The Shroud of Turin

A 14-foot linen cloth bearing the faint image of a man who suffered exactly the traumas described in the Gospel crucifixion accounts: scourge marks consistent with a Roman flagrum, puncture wounds around the scalp consistent with a crown of thorns, nail wounds through the wrists and feet, a spear wound in the side, and post-mortem blood flows matching what forensic pathology would predict. The image is a photographic negative; it behaves like a negative that predates photography by centuries. NASA’s VP-8 Image Analyzer revealed that the image encodes three-dimensional distance information: the brighter areas correspond to points closer to the cloth, meaning the image was formed by some kind of distance-based interaction between the body and the cloth, not by an artist’s brush. The bloodstains are real human blood (Type AB), and they were on the cloth before the image, meaning the body was wrapped in the cloth and the image formed after. The 1988 carbon dating placed it in the medieval period; but the sample was taken from a corner that textile experts have since identified as a medieval repair patch. No modern technology has been able to replicate all of the Shroud’s properties on a single piece of linen.