Transcription
Hello there, guys. If I were to ask you whose face this is, I can safely say almost anyone watching this video could identify him in an instant. Millions, maybe even billions of people around the world, from Wall Street stock brokers to tribesmen in Papa New Guinea, could recognize this man. Jesus Christ has one of the most easily recognizable and widely known faces in all of human history.
But here's the thing. Did he really look like this? What did Jesus Christ actually look like? This question has sparked interest in recent years with news publications and scientific studies releasing their own facial reconstructions and alternate versions of Jesus's face that seem to question the norm. Mounting evidence seems to show that this face may be wrong. 2,000 years or about a 100 generations separate us from Jesus. So, how does anyone know what he looked like at all? How did we arrive at this face? Well, let's find out.
I think a good way to understand this question would be to start by looking at how the first or earliest Christians understood and visualized Jesus. What did they think he looked like? Well, for starters, it seems like at least to the very first Christians, what Jesus looked like wasn't important. It might be a surprise to learn that the New Testament of the Bible itself is completely silent on Jesus's physical appearance. There is not a single description of what he looks like outside of the fact he has arms and legs.
There is a single verse in the Old Testament book of Isaiah which states that the Jewish Messiah will have no beauty or majesty to attract us to him. Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. Some Christians have inferred that if Jesus was fulfilling this prophecy, he must have been plain, unremarkable, or even ugly in appearance rather than handsome. Outside of that, though, there really is nothing in regard to Jesus's face, hairstyle, skin color, body type, or anything like that in the Bible. The original Christians evidently didn't feel the need to record that information. And the new followers that hadn't met Jesus were just left to wonder.
These first generation Christians also tended to follow the Old Testament commandments of Moses more strictly. One of them being to not create graven images in the likeness of humans or animals. Jesus himself appears to have been included in that commandment. Consequently, seemingly no portrait or physical representation of Jesus was made during his life or for many decades after.
Surprisingly, one of the earliest surviving artistic depictions of Jesus made during this imageless period was not made by a Christian, but someone mocking Christianity. The Alexa Menos graffito is a piece of Roman graffiti originally found in an ancient room on Rome's Palentine Hill. It consists of a crude drawing of a man worshiping a figure with the head of a horse or a donkey nailed to a cross. An accompanying inscription in Greek says Alexa Theon, which might be a somewhat sloppy and misspelled way to say Alexa Sabati Theon or in English, Alexa Minos worships his god.
Most scholars today have essentially interpreted this graffiti as an ancient soy jack meme. It appears to have been drawn by a man or boy mocking his friend or let's say acquaintance presumably named Alexa for worshiping Jesus Christ. The donkey head on the crucified figure is very clearly meant as an insult. And if it is meant to be Jesus, the original artist was basically calling Jesus, the god of Alexa, an ass. It gives us a taste of how the average Roman felt about this new religion of Christianity. The idea that a god would be crucified like a common criminal was a point of humor and mockery, reflecting Roman attitudes towards Jesus and by proxy his followers as weak and enemies of the state.
The exact date of the Lexamos graffiti's creation is uncertain with scholars suggesting dates ranging from the late 1st century to the beginning of the 3rd century AD. If one favors the late 1st century date, the drawing would have been created within 70 years of Jesus's death, thus making the donkey headed Christ possibly the oldest surviving depiction of Jesus. Ironically created by someone trying to insult him.
Now, as time marched on, Christianity gradually spread throughout the Roman Empire, and one by one, the original apostles died out and were replaced by new Christians. These new converts in the 200s AD, unlike their predecessors, for one reason or another, felt the need to depict Jesus artistically. Many of these second and third generation Christians were ethnically Greek Romans from cities like Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome itself. And we know that they first began by tentatively depicting Jesus symbolically rather than depicting him outright.
One symbol that proved to be the most popular was the image of the good shepherd, a young man almost always beardless with youth, wearing a short Greek kiton and carrying a lamb over his shoulders. Curiously, this image already existed and was popular in Greek art long before Jesus showed up. For thousands of years, the creoporos or rambearer was an artistic motif that originally represented a pious man on his way to sacrifice an animal to the Greek gods. This creoporos perhaps unintentionally worked well with some of the stories and teachings associated with Jesus. For example, in the gospel of John, Jesus says, "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." And thus the ancient symbol of the rambearer was reinterpreted not as a man sacrificing a lamb but rescuing it from the wilderness. These early Greek Christians were borrowing this pre-existing symbol and reusing it to represent their new beliefs. In a sense, it allowed them to hide Jesus in plain sight at a time when Christians were seen as antisocial revolutionaries and persecuted for their beliefs. Outwardly disguised as the good shepherd, Jesus looked like a pious representation of someone following pagan practices. But to insiders familiar with the gospels, it was a coded message.
Now eventually, we don't know exactly when, this symbolic representation of Jesus became a literal representation of Jesus. Christians began to visualize him as actually looking like the ram bearer. And this started Jesus's long journey of progressively looking more and more Greek.
With another h 100red years, Christianity not only continued to spread, but started to become more socially acceptable in the Roman Empire. In some regions, recent converts were wealthy and elite members of society. And these elite Christians not only had money to commission artwork, but felt comfortable depicting Jesus more explicitly. Jesus no longer needed to hide. Christian artists of this period began to draw actual religious scenes described in the gospels such as this painting from the Roman city of Dura Europos dated to 232 AD. It depicts Jesus's famous healing of a paralytic recorded in the three synoptic gospels. We can see a very simple drawing of Jesus ordering a paralyzed man to get up and take your mat and go home. As it happens, this is actually one of the earliest surviving depictions of Jesus made by a Christian. He is shown to be a gaunt, clean shaven man with short hair and what I think might be a receding hairline, which is kind of funny. I call him office worker Jesus because he looks like a guy I feel like I would see at the grocery store.
However, this was just one idea of Jesus at the time. Also cropping up around this time in the 200s and 300s AD was Jesus the Roman scholar. These depictions appear most commonly among early Christian communities in the Italian peninsula, such as this painting in the catacomb of Damatillaa in the capital of Rome itself. In the center of the image, a seated man with the air of authority raises his hand to address a congregation. The framing of this image evokes pre-existing works of art in the Roman world, namely depictions of Greek philosophers like Socrates or Plato surrounded by their students. In the man's left hand, he grasps a papyrus scroll, indicating he is educated and probably from a noble or elite background, a fact that is only proven further by his nice Roman toga. You might not recognize him, but this man is Jesus, and the students surrounding him are his disciples. The contrast between this image and that of the good shepherd is almost night and day.
This aristocratic Roman philosopher Jesus is almost unrecognizable. Once again, he is clean shaven, but this time he also has a mop of curly necklength hair, noticeably longer than his accompanying disciples. It would be hard for a Roman or Greek audience to not see the similarities this Jesus would have to contemporary images of Alexander the Great, a man who at that point in history was probably one of the most widely depicted people in the world. Alexander's mane of curly hair combined with his beardless youthful face set a fashion trend that continued into Jesus's time. Alexander was understood to be the ideal philosopher king, a powerful ruler who was also intelligent and wise. By invoking his image, specifically his hairstyle, the artist may have been trying to portray Jesus as someone like the young conqueror. And I've actually seen some scholars argue that Alexander the Great might be where Jesus originally got his long hair from.
Now, crucially, this Jesus wears a toga, something he most certainly never wore nor would have wanted to wear while he was alive. The toga was an article of clothing reserved for Roman citizens. Foreigners and non-citizens like Jesus would have been barred by law from wearing them. And as a Jew, a people who as a general rule were not exactly fans of the Roman Empire, he probably would have thought wearing one was an insult to his heritage. By placing Jesus in a toga, the artist of this painting is making a very strong statement. Jesus was a Roman citizen and far from the condemned criminal mocked by the friend of Alexa. The image has been cleverly calculated to portray Jesus in the most uncontroversial way possible. Jesus wasn't some foreign revolutionary preaching against the Roman state or Roman culture. He was one of us. He was a Roman. Worshiping him and following his teachings shouldn't be seen as dangerous. The painting and ones like it reflect Christianity becoming everinccreasingly more mainstream in the Roman Empire and is something associated with the upper educated classes of Roman society.
It should be noted that Jesus the Roman scholar and Jesus the good shepherd were not mutually exclusive. Though this sarcophagus dated to the 200s AD belonged to a wealthy Roman woman who also happened to be a Christian. You can see her depicted worshiping on the far left. However, in the middle and far right of the sarcophagus, we can see two likenesses of Jesus, the scholar and the shepherd coexisting side by side.
Still other depictions of Jesus from this era combined him with pre-existing images of pagan deities. This mosaic from the tomb of the Giuli discovered beneath St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican dates to the 3rd or 4th centuries AD and represents Jesus in the manner of Soul Invictus, the beautiful and proud Roman sun god on his flaming chariot. As we can clearly see from all these works of art, for most of early Christianity from the 200s to the 400s AD, artistic depictions of the son of God vary greatly and could often contradict one another. He could be poor or rich. He could have short hair or long. He could have a plain face or a beautiful one. He could dress like a Greek shepherd boy or a respectable Roman citizen. There was no real consensus on what Jesus looked like. And it seems to have depended largely on the region and ethnic background of the Christians drawing him who tended to visualize Jesus in ways they already knew and at times made him look a lot like themselves.
But something they all seemed to generally agree on was that Jesus was beardless or clean shaven. Unlike Paul, who by this point in Christian art had been given his characteristic beard and receding hairline, Jesus went about clean shaven and thus lacked one of the key features we associate with him. The reasons for this are actually pretty simple. Sporting a beard in the Roman Empire was kind of viewed as out of the ordinary. Around the time Jesus would have been alive, and for many decades after, shaving your facial hair just stuck to current fashion trends. Most of the Roman emperors up until Hadrien were clean shaven and the Roman public largely followed their example. Certain types of facial hair like mustaches were worn by northern barbarians like the Gauls or Eastern barbarians like the Persians, both enemies of Rome. So some types of facial hair were kind of seen as univilized or foreign. Consequently, to people at the time, especially Romans, a beardless Jesus just would have felt normal. In the same way giving him a toga would be. In all likelihood, if you showed a Christian from this time a modern image of Jesus, they likely wouldn't recognize him. If anything, they might think this was a drawing of Paul or one of Jesus's apostles.
Now, at some point around 300 AD, there was a change. Somebody, we don't know who, where, or when, decided Jesus would look better with a beard. Whoever this artist was, seems to have taken the Roman scholar Jesus archetype and just tacked on a beard, creating the face that even us 1,700 years in the future would easily recognize. The decision wasn't exactly surprising or revolutionary. Giving Jesus a beard was merely a natural progression of something that had already begun when early Christians linked Christianity to Greek philosophy. All the famous sophists like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates sported fabulous beards. And in fact, wearing a beard in the ancient world, particularly the type Jesus was given, was a way to signify you were big into philosophy. We know that the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius likely grew a beard as a way to display his knowledge and interest in the philosophy of stoicism. It was a clear fashion statement about one's character and profession in the same way long hair in the 1960s and '7s was linked to being a hippie. Hippie. Sorry, that was my Nixon. A bearded Jesus did the same thing, linking him visually with Greek philosophy and famous philosophers before him. In the mind of the artist, Jesus was a philosopher, a wise teacher like Socrates or Plato, and like them would have worn a beard to distinguish himself from common men.
This new image of Jesus seems to have resonated with converts and gradually spread over the ensuing centuries. But keep in mind, it would take a long, long time before it would become the standard. The other versions of Jesus we have discussed would endure for several hundred years. This bearded Jesus became a hallmark of Eastern Christianity in Greece and Anatolia, probably due to its large ethnically Greek population, a population with a long history of hairy philosophers. The beardless Jesus or Jesus's on the other hand continued to circulate for quite some time mainly in Western and Northern Europe. There examples of the clean shaven Jesus persisted into the high middle ages. However, by the Renaissance, the bearded Jesus finally won the popularity contest. There were some lastminute attempts to revive the beardless Jesus, particularly by Michelangelo in his cysteine chapel, but these ultimately failed. And as Christianity spread even further throughout the world during the age of exploration, Catholic missionaries on Portuguese and Spanish ships always brought the face of Jesus that had the beard and no other. And here we are today.
Now, although the beard and hair thing has been settled to this day, Jesus's skin color or skin tone remains a matter of debate, at least among artists. And it should be stressed that this is nothing new. More recent depictions of Jesus from the medieval period onward depict him as having pretty light skin ranging from very pale to olive with a few exceptions like the holy face of Luca dated to 770 or 880 AD depicting Jesus as having very very dark skin almost black. However, as a general rule, the earliest Christians seem to have favored bronze hues for Jesus's skin tone, consistent with how men were typically painted in Greek and Roman art. Not black or white, but something in between. To me, it seems likely that Jesus probably had a skin tone similar to those in the Fu mummy portraits, which depict people living in Roman Egypt around the time he lived.
So, in summary, the concept of Jesus possessing long hair in a beard was a later invention that didn't come about until almost 300 years after his death, and it has little to no textual basis for being historically accurate. It was the product of several centuries of crowdsourcing in attempts to make Jesus more palatable and understandable to a Roman and Greek audience by using pre-existing imagery they would have recognized and found familiar. He seems to have gotten his hair from Alexander the Great and his beard from Socrates. Before this face, there were countless rival faces of Jesus. And in truth, any one of these early versions could have beat out and gained dominance over the bearded one. It was just a matter of popularity. One wonders what an alternate world would look like if the scholarly Alexander the Great Jesus or the very simplistic plain one of Dur Europos became the norm instead. Would modern Christians have seen that face in Pieces of toast? We will never know.
Still, the question remains, what did Jesus really look like? Would he look like any of these depictions? Well, as I said before, because no one bothered to describe him physically or create a portrait while he was still alive, we will likely never know. But we can make educated guesses. I would personally argue that based on small details taken from literary sources, we can safely say Jesus probably wouldn't have had long hair. We know this because in 1 Corinthians 11:14, Jesus's Apostle Paul, writing just a few decades after Jesus's death, rhetorically asks, "Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him? But if a woman has long hair, it is her glory." From this line, we can infer that Jews at the time thought long hair was for women. Paul seems to consider long hair on a man unnatural. And it sounds like Jesus would have conformed to this social standard. So, in my opinion, Jesus probably had short hair. By by the way, my my my man Paul, I'm kind of offended. It's kind of it's kind of rude.
Additionally, I think the evidence is pretty strong. He may have had a beard as well. Even if being clean shaven was the standard in the Roman Empire, Jews didn't follow Roman standards. And we know historically from surviving artwork from this period, growing a beard was something Jews preferred to do. These traditionally Jewish beards appear to have been shorter and more closely trimmed than the modern Jesus's philosopher beard. It seems to have almost been like a chin strap with either a light mustache or no mustache on the upper lip. So if Jesus followed Jewish standards at the time, he may have looked something like this. I think it's possible that this original bearded Jesus may have simply been forgotten as the religion spread to regions where having a beard was not the social standard as it was in Judea. I would personally say that the Duropus drawing might be the most accurate, at least in spirit, to what we know from the Bible. Jesus probably would have looked like an ordinary, unremarkable guy that could have blended into a crowd. But again, none of this is exactly certain. The evidence has just lost us. Oh well. The point is that images of Jesus have always kind of been historically inaccurate. Even the earliest Christians basically made him look however they wanted him to look. And for the most part, that meant someone like them. You see, the real Jesus was inside us all along.
Okay, I'll shut up now. I hope you enjoyed this shorter installment of Trade Explainer, and I hope to see you next time. I got a lot on my plate and uh tons of really really cool ideas in the near future for you guys to check out. So, I'll see you later. I'll keep working. Bye.