It was only a matter of time…
As the glutton in all of us gears up for this weekend’s chocolate Easter egg haul, an AI tool has come up with a timely rendering of Jesus Christ‘s real face.
Using the famous Shroud of Turin, website Midjourney managed to reprocess the linen cloth’s alleged facial imprint into something quite remarkable, giving Christians a much more precise idea of the Son of God’s appearance.
In a clip, Jesus is revealed to be a long-haired and bearded figure with hollow cheeks and noticeable scarring – pointing to his crucifixion.
Although a large portion of social media was onboard with the AI visualisation, one person argued on X: “This is literally every movie version of what people think Jesus looks like.”
“Jared Leto resurrection???” joked somebody else, while a third user wrote: “Who’s this handsome fellow!”
Interestingly, this latest addition to Jesus imagery slightly contradicts what the University of Sheffield’s senior lecturer in Religious Studies, Dr. Meredith Warren, previously told MailOnline.
“Jesus would have had brown skin, brown eyes, like the local population,” she explained. “He died before he was 40. He wasn’t rich and would have spent a lot of time outdoors, so some lines on that face, probably. His hands and feet were probably calloused and rough.”
As for the Holy Shroud itself, which presents a faded blood-stained picture of a dead man folding his arms (said to be Jesus), Italian researchers made a huge breakthrough in 2024 after reanalysing the cloth with x-rays.
Contrary to a 1980s study, which dated the material to the Middle Ages and thus destroyed its credibility, the Italians confirmed that the original theory could actually be true; the cloth was manufactured around 2,000 years ago in the time of Jesus, meaning the timelines may add up after all.
