If you have a chance, go online and look up the Shroud of Turin. It is a single piece of linen, 14 feet long by 3 ½ feet wide that bears the faint image of a man, both his front and his back. It was first mentioned in 544 A.D., and a French knight displayed it in 1356 A.D. The claim was that it was the burial shroud of Jesus. People had to look long and hard to figure out that it was an image of a person.

But something remarkable happened in 1898. For the first time the Shroud was photographed, and an amazing thing was discovered when the photographer looked at the negative of the picture. He found that the Shroud itself acts as a photographic negative. In other words, if you take a picture of the Shroud and look at the photographic negative, that image becomes a positive record of the image on the Shroud.

The person on the Shroud appears to have been beaten in the face, jabbed in the scalp with small, sharp objects, crucified with nails through the wrists rather than the palms, stabbed in the side, and beaten on the back. If it was a fake, why would someone in the Middle Ages create it so that hundreds of years would have to go by before photographic negatives could be produced to truly see the image?

Of course, there are two big questions – Is it a fake? Is it the image of Jesus?  Archaeologists and historians have noted that very early paintings of Jesus show him with a face similar to the one in the Shroud. Tests show real bloodstains, rather than paint. Another test done in 1989, using carbon 14 dating methods, placed it as a medieval cloth. So that seemed to suggest it was a fake. However, newer carbon dating shows it to be roughly 2000 years old. Why the differences in dating? The first dating was made from an area of the cloth mended with newer cloth, plus there was a thin coat of bacteria that threw the dating off. Some believe it may be a natural evaporative process while others think it could’ve been a hoax in which the cloth was placed over a hot statue. There’s obviously much more that could be said on this topic, but go online if you want more details.