snjoseph's Journal: The Hotness of the Christ

The New York Times reports that Eminent Scienticians working with the Italian police have reconstructed the face of Jesus from impressions left on the Shroud of Turin. Yes. You'd think in a country where the prime minister is a notorious fraudster, the police would have their hands full with useful work. But no, apparently the cops had a squad of forensic investigators free to work on the digital reconstruction at the request of Italian television. CSI: Rome must be a boring show.

The article notes that there's been a small outbreak of pseudo-scientific documentaries into the life of Jesus in Italy, declaring the country "awash in crèches and sensationalism." I hardly think that's fair to the Italians. American culture is littered with similar wastes of time; as recently as 2000, ABC News aired a special report on The Search for Jesus.

I call these endeavors wastes of time not because research into the origins of Christianity isn't interesting--it is--but because most of the recent stuff is at an incomparably lower scientific level than acheived a century ago by people like Bruno Bauer and Karl Kautsky. There's more to be gained, in terms of serious historical knowledge, from reading Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity than from watching Peter Jennings inteview some Professor of Theology as he desperately defends his tenure in the age of practical atheism.

In any event, you're probably dying to see what the Lamb of God looks like. Check it out. Here's the article's description:

The image shows a 12-year-old boy with fair, smooth skin, glassy blue eyes, fleshy lips and waves of dirty blond hair streaked with just enough purple and pink to suggest a sprinkling of cosmic dust.

Cosmic dust, eh? Looks like the King of Kings was, in addition, King of the Faeries. Also, Jesus may have been the most Aryan Jew in Palestine until Ashkenazi from Brooklyn started kicking the natives out of Judea some 2000 years later.

In conclusion, if you are going to commit a crime, why not do so in Italy? With their police on the case, you are surely not in much danger.