mX: Where journalism goes to die.
If anybody happened to be on Melbourne public transport yesterday, you may have chanced to have an mX unwantedly thrust upon you (or wantedly, if you’re a bit of a masochist). If so, it would have been hard to miss the giant headline blaring at you from beneath the pictures of socialite Posh Spice and well-read political commenter Kevin Federline . For those of you who missed it, the bold white letters horribly typeset across the page screamed out:
‘The real face of Jesus’
But instead of seeing what I was expecting to see from such a bastion of journalistic integrity and moral guidance, i.e. something like this…
…we got more of the same ol’ same ol’ — namely, a white guy with a big nose and some vaguely semitic facial hair.
Now, don’t get me wrong. If archaeologists found physical proof of the existence of Jesus and were able to construct a realistic portrait of him from that evidence, I’d be interested. It wouldn’t make me believe he was the son of god anymore than the existence of leprechauns would make me believe that Lucky Charms are part of a nutritious breakfast, but at least it would confirm that he actually existed.
Overall, I must confess that when it comes to the existence of Jesus I’m on the fence and not really convinced it matters — even if there was a real Jesus, the Jesus of the bible is still a fictional construct as much as the Pilate of the bible is a fictional construct (and we know there was a real Pilate!). But hell, it’d be nice to know that all of this craziness is based on something.
Needless to say, I really shouldn’t get my hopes up. The article begins…
The face is familiar, yet has only now been revealed for the first time — Jesus Christ as he really looked.
Familiar? Really? Let’s play a fun game — which of the following pictures are supposed to be pictures of Jesus:
If you guessed ‘all of them’, you are correct! Of course, that’s only a taste of what’s to come…
Computer artists recreated the face of Christ using digital technology, taking information and blood encoded on the Turin Shroud — the blood stained linen that many believe was the burial cloth of the crucified Jesus Christ — and transforming it into a 3D image.
That’s how they’ve recreated the face of Jesus? They’re using the freakin’ Shroud of Turin? Really? The same Shroud of Turin that has been dated to approximately the thirteenth century (which, for those of you playing at home, is about thirteen centuries after it should appear) and which can be replicated using only techniques from the middle ages?
Love me gently with a sledgehammer, mX, please, please tell me that you’re kidding…I mean, I get that this is about the level of quality that we’ve come to expect from you, but surely you should be relegating something like this to page three, maybe page two if I’m being generous? Was it really that slow a news day? Did no minor celebrities fall pregnant or confess to an eating disorder? No puppies riding skateboards to raise awareness about the plight of inner-city tadpole hunters? No mysterious correspondence from somebody claiming to be Harold Holt thrust into the future by a Chinese submarine experiment gone horribly awry? This is really what you consider to be important, front page news?
Jesus wept…
I’ve noticed a few things of this type lately.
Could it be an outcome of the atheist convention, maybe ‘they’ are scared that we may become as organised as them!
There was Ablett’s diatribe and even a chatbox comment during an IT online seminar in regard to Easter that “remember, Jesus is the reason for the season’.
[...] Cross posted from Divisible By Pi. [...]
[...] out of it? If that’s the real face of Jesus, my arse is a divine pogo stick; not to mention the credulous print reporting we’ve already had to deal with. Why not break from tradition — send out information about something different for a [...]