Amazon.com is selling the History Channel’s “The Real Face of Jesus,” and indeed all History specials for $1.99. This is not a DVD but a downloadable version that you can own and watch as often as you want on any home computer and many tablets. I bought it and downloaded it to a Kindle Fire. It is the full, ninety minute Ray Downing documentary.
You can still buy the DVD, but it is seldom discounted. It is still a good selling special after one and a half years.
Note: for some reason I don’t look quite so overweight on the Kindle Fire.
A pretty interesting documentary but it must be seen as a possible face of Jesus but always keep in mind that the real face of Jesus could really have been a bit or even a lot different that this one because there’s many data that cannot be extracted from the Shroud like the color of the hair, the color of the eyes, even the possible wrinkles that Jesus could had (for example : aroung the eyes). All those data cannot be accurately extact from the Shroud images and those are very important and can make a pretty big difference in the physiognomy of someone. So, we have to take this portrait of Jesus with a grain of salt…
Also, being catholic as many of you know by now, there’s one aspect of the program that really bug me and that’s all the talks about the gnostics concepts versus the Shroud, which is something I’ve found TOTALLY OFF-TRACK AND OFF-TOPIC… If I were the producer, I would have droped completely all this part of the program to stay focused on the historical Jesus. I really don’t understand what a gnostic concept of the Universe have to do with the Shroud of Turin… To me, this kind of association is borderline to the lunatic fringe.
But beside that, good program that deserve to be seen at least one time by every person interested in the Shroud… To me, one of the best part of the show is when they extract all the blood from the images by playing with the colors. That’s pretty impressive. You can see that the body of Jesus was literally covered with humid blood clots (some more than others, with the result of giving different kinds of blood marks, some really evident and some other much more superficial and hard to see with the naked eye). In fact, this playing of color revealed many marks that are not really visible with the naked eye and we have to assume that they came from near-dried blood clots. It is interesting to note that some blood clots were nearly completely dried when they put to body in the Shroud and to me, this is very consistent with the study of the Sudarium of Oviedo that reveal that Jesus body spend one hour on the cross after his death (vertical position) and another hours on the ground (horizontal position) before being put into the Sudarium. So, in 2 hours, it’s enough for many blood clots that were still humid before death to dried almost completely and only leave a faint mark on the Shroud. Tto me, all those blood details are the most important details that we can see on the Shroud to logically deduce that this cloth is an authentic burial cloth that has contain a dead corpse of a man that was tortured exactly like Christ… I ask this question before, but I’ll do it again : IF IT’S NOT JESUS, THEN WHO WAS HE ??? :-)
Oups, I’ve made a little mistake. I said : “very consistent with the study of the Sudarium of Oviedo that reveal that Jesus body spend one hour on the cross after his death (vertical position) and another hours on the ground (horizontal position) before being put into the Sudarium”. I should have said this instead : “very consistent with the study of the Sudarium of Oviedo that reveal that Jesus body spend one hour on the cross after his death (vertical position) and another hour on the ground (horizontal position) before being put into the SHROUD.”
Anyway, I’m sure you understand what I meant. Another thing I want to add to my comment : This 2 hours conclusion is an estimation done in laboratory. So, the real time frame can well be + or – 30 minutes or so, but in the end, the important thing to understand is that there was a pretty long wait between Jesus death and the moment they put his body in the Shroud and that conclusion from the study of the Oviedo cloth is totally consistent with what we can see on the Shroud concerning the blood marks and also consistent with the gospels account who talk about an unprepared (because it was unexpected) burial rite that was due only to the negociation done by Joseph of Arimathea with Pilate after Jesus death…
When you check out carefully the whole portrait of the Gospels, the Shroud and the Sudarium, IT FITS. IT MAKE SENSE. IT IS LOGICAL.
Last thing I want to say is that I think anyone interested in both the Shroud and the Sudarium should read this great paper about the study that was done on the Oviedo cloth. You can find this paper here : http://www.shroud.com/heraseng.pdf
Dan, you look good in that documentary. Notice that the 3D reconstruction puts some of the bloodstains in the hair, not on the cheeks as proposed by Lavoie. That makes sense. Also, during the 3D reconstruction process, bloodstains was clearly identified in the mustache and beard. That puts a dent in the theory of a double-superficial image in that area by Fanti. Double-superficiality implies that no part of what we see on one side soaked on the other side, this is not the case for blood thinly spread in the mustache and beard as shown in this documentary.
If you would like to see the Real Face of jesus go to my web Site http://www.shroud-image.com This Image came to me throud the Shroud, there is nothing more real about the Shroud than the Image (Face) i have produced simply through my Camera. There is no need for further investigation into the Shroud as this proves its authanticity. The Face came out of the Shroud.
Nice comment Mario ! But that command a few remark from me :
1- The double superficiality, in my mind, only concern the body images and not the blood images. It’s pretty clear that the 2 types of images were transferred to the cloth by 2 different process. So, the blood transfer was a clear natural transfer process that implied direct contact with humid blood clots and those contacts left mirror images of the blood clots (Ref. : Barbet’s book “A doctor at Calvary” and also Adler book “The Orphaned Manuscript”). With a transfer process like that, it’s natural to see profound penetration of the blood material into the cloth and this blood, in many cases, was able to soak all the way to the other side of the cloth. Now, with the body image, it is pretty clear that there was no profound penetration of the coloration anywhere and there’s some possibility (it’s a possibility and not a confirmed fact for the moment) that yes, there are really BODY images on both sides of the Shroud (that we can called “double superficiality images”) but only for some body parts like the hair, the nose and mouth region and the hands and those body images appeared to be only in the back part of the frontal image of the Shroud.
2- If you read Ray Rogers book carefully (and I know you already did !), he talk about a statement from Monsignor Ghiberti who was present in Turin during the 2002 restoration of the Shroud and who said that that the only body image that can be seen with the naked eye was in the hair region. For the double superficiality of the face region, it’s another story because M. Fanti used strong imagery treatment to find an image and that’s surely questionable. Only direct chemical tests from fibers samples of all those regions (hair, face, hands) will tell us if there is really a body image there. For the moment, I think the declaration of Ghiberti have to be taken seriously because it came from an eye witness who surely had no bad intention or any agenda behind his head to said what he had said… But, to be absolutely sure, we have to wait until new direct chemical analysis could be performed on samples from those regions.
Question regarding my 2 comments : If there is still a possibility that those body images (or some of them) are really there on the back part of the Shroud, why the fact that there’s blood in those region that were able to soak deep into the cloth can contradict the hypothesis of a double-superficial image made by Fanti and confirmed partially by Ghiberti’s declaration ? I always thought that this concept of double-superficiality only concerned the body images and not the blood images…
There’s another question I have regarding what Mario said about the penetration of the tiny blood stains in the beard and mustache area : Is it confirmed that those tiny blood decals are visible on the back part of the cloth ? I ask that because it’s pretty clear from the transmitted light photos of Barrie Schwortz that not all blood marks were able to soak very deep into the cloth. Some of them are not visible in the transmitted light photos, meaning that those are pretty superficial. It is the case for many scourge marks, especially in the frontal part of the cloth. So, I’m curious to know if those tiny blood stains are superficial in nature or if they really were able to soak deep into the cloth and stain also the back part of the Shroud… I think the photo of the back part of the Shroud (published by Flury-Lemberg) could give us the correct answer to this question.