Relic bone attributed to Saint James, 'brother' of Jesus, radiocarbon dated to 214 - 340

essentialsaltes

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Now, after careful extraction and analysis, a bone said to have belonged to Saint James has been radiocarbon-dated – and sadly de-authenticated. Despite being incredibly old, having died at some time between 214 and 340, the individual housed in the Santi Apostoli church for one and a half millennia turns out to have been a few generations off the real deal.

In ancient Rome, families commemorated the birthdays of their ancestors by taking festive meals at their graves. This custom was later taken up by early Christians, who came together around the tombs of their saints on their name days.

But there was a problem. As Christianity became more dominant, the tombs of saints became overcrowded. Plus, the tombs were often situated outside the city walls, which made the feasts potentially risky. In an effort to make them safer and more accessible, saints’ remains were exhumed and transferred into churches in a process called translation.
 

Landon Caeli

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Now, after careful extraction and analysis, a bone said to have belonged to Saint James has been radiocarbon-dated – and sadly de-authenticated. Despite being incredibly old, having died at some time between 214 and 340, the individual housed in the Santi Apostoli church for one and a half millennia turns out to have been a few generations off the real deal.

In ancient Rome, families commemorated the birthdays of their ancestors by taking festive meals at their graves. This custom was later taken up by early Christians, who came together around the tombs of their saints on their name days.

But there was a problem. As Christianity became more dominant, the tombs of saints became overcrowded. Plus, the tombs were often situated outside the city walls, which made the feasts potentially risky. In an effort to make them safer and more accessible, saints’ remains were exhumed and transferred into churches in a process called translation.

Radiocarbon dating is not 100% accurate.

How Accurate is Carbon Dating?
 
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Friedrich Rubinstein

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It's funny how dating methods can't be 200 years off when measuring religious artifacts but if dating methods are a couple of million years off when dating dinosaur bones it is called "standard deviation".

I'm not saying those bones are from James, I'm just pointing out the prejudiced way of thinking.
 
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essentialsaltes

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It's funny how dating methods can't be 200 years off when measuring religious artifacts but if dating methods are a couple of million years off when dating dinosaur bones it is called "standard deviation".

I'm not sure what's amusing about it. If the expected error is 5% and the dingus is 2000 years old, that's 100 years. If it's from the Jurassic, that's 10 million years.
 
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Landon Caeli

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That's why there's a date range spanning more than a century where we have confidence the true value lies.

It's 'close enough' to the time James lived, for me... Standard deviation.
 
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Friedrich Rubinstein

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I'm not sure what's amusing about it. If the expected error is 5% and the dingus is 2000 years old, that's 100 years. If it's from the Jurassic, that's 10 million years.

I'm talking about differences in the range of 100 million years. If the standard deviation is that much then the "214-340" is perfectly within range.
 
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Estrid

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It's funny how dating methods can't be 200 years off when measuring religious artifacts but if dating methods are a couple of million years off when dating dinosaur bones it is called "standard deviation".

I'm not saying those bones are from James, I'm just pointing out the prejudiced way of thinking.

Ah, but whose prejudice do you refer to?

Radiocarbon over and over proves to
be useful and accurate.
At 100,000,000 years, like your dino bone,
dating is a lot harder, radiocarbon of course is
useless for that.

Two million years would be a 2 % error,
A 2% error on 2000 years would be
40 years. Still way wrong for a contemporary
of Jesus.

So where's the prejudice? :D
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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I'm talking about differences in the range of 100 million years. If the standard deviation is that much then the "214-340" is perfectly within range.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Different measurement techniques will have different error bars.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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The church makes a mistake sponsoring fakes of any sort,
don't you think so?
It's served them pretty well until recently. It's said you could build an Ark with all the authentic fragments of the cross in churches around the world, and a holy army with all the saint's bones ;)
 
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Friedrich Rubinstein

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Ah, but whose prejudice do you refer to?

Radiocarbon over and over proves to
be useful and accurate.
At 100,000,000 years, like your dino bone,
dating is a lot harder, radiocarbon of course is
useless for that.

Two million years would be a 2 % error,
A 2% error on 2000 years would be
40 years. Still way wrong for a contemporary
of Jesus.

So where's the prejudice? :D

Hmm. I either misunderstand your comment or you have no clue of dates/dating methods. There are no dinosaur bones from 100 million years ago. All dinosaurs found contain C-14 which means they're not older than 60,000 years.

And "radiocarbon over and over proves to be useful and accurate"? The method does not even work on living organisms, how do you want to know that it works on those who died a long, long time ago?
The radiocarbon method dated a freshly killed seal 1300 years ago, living clam shells were supposedly 2300 old and snail shells dated 27,000 years back.
Environmental conditions affected the C-12/C-14 ratio in these of known age. When testing a sample of unknown age from a largely unknown environment, how can we exclude similar sorts of effects?
We can't.
 
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essentialsaltes

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Hmm. I either misunderstand your comment or you have no clue of dates/dating methods. There are no dinosaur bones from 100 million years ago. All dinosaurs found contain C-14 which means they're not older than 60,000 years.

I think you'll discover that it's you who has no clue about dating methods.
 
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sjastro

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Associating relics with biblical characters is fraught with problems.
As an example either John the Baptist had four heads or at least three of the four sites claiming to have possession of his head have got it seriously wrong.
Where is the Head of Saint John the Baptist? | HISTORY
 
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