The names of the three males used as models for depictions of Jesus back in the days of Greek Gods sound like a perfume, a handbag, and a Harlem theater. Orpheus had superhuman skills and hung out with Jason and the Argonauts, a Toronto band. Hermes was the god of a dozen things, including travelers, thieves, shepherds, and handbags. He had wings on his heels, just like his cousin Mercury, and is regarded as a “divine trickster.”
Apollo was one of the really big names in Greek and Roman mythology. He used spiritual mediums (in those days, they called them oracles and prophets) to deliver messages to mere mortals. Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, was his chosen messenger. If you’ve read Who Was The Oracle of Delphi? you know those with enough pull to get past the doorman’s velvet rope and enough money pay the bouncers a steep cover charge got private sessions with Pythia (curated by the priests, no doubt).
Who would’ve thought the models for the earliest Jesus pictures would be a lobbyist, a trickster, and the Six Million Dollar Man? And why was Jesus depicted with a beard when all three models were clean-shaven?
When Did Jesus Go A.I.?
Machine learning, knowledge engineering, and roboputers of all kinds work a lot like a kaleidoscope
The small bits that look like colorful fish tank gravel are loaded inside the tube and the mirrored device is sealed. The physical bits never change, but as you turn the tube, they take on a nearly infinite number of new forms.
The gravel represents all the information fed into memory for a specific computing task. The patterns that change when you twist the tube is the software scanning at the same contents from lots of different perspectives. Looking at things in different ways
A.I. image company Artbreeder trained its neural network on thousands of photographs and paintings of human faces
The software took the faces visual artist Bas Uterwijk fed it, no more, no less, and put them in a blender. Uterwijk says he fed his machine a Leonardo da Vinci portrait and the Shroud of Turin, then “tweaked the ethnicity to a more convincing Middle-Eastern face.” He made no mention of Salvador Dali, Vincent van Gogh, or the guy that paints the dogs playing poker and smoking cigars.
Artbreeder’s model did everything right
It obeyed Uterwijk’s instructions, no more, no less. Using its own secret formula, the tool put together a composite of all the faces in its inventory, again no more, no less. Yet Uterwijk made changes to the composite because in his judgment, his computer, following his instructions and performing his calculations, was unable to produce a satisfactory Jesus face.
After using A.I. to lend scientific credibility to his drawing and to make for a great headline, Uterwijk added that he was happy with the cultural part of the depiction. “But at the same time I felt it lacked any historical accuracy. So I changed the hair and beard to a more credible length and style for the time and region and I brought in elements found in some Egyptian mummy portraits, pushing the renaissance art to the background.”
So Uterwijk drew what he thought Jesus should look like. It’s alright with me. I’m just sayin.’
Joan Taylor, author of What Did Jesus Look Like? has a long list of accomplishments in religious history. A Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London, Taylor calls Jesus “The iconic Jew of the first century that everybody knew about.”
Technically speaking, Jesus was a homeless wanderer
Above is a forensic reconstruction of an adult male from that time and place. Jesus was from the area. He was born in Bethlehem, lived in Egypt for a time, and settled in Nazareth of Galilee. That means it is highly unlikely that Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jew, would have long blond hair or blue eyes. Men back then did not have the luxurious long hair we see in church art, or long beards, either, because lice were everywhere. I wasn’t there, but I’d wager Jesus of Nazareth never wore a getup like the one below. It looks more like that Bee Gees hair guy or one of the Fabios on the cover of bodice-rippers at the airport bookstores.
The Jesus pictures billions of kids saw taught them that the Son of God was a fair-skinned man, with long, light-colored hair and blue eyes
As kids, we didn’t know it, but we were seeing a bowdlerized version of Jesus of Nazareth. Bowdlerizing is modifying existing works by removing, adding, and changing original words and meanings, sanitizing words for your protection. For a closer look at bowdlerizing, click here.
People who study such things say one particular painting of Jesus has been reproduced more than one billion times
No wonder it came to define what Jesus looked like for generations of Christians. It’s called Head of Christ and it was drawn in 1923 by Warner Sallman, an illustrator and commercial artist from Chicago. As the story goes, Sallman had long been exasperated because none of his sketches looked like how he imagined Jesus appeared 2,000 years ago. His prayers were answered at two o’clock one morning when he suddenly shot up, leapt out of bed, and did a 24-inch by 24-inch charcoal sketch of the Jesus he had just envisioned.
In 1924, his sketch appeared on the cover of the first issue of The Covenant Companion, a youth magazine of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden. Nearly 40 years later, Sallman was commissioned to paint his Head of Christ in color. He did, and this version has been seen by so many people that millions would easily pick Sallman’s Jesus out of a lineup.
White Jesus
Some say Jesus was whitewashed so that fair-skinned churchgoers could find it easier to relate to someone who looked like them. Another explanation for the bleaching is the conversion of slaves to Christianity. More than a few plantation owners reckoned that if Jesus looked anything like the slaves, it would mean colored folk would think they were better than their white owners. This explanation says Jesus was painted to look like a slave master, someone that slaves feared. A third thing to consider is that the Chicago artist may never have seen a man from the Middle East.
When software is combined with robotics, lots of things happen. Here’s the headline someone sent me last week:
What Jesus Really Looked Like FINALLY Revealed After 2,000 Years
At last, satisfied with its appearance, Uterwijk took his A.I. Jesus robot to St. Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne, Switzerland. All of the robot’s responses were built around bible verses. The model was directed to give answers from the New Testament and not use gender pronouns, which would lead to Jesus being identified as they, which is nonsense to all but a few.
NBC said this “deus in machina” was developed by a team at the Immersive Realities Research Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Forbes called the A.I. Video Jesus, “a heavenly hologram radiating serenity.” Nearly a thousand people entered a confessional booth and spoke to the A. I. Video Jesus through a standard confessional screen.
A church and a confessional are hardly the neutral site needed for real research, so the event was really more like a demonstration
It may be why the experimenters chose the confessional booth, where the face is dim, the lattice blocks our view, and we can’t really see his lips moving. Watch and listen to a few seconds of Laptop Jesus here.The horrid lack of synchronization between the sound and the robot’s mouth movements ranks right up there with K-pop star Lisa. I’m willing to hypothesize that people’s confidence in videobots will be lower when the fake singing is obvious than when it’s crooned by someone like The Velvet Fog.
Once scientists get videobots’ mouths to move better than Barney Rubble’s, an interesting experiment would be to compare how lip synching <sic> religious advice delivered by an avatar or hologram or robot relates to trust and confidence.
Move over and make way for videobots because they’ve come a long way from Pac-Man, Toto
The first ten results for <online A.I. Jesus> were sites advertising their own A.I. Jesuses. The eleventh was a free online sermon generator. Most are apps that let you have live video chats with their “Jesus.” My favorite was a site where talking to Mr. Jesus is free, but you’ve got to pay $2.99 to chat with Satan. Other players have since joined up, so now we can talk to Mary and Joseph, Adam and Eve, Noah, and John the Baptist, with more new robots on the way. I’ll bet Elvis Jesus will be along soon.
The Southern Baptist Convention issued a stern warning through its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in An Evangelical Statement of Principles
“We deny that the use of AI is morally neutral. It is not worthy of man’s hope, worship, or love. Since the Lord Jesus alone can atone for sin and reconcile humanity to its Creator, technology such as AI cannot fulfill humanity’s ultimate needs.”
One popular talking point cites Jesus saying, “Many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many people.” Matthew 24:5
Bonus
In the days of early Greek theater, someone decided the actors portraying gods would appear more godly if they could ascend to and descend from the heavens above somehow. So the roadies and grips built a crane to raise and lower the gods from above. This was a clever special effect for its time.
They called it Deus ex Machina, god out the machine. Down the gods would swoop from the heavens to rescue the heroine when all was surely lost. They’d snatch her up at the very last moment and carry her away safely to a divine realm, a utopia of eternal joy. The last-moment-life-or-death-rescue puts people who have been around for a while in mind of Dudley Do-Right rescuing Nell Fenwick from Snidely Whiplash.
Will the real Jesus please stand up?
