Finding AI Jesus
Most depictions of Jesus in stock footage have more to do with artistic tradition than historical reality. This pipeline trains on first-century Jewish material culture, clothing, textiles, built environments, the actual world Jesus lived in, and outputs production-ready visuals that creators can use in sermons, documentaries, and spiritual media grounded in what the scholarship actually says.
Finding AI Jesus
The Imago Dei, the image of God, is understood as the divine reflection within the human person. For theologians and philosophers, it is the Vestigia Dei, the traces of God projected outward into the physical world, that connects us to that reflection. There is clearly a line between thoughtful creation but at what point do these images project the desires of the artist, or the programming of an AI, and point away from the divine?
How can we know the difference?
The debate over whether you can make an image of Jesus is part of that same long argument. The church split over it more than once, producing the iconoclast controversy, the Second Council of Nicaea, and centuries of theological argument over what separates an icon from an idol.
Augustine of Hippo defined a sign as something that causes the mind to move toward something beyond itself, and argued that a sign which stops pointing beyond itself and becomes an end in itself crosses that line. That framework was developed in the fourth century.
In today's world, where AI generative images and video can be crafted with a few taps on a phone and full cloth generated by the AI system being used, questions about authenticity, ownership, and ethical use have become more urgent. This project focuses on the most ancient image, the most debated and the most provocative, that of Jesus, as both litmus test and guidepost.
The Research
The question this project asks is whether artificial intelligence can be used to make images of the divine, approached through the most contested image in Western history, the image of Jesus. As the debate over ethical AI use within video game, post-production, and VFX workflows continues to develop, this project offers grounding. By exploring the ancient debate over images of the divine and their purpose in human culture, and by tracing the historical realities of divine imagery in ancient centers of engineering and art like Rome, the project works toward a modern understanding of digitally assisted creative output.
The research began at McGill's Birks building, home of McGill's religious studies department. It then moves outward through Montreal's iconographic religious traditions before moving to Rome.
Rome is where the argument becomes concrete and where our journey begins.
Why Rome?
The ancient Romans were engineers and image-makers who built on every culture they encountered, and the early Christian visual culture was built directly on top of that. The historical record is consistent: humans have always used the tools, images, and ideas available to them to depict the divine. The question has never been whether to use those tools. It has always been how, and to what end, and with what effort.
These explorations will be the ethical foundation the project is built on. Where is the line between thoughtful creation and meanless output? What determines whether an image is ethical? Is the effort or intention behind it?
Starting in August the project will produce a body of AI stock imagery depicting scenes from Jesus' life, held to a standard of historical accuracy throughout. If Jesus drives the money changers from the temple, the coins in that image are correct. Sources are scanned, documented, and cited. No character speaks in these images, instead we will explore if these silent scenes from the bible meet the standard of icon, and not idol.
The JS Project
When the research closes, production opens. The pipeline runs through ComfyUI and ComfyCloud with a custom trained LoRA built from first-century Jewish material culture: clothing, textiles, and built environments from Roman-era Judea and Galilee. Custom Python nodes keep the workflow repeatable. Using modern VFX, post-production, and game workflows, the project recreates first-century imagery through Maya, After Effects, and Unreal Engine, completing a full production cycle from conception to execution including editing, sound, and finishing.
The images of Jesus this project produces is grounded in the historical realities of a first-century Jewish man of the ancient Near East, the world he lived, ministered, and taught within.
Technology
ComfyUI / ComfyCloud
Custom Python Nodes
LoRA Model Training
Maya
After Effects
Unreal Engine
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