News flash: Jesus was five-foot-eight, quite swarthy, not blond and looked nothing like James Caviezel or Willem Dafoe.
Jesus was not movie-star handsome, nor even handsome at all. And he certainly didn’t have blue eyes.
Behold the “real” face of Jesus.
This startling image was painstakingly “lifted” from the Shroud of Turin and reconstructed by computer for the History Channel special, “The Real Face of Jesus,” which airs next week.
How did they do it?
Jesus’ real face was “recreated” by taking the encoded information and the blood on the shroud and then transforming it into a 3D image, Ray Downing, president of Studio Macbeth, told The Post.
“We ‘lifted’ the blood and isolated it [on the computer],” he said, ‘so that would sit ‘in air’ [on a transparent background].”
Since the Shroud of Turin was wrapped around and not simply draped on the body, the blood was transferred to the cloth as it was wound, and therefore did not align with the places on the face from which it originated.
And what about the rest of the brownish image that appears on the cloth?
Popular theory has it that the image was created when body oils oxygenated on the cloth where it touched the body.
Downing disagrees. “That is a hypothesis that no one has ever tried to disprove and it is easily disproved,” he says.
He claims that his technique of computer imaging actually uncovered what substance created the image and thus enabled him to see for the first time since The Crucifixion, the actual face of Jesus.
Downing told us, “I will reveal at the end of the show the type of event that must have occurred 2,000 years ago” to create the image on the Shroud.