It sounds impossible, but within the last few years, forensic scientists created a picture of Jesus from the shroud of Turin.

Now they’ve back aged that image, taking off more than 20-years to construct the picture of a boy.

Using equipment they usually use for solving crimes, forensic scientists have created an image they say this is what Jesus would have looked like at the age of 12.

Investigators use the equipment to enhance photos to age missing children or create pictures of suspects. But in this case, at the request of an Italian TV station, they tried to unlock a 2000-year-old mystery.

Italian detectives arrived at a police sketch after launching an investigation.

Reconstructing the image of a man many believe to be Jesus Christ, then seeing what that man looked like as a child.

“Without a doubt, the eyes… That is, the deepness of the eyes, the central part of the face in its complexity,” said Andrea Amore, Italian Police Sketch Artist.

It was the skills of Amore which arrived at the rendering.

He began with an image taken from the shroud of Turin.

The shroud was discovered behind a jewel encrusted crypt and many believe it is the burial cloth wrapped around Christ.

Computer enhancement reveals the imprint of a face on that cloth.

“The face of the man on the shroud is the face of a suffering man. He has a deeply ruined nose. It was certainly struck,” said Dr. Carlo Bui, Forensic Expert.

The team took that faint image and was able to use computer modeling to develop a picture.

The computer then could make assumptions about features at a younger age.

Of course there was some guess work.

“I understood the very moment to stop the drawing… When it was enough that was to be the face,” said Amore.

In current investigations, police can use DNA and compare features of living relatives.

With this picture the features may be right, but there is no way to know other things like eye and hair color.

In downtown Salt Lake City people were curious but skeptical.

“You can guess as much as you want, but no one’s really seen him,” said one observer.

Most said they’ve never given much thought to what Jesus looked like as a 12-year-old boy.

For believers this new image may be the closest thing to a photograph of Jesus of Nazareth as they will ever see.

Ironically, this picture was created at the same time new research was published about the shroud of Turin.

Scientists are casting doubt on some testing from 1988. They now believe it could be at least 2000 years old.

A Los Alamos, New Mexico scientist has recently cast grave doubt that the carbon dating originally used to date the shroud was valid. This would suggest that the shroud may in fact be 2000 years old after all, placing it precisely in the period of Christ’s crucifixion.