On findings being published in a new book out today on the Shroud of Turin. That’s the linen cloth believed to bear Jesus’ imprint as he was being prepared for burial. And now there’s new research that may disprove the claim of people who have said it’s an elaborate fake. He was wrapped in linen and then his body was put in the tomb.

In 1978, a Jewish photographer entered a cathedral in Turin, Italy with one goal in mind: to disprove what many consider the most famous relic in Christianity.

His name was Barry Schwartz. He was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in a deeply traditional Orthodox Jewish household where religious customs shaped daily life—separate sets of dishes and silverware, extended family living together, and a bar mitzvah at the age of 13. But by the time he arrived in Turin, his life had changed.

He was no longer religious and hadn’t given much thought to God in years. Jesus Christ, the resurrection, and any effects connected to them meant nothing to him. For Barry, this was simply another assignment—one he expected would expose a long-standing myth.

But Schwartz wasn’t just any photographer. He was one of the top scientific photographers in the United States. So when a group of 33 scientists came together to study the Shroud of Turin—a 14-ft long linen cloth believed by millions to have wrapped the body of Jesus after the crucifixion—they needed someone completely neutral. No bias, no beliefs, no agenda. Just someone focused purely on capturing accurate images and data.

Schwartz actually tried to back out of the project twice. He even asked the team leader, “Why would a Jewish man want to be involved with what’s probably the most important relic in Christianity?” At that point, a NASA imaging scientist named Don Lynn responded with a simple but powerful reminder: “Have you forgotten that the man in question was also a Jew?” Then he added five words. Words that would shape the next 46 years of Schwartz’s life: God doesn’t reveal everything ahead of time.

He arrived in Turin expecting to find paint, brush strokes, clear signs that the image was man-made. But within the first hour of examining the Shroud of Turin, he realized something didn’t add up. It didn’t look like a painting at all.

Still, he wasn’t convinced it was authentic. There was one detail that just didn’t make sense—something that kept him skeptical for the next 17 years. The blood on the cloth was red, not brown, not black, not the darkened color every forensic expert says blood turns after decades, let alone centuries. It was red.

Standing over the cloth in 1978, Schwartz glanced at his colleague Vern Miller and they both quietly shook their heads. They didn’t even need to say it out loud. They could see the same doubt in each other’s eyes. Old blood doesn’t stay red. Something didn’t add up.

It would take 17 years, a phone call from a dying Jewish blood chemist, and one crucial term—bilirubin—to finally break Barry Schwartz’s resistance and push him to accept what the evidence had been suggesting all along. That call is coming, but not yet.

Because the story of the Shroud of Turin doesn’t start with Schwartz. It begins decades earlier, in 1898, inside a dimly lit room where a man almost dropped a priceless glass plate after seeing what appeared on it. The face staring back at him shouldn’t have been possible.

May 28th, 1898, inside the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin. An amateur photographer named Secondo Pia had been granted rare permission by King Umberto I of Italy to photograph the Shroud during a royal exhibition.

Photography back then was anything but simple. There were no digital cameras, no screens to instantly check your work. Pia had to carry a bulky camera the size of a suitcase up onto scaffolding inside the cathedral. To capture the image, he used intense magnesium flashes and exposed two large glass plates, each roughly 20 by 24 inches.

Later that night, alone in his darkroom and surrounded by the faint red glow of a safety lamp, Pia carefully lowered one of those plates into a tray of developing chemicals. As the image slowly appeared on the glass, he nearly dropped it.

Because in a photographic negative, everything is reversed. Light turns dark, dark turns light, and human faces usually look eerie and distorted. But this time, it didn’t. Flat, lifeless masks with hollow-looking eyes—that’s what you normally expect from a photographic negative. It’s a basic rule of photography.

But the Shroud of Turin broke that rule completely. What appeared wasn’t distorted at all. It was a portrait. A clear, detailed, and hauntingly lifelike face. The eyes were gently closed. The nose looked broken. There was visible bruising along the right cheek, a mustache, a split beard, and an expression of deep, almost unimaginable calm. Like someone who had endured intense suffering. It looked less like art and more like a real photograph of a human being captured centuries before photography even existed.

Here’s why that’s so unsettling. The image on the cloth is already a negative. And when you turn a negative into another negative, it becomes a positive image. That means the realistic face was hidden within the cloth all along, waiting to be revealed.

And that image is anatomically precise, perfectly proportioned, and incredibly detailed—far beyond what any known artistic technique from the medieval world can explain. So it raises a difficult question. Who, 800 years before photography, understood the concept of a photographic negative? Who could create a perfectly reversed image across a 14-ft piece of linen without any way to see the final result, test it, or correct mistakes?

The human eye doesn’t see the world in negatives. The brain doesn’t naturally process or create images with reversed light and dark values. No medieval artist had the knowledge or even a reason to attempt something like this. And even today, no modern artist has been able to fully replicate it.

That single photograph taken by Secondo Pia became the first real crack in the long-standing assumption that the Shroud was just a painting. Because it didn’t behave like one. It behaved like something we didn’t have a name for.

For the next 78 years, that mystery remained unsolved. Then, in 1976, two US Air Force physicists decided to analyze the image using technology originally designed to map the surface of Mars—and suddenly, the mystery became even deeper.

February 1976, at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Two physicists, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, decided to run a photograph of the Shroud of Turin through a device called a VP-8 image analyzer. This was Cold War era technology originally designed to convert image brightness into three-dimensional maps, mainly used for studying planetary surfaces from satellite data.

Here’s how it works. You input a flat image and the machine translates light and dark areas into height and depth. Brighter regions appear raised; darker ones sink, creating a kind of 3D terrain model.

Before testing the Shroud, they had already run dozens of images through the machine—paintings, photographs, sketches, even X-rays. Every single one produced the same kind of result: distorted, meaningless shapes with no real structure. That’s because in normal images, brightness reflects light, not physical distance. A bright spot on a face doesn’t mean it’s closer. It just means light hit it at a certain angle. The VP-8 can’t turn that into accurate 3D data.

But the Shroud was different. When its image was processed, it produced a clear, accurate three-dimensional form of a human body. The nose, cheekbones, brow, chest, crossed hands, and legs all appeared properly shaped and proportioned. The figure could even be rotated without distortion. Something that simply didn’t happen with any other image.

Peter Schumacher, the engineer who created the VP-8, had no prior knowledge of the Shroud and no personal or religious interest in it. Yet, even he admitted that the results were unlike anything he had ever seen before or after.

For the first time, the image showed a geometrically consistent human form where the intensity of every point matched the actual distance between the body and the cloth—not reflected light, but real spatial information. It was as if three-dimensional data had somehow been encoded directly into the linen itself.

In the nearly 50 years since that experiment, no image—whether painted, photographed, or even digitally created—has ever been able to reproduce the same result. Not a single one. Only about 60 VP-8 analyzers were ever built, and today, just two are still operational.

Yet the mystery hasn’t gone away. How do you encode precise distance information into a piece of fabric without any technology that existed before the 20th century?

If you’re already wondering how that could even be possible, that’s exactly the kind of mystery this story keeps uncovering. Because as strange as the image is, the blood on the Shroud of Turin is even more puzzling.

Some researchers dismiss the idea that the shroud proves a miracle, but even they admit something important. They still can’t explain how the image was formed. Others have argued it could be done with simple medieval techniques without advanced tools or unusual theories.

But then you go back to 1978, to Barry Schwartz standing over the cloth staring at blood stains that didn’t look right. And he wasn’t alone. A full scientific team known as the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) brought together 33 experts from places like Los Alamos, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the US Air Force Academy. They spent 120 continuous hours examining the cloth using every tool they had.

They ran X-ray fluorescence, infrared spectroscopy, ultraviolet photography, and detailed microchemical tests. When the analysis was complete, two chemists, John Heller and Alan Adler, conducted 12 separate diagnostic tests on the suspected blood samples.

When Heller saw the spectral results confirming hemoglobin, he later said it gave him chills. Because it was real blood—not paint, not pigment, not some medieval substitute.

They identified hemoglobin, albumin, and heme-related compounds. They even found what are known as serum halos, faint rings that appear when blood begins to separate as it dries. These are subtle details that no medieval artist would have known to include because the science behind them wasn’t understood until modern forensic studies.

And then there’s the detail that challenges nearly every forgery theory at once. The blood was on the cloth before the image appeared. In other words, whatever created the image didn’t disturb the blood stains. It formed around them.

Beneath the blood stains, there’s no image of a body at all. None. The sequence is clear: blood came first and the image appeared afterward. That alone is unusual. In every known artistic method, a painter creates the figure first and then adds blood on top. That’s how art has always been done. But the Shroud of Turin shows the exact opposite.