Shroud of Turin forensics result in image of Jesus as child

Friday, May 8th, 2015

Italian police claim to have worked out how Jesus looked as a child, based on computer forensics applied to the Shroud of Turin’s image.

The police generated a photo-fit image from the negative facial image on the shroud.

From this they reversed the aging process to create an image of a young Jesus, the Independent reported.

They did this by reducing the size of the jaw, raising the chin and straightening the nose.

The technique effectively reverses the method that Italian police use to generate current likenesses of criminals when they have been on the run for decades.

Such techniques were used to produce an image of Mafia boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano, from a photo taken in 1959.

Provenzano was eventually captured in 2006.

The image of Jesus as a young boy, and the methods used to create it, will be the subject of an upcoming programme on Italian television.

But the exercise was done to mark the current public display of the shroud at Turin Cathedral.

It will be on public display for two months, with millions of visitors expected.

Pope Francis is due to visit and pray before the relic on June 21.

Some believe the shroud to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, citing evidence including findings that the cloth contained pollen grains from plants that could only be found in the Holy Land.

But others maintain the shroud is a medieval hoax, citing carbon dating tests for instance.

The Church has never officially proclaimed that Christ’s body was wrapped in the shroud.

The sceptics’ case was boosted when researchers recently presented findings based on bloodstain pattern analysis.

American and Italian researchers did tests with a dummy to see which way blood would have flowed from crucifixion wounds and how they would have stained a burial cloth.

Their tests showed remarkably different staining from that on the shroud.

Sources