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The sincere skeptical inquirer ponders . . .
What is the theory that the images are prototype photographs produced before 1356?
Nicholas Allen, of the Port Elizabeth Technikon, South Africa, has suggested an alternative to the Leonardo da Vinci polemic. He propose that someone other than da Vinci produced the Shroud as a photograph much earlier.
See: What is the theory that the images were created by Leonardo da Vinci?
The late Dr. Alan D. Adler, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Western Connecticut University, in an article entitled, “The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin,” comments:
Allen has proposed a variation of the method just examined [the da Vinci polemic] except that his charging photosensizers are silver salts. The receiving cloth is a crude photographic plate. It is still an albedo image and will fail a VP-8 test and there is no microscopic, chemical, or spectroscopic evidence for silver species or the expected products of their chemical reaction on the Shroud body image areas or sticky tape samples. He does not really deal with the blood image problem, either.The Shroud is not a photograph”.
Historian Dan Scavone comments:
When South African scholar Dr. Nicholas Allen, Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Port Elizabeth, published his Shroud-as-photograph theory in 1993 that, consonant with the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, his hypothetical photo was made before 1356, he overcame some of the palpable weaknesses of the Leonardo theory. Today we know the ingredients and requirements for making a photo. We can read a children's handbook and make rudimentary home-made pictures. Dr. Allen notes that all the ingredients were available in the 14th c., and all one had to do was suspend the corpse for three to four days in sunlight, at the proper focusing distance from the fourteen-foot cloth that has been treated with silver nitrate or silver sulphate, outside a large camera obscura whose aperture contains a double convex quartz crystal lens fifteen centimeters in diameter and seven milimeters thick, then fix the negative image with ammonia or with urine
We know enough about the image chemistry from spectral analysis to know that the image was not produced with photosensitive chemicals.
See: What is the chemical nature of the images? Melanoidins (EU, Volume 4, 2003).
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Shroud of Turin and the Skeptical Inquirer
Fact:
The 1988 carbon 14 dating used invalid samples snipped from a
discrete medieval repair. Furthermore, kinetics constants for the
loss of vanillin from lignin indicates that the cloth is at least
twice as old as the dates determined by the carbon 14 dating with
the faulty samples.
By some estimates, from
examination of documenting photographs, there is sufficient new
thread (about 60%) to allow adjusting the cloth's date to
approximately the first century.
Fact :
The images are formed by a brownish, complex conjugated carbon
substance within a carbohydrate layer of starch fractions no thicker
than 1/100 the diameter of a human hair.
The images are probably the
product of an amino/carbonyl reaction.
Fact :
The bloodstains are real blood. The blood is unusually red for
old blood.
The blood probably stayed red and
did not turn black as blood normally does because trace chemicals
found in the starch fractions are hemolytic. Also, the blood is rich
in bilirubin, a bile pigment produced when a human body is under
severe traumatic stress. Bilirubin is bright red and stays red.
Fact :
There is a faint, superficial face image on the back of the cloth.
This supports the hypothesis of an
amino/carbonyl reaction.
Fact :
There are sufficient descriptive historical records to suggest that
the Shroud of Turin is the Edessa cloth (ca. before 544 to 944 CE)
and the Bucoleon Palace grave cloth of Constantinople (ca. 944 -
1204).
Fragmentary evidence suggests that
the Edessa Cloth originated in Jerusalem in the 1st century and that
it is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.
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