TaborBlog

“All things biblical” from the Hebrew Bible to Early Christianity in the Roman World and Beyond
March 15, 2012

Photoshopped Image of “Big Fish” Exposed as a Fake

Scientists have determined the following image of a man supposedly being swallowed by a large fish, much like the biblical story of Jonah, has been totally computer enhanced, altered, adjusted, and manipulated to give it a decidedly icthyomorphic appearance. Presumably the creator of this deception wants to somehow validate the biblical story that most scholars take to be a myth or legend. The fish image is in fact a blue vase such as the one pictured below, heavily “Photoshopped” to make it look like a fish, but notice, turned horizontally so that no one would imagine it could be a vessel, then tail altered, and fins shaped and added. Then water and ripples were added to give a decidedly aquatic appearance, and a kind of stick figure was drawn in to represent the legs of a human–but oddly, coming out of the pointed base of a jar, that has now become the mouth. The key giveaway was the creator decided to use the same color hue on this vessel for the water, which obviously would not be the color of any kind of fish of this type.

This just goes to show the truth of the old slogan: “If reality won’t do, try Photoshop.” There is nothing wrong with enhancing, altering, or otherwise editing photos, we do it all the time. Filmmakers now use CGI images to create total scenes–witness the opening of the new film Hugo with the breathtaking scene of Paris. The difference is Scorsese is not trying to fool anyone with his creation. It truly looks like Paris and he did not take a photo of London and change it into one of Paris. That is essentially what is happening here. The creator clearly wanted this to be a scene that would remind one of the biblical story of Jonah and the “whale,” or as the text actually has it, “the big fish.” That is fine but anyone who has any sense of reality would know that this scene, as shown here, is obviously faked–and the layers in the photo itself can be easily stripped off, revealing nothing more than an nicely shaped blue vase from antiquity, turned on its side so as to cause no suspicion as to its true identity.

What one could hope is that those who want to support their imaginations or will fulfillments when it comes to biblical stories could move beyond a Sunday-school literalness and come to appreciate the deeper metaphorical meaning of some of the more legendary stories of the Bible.

 

Share
March 15, 2012

More Photos of the Talpiot Tomb Discoveries Released

We have just uploaded a dozen or so additional photos of the Talpiot tomb discoveries at our main web site: thejesusdiscovery.org. They are available for both viewing and downloading and can be used freely by anyone. You can find them under the tab: Photos and Graphics.

Some have circulated the charge that we have cropped, altered, manipulated, edited, “photoshopped,” or otherwise adjusted the photos we have released, while others have even suggested the poor quality of the images is a purposefully sinister move on our part since we don’t want the public to be able to see clearly our findings so we can control their interpretation. These charges and innuendos are as false as they are unfortunate.  Here are the facts:

1. No photos of the Jonah image or any other images from the tomb have been cropped, altered, manipulated, edited or adjusted in any way whatsoever. The photos we distributed were precisely what we took from the camera itself, or still shots taken from our monitors.

2. Because there is no single camera shot of the Jonah image but rather hours of camera footage and hundreds of stills, all taken at varying angles with different light, we asked our CGI people to produce a computer generated composite of what the whole image might look like. Our desire is to make this representation as accurate as possible and as time goes on we will continue to make improvements. The image is oriented downward, with the fish’s nose and “head” of Jonah pointing to the bottom of the ossuary, as is discussed and made clear in my preliminary academic report, in the book, The Jesus Discovery, on the ossuary museum model, and at our press conference in NY on February 28th. In fact this downward orientation was one of the reasons we rejected the nephesh or “tower” interpretation of the image, since an up-side-down monument made no sense to us or to many of our academic consultants.

2. In the case of the four line Greek inscription, the name MARA, and the photos of the “fish in the margins” along the top border of the ossuary, we have posted photos that are “lined in” to show how we see the letters or the images. These marks are clear and obvious. They are done by anyone wanting to illustrate something on a complex photo. So long as the original, unlined version is available, so people can make comparisons, marking features on photos, or otherwise highlighting, is certainly not “manipulating” “altering” or otherwise “adjusting” them with an intent to deceive. Recently several have used such marks to point out other features they want to call attention to–including “handles” they see on several of the images from both 1981 and our shots from 2010-2011. This is perfectly fine with us and the debate and discussion is then open as to whether what one “sees” in does in fact represent what one maintains.

3. No photos on the web site have been taken down, altered, manipulated, or otherwise adjusted. When our web person is in the process of arranging or uploading new photos the site remains live so it might appear to a visitor, for a very short time, that this or that has been taken down or added, but everything is up that we put up on February 28th, with more photos now added. We do continually want to correct anything wrong. For example, two of our photos were labeled 1980 rather than 1981, and we have corrected that. We appreciate anyone pointing out any other errors and we will do our best to correct them. I thank Mark Goodacre for his sharp eyes in noticing that one of the figures in my Preliminary Report is misidentified (the inside shot of the ossuary with the bones, Fig. 7 in my Preliminary Report, was incorrectly labeled as ossuary 5 when in fact it is ossuary 4 as our GE camera man has now confirmed). Robert Cargill suggested that the label “composite representation” for the complete Jonah image we produced should be clarified as a CGI representation and not a photo and we agreed and made that clarification.

We hope these additional photos will stimulate more discussion, collegiality, and “good faith” exchange of views. Once the film is aired in early April on Discovery TV we will no doubt have the green light to distribute live video clips of our filming and many other images.

Share