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Come to the nelson-atkins museum in kansas city, missouri. they want to analyze an ancient treasure reputed to be the finger of john the baptist. could it come from the same individual as the bulgaria find? >> this is containing the relic. it's gilt silver. it dates from about the year 1400. >> what's really exciting about the kansas relic is for the first time we'll be able to compare the carbon data relic with the one we've already obtained from bulgaria. >> the bone has been identified as a human bone coming from a hand. >> what's interesting about the finger is it's part of a medieval trea...

Drill, he can't be sure they've got enough to determine whether this bone could have belonged to john the baptist. in jerusalem, the more john the baptist denounces herod, the more he risks inflaming herod's anger. with all the danger that could follow. >> you could talk about repentance and judgment day and maybe not get into much trouble. but you start to attack herod personally, and he's going to attack you personally. >> what's wrong? >> i see herod antipas as a really divided soul. he was really kind of caught between his ambition, his desire to rule and his desire for his wife. by marryi...

>> in kansas city, professor tom higham of oxford university is trying to figure out a way of drilling into a relic of john the baptist. >> i think it's best to go in here. >> he hopes to date the carbon inside the bone and perhaps even get a dna profile that can then be matched against the first century relic he has already tested from bulgaria. >> it's the collagen part of the bone that we want to date. that's the protein part. and that, in modern people, is about 20% by weight. but of course, in older materials, the collagen decays and degrades. and so it's often not present in that large a...

>> the result isn't surprising to me. there are many bones attributed to john the baptist. and they can't all be. in this particular case, using radiocarbon, we've managed to show that the date from this particular bone is about six centuries later than it ought to be. >> we've tested now two relics of john the baptist. we had one date from the 1st century and one from the 7th or 8th century and we're just starting to get a feel for what there is out there. so it's very exciting. it gives us a new bit of information. i'm hopeful that we'll go forward from here and ask more questions and test m...

It goes, i think. >> in kansas city, professor tom higham of oxford university is trying to figure out a way of drilling into a relic of john the baptist. >> i think it's best to go in here. >> he hopes to date the carbon inside the bone and perhaps even get a dna profile that can then be matched against the first century relic he has already tested from bulgaria. >> it's the collagen part of the bone that we want to date. that's the protein part. and that, in modern people, is about 20% by weight. but of course, in older materials, the collagen decays and degrades. and so it's often not prese...