Forensic Scientists reveal what Jesus may have looked like as a 12-year old

Catholic News Agency ^ | February 12, 2005

[NYer]

Rome, Feb. 11, 2005 (CNA) - Forensic scientists in Italy are working on a different kind of investigation—one that dates back 2000 years.

In an astounding announcement, the scientists think they may have re-created an image of Jesus Christ when He was a 12-year old boy.

Using the Shroud of Turin, a centuries-old linen cloth, which many believe bears the face of the crucified Christ, the investigators first created a computer-modeled, composite picture of the Christ’s face.

Dr. Carlo Bui, one of the scientists said that, “the face of the man on the shroud is the face of a suffering man. He has a deeply ruined nose. It was certainly struck."  

 Then, using techniques usually reserved for investigating missing persons, they back dated the image to create the closest thing many will ever see to a photograph of the young Christ.

“Without a doubt, the eyes... That is, the deepness of the eyes, the central part of the face in its complexity”, said forensic scientist Andrea Amore, one of the chief investigators who made the discovery.

The shroud itself, a 14-foot long by 3.5-foot wide woven cloth believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus, is receiving renewed attention lately.

A Los Alamos, New Mexico scientist has recently cast grave doubt that the carbon dating originally used to date the shroud was valid. This would suggest that the shroud may in fact be 2000 years old after all, placing it precisely in the period of Christ’s crucifixion.

[CyberAnt]

Look .. I spent 3 years studying the Word of GOD - nobody can tell me GOD's own son would be anything but the most excellent specimen of humankind ever born. He would have been tall and strong .. yet calm and determined .. passionate and sentimental .. all at the same time.

In Eph. 4:13 - "Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

While I realize that scripture probably speaks of spiritual stature, I cannot imagine aspiring to a short "fulness of Christ" - you see my dilemma ..??

You can argue that all you want - but I'm already settled with it .. and I'm done discussing it.

[Kolokotronis]

Mathemagician, with all due respect, many Protestants seem, at least to me, unaware that for the first 1054 years of its earthly existence, and in many places for a couple of hundred more years, The Church was in fact the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church complete and undivided. For reasons not here relevant, the Church split into the Roman West and the Orthodox East. From Apostolic times to the 1500s, all Christians, East or West, used and venerated icons. It was not an Eastern or Western, Orthodox or Roman Catholic thing, it was a Christian thing. When the Protestant Reformation took place, Protestant leaders, Luther in particular, for reasons good or ill, determined to adopt a dogma of sola scriptura, a hitherto unknown concept in the Church. By using a sort of Western systematic type theology and cut loose from or rejecting most of what the Church called and calls Holy Tradition, the early Protestant Divines developed a completely new and different religion than had prevailed for the previous 1500+ years and which prevails to this day for most Christians. I must say, from the outside looking in as there has never been anything like the Reformation in the Orthodox East, that when the first Protestants adopted sola scriptura, they threw out the baby with the bathwater. The wholesale rejection of the 1500 year old meaning of the sacraments, the Apostolic Succession, the writings of all the Fathers except +Augustine of Hippo, really did create an atmosphere where every man's a pope and there are more that 2300 Protestant groupings in the US alone, all claiming to have the correct interpretation of the Bible. There are few Romans today who would argue that there were not evil practices which had crept into the Roman Church by 1500. The same is true in the East. But the reaction, which seems to me was really about the particular practices of a particular set of popes and their political allies, was an overreaction brought about by men who had a very, very limited understanding of the practices of the early Church which had been preserved for the most part in the East, though Martin Luther himself had a very high regard for Orthodoxy. You might want to read the series of letters between a group of Lutheran Divines during the period 1574-1582 with Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople. Here is a link to a site which contains the correspondence and has an excellent discussion of the state of the Christian world which formed the backround of the letters. Please read this and you'll understand some of what I have been talking about. http://www.stpaulsirvine.org/html/sixteenthcentury.htm

[k2blader]

No one is suggesting that you MUST believe the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

Already understood. Let me try to clarify based on what the article says:

Using the Shroud of Turin, a centuries-old linen cloth, which many believe bears the face of the crucified Christ, the investigators first created a computer-modeled, composite picture of the Christ’s face.

...

Then, using techniques usually reserved for investigating missing persons, they back dated the image to create the closest thing many will ever see to a photograph of the young Christ.

The huge assumption made here is that the shroud *is* the burial cloth of Christ. The investigators, whoever they are, used computers to "recreate" the face of the person who was in the shroud, supposedly Christ. Then, they took that and "created" another image of the person, supposdly Christ, at a younger age.

So it's pure guesswork three times over. Not to mention the investigators had to have been very subjective about how their "recreations" and "creations" looked in the end.

It's a matter of faith in the shroud more than anything else. Some folks have faith in it. I don't.

[Kolokotronis]

" Um, I'm not Roman, I'm Orthodox.

Nary a difference, filioque or no filioque. "

Well, there are some rather big differences, but good on you for the filioque part! :)

[Kolokotronis]

"Christ is divided"

No, the visible Church is.

"You're guided by the Eastern Holy Spirit, and the papists are guided by the Western Holy Spirit. Gotcha."

Nope again. No "gotcha" Cronos is the Roman; I'm the Orthodox one. As for the Holy Spirit, well we all know He is bilingual, Hebrew and Greek. Translations from Greek to Latin are always troublesome. And we all know He doesn't know a word of English! :)

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[WVNan]

with all due respect, many Protestants seem, at least to me, unaware that for the first 1054 years of its earthly existence, and in many places for a couple of hundred more years, The Church was in fact the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church complete and undivided.

I'm Protestant and I agree with that observation. It's one of many things that Protestants seem to have "forgotten". Were it not for the Catholic Church there would be no Christian Church as we know it.

[Kolokotronis]

"Hallellujah! And to think, we Catholic and Orthodox were debating about this for so long. Seems we were wrong all the while -- Math just told us we're really the same, with nary a difference..."

Well, you know, "out of the mouths of babes...." :)
Probably that "unbiblical" Apostolic Succession, Mariology and Holy Tradition that clouded our vision! Oh, and I forgot, those Father guys, like +Ignatius of Antioch and +Athanasius and +Irenaous and +Jerome and +Augustine and +Gregory and +Basil and +John Chrysostomos and +Anthony the Great; them too!

[Kolokotronis]

"Were it not for the Catholic Church there would be no Christian Church as we know it."

Well, it depends on what you mean by "Catholic". The word has come to mean in common parlance a particular Christian Church and rite centered at Rome. Prior to the Great Schism, the term Catholic was used by the One Church to denote its universality. Today, both Rome and Orthodoxy and I think Anglicanism use the term Catholic in its original ecclesiastical sense. So, if you mean the Roman Catholic Church, I disagree. If the Roman Church didn't exist, Orthodoxy would and the Church would be preserved, and vice versa.

[Cronos]

I would add that many of these teachings are also present in churches that are not Catholic or Orthodox but equally ancient -- the Armenian, the Coptic and Ethiopian churches for example.

[Kolokotronis]

"I would add that many of these teachings are also present in churches that are not Catholic or Orthodox but equally ancient -- the Armenian, the Coptic and Ethiopian churches for example."

Well, they really are part of the Church anyway, the Monophysite language misapprehensions to the contrary notwithstanding (although the Copts can get pretty huffy sometimes!).

[Cronos]

I see: Christ is divided. You're guided by the Eastern Holy Spirit, and the papists are guided by the Western Holy Spirit. Gotcha.

Err.. I am Catholic. There is no division in God.

[aruanan]

most unlikely that He would allow a graven image on HIMSELF to be left behind when He is so opposed to it.

The proscription isn't against images, graven or otherwise; it's against the bowing down and worshipping of them.

Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am the LORD your God.
--Leviticus 26:1

This is where the Muslims screwed up when they ripped off various Old Testament scriptures in constructing their heterodoxy. It resulted in nice geometric art, though.

[Cronos]

Were it not for the Catholic Church there would be no Christian Church as we know it.

With respect to my Orthodox friends, I would say the Church is composed of the Catholic/Western tradition along with the Orthodox/Eastern and also of the Oriental Churches -- the Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Assyrian, Syrian-Chaldean, Marthomite and yes, I'd even include the Nestorians at this point.

[Cronos]

Actually it is pretty interesting reading about the debates between the usage of terms like hypothesis, Theotokos etc. I guess it's all Greek to me ;-P

[Kolokotronis]

" I guess it's all Greek to me ;-P"

Well as we say in the "mother tongue" "Preppi na mathis Ellennika", You must learn Greek!

[olde north church]

" This is derived from Arian belief as Islamm is to a large extent a Christian heresy."
I do wish more people understood this.
Why should more people understand it? That definition is how you say in In-gleesh? Wrong.
The Arianism "heresy" was given that status about 300 years before the birth of what's his name. That "heresy" began within 100 years of the time Jesus and within 100 miles of Jerusalem. Arianism WAS the belief that Jesus was not born divine but ascended to Divinity. There was no need for Him to ascend to divinity. Man is divine by his very nature, it happened when God formed him from the Earth, in His own image and breathed life into Adam.
Just setting the record straight. Oh BTW, the seed for Arianist belief was obviously the result of Hindu or Buddhist missionaries in the Middle East.