McManus: Science, faith come together for ‘Real Face of Jesus’

By Mike McManus

I have seen the face of Jesus as he looked after being taken down from the cross!

So have millions of others who watched an extraordinary documentary aired on the History Channel last Tuesday. It was replayed Saturday and will be aired again at 4 p.m. today. How much more appropriate than the umpteenth broadcast of “The Ten Commandments,” which a network airs every Easter.

In Holy Week, which commemorates the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, it was amazing to see how computer artists used cutting-edge technology to reveal what is undoubtedly “The Real Face of Jesus,” as the show is titled.

How was it possible?

Many believe the Shroud of Turin to be the bloodstained linen in which Jesus was wrapped after he was taken down from the cross. “If you want to re-create the face of Jesus, you have only one object, and that's the shroud,” said computer artist Ray Downing of Studio Macbeth; he oversaw the computer graphics.

The ancient 14-foot shroud contains a faint impression of a man's face and the front and back of a human body. While there is no guarantee it was the body of Jesus, it is undoubtedly a crucified man, who was scourged by more than 100 lash marks. On his side, there is a wound as described in the Gospels, which gushed blood that poured around the body, and pooled in the small of his back.

Over time, it has been denounced as a fraud, as far back as 1355 when a Catholic bishop said it was a forgery that was painted on the cloth.

However, in 1978, a team of scientists were allowed five days to examine the shroud and concluded that the image of a crucified man could not have been painted. They did verify that the blood on the shroud was human.

A team led by John Jackson, a physicist, was able to create a 3-D image of the body, using technology pioneered by NASA to estimate the height of craters on the moon. He worked with Downing to create the face of Jesus.

However, in 1988, the Catholic Church allowed experts to take a “carbon dating” sample of a corner of the shroud, to estimate its age. They came to the shocking conclusion that the linen was made between 1260 and 1390. Headlines shouted “fake.” The Shroud of Turin was apparently not old enough to have been the burial cloth of Jesus.

More recent analysis, however, suggests that the section of cloth on the shroud's edge given the carbon dating test might have been added in the Middle Ages to facilitate its handling. What's needed is to carbon date the shroud's center where the image appears.

One piece of evidence placing the shroud in Israel is the fact that tiny spores of a flowering thorn plant, that grows only within 50 miles of Jerusalem, were found in it.

But the mystery of how the image was created remains.

Father John Norris appears in the documentary, saying, “Maybe there is a real miracle here. The power of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth created this image as a byproduct of the miracle of the resurrection. Some sort of energy or radiation created the image.”

This is a perfect Easter story, of science and faith combining to resurrect for this skeptical generation evidence that Jesus was both crucified and resurrected.

The shroud, not displayed in public for a decade, will soon be on view at Turin Cathedral in Italy, this month and in May.

Michael J. McManus, longtime journalist and former TIME magazine correspondent, has written a syndicated column, Ethics & Religion, since 1981 and with his wife Harriet is co-founder of Marriage Savers, a non-profit corporation that works to reduce divorce rates. Comments: mike@marriagesavers.org