The Holy Shroud of Turin

From time to time I visit the shroud.com site to see if there are any new articles about the Holy Shroud of Turin - a subject which has fascinated me for something like forty-two years. Having looked again this evening I subsequently found that Fr. Longenecker had posted a poll on what people thought it was - medieval fake, photograph of Christ etc.. I may be accused of hair-splitting but, although I think it may be genuine, I do not think it is a photograph or,as has been often suggested, a photographic negative. Nor do I think it the product of "atomic radiation". Rather does it seem to me to possess something of the character of a print- as something resulting from a direct one to one contact between a three dimensional body and the cloth itself. Moreover it is a print the reulting image of which is the product of two distinct processes one of which is created by a degradation of the surface of the cloth while the other is the accumulation of very fine matter upon the surface. The latter relates to "blood" -which, genuine or otherwise, it may well be.
Now whether that three-dimensional body causing the imprinting was the body of our Saviour in his death or that of someone else with appropriate features I cannot tell. A lot of ink has been wasted detailing suggested forgery techniques. For instance it is not necessary to posit an artist with the anatomical knowledge and graphic skills of a Leonardo da Vinci since the relationship of original body to image is one to one. Nor is it necessary to imagine an artist with extra long brushes working at more than arm's length in order to be able to keep everything in proportion. Nor is there any point to claiming that the medievals secretly knew how to fix the images produced by a camera obscura quite simply because the image is not a photograph.

The mistaken idea that the image on the Holy Shroud was a photograph arose from the fact that when it was first photographed in1898 the resulting negative produced a more coherent or intelligible image than that hitherto available to the naked eye. This was a matter of scale as much as anything quite simply because the image on the shroud is, as we would say, at a very low level of resolution. This low level of resolution also explains why people are also able to claim to see details imaged which others do not see and which in my opinion (certainly as regards the coins minted under Pontius Pilate) are not there but are like "the face in the clouds". There is just enough "information" to trigger a suggestion response. Our "suggestibility" as viewers is, paradoxically, the reason we are able to make any sense of the image at all