It comes up every now and then. So it is no surprise to read at The Jesus Alien Blog, “Jesus was a blonde!”
I am not one of these maniacs tied up in the Jesus’ appearance debate and I am fully open to being corrected, but if you look at the positive image of the shroud of Turin you can clearly see the beard is brighter than the skin colour.
The image on the left is the original and is itself a negative image. The reason you can tell this is because the shadowing of the eyes is brighter than the rest of the face, essentially the blacks are whites. The darkest feature on the face is actually the beard. When a negative of the image is produced (which turns it into a positive), and the contrast enhanced, you get an image such as that on the right.
Now you can see the shading is correct on the eyes, nose, cheeks etc. This is the positive image, essentially a black & white photo of the beaten, battered and bruised Jesus.
However the beard is almost white in this image! In terms of tone, that could easily be either grey or, you’ve guessed it, BLONDE!
REALLY?
We could wonder about a man who was born of a virgin mother, “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father,” as the Nicene Creed says, and thus say that we cannot even speculate that it is highly probable that Jesus should have common characteristics of a majority of Jews in that part of the world during that late—Second Temple era. If that is so, any appearance will work and that includes blonde hair.
Or we can say, forget about difficult and perhaps unnecessary doctrine and dogma; he was plainly Jewish. That means he almost certainly had dark hair. That would apply to his beard if he had one. But his hair color might have been an exception. There were exceptions then as there are today. Blonde works.
But all this presumes that the image represents reflected light as it would if it was a painting or photograph. That almost certainly presumes that the image is a fake or that is miraculously created in ways we don’t understand. If the latter is the case, all bets are off. Blonde would work. Since there are no reliable descriptions of Jesus almost any hair color would work. Purple would not have worked for there would certainly then have been descriptions of Jesus.
But what if the image was formed by some other form of energy — corona discharge, heat or some form of radiation other than light – we can’t imagine how it might have captured color or even lighter or darker tones. If the image was formed chemically, perhaps as the result of a amino/carbonyl reaction, the hair might serve to concentrate greater amounts of heavy amines to react with some chemical residue on the cloth producing what in the end looks like blonde hair. In fact, Raymond Rogers demonstrated this experimentally.
So until we know how the image was formed, we cannot make any assumptions about hair color. And even then unless we know that Jesus’ appearance was not exceptional, we cannot do so. Blonde works. So does black.
We read at alien Jesus:
I absolutely loved the documentary about ‘The Real Face of Jesus’ and I believe that the shroud is 100% real and that it took some fantastic technological process to produce it, even it it was faked 600 or so years ago.
I participated in the show. Glad you liked it. Black hair was an educated guess by the graphics team. And I think the shroud is real and that it was not faked. I’m inclined to think the image is a natural chemical reaction. (I’m not the guy in the show who says he thinks it was a burst of light.)