Lighthouse Journalism came across an image being shared on social media platforms. The image which looked like a collage of 3D images of a lady was being claimed to be a reconstructed 3D model of mother Mary, mother of Jesus Christ by the Scientists at Harvard. After investigation the claim was found to be fake. This image and claim resurfaces regularly on social media, appearing almost every year.
Claim:
X user @erenfromtarget shared the viral claim on her profile.
There are over 4.5 million views on this tweet.
Check the archive version of the post here.
Other users too are sharing the same claim.
Investigation:
After running a Google reverse image search, we found out that the claim has resurfaced on the social media platforms almost every year.
We found an old article on Huffingtonpost, which mentioned that the picture being shared was that of Lady Gaga.
Pop star Lady Gaga had earlier expressed her desire to play Mary Magdalene from the Bible.
This image was a 3D recreation that soon became a meme.
According to the article: This meme has been making its rounds since 2019 as part of a wider meme trend where users compare a celebrity to an “AI generated image of Cleopatra,” not Mary Magdalene.
We also found the image on the website titled ‘know your meme‘.
We also checked for news reports of Harvard University making a 3D model of Mother Mary, but we did not find anything on the same.
Conclusion: Image claimed to be a recreation of mother Mary by scientists at Harvard is actually an old meme of Lady Gaga. Viral claim is false.
