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Scientists testing the samples say the results of the carbon-14 tests are 100% certain that the Shroud is not from before the fourteenth century. However, some scientists now suspect there may have been a problem. "But microbes may have interfered with those dating results, making the shroud appear younger than it actually is, asserts a research team led by Stephen J. Mattingly and Leonio A. Garza-Valdes of the University of Texas at San Antonio" (Travis 346).

While C-14 testing can supposedly date an object, it does not tell us how the images were made. "The elaborate 1978 testing failed to produce any agreed explanation of how the image, which is indistinguishable from close up, could have been imprinted as well. There is, for instance, no evidence that it was painted" (Ostling 81).

Paintings of Christ have been compared to the images on the Shroud. "The resemblance of Christ-portraits to the face of the Shroud man is one of the ... reasons for believing that the Shroud of Turin was used by early artists. The Shroud would thus be very old and may be our original source for what Jesus looked like" (Scavone 24). Paintings after about 300 AD are similar in every way to the images on the Shroud, however, those before 300 AD are not. Remember that the Shroud was hidden away for the first 300 years after the death of Christ because of persecutions. Scavone said of a painter turned Shroud researcher, "Vignon studied the numerous artists' portraits of Jesus in churches and museums. Many of them were made much earlier than 1350. Yet, strangely, they bore a strong resemblance to the face of the man on the Shroud" (23).

Scientists are still not able or are unwilling to prove how the images were formed on the Shroud. However, they are in agreement that no substance has been used to form the image at all. "A far more promising suggestion has been that the image is some form of scorch, the color being the sepia of the first stage of the oxidation process preliminary to actual burning" (Wilson 207). The one variable is the Resurrection could that be the source of the images? Scientists stop short of saying that it is the source. However, Wilson wrote, "Medical opinion is as firmly emphatic today as in the time of Vignon and Delage that, whatever the substance of the image, it is genuinely the imprint of a human corpse which has suffered the agonies of crucifixion" (206).

Although the debate about the Shroud of Turin has been going on for centuries and will certainly continue, it appears to be the actual burial cloth that wrapped Jesus in the tomb. "The questions surrounding Christianity's greatest relic did not end in 1988. As with all the other tests, theories, and documents, C-14 has added but one more piece to the great puzzle of the Shroud of Turin" (Scavone 105).

When all the evidence is weighted, the carbon-14 test stands alone against a mountain of evidence proving the authenticity of the Shroud. "The dating dispute may be settled, but the shroud remains as mysterious as ever. Reason: it bears an inexplicable life-size image of a crucified body, which is uncannily accurate and looks just like a photographic negative ..." (Ostling 81). Even the dating dispute may not be settled, however, as many people believe science has only proven carbon-14 dating does not work or a hoax has been perpetrated. "Scientists whose research had seemed to support the Shroud's authenticity immediately challenged the C-14 findings. They came up with several objections to the way the testing had been carried out" (Scavone 104).