“If you love Christ, why wouldn't you want to explore the possibility that you have an artifact of his material existence on Earth?" he said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
He added that his faith isn't incompatible with his scientific training: "How I think about the shroud comes from the shroud. It's not, 'Gee, I'm a Christian, so I'll force it to be what I want it to be.' That's not scientific logic.”
John’s wife Rebecca, 60, is a convert to Christianity from an Orthodox Jewish background. She moved to Colorado Springs from Brooklyn, New York after enlisting in the army. In 1990, while watching a documentary on the shroud, she began to think the face in the shroud’s image looked like that of her grandfather.
She met John while pursuing her interest in the shroud.
Speaking to CNA in a Monday phone interview, John Jackson explained that the hypothesis of carbon monoxide contamination in the shroud has “serious potential” for upsetting the previous radiocarbon dating of the shroud, but first it must be determined if the hypothesis has scientific merit.
He emphasized that the samples he is preparing are not from shroud but rather are “control linen samples” exposed to conditions similar to those the shroud is believed to have experienced. This preparation process, he said, is going to take a “considerable amount of time” because there are many parameters to the hypothesis.
“We have to be able to address these various parameters and we have, at the moment, only one reaction chamber to be able to do all these different experiments. Any one experiment takes a considerable amount of time to perform.”
Jackson said the research preparations could move more quickly, but he noted their progress is relative to the donations the Shroud Center receives.
“It’s going to take months to several years, I would say,” he told CNA.
If it is shown that gaseous contamination can affect the carbon dating of the shroud, Jackson said, the research would have implications for the radiocarbon community in general.
“It’s important that we bring the radiocarbon community into this project through Oxford so we are not leaving it just to us to say that the radiocarbon dating of shroud was in error, if indeed it is, so that they can be partners in that.”
“I believe they’re genuinely interested in getting an accurate date of the shroud,” he said.
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Jackson claimed other linen samples subjected to radiocarbon dating have given misdates as well.
Further, he repeated that historical and archaeological studies of the shroud suggest an earlier date, mentioning its Jewish style of weaving and burial procedure
“The radiocarbon date looks to us like an outlier.”
“I’m very pleased to see the very wide interest in the shroud,” he told CNA, noting the recent Los Angeles Times article on the shroud was listed as the most viewed and most e-mailed article on the paper’s website.
“It would be meaningful to the world if it is authentic, it would be the premier archaeological artifact that could take us into the tomb of Christ, scientifically,” he concluded. “Not to replace faith, but to help us go into the tomb even before Peter and John. That is a really exciting possibility nearly 2,000 years later.”