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What did Jesus look like?
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What did Yeshua ben Nazereth (aka Jesus Christ) Look Like?
Sometimes things go on for so long that we just take them for granted. As young child growing up in the south attending a Southern Baptist Church, I never thought much about the ‘traditionally accepted” picture of Jesus hanging on the wall.
All our Sunday School books were full of the same pictures and even God was pictured as the smiling grandfather figure with a full flowing white beard. I always thought it was Santa Clause moonlighting!
My father was the Senior Minister and I would often ask later, “dad is this what they really looked like?” He would respond cryptically, “we are all made in the image of God, which means he looks like all of us.” Yea, this really cleared things up!
Many years later, my dad ever the rebel started a series of classes on the “True appearance of Jesus.” The classes were met with incredulity and anger. Seems old Southern black Christians were just fine thank you, with the traditional pics hanging on the wall.
Now we could get into all kinds of racial and psychological dynamics with this revelation, but that is not the focus of this article.
With matters of race the issues often get cloudy and confusing, because unlike ethnicity, genetic and gender descriptions race is a strictly ‘social’ method of identification. And therefore open to all kinds of speculation.
Getting into the conversation about what Jesus really looked like is kinda' like saying Obama is either black or white. Since he is both, who gets to pick? Well, usually it’s the dominant culture that decides and since that is still white males, we are supposed to accept that he is black.
It was the dominant culture in antiquity that also got to draw Jesus the way they would have wanted him to look.
Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, associate professor of world Christianity at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, GA, commented: "While Western imagery is dominant, in other parts of the world he is often shown as black, Arab or Hispanic."
If you want to get biblical, “ His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire” (Rev. 1:14). Now you can interpret that any way you choose, but wools hair is not long flowing european type hair.
Jewish Theologian Marvin Wilson had this to say; No one knows for sure how Jesus looked in the eyes of his contemporaries. However, there is evidence that suggests the hair of Jesus may have been rather short—black or dark in color—and his beard closely trimmed.”
Most recently extensive research into this was done and the facts discovered are contained within this exerpt from Religious Tolerance.org:
Richard Neave, a medical artist retired from the University of Manchester in England, and a team of researchers "started with an Israeli skull dating back to the 1st century. They then used computer programs, clay, simulated skin and their knowledge about the Jewish people of the time to determine the shape of the face, and color of eyes and skin." Mike Fillon followed the research and wrote an article about the portrait in "Popular Mechanics" magazine. He said during a CNN interview that: "There are very strong rabbinical laws in Israel that you cannot tamper with a skull or any bones, so they needed to reconstruct the skull. Using a cat scan, which is very common in hospitals, they were able to recreate the skull precisely and make a cast of it. Then they put small wooden pegs, based on anthropological data, to figure out what the muscle structure and the skin would look like, and so they layered that on using clay-like substances."
The result is shown in the left portrait above: a person with abroad peasant's face, dark olive skin, short curly hair and a prominent nose. His height would have been on the order of 5' 1"; he would have weighed about 110 pounds. Alison Galloway, professor of anthropology at the University of California in Santa Cruz , said that: "This [portrait] is probably a lot closer to the truth than the work of many great masters."
Is it really important what Jesus really looked like? In the whole scheme of things probably not because Jesus most likely appears to everyone in a different way. But it IS important in that if we are ever as a nation to get beyond racial issues we must begin to be honest with each other. Race must cease to be an issue on applications, reports and other non -medical documents. We must begin to refer to people by ethnicity and nationality and treat each individual as unique and different. And we must begin to provide portraits for future generations that reflect those truths discussed today.
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