While traditional images of Jesus have imagined him with pale skin, blue eyes, and long flowing blonde hair, and a small beard, the AI programme has given him a much different look.
They show Jesus with olive-brown skin, thick brown hair, a generous beard, and dark almond eyes.
This isn’t the first time scientists and archaeologists have tried to piece together what the iconic religious figure could have looked like.
In 2001, retired medical artist Richard Neave led a team of Israeli and British forensic anthropologists and computer programmers who created a new image of Jesus based on an Israeli skull dating back to the first century A.D.
Like the AI Jesus, their version of the son of God also had olive-brown skin, dark hair, and a beard.
A similar conclusion was reached by Professor Joan Taylor in her 2018 book “What did Jesus look like?” who said he may have been around five feet tall, the average height for a man of this era.
The debate around Jesus’s appearance has swirled in recent years as more people begin to challenge the dominant image of him.
Professor Taylor said this version of Jesus first appeared in the fourth century and that it was heavily influenced by representations of Greek and Roman gods, with heavy influence from Zeus, the Greek God of thunder.
Writing in the Irish Times, she said: “The point of these images was never to show Jesus as a man, but to make theological points about who Jesus was as Christ (King, Judge) and divine Son.”
The image of Jesus was heavily influenced by the Shroud of Turin which several experts have dismissed as a fake.
Speaking to History Today, assistant professor Robert Cargill said: “The Shroud of Turin has been debunked on a couple of occasions as a medieval forgery.”
Mr Cargill added that Jesus would likely have looked like a Jewish Galilean man from the first century.
While the debate continues over what Jesus looked like, there are a growing number of attempts at working out what famous historical figures would have looked like if they’d been alive today, including infamous monarchs.
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Recently, an AI programme reconstructed the face of the controversial monarch King Henry VIII.
The image, posted on Reddit, shows a slightly overweight middle-aged man with short, cropped, but thinning hair with a goatee. It has also given him brown eyes and no earlobes.
As well as changing his face, the AI also changed his clothes. It has given Henry VIII a grey suit and a red and purple shirt. The picture received positive responses from users on Reddit; one wrote that he looked like a taxi driver “that calls everyone love”.
As AI has grown more advanced in recent years, recreating the faces of historical figures has become just one of several uses people have found for the technology.
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