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

The Medically Accurate Images

The ever so medically accurate images have convinced many people that the shroud cannot be a forgery. There are just too many details to reasonably imagine that a medieval forger, without a modern knowledge of forensic pathology could have created the shroud images including the bloodstains, unless, as Crossan supposes, he had an actual victim. But it had to be more than a victim to use as a model because some of the details are invisible without modern technology. Fred Zugibe tells us:

Under ultraviolet fluorescent photography, all of the wounds show a serum retraction ring of albumin around them that would have been completely unknown to an artist forger. It is very important to note that no image is present wherever blood is present, indicating that the image formation occurred after the blood staining and that the presence of blood prevented image formation in those areas. Although this is not discernable with. the naked eye, this was demonstrated by Adler [Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University and one of the world’s leading authorities on the chemistry of blood] who removed blood from several fibers in image areas by subjecting them to proteolytic enzymatic hydrolysis (which removes blood). No image was present on the fibers that contained blood. If this were done by human hands, the artist would have had to paint all of the bloodstains with the albumin halos in all of the wounds and blood flows, including the blood of the scourge marks, using human blood and then paint the body image around them in their precise locations and eliminate images wherever there was blood. A complicated process, indeed.

Several forensic pathologists have examined the details of the images and the peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. The conclusions are always the same. This is the image of a man who died of crucifixion, who is in a medically accurate state of rigor mortis, with medically precise wounds. The images are far too accurate to have been the product of anyone with only a medieval knowledge of anatomy or medicine. The blood is real human blood and it could only have come to be on the cloth by contact with real wounds.