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Nobody Knows What Jesus Looked Like · Theology Made Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: welcome to the theology made podcast i'm dr jordan vale
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  SPEAKER_00: in today's episode we're going to look
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  SPEAKER_00: at how nobody knows what jesus looked like
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  SPEAKER_00: jesus just by saying his name an image
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  SPEAKER_00: of him showed up in your head
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  SPEAKER_00: long hair somewhere between brown and dark blonde a trim beard always trimmed
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  SPEAKER_00: a calm face lit from the side the eyes turned slightly up
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  SPEAKER_00: towards something off camera maybe he has a white robe maybe he's carrying a cross
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  SPEAKER_00: and whatever just appeared
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  SPEAKER_00: in your head is not his actual face it can't be nobody wrote down what jesus looked
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  SPEAKER_00: like and nobody who knew him left us a picture
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  SPEAKER_00: which come to think of it is a bit strange the gospels are full
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  SPEAKER_00: of small oddly specific details they tell you the name of the man
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  SPEAKER_00: whose ear got cut off the number of fish in the net the color of the sky and
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  SPEAKER_00: then there's that one story in the book of mark of the guy who fled naked and
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  SPEAKER_00: yet not one of the four writers tells the shape of jesus's face the color
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  SPEAKER_00: of his hair whether he was tall or short striking or forgettable the men
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  SPEAKER_00: who walked beside him for three years described nearly everything
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  SPEAKER_00: except the one thing every artist since has had to guess at the face you pray to is
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  SPEAKER_00: a face somebody painted the only question is who and when and why they made him look
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  SPEAKER_00: the way they did let's go to the beginning the old testament has exactly one line
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  SPEAKER_00: that anyone reads as a description of the messiah's appearance it's found in
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  SPEAKER_00: the book of isaiah says he had no form or majesty that we should look at him nothing
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  SPEAKER_00: in his appearance that we should desire him
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  SPEAKER_00: that's not a description of a beautiful man it's a shrug uh meh there was nothing
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  SPEAKER_00: about how he looked worth writing down and when we come to the new testament
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  SPEAKER_00: the gospel writers seem to have agreed they had every chance to fix his image
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  SPEAKER_00: for all time and they spent their words on what he said and what he did instead for
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  SPEAKER_00: the people closest to the person the face was simply not something that mattered
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  SPEAKER_00: and the earliest christians they went a step further they made no images of him
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  SPEAKER_00: at all for a long time and it's not an accident or a lack
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  SPEAKER_00: of skill they had inherited a deep suspicion of religious images straight out of
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  SPEAKER_00: the ten commandments which warned against carving anything to bow down to
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  SPEAKER_00: a movement born inside of judaism did not rush to paint its lord for
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  SPEAKER_00: the first couple of centuries christianity was a faith you heard
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  SPEAKER_00: and you joined it wasn't one you looked at but then something happened sometime in
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  SPEAKER_00: the early 200s in a battered town called dora europos on the eastern edge of
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  SPEAKER_00: the roman empire christians did something new
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  SPEAKER_00: they met in a converted house and on its walls they painted scenes from the gospels
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  SPEAKER_00: a man healing a paralytic a figure carrying a sheep across his shoulders
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  SPEAKER_00: and these are some of the oldest surviving pictures of jesus we have
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  SPEAKER_00: and they're barely older than the church that made them
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  SPEAKER_00: yet the people who painted them had no face to copy there wasn't
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  SPEAKER_00: a portrait passed down there was no description to work from so they pulled
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  SPEAKER_00: from what they had which were the images already hanging in the world around them
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  SPEAKER_00: the shepherd carrying the sheep was a pose romans had been carving for centuries
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  SPEAKER_00: on pagan tombs a stock symbol of care and rescue
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  SPEAKER_00: when christians in the roman catacombs began painting jesus
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  SPEAKER_00: a little later they often made him a beardless young man with soft features
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  SPEAKER_00: and curly hair and he came out looking like apollo or like orpheus or like
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  SPEAKER_00: the young sun god people already knew how to draw
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  SPEAKER_00: the first christian artists they didn't invent a look
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  SPEAKER_00: for jesus they just borrowed what was around them
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  SPEAKER_00: which means from the very first brushstroke jesus looked like whoever was holding
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  SPEAKER_00: the brush and the familiar version the bearded man with long hair parted down
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  SPEAKER_00: the middle that came later
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  SPEAKER_00: by the time the empire turned christian churches grew large and golden
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  SPEAKER_00: that grave bearded long-haired type had taken over and it carried with it an air
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  SPEAKER_00: of authority a regality borrowed from how artists drew the gods and philosophers
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  SPEAKER_00: a famous icon at the monastery on mount sinai painted around the 500s already showed
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  SPEAKER_00: the face most of us would recognize today jump forward to 1940 to
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  SPEAKER_00: a commercial artist in chicago named warner salman
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  SPEAKER_00: he painted a soft glowing head of christ with flowing light brown hair
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  SPEAKER_00: and gentle european features and it was printed onto prayer cards
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  SPEAKER_00: and sunday school walls and funeral programs by the hundreds
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  SPEAKER_00: of millions some estimates put it past half a billion copies and if you grew up
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  SPEAKER_00: in american church that painting more than any sermon
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  SPEAKER_00: or any verse is probably why you picture jesus the way you do hmm
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  SPEAKER_00: the single most influential image of jesus in the modern world was made by
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  SPEAKER_00: an advertising man in the 20th century
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  SPEAKER_00: and it showed a fair-skinned northern european which tells you a great deal
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  SPEAKER_00: about chicago in 1940 and almost nothing about a man from first century galilee
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  SPEAKER_00: because we actually have a fairly good idea of what that man would have looked like
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  SPEAKER_00: and it wasn't that a team led by a medical artist reconstructed the likely face of
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  SPEAKER_00: a galilean jew from the period working from skulls found in the region
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  SPEAKER_00: from what we know about the people who live there the result was a man
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  SPEAKER_00: with brown skin dark eyes
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  SPEAKER_00: short dark hair and a short beard his skin weathered from years of outdoor work by
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  SPEAKER_00: the average build of galilean men at the time he was probably around five feet tall
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  SPEAKER_00: and lean he would have blended into a crowd in his own village
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  SPEAKER_00: without anyone turning a head and that last point that's the whole point from isaiah
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  SPEAKER_00: the absence of his face was never a hole in the record of christianity
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  SPEAKER_00: because on one side it kept his followers from doing
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  SPEAKER_00: the very thing they had been warned against freezing god into
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  SPEAKER_00: an object you could hang on a wall and worship you cannot turn a face into an idol
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  SPEAKER_00: when nobody knows the face
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  SPEAKER_00: and on the other side it set him loose
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  SPEAKER_00: because there was no official portrait every culture that received him got
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  SPEAKER_00: to picture him as one of its own Ethiopian Christians painted him
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  SPEAKER_00: with their features Korean Christians with theirs European painters
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  SPEAKER_00: with theirs he became visually whatever people needed him to be in order
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  SPEAKER_00: to feel like he belonged to them and I do think there is something beautiful in that
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  SPEAKER_00: because a face nobody preserved becomes a face everyone could share but
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  SPEAKER_00: that same door can also swing shut
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  SPEAKER_00: a face you are free to imagine is a face you are free to bend when generations
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  SPEAKER_00: of western christians like myself grew up with a pale gentle european jesus
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  SPEAKER_00: that doesn't necessarily stay neutral it taught people
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  SPEAKER_00: that holiness looked like them and like the people in charge and
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  SPEAKER_00: that image has been used in some very ugly ways and causes over
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  SPEAKER_00: the past few centuries because the moment you get
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  SPEAKER_00: to decide what jesus looked like you begin to decide who he came for
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  SPEAKER_00: show me the jesus in your imagination and i can probably guess where you grew up
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  SPEAKER_00: who taught you and what the people you trusted look like the face
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  SPEAKER_00: in your head is real it just isn't his it's a composite you assembled
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  SPEAKER_00: without meaning to out of a painting in a relative's hallway a felt board in
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  SPEAKER_00: the sunday school room an actor in a film you saw thanks jim canviesel it is yours
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  SPEAKER_00: and it says more about you than about a carpenter from nazareth who left no portrait
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  SPEAKER_00: behind
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  SPEAKER_00: the early christians they could have hired someone to capture his likeness while
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  SPEAKER_00: the witnesses were still alive and they did not they let the face go and kept
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  SPEAKER_00: the words perhaps on purpose because
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  SPEAKER_00: the second you nail down exactly what he looked like you start deciding
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  SPEAKER_00: whose side he's on so the honest answer to what did jesus look like is
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  SPEAKER_00: that we don't know and the people who could have told us chose not to
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  SPEAKER_00: thanks for listening to the theology made podcast if you were encouraged
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