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

Continuous Tone Negative

It's possible to imagine that this appearance is what a crafter of fake relics wanted to create; perhaps to portray some imagined idea of what the Resurrection was like. But the reason they look ghostlike is that they are continuous tone negative images. When photographed, the negative of what is already a negative become the extraordinarily photographic like image we commonly see. Could the image on the Shroud, in fact, be a photograph?

Near the end of the fifteenth century, about 130 years after the Shroud's first public exhibition in Europe, Leonardo da Vinci described a camera obscura (a pinhole camera) in his notebooks. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) understood the principle and so did a tenth century Arabian scholar, Alhazen who used a tent-sized camera obscura for observing the cosmos. In Alhazen's tent images were projected onto a wall where they could be traced or copied by hand. It wasn't until 1727 when Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver mixed with nitric acid created a photosensitive compound that turned dark when exposed to light. And, it wasn't until 1816 when Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura with a sensitized paper to create an image. In 1834, Henry Fox Talbot created the first stable photographic negative on paper soaked in silver chloride.

Had someone, perhaps, invented photography several centuries earlier even though there is no written evidence or samples of photographic experiments or works? Is the Shroud the work of a scientific genius whose accomplishments are lost to history? While some people have opined that it might be, there is ample evidence the Shroud is not a photograph.