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

Barrie Schwortz on the Coins

Barrie Schwortz, a technical photographers who photographed the Shroud, questions the coin identification. Having studied numerous high quality negatives of the Shroud taken in 1978, he concludes:

My personal opinion, based on my photographic experience and my close examination of the Shroud itself, is that the weave of the cloth is far too coarse to resolve the rather subtle and very tiny inscription on a dime sized ancient coin...What he [Filas] saw as inscriptions, I saw as random shapes and noise. Such is the subjective nature of image analysis. For these reasons however, I cannot accept these coin "inscriptions" as viable evidence of a first century Shroud "date"...I do not argue that there appears to be something on the eyes of the man of the Shroud, and it may well be coins or potshards, since they were used in some first century burial rituals, but I do not believe we can resolve coin inscriptions.

There is no question that background noise is a severe problem for coin identification. Banding, both vertical and horizontal, encroaches on the area of the eyes, certainly adding anomalous data. Much of the fine detail claimed to be features of the coins probably comes from background noise.