S&V - Page 116
Christine Oberlin, of the Center of radiocarbon dating, is also skeptic. « The scientific level of this publication is disappointing, she says, I see there especially a new attempt to show that the samples and thus the dating of 1988 are not admissible. ». « But, they are it », hammers Jacques Evin. And to point out the reliability of this type of dating which largely proved reliable in archaeology and which one can apply without difficulty to the linen cloth. The researcher explains that one knows only two means of modifying the isotopic ratios of carbon and thus to distort a radiodatation: a carbon pollution via moulds for example, and the exposure to a nuclear reaction. In the first case, several operations of purification to soda and acid were carried out on the linen samples. To suppose that they did not eliminate any organic trace polluting the linen, enrichment with carbon by pollution necessary to renovate a linen fabric of almost 1300 years would correspond to add an amount of carbon mass equal to that of the carbon of linen sample! One sees badly how such a contamination would have passed unperceived...

For Jacques Evin, to in addition call upon the enrichment by an exposure to a radioactive radiation does not correspond to the observation of phenomena happening normally in nature and leaves the field of the scientific investigation... It is besides what the father Jean-Baptist Rinaudo does, of the Medicine Faculty of Montpellier (France), when he affirms that the shroud would have undergone a bombardment of neutrons and protons coming from the disintegration of the deuterium nuclei of the Nazarene body caused by his resurrection... Whereas they concern the faith, his assertions are not less regularly quoted in the media and the books published on the shroud.

VSD - Page 28
Thus the researchers A.Garza-Vàldès and Cervantès-Ibarrola highlighted on cloth the presence of a film due to a mushroom, the lichenotalia. How to be certain that the cleaning of the samples was sufficient to eliminate all this pollution, whereas no physicochemical analysis was carried out, at any stage of the operations, contrary to what had been envisaged in the initial protocol ? However the sensitivity of fabrics to various pollution returns their dating by radiocarbon particularly delicate. Gabriel Vial, of the museum of fabrics in Lyon, indicated into 1997 that these datings frequently show an inaccuracy going up to four hundred years !

Another explanation for the error of dating was proposed by the Italian archaeologist Maria-Grazia Siliato: the area chosen for the samples, often handled, could be damaged then restored with such a care that this point would be unnoticed by the experts. It is curious besides to note that the weights of the samples measured at the time of the sample taking do not correspond to the known density of shroud fabric, but to an almost double density. This disconcerting fact was never cleared up. The method of dating using only some wires of fabric, an error of several centuries due to the presence of more recent fibers is perfectly plausible. Nothing even prohibits to think that several of the factors previously quoted could intervene and add their effects, which go all in the direction of a « renovation » of fabric, which could explain the thirteen centuries shift.