully, Chambers suggests that coins would block any radiation, leaving “just two black spots” on the negative Shroud image rather than the nuanced shading we actually see. Ward tends to agree with him and the great debunking peters out.
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1). I should point out that one of Pope Clement’s bulls, referring to the Shroud as a fabrication, actually predates the d’Arcis memorandum, but that’s not relevant here.
Hi, Dan,
You state in your response here: “With those critical thinking skills, I can see how Schroud authenticist scholars stay in business.” How about this for some critical thinking skills. On your danielomcclellan.wordpress.com website (from which I had mentioned in a prior comment) you mention, again, the following: “I RECEIVED my bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University in ancient Near Eastern studies, where I focused on Biblical Hebrew and minored in Classical Greek. I COMPLETED a master of studies in Jewish studies at the University of Oxford in July of 2010 and a master of arts in biblical studies in 2013 at Trinity Western University just outside of Vancouver, BC. In early 2020, I DEFENDED my doctoral dissertation written for the University of Exeter on the cognitive science of religion and the conceptualization of deity and divine agency in the Hebrew Bible. In 2018, I was the Democratic candidate for the Utah State House of Representatives . . . I ran for the Utah State Senate in 2020 against an incumbent with a 40-point lead and had similar results. . . . I worked as a scripture translation supervisor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City form 2013-2023, and have occasionally taught courses at Brigham Young University as an ADJUNCT instructor.” [Emphasis added.]
So, you claim you only had to defend your dissertation once–so why didn’t you say that you SUCCESSFULLY defended it. I’ve defended many criminals without “successfully” defending them (by way of getting them acquittal.) See the difference? Additionally, while with your other degrees, you give wording that makes it clear that you were actually AWARDED these degrees–but, again, you seem cagey with your language when it comes to you PhD. Additionally, you make it seem like the error in your not mentioning that you were AWARDED your PhD (which, obviously, wouldn’t occur the moment that you defend or successfully defend your dissertation) is due to your not having updated the information on the website that this information is in. BUT, you mention that you defended your dissertation for you PhD in early 2020–yet, you then go on to mention things that you’ve done as late as 2023–3 years after you defended your dissertation for you PhD. Are you telling us that there was a 3-year gap between your defending your dissertation for your PhD and then your being awarded it? Something is “off”–and it ain’t my critical thinking skills.
Regards,
Teddi
My convictions align more closely with the rigorous inquiry of Hugh Farey than with popular devotions.
Hi Dr Dan!
Good to hear from you. Teddi’s recent scepticism reminds me of John 20:25 !
Best wishes,
Hugh
Hi, Teddi. I haven’t updated my blog in a long time, but I *successfully* defended my PhD in theology and religion through the University of Exeter on April 28, 2020 on my first and only try. All my social media account profiles begin with “PhD in theology and religion.” The website I update far more regularly (maklelan.org) makes clear I have a PhD. Being of sound mind and body, I, Dan McClellan, can confirm that I was awarded a doctorate (PhD) in theology and religion by the University of Exeter. With those critical thinking skills, I can see how Schroud authenticist scholars stay in business.
Correction: I inadvertently wrote that Dan McClellan was “defending his PhD” in my comment from 3:50pm today. I meant to write that he was defending his DISSERTATION (to try and get a PhD.) Again, from what he has written that I have read, it appears that while he defended his dissertation, he was, nonetheless, not granted a PhD.
Hi, Hugh,
Perhaps with Dan’s being an “honorary fellow” they are, additionally, conferring an honorary PhD on him, also. Or, they might just be presuming that he’s got a PhD because he has taught or might even be teaching university level classes (I’m going from memory here.) But, as we all know, while MOST university professors are PhDs, they’re not all PhDs–some are teaching and bring with them their real-world experiences as opposed to a doctorate. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this. While they can be called Professor, they really shouldn’t be given the title of doctor. If there’s one thing that you and I can heartily agree on, it’s that people can be sloppy with what they say AND with what they write–and, sometimes, this sloppiness is due to people making presumptions and assumptions. Until I see documentation of Dan’s PhD or, at minimum, see that he, himself, is stating that he has a real one (not an honorary one), then the best we’ve got is what has come from the horse’s mouth–on his own website and with his own writing where he writes in the first person–and that as far as he has gone with his PhD endeavors is defending his PhD (apparently, not very well, since by all indications he was not awarded one.) By saying all of this, I’m not trying to imply that Dan’s stupid. On the contrary–I think he’s very well-educated and extremely clever and quite articulate and an excellent advocate. I respect these abilities of his–although I think he uses them to sow doubt in peoples’ minds about the validity of Christianity. He’s a wrecking ball–let’s not pretend that he is anything else other than this. He doesn’t put his efforts, time and treasure into advocating for the Truth of Christianity or the reliability of the Holy Bible. So, let’s call a spade a spade.
Best regards,
Teddi
Hi Teddi,
Now that’s a sensible comment (the rigor mortis one). People generally support one of two positions which Christ’s body might have adopted when he died. Either both arms were straight and the head slumped symmetrically between them, or one arm was straight and the other bent and the head slumped tight against the upright one – a position mostly supported by those who think the Sudarium of Oviedo is Christ’s sudarium. One can well understand rigor being broken at the shoulders for burial, but it seems it was also broken at the elbows, and perhaps also the head, if it was to comport to the Shroud, neither of which were necessary for a tomb burial.
You may be right that Ward just “kinda didn’t get the details right,” but was it wise of him to say that Dan is “completely wrong. Those studies have been very very carefully done, done with models, done with cadavers; if he’s in rigor mortis on the cross, then his arms are going to be in a particular position once they are taken off the cross”? Because that’s not true. I agree that Ward “just muddled things,” which would be OK and quite excusable, if he wasn’t taking part in a blog boldly titled “Taking out the trash.” If you do that, you put your head on the line, and his has been sliced off.
Back to Dan, and really, stop wading into the mire. What someone writes about his academic status in 2020 may have changed by 2026. From his earlier blog, we can tell that he is honest and precise about his qualifications. Then, he had not quite been awarded his PhD, although he had defended his thesis. As of today, he is (among other things) an honorary fellow of the University of Birmingham (UK), on whose website he is described, among many other Professors and Doctors who work for the Edward Cadbury Centre, as Dr Dan McClellan.(birmingham.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/public-understanding-of-religion/cadbury-centre-people). Now, you’re a tenacious little terrier, and may be suspecting the University of Birmingham of negligence in checking their staff’s credentials, but as I say, suspicion without evidence will do nothing but discredit the authenticist cause.
Best wishes,
Hugh
No, Hugh, you’re not telling it like it is, I’m afraid. Here you are, writing all about debunking debunkers, so what I’m mentioning is quite relevant and is not at all desperate but is a fair debunking of something you’ve said about a purported debunker.
I’m not saying that Dan’s lying about having a PhD. I’m saying that he’s basically told us (for CAREFUL READERS who understand that defending a PhD is not the same as being AWARDED one) that he does NOT have a PhD. I’m not saying that he doesn’t have a right to tell us that he’s taking his attempt to get a PhD all the way up to defending his dissertation. But, the fact is that it is quite easy for people to come away with thinking that he has a PhD–as, apparently, you have come away with thinking from what was written on that website–which does not appear to have been written by Dan–and if it has, let’s get some clarification on it and see what the current state is of his academic credentials. Again, what you posted showed someone talking about Dan in the third person. Sure, sometimes authors will refer to themselves in the third person. But, what I cite to, that’s Dan talking about himself–and in the first person. So, it certainly appears that I’m citing from the real McCoy.
Additionally, you say to me: “There is nothing at all even remotely convincing about any argument for material contamination shifting the Shroud’s radiocarbon date by over a thousand years.” Well, I say to you: Without our knowing how much and what type of contamination the Shroud of Turin has experienced, we can’t know how much the date could have been skewed by from potentially inadequate decontamination before the dating was performed. So, without knowing these things, how can you really know? Personally, I think that the dating issues are boring, because there are too many unknowns. One can demonstrate to a high degree of confidence–I think to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” level, that the Shroud of Turin is a 1st century cloth by demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that its images cannot be faked or achieved through a natural process and that the images are of Jesus of Nazareth. So, if they can’t be faked or created naturally and they depict Jesus, then they are Jesus’ burial cloth and the images were created from Resurrection Energy. All of this, of course, gives us a 1st century date without the need for any type of scientific dating of a textile.
Best regards,
Teddi
Hi, Hugh,
You mention about Ward:
“Ward claims that the position of the arms on the body reflects the position they were in when rigor mortis set in on the cross, which cannot be true[.]” Well, Ward somewhat muddles things here. Let me bring some clarity to what he was really trying to express. Many aspects of the body images on the Holy Shroud show a body in a state of rigor mortis that is in the position of a man that is nailed to a cross. Look at the legs, buttocks, head/neck, etc. Now, we see that the arms are NOT in the position of a crucified person as they are, obviously, in a very stylized and dignified position with hands crossed to, as much as possible, cover the Shroud Man’s “modesty.” Forensically, we know FROM THE BLOODSTAINS on the arms, that the Shroud Man’s arms were in the position of crucifixion–as determined by the late Doctors (real medical doctors) Pierre Barbet (a wartime surgeon as well as chief surgeon at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paris, and the forensic medical examiners Dr. Robert Bucklin (he was a chief deputy medical examiner in Los Angeles under the famous Dr. Thomas Noguchi, but, from memory, I do not recall if he was a chief medical examiner or not when he was working as a medical examiner in Las Vegas) and Dr. Frederick Zugibe (who was a chief medical examiner in New York.) So, the rigor mortis was clearly “broken” in the shoulder area so that the ams could be repositioned for burial (to, again, somewhat cover Jesus’ “modesty” while, also, enabling those performing the burial to get Jesus’ body into a cave tomb–which archeological evidence points to their having small openings. For more on cave tombs in Jerusalem, please see Massimo Paris’ presentation on this from the St. Louis conference videos.
So, while Ward kinda didn’t get the details totally straight, anyone familiar with the Shroud evidence knew what he was trying to say. But, Hugh, you’re just trying to do a big “Gotcha!” like he’s coming out of Left Field with what he was saying–and he wasn’t–he just muddled things, because he’s not been immersed in these details on a regular basis the way some of us are.
Rather desperate, if you ask me, Teddi.
a) There is nothing at all even remotely convincing about any argument for material contamination shifting the Shroud’s radiocarbon date by over a thousand years.
b) Suspecting Dan McClellan of lying about his PhD is typical of the kind of authenticist defence that contributes, as does most of it nowadays, to the Shroud’s being completely discredited in the eyes of impartial scholars who might otherwise find it worth investigating further.
Just telling like it is, I’m afraid.
Best wishes,
Hugh
And, well, actually, the best evidence of his having a PhD isn’t his claim to have one (people make false claims about their credentials on a regular basis.) It would be something more like documentation that is not just his own mere claim–but, I’m not saying that I’m doubting him as, from the best that I can tell, he’s not saying he received a PhD–although he certainly leaves that impression with people–such as with you and whoever wrote up what you read. I had checked on the internet (when I was reading about his credentials less than a week ago) to see if “defending your discretion” somehow might mean that one has received one’s PhD–and, I read (as I guessed) that these are NOT the same thing. Just like I can defend my client in a trial–yet the defense still LOSES.
Hi, Hugh,
I quickly looked at the website you mentioned–and, although I could be mistaken, it appears to have been written by someone other than Dan McClellan, himself (although I recognize that sometimes we’ll refer to ourselves in the third party.) But, take a look at this website which is, very clearly, put together by Dan McClellan, himself: https://danielomcclellan.wordpress.com/about/. There is repeated mention that he DEFENDED his PhD dissertation that he wrote for the University of Exeter, but I fail to see anywhere any mention that he has actually been AWARDED a PhD. The impression that one is clearly left with is that his defense of his PhD fell flat.
But, here’s what Dan says about himself (and he uses the first-person):
“I received my bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University in ancient Near Eastern studies, where I focused on Biblical Hebrew and minored in Classical Greek. I completed [note, here, he specifies that he COMPLETED this] a master of studies in Jewish studies at the University of Oxford in July of 2010 and a master of arts in biblical studies in 2013 at Trinity Western University just outside of Vancouver, BC. In early2020, I defended my doctoral dissertation written for the University of Exeter on the cognitive science of religion and the conceptualization of deity and divine agency in the Hebrew Bible. In 2018, I was the Democratic candidate for the Utah State House of Representatives in House District 52. . . . [then he goes on some more about this and that–but DOESN’T MENTION ACTUALLY BEING AWARDED A PhD.] HOWEVER, he does then mention that he was a licensed massage therapist.
So, this is the best that I can find on the current state of his education–which does NOT appear to show that he has RECEIVED a PhD–which would NOT make him “Doctor” Dan McClellan. However, if you find something updated from a primary source–Dan McClellan, please do inform us–as I would be interested to know the situation (as, I’m sure, the rest of us would be, also.)
Best regards,
Teddi
Hi, again, Hugh,
You mentioned this:
“The reason WAXS fabric dating hasn’t attracted a following is because the degradation of textiles depends far more on environmental factors than it does on the simple passage of time, so that unless you know exactly the conditions under which your unknown has been kept – which intrinsically you can’t if you don’t know how old it is – you can’t interpret the WAXS results as any kind of ‘clock.’“
With radiocarbon dating, there is an unjustified over-confidence by many in the belief that the cleaning procedures performed as part of the routine protocol before radiocarbon dating an object can, in fact, remove all of the possible relevant contamination that a sample (most especially a textile) contains. Yet, this is, quite obviously, not true. I don’t recall if Beta-Analytics’s new website (and the company has a new name although one can still find their current website if one searches under their old “Beta-Analytics” name) still has this warning, but I can attest to having read this on their old website around 5 years ago. They cautioned people to NOT SMOKE AROUND SAMPLES TO BE SENT FOR RADIOCARBON DATING. (!-!-!)
Why not??? Why can’t someone smoke a pack of Marlboros—or 10 packs or 100 packs directly onto a sample to be radiocarbon dated—or even in the vicinity of such a sample to be dated? I thought they had top-notch, reliable cleaning procedures to remove contaminants which can skew the date derived at from the “gold-standard” radiocarbon dating process? Well, while all that glitters is not gold, even gold doesn’t glitter as much when its purity is polluted. The “gold-standard” of radiocarbon dating is not “pure gold.” It has known impurities that make it quite imperfect—that is why there have been, for example, samples which have, of course, been (supposedly) “decontaminated”—as part of the protocol before performing the test—yet the sample yields a FUTURE DATE! Plus, it is nothing short of hubris to think that we know of all of the exceptions to why C-14 won’t breakdown at its typical rate over time.
The fact that the company formerly known as “Beta-Analytics” still—on their current website—warns against the sole reliance of radiocarbon dating to date TEXTILES MUST NOT BE MINIMIZED. They indicate the dating of textiles needs to be done via a multi-disciplinary process. Now, if this isn’t an admission about how they’re not as confident in their cleaning procedures to remove contaminants that can skew the radiocarbon dating results in ways that are unknown to themselves as to how to correct for, then I don’t know what is.
So, let’s not pretend that the cleaning process prior to radiocarbon dating objects is all that many people are cracking it up to be, because, the company has sheepishly publicly admitted, otherwise.
Environmental factors can very much skew a date arrived at via radiocarbon dating. And, with imperfect cleaning (especially with textiles), there is still too much “play” in the dating game.
Best regards,
Teddi
Hi Teddi,
Go to https://www.maklelan.org
Click on “About”
Read the first three lines: “Dr. Dan McClellan / is a public scholar of the Bible and religion. He received his PhD in / theology and religion from the University of Exeter…
Is he lying?
Best wishes,
Hugh
Hi, Hugh,
As far as debunking the debunkers who are debunking other debunkers, there is some debunking needed. Dan McClellan does not have a PhD according to what is on his own website, written by him from what I read about him less than about a week ago. Defending one’s thesis for a PhD is not equivalent to being awarded a PhD. From what I’ve seen, he does NOT have a PhD.
All the best,
Teddi