Floating in total darkness, free of weight and temperature, a retired college professor from Australia, Dr. Colin Perry, once at Deakin University in Melbourne, “died” after a heart attack. We had his account last week.
Upon realizing he might be dead, fear set in, and he began sinking toward a bottomless void. Desperate, he cried out, “Jesus, help me!” A Hand immediately grabbed his wrist, and he was pulled upward at hyperdrive speeds.
To cut to the chase: Dr. Perry arrived in a dimly lit, cloudy environment where he was surrounded by six or seven angels. With them was Jesus, Whom Dr. Perry recognized by facial features matching three-D models of the Shroud of Turin. Though the angels possessed incredible power and wisdom, they deferred completely to Jesus.
Dr. Perry described the Person he saw as resembling not just the Shroud but also Prince of Peace, a celebrated painting by artist Akiane Kramarik. In October she told a podcaster that an apparent childhood disappearance had sent her family and police scrambling to find her, but the artist who famously painted Jesus at age eight says she was somewhere no one thought to look. (“I recall I am in this entire zone, I’m seeing my whole family and all the dogs and all of the police below,” Kramarik said.)
Kramarik added she was just five when the actual incident occurred in Missouri, recalling that what she says was as a journey through another realm for nearly seven hours. Her parents called police to help search for her, fearing a kidnapping.
At any rate, she painted the image three years later and we placed the two images (hers and the Shroud) side by side and certain impressions linger.
Both show long hair framing the face and a full beard, and in each the nose is long and straight, the whole countenance elongated and solemn. But the differences are just as plain. The Shroud’s eyes are closed or barely discernible, the image faint, ghostlike, almost without detail, while Akiane’s Christ gazes out with open, luminous eyes, his face fuller, more symmetrical, and bathed in deliberate light and shadow, a living presence rather than a trace left on cloth.
There are good reasons for the gap. The Shroud is not a portrait in the ordinary sense; its image is subtle, and the weave of the cloth, the way it would have draped over a three-dimensional body, and the complexities of photographic processing all complicate any reading of it.
Akiane’s work, by contrast, is a deliberate artistic vision, rendered in color and drama, and the two cannot fairly be compared as though both were simple photographs.
It must also be said that long hair, a beard, and a prominent nose are the common vocabulary of Christian art going back centuries, so some resemblance may simply reflect a shared tradition of how Christ has long been pictured.
One detail is especially intriguing: Akiane has said she painted Prince of Peace at age eight after a series of recurring visions, and that she later found a carpenter whose appearance matched the face she remembered, using him as her model. Her painting, in other words, was never meant as a reconstruction of the Shroud, which makes any echo between them all the more curious to some.
There is a resemblance, most noticeably in the nose, the beard, and the general proportions of the face, but it is not overwhelming. A more telling test would be to convert the painting to grayscale, align the eyes, nose, and mouth, and superimpose it on the Shroud image to see whether the underlying proportions truly correspond.
We asked two versions of A.I. to do just that (render Akiane’s image in grayscale, aligning the features with the Shroud) and they came up with this:
And after making the hair conform, this:
Even then, the faintness of the Shroud and the interpretive hand of the artist would keep any conclusion from being definitive.
Did Akiane, like Dr. Perry, accurately portray Jesus, and if so, did she accurately depict Him?
It remains, for now, a fascinating question rather than a settled one.
We’ll stick with the original:
