Artificial intelligence has recreated the “face of Jesus Christ” from a piece of cloth some believe was used to wrap him after his Crucifixion.
The Shroud of Turin has divided opinion for centuries, with some claiming an outline of Christ’s face can even be seen in the material. Others routinely dismiss it as a forgery but new technology used by Italian scientists suggests that the 14ft linen sheet may indeed date back to the time of Christ.
And now, AI has been used to reinterpret the enigmatic holy relic to reveal the “true face of Jesus”. The Daily Express used cutting-edge AI imager Midjourney to create a simulation of the face behind the shroud.
The images appear to show Christ with long flowing hair and a beard – much like many classical depictions of him. There appears to be cuts and grazes around his face and body, pointing to the fact he had just been killed.
While sceptics believe an unknown 14th-Century artist faked the “shroud of the Messiah” using powdered paint on either a sculpture or the body of a model, many Catholics are convinced that the bolt of cloth was somehow imprinted with Christ’s image at the moment of resurrection.
In the 1980s, radiocarbon analysis determined that the cloth used to create the shroud dated from the mid-1300s, shortly before its documented history began.
But Dr. Liberato de Caro from Italy’s Institute of Crystallography, using a new method known as Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering, has sensationally claimed that the fabric is a good match for a similar sample that is confirmed to have come from the siege of Masada, Israel, in 55-74 AD.
Dr de Caro has cast doubt on the accuracy of carbon dating. He wrote: “Moulds and bacteria, colonising textile fibres, and dirt or carbon-containing minerals, such as limestone, adhering to them in the empty spaces between the fibres that at a microscopic level represent about 50% of the volume, can be so difficult to completely eliminate in the sample cleaning phase, which can distort the dating.”
He added that, because the X-ray scattering technique is non-destructive, the same sample could be tested by labs around the world, helping to confirm his findings.
In additional support for his claims, Dr de Caro pointed out that tiny particles of pollen from the Middle East had been lodged between the fibres of the linen, ruling out the common belief that the shroud is a European forgery.
While there is no hard evidence of the Shroud existing before the mid-1300s, a similar relic – which supporters believe was the same object – was reportedly stolen from a church in Constantinople a century before.
It bears the ghostly image of a man around six feet in height who bears wounds consistent with whipping and crucifixion. With the invention of photography at the end of the 19th Century, the shroud was photographed – revealing that the negative image was much more vivid than the faded “scorch mark” visible to the naked eye.
Over the years, a number of sceptics have attempted to recreate the centuries-old image, with mixed results. While the balance of probabilities lies with the object having been produced by an unidentified faker in the mid-1300s, whoever created it would have had remarkable, almost supernatural skill.
Various popes have endorsed the Turin Shroud as a miraculous relic, including Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis in 2013, but the Catholic Church as a whole has no official position on its authenticity.
