Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

The Germ of the Photograph Idea

Because the picture was a negative, some speculated that the Shroud of Turin might be a medieval proto-photograph. At first glance this seemed reasonable. But then common sense prevailed. How likely was it that photography was invented in the Middle Ages, used once to make a single fourteen-foot long fraud, never to be exploited, never to have been mentioned or used again until it was reinvented in an age of science.  Such speculation seemed moot. I couldn’t imagine such speculation was realistic.

So entrenched was my skepticism, it would take me a year to become open minded and longer still to change my mind. I learned that McCrone’s identification of paint was a subjective and never verified. In fact, attempts to verify his observations showed that what he thought he saw could not be what he thought it was. This was especially true of tests conducted by one of McCrone’s own staff. Heproved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that McCrone was wrong. Moreover, I would learn that it was impossible that the images were photographs. I came to recognize what Ball would later write for Nature: “It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made.”

Our minds don't easily see details in negatives. But with photographic negatives of the shroud, which were in fact positive, new extraordinary details had been noticed for the first time. Then with newer pictures taken in 1931 and then, literally, with thousands of photographs taken 1978, it became obvious to some that then anatomical details along with contusions and lacerations were so precisely detailed that only a modern pathologist could properly understand them. While, I had taken notice of this, I had not comprehended how significant this was until I came across a relevant comment by the brilliant (though very controversial) historian and biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan on a major website called Beliefnet.