|
|
|
|
|
Christ Pantocrator from St.
Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai (550 C.E.) There really are no descriptions of Jesus'
appearance in the New Testament; none whatsoever. Nor are there any
meaningful
descriptions in any known early Church sources. St. Augustine of Hippo
made a point of this when he wrote his monumental works in the fifth
century. But starting in the sixth century a new common
appearance for Jesus emerged in Middle eastern art. We see it today in
many pictures of Jesus: icons, paintings, mosaics and Byzantine
coins. This common picture quality seems to have started in the Middle
East about the same time that the Image of Edessa was discovered in 544
CE. Up until then, pictures of Jesus were mostly of a young, beardless man,
often with short hair, often in story-like settings in which he was
depicted as a shepherd. Suddenly, throughout the Middle East, and eventually throughout Mediterranean Europe, pictures of Jesus became frontal portraits
with distinctive facial characteristics. Jesus had shoulder length
hair, an elongated thin nose, and a forked beard. Numerous other
characteristics appeared in these pictures, and some of them were
seemingly strange and 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 pictures 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.
|
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
|
