Recent research surrounding the famous Shroud of Turin believed to have been used to bury the body of Jesus Christ after he was crucified, claims to have dated the cloth to around the time the Messiah would have been alive. A team of Italian researchers utilized X-ray technology to date the item to roughly 2,000 years old, refuting past research findings.
Following the latest research on the shroud’s legitimacy, artificial intelligence was employed to recreate the face depicted on the shroud. The results were shocking, similar to the historical depiction of Jesus Christ that has endured for centuries.
Executive Director of CrisisPub Eric Sammons posted on X, sharing an image of the AI-created image, “Amazing AI-generated image of Jesus Christ based on the (authentic) Shroud of Turin. It’s a good reminder of the fact that God became a particular man at a particular moment in history. This is no myth. We worship the God who became one of us!”
In the 1980s, research surrounding the cloth suggested that the fabric was a replica from the 14th Century. “If the cleaning procedure of the sample is not thoroughly performed, carbon-14 dating is not reliable,” said Dr. Liberato De Caro of the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council, the most recent study’s lead author.
He added, “This may have been the case in 1988, as confirmed by experimental evidence showing that when moving from the periphery towards the center of the sheet, along the longest side, there is a significant increase in carbon-14.”
The most recent study with the X-ray technology concluded, “‘The data profiles were fully compatible with analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, found at Masada, Israel [Herod’s famous fortress built on a limestone bedrock overlooking the Dead Sea].”
“To make the present result compatible with that of the 1988 radiocarbon test, the Shroud of Turn should have been conserved during its hypothetical seven centuries of life at a secular room temperature very close to the maximum values registered on the earth. Fabric samples are usually subject to all kinds of contamination, which cannot be completely removed from the dated specimen,” the latest research added.
Christian conservative commentator Michael Knowles weighed in on the news, “So skeptics don’t know how to explain this, this shroud. What’s odd about the shroud, though, is there is this faint image of a man on there, but it doesn’t appear to be paint. Doesn’t appear there does appear to be maybe a little bit of blood, but it’s not all blood. What’s even stranger is the image that’s on the shroud appears to be a photographic negative of the image of a man something somewhere between five foot seven and six feet tall, a man who appears to have been tortured, a man who appears to have a crown of thorns on his head, a man who appears to have been crucified, but it’s a photographic negative, as if it were produced by a spurt of light, rather than paints or anything like that. And no one’s known what this is.”
Featured image credit: Dianelos Georgoudis, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turin_shroud_positive_and_negative_displaying_original_color_information_708_x_465_pixels_94_KB.jpg