Wednesday 23 December 2015

The Real Face Of Jesus?: Using Forensic Anthropology

                         

Its not the kind of face we see in Passion Of The Christ or Jesus Of Nazareth or any Christian movie depicting Christ. This one is different. You can imagine science's attempt at desiring to know how our Lord looked like!


The supposed new face of Jesus Christ  has a darker skin tone, broader nose, and different hairstyle.
But how was this arrived at?

Richard Neave, a forensic anthropologist and former professor at the University of Manchester used three skulls dug from archaeological sites in Galilee, Northern Israel to facially reconstruct a more legitimate outlook of how Jesus would have looked like. The skulls were of men who lived at about the time Jesus was on earth.

Forensic Anthropology is basically used for biological identifications of human beings especially from corpses that are mutilated,  badly burnt or where only  skeletons are available. It can be used to ascertain age, gender, ancestry and stature of individuals just by studying and evaluating their skeletons. It is a vital technique  used in solving crimes.

Professor Neave fed the skulls into a computerised imaging machine and by evaluating their thickness and size, came up with an  appearance closer to what  Jesus might have looked like then.
Furthermore, to determine the 'likely' colour of Christ’s hair, he used ancient drawings at archaeological sites and studied the Bible to get the correct length.

It had to take Judas Iscariot to identify Jesus among the "ordinary looking" fishermen from Galilee before he was arrested. He looked like the others.

The fact is, no human being living 'has seen' Jesus and described his features to us. Professor Neave only used what men looked like then to project an "estimate image" of Christ. Neave said this was the " best shape" of Jesus image as reported by the Independent.  Not a bad attempt though but might still be far fetched since the original skull of Jesus wasn't because... He rose from the dead. Besides, anybody then could have looked like that.

This technique is used by the police to identify suspects and victims of crime with high success rate when  the  only available material was their skeletons.

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