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It is clear to those who study the New Testament that there are no
descriptions of the physical appearance of Jesus in scripture. Early documents
of the period offer no help. By the 5th century, Augustine of Hippo was making
the claim. The earliest depictions of Jesus most showed a young, beardless man, with
short hair. He was often depicted in story-like settings as a shepherd. Then suddenly, starting in the sixth century, a new common appearance for
Jesus emerged in Middle eastern art. We see it today in hundreds of icons,
paintings, mosaics, and Byzantine coins. This common quality seems to have
started in the Middle East about the same time that the Image of Edessa was
discovered. Now with modern image analysis technology we can clearly see that the
portraits in numerous works of art are most probably sourced from a single image
and those pictorial characteristics. Those characteristics are found on the
Shroud of Turin. Some most notable and telling portraits include: A Chrysanthemum image found on the Shroud is particularly significant. What
makes this so is not just the prominence and clarity of the image on the Shroud,
but the fact that this flower is depicted accurately, as to its likeness and
relationship to the face, on some early icons and coins. This includes the
Pantocrator icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery and the seventh century Justinian
solidus coin. |
The
scientific study of the Turin shroud is like a microcosm of the
scientific search for God: it does more to inflame any debate than
settle it.”
It is
simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was
made.”
Scientist-Journalist Philip Ball Nature, that most prestigious of scientific journals, that once had bragging rights to claim that the Shroud was fake, responding to new, peer-reviewed studies that discredit the carbon 14 dating and show that the Shroud could be authentic. WHAT WE KNOW IN 2005
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Jesus, in the
newer depictions, had shoulder length hair, an elongated thin nose, and a forked
beard. Numerous other characteristics appeared in these portraits and some of
them were seemingly of no particular artistic merit. Many portraits had two
wisps of hair that dropped at an angle from a central parting of the hair. Many
works showed Jesus with large "owlish" eyes. Paul Vignon, a French scholar, who
first categorized these facial attributes in 1930, also described a square
cornered U shape between the eyebrows, a downward pointing triangle on the
bridge of the nose, a raised right eyebrow, accents on both cheeks with the
accent on the right cheek being somewhat lower, an enlarged left nostril, an
accent line below the nose, a gap in the beard below the lower lip, and hair on
one side of the head that was shorter than on the other side.