It’s not the camera obscura technology, Sontagged, it’s the photography technology that did not exist in the time frame the theorists want to attribute it to existing. They can point to no other examples of renneissance era photography at all. None. Zip. Nada.
Those who do espouse such early photography without any evidence to back their claims, attribute such an ability to Leonardo Da Vinci as the one who created this miraculous photograph (who never used the technique ever again lest someone figure out what he had done) but also ignore the fact he’d have to also have to have had invented a time machine as Leonardo’s era began approximately 100 years after the first European exposition in Lirey, France, of what would later be called the Shroud of Turin.
It was also quite a number of years beyond the first exposition of the Shroud in Constantinople on August 15, 944 (10th Century) when it was described in the Sermon of Gregory Referendarius, the Arch Deacon of the Haggia Sophia, on the arrival of the Image of Edessa’s arrival there as a double image, both front and back, of our Lord.
“This reflection, however – let everyone be inspired with the explanation – has been imprinted only by the sweat from the face of the originator of life, falling like drops of blood, and by the finger of God. For these are the beauties that have made up the true imprint23 of Christ, since after the drops fell, it was embellished by drops from his own side. Both are highly instructive – blood and water there, here sweat and image. Oh equality of happenings, since both have their origin in the same person. The source of living water can be seen and it gives us water, showing us that the origin of the image made by sweat is in fact of the same nature as the origin of that which makes the liquid flow from the side. This is just like a spring pouring out fresh water as it were from two vessels, which water the tree of life and divide it into two streams, recording the same God and man, one marvellously producing something praiseworthy and superhuman, the other in bringing about a defined likeness of a man, declaring with clear words with which colours the image and likeness should be adorned. And for the prototype to be transferred to the likeness, he does this himself with the sweat of the human form he deigned to bear, and as befits the divinity he decreed that the intellectual image in us, the one we had breathed into us by the first life-giving visitation of the spirit as a good gift, should not be formed from another source, just as he did not form his own image from anywhere else, but rather from a human nature, as it were from the sweat of the form he had taken on, with exactly the right colours. And what is this nature? Purity, calmness, rejection of all evil and whatever else belongs to this class of things, through which similarity to the divinity is formed. Indeed, an image not formed by such things is not like the prototype, and is called something else, not an image.“
Gregory makes other mentions and references throughout his sermon clearly referring to an entire body imprint, and its reflection, such as “flanks” and “form” and only refers to “visage” when he clearly is referring to the inage’s face, but describes the blood flow on the side above which is the only location of the Shroud where the blood stains are obviously separated into blood and sera (clear, watery appearing) stains matching the Biblical descriptive flow of blood and water when the body was pierced by the lancia of the Roman soldier.
However, since the Image on the shroud is never discussed or mentioned in Scripture, (though it does mention that the head linens were separate pieces of cloth from the body linens wrapped around Him), I have no real use for it, as my belief that He is come in the flesh and is raised from the dead... Halleluia!
But thanks for sharing, it is interesting in terms of Church history...