Stromata Blog has a great post about the Shroud of Turin (hat tip Cronaca). Nathan Wilson, described as a conservative Protestant, has developed an extremely easy way to make a 3-D negative image on cloth — just like the Shroud. Put a positive image (on glass or other transparent material) above a cloth in sunshine, wait days, and viola, a 3-D negative image appears as the portion under the clear portion is bleached lighter.
Tom Veal and David Nishimura struggle with the two possible scenarios:
The shroud could have been created by someone, say a crusader, taking an ancient burial cloth (and therefore having the correct age, pollen, and weaving) to a painter who then created an image on a very large piece of transparent material that depicted crucifixion images at variance with the accepted iconography of how Christ was crucified, leaving them out in the sun for days, then deciding that that wasn’t good enough, turning the shroud and the transparent image over, lining up the image on the underside of the cloth with the flipped image and repeating the process.
On the other hand, the shroud was real yet somehow escaped notice by Christians until 1354 when the de Charnay family could no longer contain themselves, or it was discovered by a Crusader in the Jerusalem area who took it home to France and only then was it discovered to be a relic.
As Tom Veal says: “It seems to me that all theories about the Shroud are quite improbable.” Which is pretty much what a friend who was a Shroud lore fan told me years ago — it confounds believer and unbeliever alike. And yet it exists, which I suppose is its own miracle.
