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Are there images of coins over the eyes?
Quite possibly not. The tentative identification of the coins is limited to one particular photograph of the Shroud taken by Giuseppe Enrie in 1931. No one has been able to identify coin images on the highly technical and detailed photographs taken in 1978 using lighting carefully places to minimize miniscule shadows in between the cloth's fibers. The lenses used in 1978 produced less chromatic distortion and the film had a much finer grain. It should also be noted that the pictures in 1931 required significant contrast enhancement using orthocromatic film. Such enhancement creates a granular posterizing effect.
There is another problem: Barrie Schwortz, a technical photographers who photographed the Shroud, explains it this way:
My personal opinion, based on my photographic experience and my close examination of the Shroud itself, is that the weave of the cloth is far too coarse to resolve the rather subtle and very tiny inscription on a dime sized ancient coin...What he (Filas) saw as inscriptions, I saw as random shapes and noise. Such is the subjective nature of image analysis. For these reasons however, I cannot accept these coin "inscriptions" as viable evidence of a first century Shroud "date"...I do not argue that there appears to be something on the eyes of the man of the Shroud, and it may well be coins or potshards, since they were used in some first century burial rituals, but I do not believe we can resolve coin inscriptions.
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© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
