High C.

 

You wrote:

no doubt, with your Level of Faith in the Religion of Science, you could, H.

but those arugments would have to (presumably) accept that

 

1) The Padova skeleton, of an elderly man with arthritis, was carbon-dated to

between mid-1st and early 4th c.;

 

Lot of people living then. But I agree that arthritis is a dead giveaway...

 

b) DNA from the teeth shows he was very probably from Syria;

 

Quite a lot of those lived in Syria.

 

iii) the missing skull was matched with the reputed skull of St Luke preserved

in Prague (but not St Luke's other skull, brought to Rome from Constantinople

in the time of Gregory the Great, now dated 5th-6th c.).

 

I wish I could read medical Italian enough to check  this. Does it mean they fitted the loose part as a jig-saw piece in a skull with exactly that part missing?  But is it also known why the part from the Padova skeleton turned up in Prague? And, more importantly, when?

 

D) The leaden casket is the original burial container;

 

They were 2 a penny in them days, how can you ascertain that it wasn’t a later or earlier one? Is lead carbon-dateable?

 

IV) its decoration is typically 1st-2nd c.;

 

No shit! That’s a quite damning piece of proof!!!!

 

5) pollen inside it included pollen from Greece;

 

Was it from typical Boeotian plants? Or was it more generally Greek, like maybe from the coast of present day Turkey or Northern Macedonia? And what was the other pollen like or from where did it hail?

 

f) carbon dating of small animal remains in the casket revealed that it had

been in the Padova area since the 5th or 6th c., earlier, in fact, than the

associated literary traditions.

 

So let me recapitulate: the old ca 100 AD (50-150 AD) lead casket with a partly preserved ca 230 AD (150-320 AD) skeleton of maybe a Syrian man (so did they use a second hand casket? Why?) turns up in ca 500 AD Padova which later (how much later) is described as the remains of St Luke? Now where does that remind me off?

 

vii) The casket fits perfectly into the pagan marble sarcophagus, reworked in

the 2nd c., associated with St Luke in Thebes in Boeotia, the traditional

place of his death (a theory is that it may have been removed from there in

the time of Julian the Apostate).

 

Lead caskets, as I said, were 2 a penny in Roman times and were made, as far as I can remember, as mass products in standard sizes. Monuments where they fit in would be worked towards, were hollowed out or built to accomodate these caskets,

 

XCIX) And so on.

 

Indeed.

 

none of which, of course, obiates the possibility of "fraud."

 

a very, very elaborate "fraud," perpetrated (at the latest) in the 5th or 6th

c.

 

I think you may have a point there.

 

>so if you want to believe they are Luke's relics it helps.

 

helps *what*, eggsactly?

 

Move mountains.

 

>But I might as well talk to a brick wall, I presume.

 

sounds like someone who doubts the results of the C-14 testing.

 

C-14 testing is ok when you try to determinate if the last Ice Age started in 10000 BC or 12000 BC, but for determining medieval stuff to within 50 years it is tricky. You probably have heard that several dates thus determined in the early era of carbon dating have had to be revised. Contamination by all kinds of stuff did that. I know that nowadays the methods are safer and the results correspondingly more precise, but they always have to be compared with dendro, and other, even historical, research results. Indeed, I do not trust C-14 just on its own.

 

carful, there, H., lest you Lapse into Heresy and be Excommunicated from the

Church of Science.

 

See if I care!

 

H.