Italian police 'reveal' what Jesus looked like as a young boy
While arguments persist over the race, colour and appearance of Jesus Christ, Italian police claim to have revealed what the Lord looked like as a young boy.
Hundreds of years after Jesus' life on Earth, police investigators say they have shed further light on the religious figure's appearance using the power of modern-day technology.
Using the Turin Shroud, the supposed burial cloth of Jesus, police investigators generated a photo-fit image from the facial image on the linen.
They then reversed the ageing process to reveal what Jesus may have looked like as a young boy.
Police use this same technique to generate photo-fits of criminals who have evaded police for decades.
Such techniques were used to produce an image of Mafia kingpin Bernardo Provenzano, from a photo taken in 1959. He was eventually captured in 2006.
The photo-fit was created to mark a rare public display of the Shroud, one of Christianity's most celebrated and hotly-debated relics, at Turin Cathedral.
Devotees believe the shroud, which is imprinted with the image of a man who appears to have been crucified, to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
Sceptics are just as adamant that it is nothing more than a Medieval forgery which scientists have carbon-dated to around 1300 years after Christ supposedly died on the cross.
Despite their certainty about the likely age of the most-talked-about length of linen in history, researchers have not been able to explain how the remarkable image was created, leaving space for theories of some sort of miraculous process to flourish.
The Church does not officially maintain that Christ's body was wrapped in the shroud or that the image was the product of a miracle.
But it does accord the cloth a special status which has helped to sustain its popularity as an object of veneration.
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