The Shroud of Turin is Real

The Shroud of Turin is Real!

It is concrete material evidence that a real human man was tortured and covered in a cloth. The image is actually a photograph or to be exact it is a photogram. To analyze the shroud we must first consider how it came to be in existence.

A photograph must have certain conditions in place in order to successfully produce an image. You must have light and you must have a surface that reacts to light. My theory regarding the shroud is that this man lay in a low light or no light environment for a long time. Just enough time for the available light to make contact with the material that will eventually react to it. A long exposure in a low light environment will have a diffusing effect on the image. The light is not completely nondirectional if you consider the upper lip is in shadow while the lower lip is highlighted. This may be caused by the interference of the light path by the hair of the mustache.

The light itself is not the greatest mystery. It is entirely conceivable that there was enough available in a tomb for light to enter a tomb, even one sealed with a stone, and pass through the cloth becoming diffused and reflecting off of the surfaces of the skin and hair and bouncing back to contact the interior surface of the cloth.

The available light theory begs the question, How did the image get on the back if the body was lying on the back? Light would not have been able to get to the areas of contact. To answer this I have considered that possibly the body was lying on its side. This would answer the question of why there is no side image and it would also explain why the legs are so perfectly straight. It may also answer some of the other nagging questions that I will cover later. But if you don’t like the “on the side” explanation I have also considered another intriguing theory.

It is possible that there was enough light generated from the body itself to create the image. No I am not proposing that there was some great flash of light as the body supernaturally transcended the physical world to the spiritual world of pure energy leaving behind a residue of image on a cloth. Because for one thing a great flash would have been strong enough to create image on all levels of the cloth and not just the extreme inner surface. And the stronger light would not have had such an extreme fall off in order to create the very subtle shadows that we can see in the crease of the eyelid and the strands hair in the beard and the subtle lines on the bottom lip. It is possible however that the light was generated from the body in the form of simple human bioluminescence. This phenomenon is not uncommon. In fact everybody radiates light. The question is, does a human body radiate enough light to create a chemical reaction on anything? Well I am not entirely sure on that one, but I do know that on some medical radio-active die tests that are done, the technician must take our baseline radiation levels in order to get an accurate reading of the test. Therefore we do radiate some light. Obviously we normally don’t radiate visible light but since the reaction we are looking for is not in the human eye, that is not relevant right now but for a future discussion skin fluorescence is not completely unheard of.

If the image was created via bioluminescence it may explain why the image is also on the back. I believe the very low levels of light would be what was necessary to create the diffused quality and subtle shadows.

The second half of the equation for creating a photograph in the materials that will react to the light. In this case creating an image on a cloth. When I began contemplating this I thought first of the photographs we create today and a memory flash through my mind. As a photography student I had unwisely worn a very nice white shirt to do some work in the darkroom one day and of course splashed it with some of the chemicals, the developer I believe but really hard to say since it was dark. Any way I was bummed and I really liked that shirt so even with a big ugly yellowish brown stains I kept it for years. I must have tried to get that stain out at least 20 times in many different ways until one day after watching a television show about getting out stains, I contemplated what the stain was made of . So long story short I figured it was made of silver, got out the silver cleaner and bingo! in three seconds all of the stains were completely gone. So when I was thinking about the shroud it struck me that the color of the stain on that old shirt was similar to the shroud image color. In order for the image to be silver, chemically transformed by light there would have to be silver present on the shroud. And in order for my theory to feasible it would have to be uniformly distributed. Both of which I knew would be true because the shroud was kept in a silver box for most of its life. Everyone who has studied that shroud has agreed that it is a high quality linen. That being the case it may have started out its life in the merchants shop at a bazar in the streets of Jerusalem in a silver box, as is often the tradition for fine linens. Silver is present uniformly in the shroud.

Finally, since I don’t believe that they had developer and fixer in the first century, I had to explain how the silver in the shroud came to be darker in some areas and not so dark in other areas. So in considering what technology was available in the first century I decided that the process must be naturally occurring. What naturally occurring process causes silver to change colors? Tarnish! So completely simple, It must be right.

If the human bioluminescence theory turns out to be true it has some very disturbing implications. I was very uncomfortable when I realized that in order for the body to generate radiation it must be alive. It was several day before I allowed myself to accept the possibility but once I did other things that had bothered me started to make sense. One thing I took a closer look at was the area of the mustache. Directly below the nose the image is blurry but further out to the edge the image is so sharp individual hairs can be distinguished.. Motion from the breath may be the cause of this. The blood flow along the waist at the back is not logical and deserves a second look.. The odd blood flow may be from the body being on its side, but more importantly would the blood still be flowing if the body was not alive?

I have a few other issues and comments that I have been considering . The issue of the hair is so contrary that it must be important. Why is the hair on his head “light” or “white”? Obviously we can’t assume an exact color but the density of the image is increased where the hair on his head is concerned but the rest of the hair on his body, (eyelashes, chest hair) is represented as less dense. Another interesting feature is the lack of pubic hair. I believe this is explained by the commonly practiced religious cleansing ritual when the body is shaved. This ritual is still practiced in some religions. Perhaps the hair on the head turned white from the shock and trauma of the torturing. Hair turning white from trauma is not unheard of. Perhaps the hair on the head is white because the man is old. The face certainly seems older than the supposed 33 years. Of course the age is impossible to determine. Who could say how people aged in the first century or even the middle ages? If reflective light created the image then more reflection would be generated from lighter surfaces as seems to be the case from the skin. If bioluminescence created the image then it may have created a denser image for the hair on the head for some other reason.

For more information on the Shroud of Turin go to one of my favorite sites about the shroud, the best photos and real scientific peer reviewed studies SHROUD.COM