Jesus Christ Appears on Walmart Receipt

A South Carolina couple found Jesus this past week. More specifically, they found what they believed to be the image of Jesus Christ staring back at them from a Walmart receipt. They also believe that it was a sign from God.

Gentry Lee Sutherland and Jacob Simmons left a receipt for developed pictures on the kitchen counter in Sutherland's apartment for three days, but upon returning home from church services found the receipt on the floor. Simmons told NBC affiliate WYFF in Greenville that "it was like it was looking at me."

Looking up from the bottom of the receipt appeared to be the image of a face.

"Then the more you look at it, the more it looked like Jesus, and it was just shocking, breathtaking," Simmons said.

Sutherland and Simmons are regular church-goers. The couple said they believed that the image was a sign directly related to their recent visit to church for a Wednesday evening bible study.

"We had a message on knowing God, abiding in him," Sutherland said. "(The preacher asked) 'If you know God, would you recognize him if you saw him?'"

Simmons said he called Walmart and asked how such a thing could have occurred. He was told that "the only way you could really get it black was to put heat on it."

But he and Sutherland maintain they did nothing to the receipt paper.

The Internet has run wild with speculation, explanations, and reproachful condemnations. Besides an image of Jesus Christ, others have offered that the likeness resembled a young Joseph Stalin, actor Adrien Brody as Charles Manson, the crafty Russian adviser Rasputin, and the Zig Zag rolling papers man.

"People are going to believe what they want to believe," Sutherland told the New York Daily News .

"There's tons of people who will say, 'Oh, we're in the Bible Belt,' but here's my question to the doubters, who else has the power to put their face on a check-out receipt but Jesus?"

The doubters and skeptics would most likely explain the facial image by stating that the only power needed to raise an image on the receipt paper was an applied heat source. Walmart receipt paper is a commonly used thermally activated thin paper. It is coated with a dye and an emulsion that, when heated (via heat printer in most cases), leaves a black image. Besides the receipt characters normally found on a Walmart receipt, a heat source can turn the entire paper black.

But people are always finding Jesus Christ in the strangest places. Although there are no likenesses of the Christian messiah available from the time when the young Jewish rabbi lived and died, his followers have seen his image on Cheetos, in cat's fur, on the back of a Texas moth and even in a jar of Marmite. The most famous image of Jesus, of course, is the revered Shroud of Turin, although scientist's have studied the material of the shroud and found it to be 600 and 800 years old.

Sources:

"Couple Sees Jesus In Walmart Receipt," WYFF4.com

Mike Jaccarino, "South Carolina couple claims to possess Walmart receipt with the face of Christ," NYDailyNews.com