For for two thousand years, theologians and historians have argued about what the historical Jesus Christ might have looked like. In Renaissance art and by the Catholic Church, the Son of God is generally shown as a towering, muscular European with long, blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Most historians believe, however, that a carpenter’s son born in modern-day Palestine would have the same physical traits as the inhabitants of the time: a shorter, stockier frame, and curly black hair.

However, owing to an amazing artificial intelligence technology developed by a Dutch photographer and digital artist, the debate may have been settled once and for all. Bas Uterwijk, an expert in algorithmic picture synthesis, created a magnificent portrait of Jesus using the machine-learning capabilities of the application Artbreeder. His “historically accurate” portrayal of the Messiah contrasts sharply with Western art and ecclesiastical representations of the Messiah.

Is this the genuine Jesus? The AI-generated image of God’s Son. “I have a background in Computer Generated Images and Special Effects,” Mr. Uterwijk explained. “The artificial intelligence software utilizes a neural network trained on photographs and paintings of thousands of human faces.

“This application allows you to blend different sources of faces and merge them into a synthesized form, driven by the user’s artistic judgments. It’s what I use to make historical and imaginary figures. “I used several cultural depictions of Jesus of Nazareth of Byzantine and Renaissance origin including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi”, and the Turin Shroud, tweaking the ethnicity to a more convincing Middle-Eastern face.”