This was forwarded by Petra Larsson of Sweden and is reprinted as written. It conerns a story a couple of weeks ago regarding the bones of two apostles that were scientifically dated but came up a couple of hundred years too recent.
She begins by saying, reading the newspaper this morning, an article with the title 'Worshipped Dead in Rome were not Apostles' – see www.dn.se/kultur/vasterbros-historia-dyrkade-doda-i-rom-var-inte-apostlar/ …. which caught her interest. The story was about the relics of two of Jesus' disciples worshipped for 1500 years in the Basilica dei Santi XII Apostoli in Rome, St Philip and St James, the brother of Jesus. Both are said to have died in the second half of the first century AD, in tradition.
However, the author stated with enthusiasm that the relics very clearly were for other persons living a long time later, because in a recent study, reported at https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-… a radiocarbon date between AD214 and 340 was obtained from one of the bones kept in the reliquary.
Now, this radiocarbon date is very good news for us and all who were convinced that these relics really are from the two apostles. This is because Jesus and his disciples are historically dated in Western Roman Empire contexts as living around the time of Emperor Augustus and his immediate successors. Having postulated that Western Roman history is conventionally dated too old by 232 years, at https://researchgate.net/publication/296060902_Astronomical_dating_of_Ro… , we generally would expect organic sample like bone collagen from that time to produce calibrated radiocarbon dates more than 200 years younger than conventional dates. And in this case, with a secure provenience of the sample material, we find just that.
Another of our studies involved dendrochronologically dated Western Roman timber which produced radiocarbon dates more than 150 years younger than conventional dates. See https://researchgate.net/publication/334094183_Radiocarbon_dates_of_dend… …
Note … the Larssons have suggested a discrepancy in dendrochronology of the order of 200+ years in the first millennium AD. This theory runs in tandem with the ideas of historical revisionists, mainly based on the continent. The idea has been explored in SIS Review but it would be true to say that British revisionists are more interested in a realignment during the first millennium BC, as opened up by the Hallstatt Plateau [a period of a couple of hundred years where carbon dating runs into trouble, so much so that archaeologists find it difficult to date artifacts retrieved from Iron Age contexts]. The SIS remain neutral and are prepared to air both points of view as well as the mainstream version. We are open to new authors on the subject. The Larssons are well versed in their subject and it is worth reading the links above. The problem came about as both dendrochronologists and carbon dating required some sort of baseline in order to set their stalls. It seems that it was assumed that conventional Egyptian dating was secure and was used as the baseline – and this may have ended up creating the dark ages in the Aegean and Anatolia, and in the Levant, regions closely associated with ancient Egypt in the Late Bronze and Iron ages. It is an intriguing conumdrum that has not been adequately answered to date, a problem very often glossed over by mainstream. The idea of an AD hole in chronology developed out of suspicions surrounding the use of dendrochronology to prop up radiocarbon methodology, most notably via calibration of the two dating systems. By rights dendrochronology should be the most reliable and should take preference over radiocarbon. However, it has become clear that radiocarbon levels go up and down for various reasons, due to the amount of cosmic particles entering the atmosphere for example, leading to plateaus such as the Hallstatt. In other words, injections of radiocarbon into the atmosphere are a fact of life. When the methodology was first put forward it was thought there was constant and reliable rate of radiocarbon affecting earth's atmosphere and it was regarded as a reliable method of dating – and still is in many respects, particularly between plateau events. However, plateaus caused dating discrepancies. Two artifacts from the same tomb could vary in date by hundreds of years, as an example. Not so useful for archaeologists keen to get a date on organic material retrieved during excavations. Hnece, the calibration process. Revisionists have homed in on these discrepancies in order to fuel their ideas of chronological issues, whether in AD or BC.