Why Don’t The Gospels Describe Jesus’ Appearance?

Dr. John Nelson, welcome to Within Reason.

Mr. Conor, great to be here. I'm smiling so much because it's a thrill to finally bring you on the show. We've been friends for a number of years, uh, and we always just have the the best conversations, always edifying, although I think that is probably more in one direction than the other most of the time. Off camera happens all the time. We've traveled around the world to theological sites and had debates and discussions about Christianity, which I honestly think have, in fact, people who've listened to the show a bit will have heard your points, will have heard me mention you by name, uh, on on a few occasions, including recently to a certain Dr. Peterson, uh, will have heard you, you, you reference specifically a lot of the things that you've taught me about Christianity and biblical scholarship have seeped into their channel. And I've been practically begging you to come on the show, so I'm, I'm so glad to finally sit down with you and, uh, and do this. I'm finally here.

Within Reason. Yes, yes, yes. Within. We'll, we'll try to keep it within reason. And, um, but, but hopefully not just within the podcast because you also have a Substack, which is [Music] [Music] www.behindthename.com. Saying that because you're my friend, um, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's really a thrill to finally have you here. We're here to talk about the physical appearance of Jesus. What did Jesus really look like? Is the, is the question of the day. Um, I wanted to ask you about a headline from Forbes from 2018. Science Reveals the Face of God, and it looks like Elon Musk. Yes. Has science taught us that that God, Jesus, looks like Elon Musk? Was this a SpaceX funded study?

Um, so the study that's being referred to there is, I think, it's called The Real Faces of God in America. It's a 2018 article. Some researchers at the University of, uh, Chapel Hill, um, or North Carolina in Chapel Hill, yes, um, uh, got a representative sample of the American public, I think about 500 Americans, to pick faces which they thought resembled God's own appearance. Um, and it turned out that they found what, what is called an egocentric bias in our kind of imagination of God. Um, so if you're, um, and this, this is along the lines of, I think, race, um, uh, and age, and youthfulness, and attractiveness. Attractiveness is another one. If you're attractive, you're going to imagine God is attractive. If you're old, you're going to imagine him as old. Um, and I think liberals, interestingly, imagined God as slightly more feminine, slightly more darker skin. I wonder whether implicitly that's because they're thinking of Jesus's appearance, and they know that Jesus wasn't the sort of Caucasian man that Western art has often made him out to be. But, um, it was actually Middle Eastern. Yeah. I mean, and so they've, they, they sort of took the amalgamation of all the different faces that people said looked sort of most like God, and they put them together, and allegedly, it's supposed to look a bit like Elon Musk. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if you see the result. When you, it doesn't not look like him. Um, we'll put it up. I think that would say something very interesting about the American people as a whole, in terms of what, what do Americans see as divine? Is it, is it truly Elon Musk? I, I think it might have something to do with the headline that that sort of motivated seeing Elon in the, in the face of God there. Um, but it is interesting to think about how people see themselves in God, because it seems not to happen across all dimensions. For example, you know, uh, you say an old person might imagine an old God, a good-looking person, a good-looking God, but a woman is unlikely to imagine a female God if they're, like, a Christian, for example, because there, there are some indications in Christian scripture as to what God is like. You know, God is male. Um, outside of that, there's very little in terms of his, you know, when, when Jesus appears, his hair color, his height, his skin color, this kind of stuff. And so it's, it's interesting to think about why certain things are specified. We know he was male, but we don't know his precise skin color, for example. Um, why that was sort of considered important and not. And I want to talk about that, but first, I want to ask you, uh, given that you've, you've just completed a PhD in the physical appearance of Jesus, which is a, a sort of fascinatingly specific area of research within the, within theology. Um, the first question I want to begin with is that question: What did Jesus really look like historically speaking? What can we know about the physical appearance of Christ?

Well, it's one of the strange things. So my PhD was from a biblical studies perspective, and it's one of these very strange things that the Gospels don't actually describe Jesus's physical appearance. So we, we have sort of fleeting glimpses into his wardrobe, um, in a few few moments in the Gospels. Um, John talks about his seamless tunic. Um, we have instructions to his followers about what they're to wear on their missionary journey, so when they're ambassadors of his, his own ministry, so presumably, you know, Jesus was wearing something similar. But when it comes to actually the physical likeness of Jesus, we don't really get anything. And so what I was partly doing in my PhD was working out, is that even surprising in the first place? So I, I essentially read, I think, around a hundred biographies, so the whole corpus of ancient biography from 400 BC to 400 AD, and I found that the evangelists, the Gospel writers, were the only biographers in antiquity not to mention their subject's physical appearance. And so sometimes this is a very fleeting glimpse, maybe it's just a general reference to the beauty of of their subject, um, or maybe it's just a a particular attention to some, uh, physical trait. Um, sometimes, as in the case of writers like Suetonius, who writing shortly after the evangelists or maybe contemporaneous to, um, the later evangelists, he gives us a full-bodied sort of physiognomic description. So this seems very important to the ancients. Um, uh, Elizabeth Evans, who's a classicist, talks about antiquity's physiognomic consciousness. So this is the idea that you can read someone's character, their ethos, or their nature, their physis, from their appearance. So if I want to understand who this person really is in their character, which is what ancient biography was all about, I describe their physical appearance. So it's actually very striking that the Gospels don't do this. So maybe we can sort of fill in some of the gaps. Um, uh, the best study of this was a 2018 study by Joan Taylor, who's a professor in biblical studies at King's College London. She wrote a book called What Did Jesus Look Like? And she comes up with, I suppose, a fairly sort of average-looking Jesus for the time. So he's certainly not the sort of white Caucasian, maybe attractive, um, blond-haired depiction that we often have in the West. He's probably honey-colored in his skin, maybe a sort of dark, dark honey complexion. Um, Yossi Nagar, who is a specialist biohistorian, he, um, he's looked into the sort of the genes of, um, Jews of the time in Palestine, and he thinks that if you take an Iraqi Jewish male today, that's probably the closest, um, that we can find, um, to, to the appearance of Jesus. Um, so we can, there are lots of different areas we can explore in terms of his, his traits, but just on the level of his, his complexion, we're not to imagine, um, the sort of the, the white Christ, obviously, that, that we've often made out to be.

Yeah, I'm really interested in this ancient biography is so heavily invested in the in the image of their of their subjects because this is this is important. I mean, in the modern age, we like to think, you know, it doesn't matter what you look like, what matters is on the inside. But clearly, talking about some grand warrior, you want to describe them as as tall, maybe beautiful, and you want to describe them as standing proudly, this kind of thing, because it's important to the kind of person you're dealing with. This would give us a lot of insight into who Jesus was if we knew how he held himself, right? If we knew if he towered over everybody, or whether he sort of everybody sort of couldn't even see him through the crowd. This would, this would tell us a lot. And so it's really fascinating to think that if you read the Gospels, you wouldn't notice necessarily that you haven't been given a depiction of Jesus, because it's something that's not there. But what you're saying is that as far as ancient biographies go, this is actually quite extraordinary. Because how much of Jesus's appearance is described in the Gospels? Is there, is there any indication? I mean, do they sort of not describe it at all?

Cool. So there was an interesting article in, uh, JBL, the Journal of Biblical Literature, by a scholar called Isaac Soon. And the article, called, I think, "The Little Messiah." And it looks at Luke 19:3, which is the classic Sunday school story of Zacchaeus climbing the sycamore tree, you know, because he wants to see Jesus, and he needs to climb the tree because he's small. But if you look at, you know, both the Greek and the English, I mean, it's the same. It says something like, "He wanted to see Jesus from the crowd." I mean, Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus from the crowd, but he was not able because he was short in stature. Who's, who's he, who's, um? So is it Jesus or is it Jesus short, and that's why he couldn't see Jesus? Or is Zacchaeus short, and that's why he couldn't see Jesus? So, so the classic approach, at least in sort of recent studies, has been to say, we know it was Zacchaeus because Zacchaeus is introduced in Luke's Gospel as, um, I think, a chief tax collector and very wealthy. And, you know, I mean, last night we went to, uh, King's College Chapel in Cambridge, and we heard The Magnificat, which opens Luke's Gospel. You know, "He has sent the, sent the rich empty away." You know, "He feeds the hungry, but he sent the rich empty away." So this is one of the themes running throughout the Gospel of Luke, um, is that Jesus is one who comes to the poor, he comes to liberate the poor. So Zacchaeus is your sort of classic baddie in the Lucan narrative, and so by being short, this seems to sort of accentuate that negative character. This is doing what ancient biographers do of of of, uh, you know, pointing to a physical aspect of a character to imbue their character with a certain interpretation.

Yes. And, and there is a certain sort of embarrassment about short height. So, uh, Suetonius in his life of Caesar Augustus gives quite a glowing description of the, the sort of godlike emperor, um, and then mentions that there was a, there's a record that, uh, Augustus was small, and he's very quick to say, "No, I have an eyewitness source that says that he wasn't small, he was actually 5'9." So that gives us an indication of, you know, what was considered sort of medium to tall height. Yes. And also an indication that this is important to to people. That it's, I mean, it's important. We like to think that height doesn't matter today. It still does to a lot of people, but particularly in terms of our sort of political leaders or or or mythological figures, I guess, I guess height can imbue a sense of of of power, of stature. I mean, in terms of, um, there is, uh, that narrative, uh, in the Jewish scriptures about King Saul. And King Saul is chosen as king, why? Because he fits the physiognomic profile. It says he stands head and shoulders tall above the rest. So here we have a sort of ideal king being set up because of his height. So in casting Zacchaeus as small, maybe this reflects something negative about his character. Um, as well. Um, but it's possible that the Gospels were actually saying Zacchaeus had to climb a tree to see Jesus because Jesus was short, because Jesus was short. And so if this was the case, and bear in mind that the crowd is mentioned in the narrative, then you could imagine, you know, a person of moderate height not being able to see Jesus if he's sort of tucked away within the crowd. Yes. So maybe Zacchaeus was just a normal height and had to climb up the tree. Um, and Soon supports, um, this contention very interestingly by pointing to other philosophers in the ancient world like, like Aesop, like Socrates, who were also known for their short height. So maybe what's going on is Luke is actually enhancing this sort of Socratic, Aesopic like characterization of Jesus. Um, and there are hints of this actually in Luke's special material. So, so the material that Luke alone has amongst the evangelists. So, that is, that is when you say the evangelists, you're talking about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Yes. The, uh, canonical Gospels. And when you say, uh, the Lukan sort of special sources, you mean that which appears in Luke's Gospel, but alone, alone gospel. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Material which might tell us about Luke's special interest. So The Magnificat, I mentioned earlier, would be part of that. And Magnificat is a sort of prayer that appears at the beginning of of Luke's Gospel. And thanks, thanks for altering me for for going to church, by the way. I'm not jumping on board with this whole cultural Christian thing that's that's going around at the moment. Something in the air. But we did want to see King's College Chapel yesterday in Cambridge, and it was shut except for Evensong. That's why I was there. Okay. Won't have any more, uh, more conspiracy theorist comments. Won't out you any further. My Christian conversion that's supposedly forthcoming. Um, so, okay. Jesus may have been short, but probably not. I think this is unlikely. So, you know, 19 centuries of interpretation go by, and there's no real indication that, um, people were reading Luke, Luke 19:3 as an indication that Jesus was short. So, you know, we have people being referred to as a Zacchaeus, for example, in the tradition because they are short. So we know, we know that people were reading Zacchaeus as the short one. Okay. Um, but I mean, Soon raises the interesting point that this might be because of our able-bodied bias. So I actually was reading a letter that C.S. Lewis wrote, I think in 1940, and he says, you know, it's so difficult to imagine our Lord as shorter than us. Um, so I think we maybe we don't like the idea of Jesus, the sort of perfect embodiment of this, this charismatic leader, as shorter than us. Um, so maybe, maybe that's sort of playing into the interpretation. But I think for the reasons outlined earlier, um, this kind of physiognomic connection with, with Zacchaeus as being a sort of arch baddie, is quite a, quite a good reason for us to think that he is, he is the small one.

It's so interesting to hear C.S. Lewis say something like, "Oh, I, it's so difficult to imagine Jesus as short." When the whole point of Jesus is like, it's so difficult to imagine my God on a cross. It's so difficult to imagine him poor. It's so difficult to imagine him, you know, this is, this is why, um, even today, uh, many religious traditions reject Jesus as God on the grounds that God would not lower himself. And that's what Christianity celebrates. So it's, it's interesting to hear C.S. Lewis there saying, "Oh, well, you know, I wouldn't think he should." Well, I think I think he was almost being surprised at himself for that. But, um, so, so, you know, I suppose the ancient equivalent of the cosmic skeptic would be Celsus in the late 2nd century. He writes this, this critique, this anti-apologia of Christianity. And in it, he mentions that Jesus, as he says, "as they say," they say is usually a sign that he's referring to something that he's heard Christians say, um, "as they say, he was short and dishonorable and ugly." So there is perhaps some indication in the second century that Jesus was already being remembered in this way. The question is, does this tell us anything about the historical Jesus? Because I think they may have got this idea from Isaiah 52:53, the sort of the fourth Servant Song, as it's sometimes called, which imagines this figure who is, who is marred in his appearance, is disfigured, had no beauty that anyone should desire him. And it also refers in verse two, I think, of the LXX, the Greek translation, that he was stunted like a plant in its growth. So this is where the kind of the idea that he was short in stature would come from. Um, I don't think he's getting that from Luke, because Luke, um, at least in the, in the infancy narrative, says that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. Yes. That's the same word. So if Luke was later going to present Jesus as small, and I, I should say here, not everyone thinks that that infancy narrative is is original to Luke. Increasingly, there's sort of a growing number of scholars who, who, um, who don't think that. But it would be strange for Luke to say that Jesus grew in stature, almost giving us a picture of ordinary development that we often get actually in ancient biographies, only later to say that, um, he was actually short in stature.

So my question was wrong. My question was wrong, you know, asking about whether the Gospels describe Jesus's physical appearance, because of course, this isn't the only place where we can get our information about Jesus. But, but is that, is that really it in the Gospels, in the actual canonical Gospels, is that the only time where we maybe get something like an indication of what Jesus looked like? You know, his, his, his height, his, his skin color, his hair color, you know, the shape of his, you know, like anything. You said about the clothes that he wore, you know, they, that he, the tunic is mentioned, uh, around the time of the crucifixion. Um, so we've got something about clothing, maybe, but like, is there anything else?

So in terms of his physical traits, um, Craig Keener, there, there's a scholar called Keener who thinks that because Jesus is able to slip away from the crowds unnoticed, that there was nothing sort of especially important about his appearance. Although I think this kind of disappearing act is a kind of, um, almost like a polymorphic, um, uh, occurrence. It's, it's almost Jesus being, it's almost Jesus being able to, um, transform himself so that he goes away unnoticed. So this also happens in Luke's Gospel at a point as well, where he's trying to evade enemy danger. So I wonder whether this is more part of the Lukan and Johannine depiction of Christ as divine in some sense, right? Um, as opposed to, you know, telling us anything about his, you know, average looks. Yeah. Um, but Jesus is really shadowy in the Gospels. I mean, if you think about it, in, say, if we take Mark's Gospel, how old is Jesus in Mark's Gospel? I don't know. Mark never tells us. How old is, how old is Jesus in John's Gospel? Well, at some point, he becomes, he becomes sort of 33. But I guess in John's, this, this is unique to Luke. So Luke gives us this indication that he's around the age of 33, and he, he's not very precise about it. Okay. In John's Gospel, though, there is this moment where people say, "You are not yet 50." And I think one of the early church fathers, it may have been Irenaeus, um, took this as an indication that Jesus must have looked 40 or like on his way to being 50, opposed to the younger age. But this is just to say that the Gospels give us very little in the way of idiosyncrasy when it comes to Jesus, not only in relation to his appearance, but also in relation to his voice. Voice was very important physically in the ancient world, um, in relation to really anything that would mark him out as a specific individual. Um, it seems like what the Gospels are doing is they're enhancing his kind of paradigmatic character, so as to uphold him as, as the Son of Humanity, someone who all of us can emulate. It seems like that's one of their primary purposes. And so to present him as someone we can emulate, we want to downplay those things that would set him apart as an individual. And I think, you know, how terrible would that be if we actually knew what the Son of God looked like, you know, in his, in his details? So because we would forever say, you know, imagine if we, we were told by the Gospel that he had short hair, surely we would imbue some kind of symbolic significance to this. And looking at you, I would say, "Oh, Alex, you're looking divine because you've got this, you've got this lovely short hair." Say that anyway. Um, but actually looking at you now, Alex, um, and I'm, I'm speaking historically here, I think this is probably not too dissimilar from what Jesus would have looked like in terms of his hair.

Well, there you have it, folks. You can, uh, take that to the bank and smoke it. Um, does, does Jesus look like Elon Musk? No. But perhaps Alex, perhaps he looks like me? No. But so short hair was very much the fashion of the time, really. So not the sort of long flowing beards, um, or long flowing hair with this kind of wavy with a sort of middle parting. This seems to derive from, uh, the Letter of Lentulus, which is this late 15th-century forgery, which was written by this, uh, this governor of Judea. By the way, "press," that word, that Latin word doesn't appear in documents until the 3rd century AD, so we know this is a blatant forgery. But it's a description, this letter, which is written, I think, to the Senate and to the Roman people, is a letter describing Jesus's appearance. And it's, it's very odd because it, it almost, the whole purpose of the letter is to describe Jesus's appearance, suspiciously. And it tells us that he had the, the hair of an unripe hazelnut, which we're not supposed to imagine is a kind of alien green. It's, I think, it's supposed to be a sort of light brown. So this is, I think, sometimes people try to say that, uh, Leonardo da Vinci modeled his depictions of Christ on on his gay lover or something like this, or which I think was one of the Popes. It's not. It comes from this, this letter of Lentulus, which was so popular at the time, this description with the middle parting, the wavy hair from the ears down, um, and tall, attractive, handsome, and so on. H. Now, now you mentioned the fact that it's, it might have something to do with the desire to be able to see yourself in Christ, that leads to this motivation to not describe his physical appearance in the Gospels. Your PhD, if I'm not mistaken, is specifically about why Jesus's physical appearance is not really described in the Gospels. Is that your ultimate conclusion? That that was in the back of the mind of the writers of the Gospels?

So, so not exactly. So I don't think it's this kind of like individualistic attempt to get us to see ourselves in Christ. I think they were playing down his idiosyncrasies so as to play up his character, right? So he is one that we, we can emulate. Say, this is what's important. This is what's important. It's the way that Jesus lived. Now, as Luke says, "Go and do likewise," or in John, um, you know, "I have shown you what it is to love. Now love one another." So this kind of, um, this purpose of imitation is very explicit in the Gospels. In Mark's Gospel, it's all about taking up your cross and following Jesus. So Jesus goes to die like a slave, and his disciples are expected to do the same. Um, in Matthew, it's much more Jesus as the rabbi, and we are students of the rabbi who go along on this kind of Mosaic journey with Jesus. So, so this element of imitation seems to be very important. And I think that's particularly prevalent in lives of philosophers. Now, what was interesting, I found in my PhD, was that lives of philosophers are the least inclined to, or at least disposed to, describe their subject's physical appearance. In so far as maybe the Gospels resemble lives of philosophers more than other sorts of lives, maybe what they're doing is less exceptional. Um, but it's still striking that we don't have an appearance of Jesus as both a royal figure, so he's the Davidic Messiah, as Matthew makes very clear in his genealogy, um, but he's also a divine figure. And I mean, divine, uh, if you were an elite male, you were expected to manifest, um, your, your proximity to the gods by being beautiful. Okay. So we talked earlier about how beauty is an indicator of who you are by nature. This is the kind of the fixed cosmos of the, the sort of the ancient Stoic conception. You're beautiful by nature. So if I look at you and I see beauty, I know that you're sort of destined to be elite in this society and close to the gods. Um, and what's interesting is that the Gospels do play into this to some degree. So Jesus has a Transfiguration where almost his divine identity is disclosed. So you have the, the, his, his garments turn white, I think Mark says, so white that no bleacher could ever bleach them like this. In, it's a very, sort of intimate description. Um, but we're not told that Jesus was beautiful, as we might get as with Athena in The Odyssey, or with other, um, divine epiphanies. So, or with, with David, with David in the, in the Jewish scriptures, as well, is described as beautiful. So there were these opportunities, I think, there were these typologies that the Gospel writers could have easily tapped into, and for some reason or other, uh, they made a, they made a choice not to. I think given that, uh, given that there's such a preponderance of descriptions in ancient biography, that this was probably a deliberate move. And you may see subtle hints of this in the Lukan Transfiguration narrative, because Mark describes the Transfiguration as a metamorphosis, so literally a, a change in form, okay? A change in outward appearance. Um, but Luke, instead of telling us anything about the beauty of the Lord, he, he says that the, the appearance of his face changed. So we're not sure how it changed, but the appearance of his face changed. And some people have suggested that this is aping the theophanies of the Old Testament, where what is a theophany? It's a visible manifestation of the Lord. Often we think of the Lord today as kind of immaterial and formless. This is not how the ancient Israelites, um, pictured God. They thought that God had a body. They thought that God could, um, could walk around in the garden with Adam and Eve and so on. It's not that, um, Jesus, uh, or God does not have a body. It's that you should not image his body. You should not make a graven image of it. So that's the prohibition. It's not that Jesus, uh, it's not that God does not have a body. This is much later. This comes with a kind of Platonic influence, I think. But what's interesting is that in these theophanies, we, we almost catch a glimpse of God, but it's, it's the language is often that of analogy. You know, his hair was was like wool, or, you know, his feet were like bronze, and so on. It's very similar to the, the theophanic description we get of Jesus in, in the Book of Revelation. So it's not a description of the physical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth as he was walking around, but it's this highly theologically symbolic description. Um, and I think maybe there is this reticence to describe Jesus, just as there's a reticence to describe the Lord in the Old Testament. So Luke drops the language of or of metamorphosis and replaces it, um, and says that the appearance of his face changed. So it's not even that his face changed, but the appearance of it. So this might be echoing some of the distancing strategies that go on in theophanies in the Jewish scriptures. So it may be that it's not that the, the Gospel writers, uh, felt like they could describe Jesus's appearance, but there was actually a kind of something part of their Jewish background was actually pulling them away.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, we went to a church in Nazareth, maybe a couple of years ago or something. I can't remember what the church was called. You know the one I'm talking about, right? I, uh, was it the Church of the Annunciation? The Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, where churches from around the world, Catholic churches from around the world, had sent in artistic, uh, depictions of Mary and the baby Jesus. And so you had the same image of Mary holding the baby Jesus, but there were, I don't know, maybe like a hundred of them or something, all sort of around the perimeter of the church. And, you know, European countries had a European Mary and Jesus. Ethiopia had an Ethiopian-looking Mary and Jesus. Thailand had a Thai Jesus and a Thai Mary. I mean, these artistic renditions, I suppose they weren't asked explicitly, although I don't know, to draw, you know, Mary and Jesus to look like you. They were just told to send in their rendition. When somebody like when somebody from Thailand, when that artist sits down and draws, I mean, it was an extraordinary church because of these images. Somebody sits down and draws this, this Thai Jesus. Do you think that they actually think that's what Jesus and Mary looked like? Or do you think that sort of something else is going on there?

No, I think that there, I think probably something else is going on. I mean, at least in this kind of information age, as it's often been dubbed, I think most of us are aware that Jesus came from, um, Galilee in Palestine and was, was a Middle Eastern-looking man. I think I think it's natural, though, the, the message of Christianity is the Incarnation. It's that God becomes one like us. You know, God becomes so close. And I think, um, I think it reflects that truth of the Incarnation, that that sort of intimacy of Jesus, to to be able to imagine him, you know, within our own ethnicity. And I think, I think mostly it's, it's, it's harmless. I, I don't think we should look too, too back too harshly on the way that sort of modern European artists, you know, a Dutch, a Dutch, um, artist would depict Jesus as a Dutch man, and an Italian as an Italian, and so on. I don't think we should look, um, too harshly on those. But I think we need to be careful because I suppose the difference is that the Caucasian Christ, I think this, this church of the Annunciation is probably an exception here. I think the Caucasian Christ is still the normative Christ, and that's because of the colonial heritage of Western Christianity, you know, across the world. Um, so, and I think that has some dangerous repercussions. So there are studies that, you know, have suggested that if you, if you look at a picture of a white Jesus, that this will give you more favorable attitudes to to white people. Or there was a book by CH McDonald, who is the director of Theos, um, sort of the major religion think tank in the UK. And her book is called God Is Not a White Man. And I think in that, she talks about how it wasn't until reading The Shack, which is a sort of novel which depicts, um, God as, um, a black woman, that it really sort of punctured her assumption that made her aware of her assumption that she'd always thought of Jesus as white. Um, so I think, was it, was it Mary Daly, the feminist theologian, who said that when when God is Man, Man is God? Well, when God is white, white is God. I think that's the, that's the problem, is sort of the divinization of a particular physical form. It's a bit like what you were saying before about, you know, if we knew that Jesus had short hair, then we might start even subconsciously valuing short hair and sort of condemning long hair. If we think of Jesus as white, the same problem comes about.

Interestingly, this novel you mentioned, The Shack, is it called? Jesus depicted as a black woman? Strangely, I think it might be God the Father. But it's that was the difference. I was going to ask about. Is that like, you know, you can, you can find art of, you know, black Jesus, white Jesus, Arab Jesus, Italian Jesus, with long hair and short hair, ugly and beautiful. But I'm sure this art exists, but rarely, you know, in a church, for example, that you're going to find a female Jesus. One thing that we do know about the physical appearance of Jesus is that he looks like a man. He did not look like a woman. I mean, there's got to be some significance in that, like that we know at least that about what Jesus looked like, right?

Well, we know he was a man. Yeah. But it's funny, if the character of Jesus is supposed to, as you say, or as you suggest here, like there's maybe at least some intentionality in not imbuing Jesus with specific qualities so that everybody can see themselves in him and so that they can emphasize the importance of the Incarnation and the salvation of humankind, then to make him a man, yeah, seems like an odd choice. I mean, so it wasn't always the choice of the church. So I think from the sixth century onwards, perhaps we have baptistries which depict Jesus almost like a young god, like Apollo or Hermes. And the significance of this is that these gods are, you know, fairly beautiful, um, sort of young men, and they're quite androgynous, and maybe deliberately so. Why would you place an androgynous-looking Jesus in a baptismal history? It's because in Christ, as Paul says, there is neither male nor female. So as we're as in this moment of entering the body of Christ, the church, we look up and we see, um, we see a man who's not, you know, a Middle Eastern man in his, in his 30s, about to get baptized by John the Baptist. We see the sort of young androgynous God. So we're able to see, see, um, ourselves in, in Christ, and vice versa. So, um, it's not been the case. I mean, there is a, there is a sculpture called Christa, which I think was depicted in an Episcopalian Cathedral, maybe in New York, which was probably quite controversial, and it shows, it shows a female Jesus on the cross. And maybe there is some sort of, maybe there is something good about that in terms of, you know, Christ was entering into the full experience of humanity. Um, so maybe there is some value to those.

That's heretical. I mean, I understand, in a sense, somebody could say, if you depicted, like, a, a, just a visibly Ethiopian Jesus, somebody might object to that and say, "Well, that's, that's kind of heretical because we know Jesus wasn't from Ethiopia. We know he almost certainly didn't look like that." That's, that's heretical. But somebody might say, "Yes, but we're trying to humanize Jesus in a way that's, in a way that I feel like if they try to, you know, transform Jesus into a woman, yes, I feel like it would be less accepted." In other words, there seems to be like a, a bigger significance of the of the gender of Jesus than there is on say, the race of Jesus. And I, I wonder why that, why that might be the case. And and therefore also this, this depiction that you're talking about, the statue of Jesus as a female, you say, "Well, maybe that does some good." If you're a Christian, then this seems to me something that should give you much more pause and discomfort than say, the Ethiopian, even if both are sort of speaking from a secular level, yes, they both make this historical mistake of misidentifying Jesus's physical characteristics. I think the question has always been, you know, the church has had these iconoclastic debates about whether we should use images in our worship. I think the question has always been the use of them. So when we make a Christian sculpture, are we claiming that Christ was actually a woman? No, but what we are seeing is that Christ, in entering into our fleshly humanity, was identifying with humanity as a whole, and that includes women. Um, so his experience, and I think that can be a very profound experience for, you know, a woman to see Christ depicted in that way. And I think this is, yeah, this is, I suppose, along the same lines as, um, not depicting, uh, Christ at all in the Gospels. Is that it allows us to, um, imagine Christ as identifying with us. There's something quite, um, there's quite apophatic, I suppose, about, um, imagining Christ as one like us.

Yeah, I, I mean, I begin to more and more understand, for example, the Islamic injunction against depicting God at all, and indeed, you know, the prophets as well, but God in particular, because once you start allowing these physical characteristics, I guess it's difficult with God in Islam because God is not a person in the same way. And Muhammad, being a historical person, there will be facts that you can know, true or false, about his appearance. But with Jesus, it seems like maybe we shouldn't be able to depict him because it seems like, okay, long hair, short hair, doesn't really matter. Okay, white skin, dark skin, kind of maybe matters a bit more, especially because of some of the stuff we've just been talking about. But, you know, we kind of get it. Okay, male or female Jesus. Now we're getting a little bit like, again, depending on what we're doing here, for example, like a disabled Jesus, a Jesus in a wheelchair. I can understand why somebody seeing Jesus depicted in a wheelchair would make them think, "There, there it is. You know, Christ identifying with me. I'm in a wheelchair, and I can identify with that." But at the same time, Jesus being God, known in the Gospel stories to be walking around and also healing people of of their disabilities, it just sort of wouldn't make theological sense to depict him like that. And so you have this image of Jesus which is historically completely, like, wrong. And I think in the same way that like a disabled Christ, I can understand why someone would depict it that way, but I also totally understand why people would have a big problem with that because even if you're only trying to make the theological point, I don't think this is what Jesus looked like. I'm just trying to identify his sort of, you know, um, his, I'm trying to identify with him and identify him with the disabled. Are not people right to say, but this just brings up an unbridgeable theological problem. That's not what Jesus was like.

I think Jesus was discipled. I think he was, uh, disabled on the cross. So that's already a starting point for us to see, you know, to see God as in some sense allowing himself to be disabled. Um, but I also think that, you know, this is, this is one, this is one area of our depiction of Jesus in the West that also needs destabilizing or deconstructing. Is the idea that, you know, even on the cross, Jesus is tends to be depicted as this really hunky, manly man. You know, might think of, you know, the depiction in Gibson's Passion of the Christ, where Jesus is completely ripped when he's on the cross. He's sort of, it's a sort of picture of stoic masculinity. For him to be able to enjoy this, I think there are elements of that. Uh, maybe in the later Gospels, in in the Gospel of John, we have a Jesus who very much embraces his fate, um, and says, you know, "Will I say that this cup should not, you know, be taken from me? No, I'm going, I'm going to go to the cross and is triumphant. It is finished." Um, but in the Gospel of Mark, and I think this applies to all of the Gospels as a whole, Jesus's death is still very much a slave's death. You know, Christianity is the only religion which celebrates as its central ritual the the crucifixion of a criminal. And I think, you know, wearing a crucifix, I mean, it's a cliched point, but, you know, wearing a crucifix round our neck doesn't quite capture the utter humiliation and emasculation of what this meant in the ancient world. So Jesus is already disabled, at least momentarily, on the cross, if I may, if I may say that. And I mean, just to give you an impression of how humiliating this was, in the late 2nd century, early 3rd century, um, there was a, a graffiti, I think it was on the Palatine Hill of Rome, where G, which is the earliest iconographic depiction of Jesus, and it's two almost stick figures. There's one stick figure looking up at another who is on the cross, and he has a donkey's head. And the graffiti text below it reads, "Alexamenos worships his God." Worships his God, or thinks the Greek actually says "worship your God." It's an imperative. Oh, like "worship your God." Yes. This is a sort of common mistranslation, really. "Worship your god." Um, and who is Alexamenos? I mean, a Greek name, I think, maybe a convert to or an idealized convert to to Christianity. And just like, like Celsus earlier, saying, you know, why would, why would you be worshiping a God who is crucified? This is very much the sort of pictorial side of that. Why would you worship a God who gets, gets crucified? And, you know, the donkey is a humble creature. You know, Jesus rides in not on a, not on a horse or chariot like the Roman Emperor would, but on a humble, on a donkey. So this is, this is a, this is a foolish creature, and that's how Jesus is being presented on the cross. It's, it's fascinating that this is potentially our earliest depiction of Jesus. The earliest that we know of. I think there's something that competes for it that's in just around the corner from here, in the, in the British Museum. There's some kind of, uh, coin that's, that's, or some kind of, you know, I think medallion, a gemstone, like sort of maybe a gemstone, I don't know, some, some kind of that seems to have an image of Jesus's head. But it competes with this Alexamenos graffiti, which, as you say, is just, is just graffitied onto the wall of the Palatine Hill in Rome, and it's somebody making fun of Christianity and depicting Jesus as a donkey. But the thing that they depict is him on the cross. And it's like, if they're making fun of Christianity, if depicting him with a donkey's head is supposed to be disparaging, then maybe depicting him on the cross is also supposed to be disparaging. You know, why are you worshiping? You know, worship your God as a joke, to to say to just allow this is your God, here's your God, to be an insult, to be a joke, requires depicting that God in a way that is generally going to be seen as quite disparaging. And so that's what, you know, that's what the cross does. But then again, this is about what the artwork is supposed to do. That person was not claiming they were not making a historical claim that Jesus of Nazareth had a donkey for a head. They were employing that as a technique to make a wider sort of theological point, really, which is that this is an, this is an ungodly man, this is an ungodly way to die, this is a non-messianic fate. And to make that theological point, they make the very ahistorical depiction of Jesus with a donkey's head. Similarly, if somebody draws a female Jesus or disabled Jesus and says, "This is what I think Jesus looked like," you say, "That's ridiculous. You know, get it out of my sight." But if they said, "In order to make a very specific theological point, I'm going to make a very ahistorical painting depicting Jesus in a particular way," you know, maybe that's more justified. The problem is, for Christianity, you're dealing with God here. And so when you depict Jesus as a woman, for example, when you know historically he was not, it seems like you're sort of, you're committing this grave sin of identifying something as divine which it's not. Identifying a disabled woman as a divine figure when a disabled figure was not. In Islam, the greatest sin you can commit is shirk, worshiping the wrong thing, identifying God and the divine in something that is not God and the divine in that. It seems like.

be something like the sin that you sort of run the risk of committing when you allow yourself to start depicting Jesus as a woman or as disabled or, you know, to maybe to a lesser degree as an Ethiopian. Well, I think theology is a constructive project. And when it says in Genesis that, uh, humans are made in the image of God, it says, "Male and female, he made them." Yeah, sure. So, um, I think there is some kind of theological precedent there. And, you know, this is, this is just one of the, the divisions between Christian and Islamic theology is that, um, I think maybe Christian theology sees God in the human in just a way that Islamic theology, uh, in which, in a way that is, is probably blasphemous for Islamic theology.

But I don't think, I mean, say if we were to depict Jesus as disabled, I don't think this would actually be, um, too much of a guess on a, on a historical level. So, it clearly wasn't the case that Jesus was, um, uh, unable to walk around Galilee and so on. I mean, he's presented as a, a peripatetic, you know, itinerant preacher. Um, he's able to sort of escape the crowds and so on. Um, but I think, I mean, what do we know about Jesus in terms of his background? He was a tekton in the Greek. Now, this is often translated as a carpenter, and he may have been a carpenter. Maybe he, he built ships, or maybe he, I think we saw a ship in the Vatican Museum recently that could have been something almost built by Jesus, or maybe he was involved in the construction of nearby, uh, Sepphoris. By the way, the Vatican Museum don't claim that they have a boat that's built by Jesus. It's just, uh, they, they do call it the Jesus boat. They do, they sort of replica of, of of the kind of boat that someone like, you know, Peter, Simon Peter would have been a, would have been a fisherman in. Um, just in case, you know, anybody would, you know, we don't like to, um, unintentionally disparage the Catholic Church on, on this podcast. Um, but so, Jesus, so this often gives us the kind of, almost an able-bodied picture of health, you know, Jesus is, Jesus must have been fit and muscular. Maybe this sort of serves some of our recent reconstructions of his image, or at least our, our depictions of His Image. Um, I'm not sure this would have been the case, though. You know, you think about, you know, there, there is no, uh, healthcare in the ancient world, at least not in the developed sense that we have it today. And that kind of work as a, as a carpenter or a stonemason, a tekton is someone who works with hard materials, so that could have also been, um, stone. These people were likely, I think, to pick up some injuries. So if there's this sort of 30-year period, or maybe maybe if Jesus had been working for 15 years as a, as as a, as a tekton, that he would have picked up some, you know, some some bruises, some damages on the way. So I don't think, I don't think we should imagine him as this sort of perfect picture of health. I mean, um, one, one article by Jane Taylor recently said that Jesus probably had a better immune system than most because he was engaged in this ministry of effective touch, which would have helped him. But I also think he would have got sick quite a lot as well, you know, if he was, um, if he was constantly going around and touching lepers and and engaging with people, unless he was getting ill and then just sort of peeling himself. I mean, possibly one of the sort of, the tricks he's got up his sleeve a little. Oh, better again. So we, we don't know. But, um, yeah.

So I, I don't know whether I don't know whether this idea that Jesus was disabled is, is necessarily an outlandish one. I think it's, it's something, um, it's something he could have been. But if we, if we say that Jesus was, um, you know, a person with disabilities, then why would the gospel writers not mention this? I think we have very good reason. So we can look at the way that, um, Philo writes. He's a contemporary of Jesus. He writes a biography of Moses, and Moses in the biblical narrative, he has some physical deficiencies, shall we say. So, um, he is unable to speak before, you know, it seems like in the biblical narrative like he's just got a lisp or something. He's not very good at speaking in public. So he's not your sort of manly man in Philo's time. And there's also this scene where his hand is, is white like like leprosy. And these details, Philo and Josephus are careful to modify or omit. So they sort of Photoshop Moses's appearance, and they describe him as beautiful throughout his life. So he's born, and the real reason why he's taken in to the to the royal household is because they look at him and see such a beautiful baby, really. So in, in the Hebrew, he's "tov." "Tov" is just the word "good." You know, maybe this just means some robustness as a child. Maybe he's a sort of, you know, not physically beautiful, but in the Greek translation, he becomes "asterios," which is like a, a handsome. And then Philo sort of runs with this, and he's becoming more and more beautiful. So when he comes down the mountain, you know, he is, he is really sort of emanating the light of the divine, and he's very much beautiful. So he's not just, you know, emitting rays, but he's actually physically handsome as well. So I think they're very careful to, to omit, um, or adapt elements of Moses's physical deficiencies, saying that he was just so star-struck by his conversation with God that he couldn't speak. It was just ineffable.

So let's, let's assume for a moment, with our background knowledge of carpenters and the dangerous nature of that work in antiquity, that Jesus had inflicted some injury throughout that time. So he was still itinerant, but maybe something else had gone on. Why would the gospel writers mention it? Because it was, it was physically awkward for them? Or take the suffering servant that we talked about earlier. The suffering servant is, is something the evangelists depict Jesus. They don't make a, a huge thing out of it, but there are allusions to that, to that song in, in the gospels. So why don't they just describe Jesus as, as disfigured? Well, maybe it was because it was awkward for them to do so. The suffering servant being who, uh, this, the servant in Isaiah 52-53, right? Um, so why don't they play that up? Well, is it because it was awkward for them to do so? Right, right, right.

So, um, so I think there is some, some scope here for sort of envisaging the historical Jesus as, as ugly. Um, something I'm toying with at the moment is one of the earliest writings, if we see it as a pre-existing pool, is the Philippian hymn in Philippians 2:5-11. And there it says that though Jesus was in the form of God, he took upon the form of a slave. And the word there again is "morphe," and this is the word that we find in biographies to describe someone's form, their outward form, or their visible appearance. Now, it may be, it may be that Jesus is just being described as the form of a slave when he's being crucified. This is, you know, a slave's crime, you know, he would have had a sort of slave's appearance in that moment. But could it be that this is maybe the earliest memory of Jesus and his outward physicality throughout his life looks like a slave? Looks like a slave, and this just gets omitted in, in the gospels. And what would a slave have looked like? What would people interpret that as, if they read someone looks like a slave? So, I mean, if you were a laborer in a field, you would, you would wear a kind of tunic that would give you some sort of like scope for movement. And then, um, maybe, uh, if you were, you know, high up, sort of in the, in the, in the economy, then you would look more like you would be less distinguishable, um, from your, from your master. I think there is, I think Seneca talks at one point about this law that was being passed during the time of Nero. Seneca was Nero's tutor, I think. Um, and the law was to, to distinguish slaves by some kind of mark. And the Senate des, the Senate decided not to go through with this because they thought that if all of the slaves could see each other as slaves, they would start to rebel. Right? So, um, it wasn't like, I suppose, modern chattel slavery in the sense, in this specific sense, that you could just tell whether someone was a slave, you know, by the color of their skin or something like that. It was, there were other markers. People did wear, um, I think they, they're called "clavus" or "clavi," which are these stripes. So sort of the higher up you go, the more stripes you can put on your tunic, I think. So the, the one item of Jesus's clothing in the gospels that is described in some detail is his seamless tunic. Seamless tunic, yeah. And this is, this is in John's gospel, and it seems like the seamless tunic is being described as a kind of fulfillment of prophecy that they did not tear. They did not tear his, his. This is after the crucifixion, or during the crucifixion? Yes. So they didn't tear his garment. Why didn't they tear it? Well, John explains why, because it was seamless. Um, he also says that it was, um, woven, uh, as a whole from above. "Anōthen." And this is, this is a word that sort of appears multiple times throughout the gospel. Um, and it always has, or or two times before, and it's always a kind of double entendre. So, um, it can mean, say, "born anōthen," "born again," but it can also mean "born from above." Or it could be, I think Pilate also uses this phrase, um, that his authority is "from above." And again, it's a double entendre. Pilate is thinking about his, his seniors, maybe the emperor, when really it means God. It has some theological meaning. So is this a kind of symbolic garment? That on the one hand, it's, it's a seamless tunic, but in another way, it could express something theological? And lots of people have interpreted this in different ways. So sort of when it becomes theologically relevant that something's being described, and possibly, if we're going to be cynical skeptics, an invention of John, the seamless tunic as a sort of literary device rather than an attempt at historically remembering the exact kind of garment that Jesus was wearing? Yes, I think so. I think, um, a majority of commentators, if we can appeal to to numbers in this field, probably still do see John as sourced at, you know, by an eyewitness at some remove. So, whether people, I mean, I don't think it's likely that that's John, the son of Zebedee, but an option, a potential candidate for the, the authorship of John's gospel is this other John, John the Elder, who is the scribe. So, so who seems to be, I mean, Richard Borham identifies him as a Judean disciple of Jesus. So maybe he wasn't part of the 12, but he's sort of there in the action, and maybe this is a detail that gets remembered. But in terms of, you know, thinking about his clothing, if Jesus did wear a seamless tunic, I think these have actually been found, uh, by the Dead Sea. There is, there's a Qumran cave, and, and I think some of these seamless tunics have been found. They're very simple garments, so you just make them by essentially just making a hole in a, in a, in a piece of cloth, and they're called bag tunics sometimes because it gives us this, this impression of loneliness and, and humility. And I think that runs like a thread throughout, you know, runs like a thread throughout the gospels because, um, in the synoptic gospels, Jesus gets annoyed, actually, at what people are wearing. He says, you know, that the Pharisees and the scribes, they dress up in their stoles, their long robes. There's an irony here that the, the clerical alb is is itself a long robe. And Jesus ends up in a sort of, in the post-Constantinian era, as being depicted almost like Zeus with this long flowing beard and with gold and this long toer. So which are usually, you know, garments of luxury, you know, if you can wear something that's flowing, you don't have to work in the field with your tunic, you can wear something long, you know, you might think of the Oxbridge don today, or students, you know, walking around in their, in their long gowns. So he gets annoyed at this. He gets annoyed at people who were broadening their phylacteries, which are these little boxes which contain the Jewish scriptures in them, and enlarging their their tassels. They're, I, I'm going to pronounce this incorrectly, but they're "tzitzit," which are these almost violet or blue tassels that you would, that Jewish men would wear on their outer garments, their cloaks. And in, uh, in the story of the hemorrhaging woman, the woman with a flow of blood, she touches the "kraspedon," the edge of the garment. And it's, it's probably thought that this is the tassel, the Jewish tassel that Jesus would wear. So in one sense, we need to, we need to get away from this idea that Jesus is a sort of modern-looking person. I mean, he is, he probably looks much closer to a Middle Eastern Muslim than he does than certainly than he does a kind of modern Western man. So he's, he's in religious dress, but he does qualify it in some ways. He says, you should, when you go out on your missionary journeys, you should wear one tunic. And we find this description also, um, in the Cynic. The Cynic, from that word "kyn," meaning dog. Yes. So they were kind of very boisterous philosophers, boisterous characters, and they would sort of acclimatize themselves to nature, and in doing so, they would sort of skew social convention. And there was a kind of shamefulness to their dress. So I wonder, I mean, what's going on there when Jesus says, you know, wear, wear very little, sort of only take one tunic with you? I think part of it is he's embodying his teaching, his teaching of loneliness, his teaching to become, you know, anyone who enters the kingdom must become like a child, become like a servant or a child. And he's embodying that in his dress. So when they go out on their missions, embodying the message of the kingdom, they are to dress in this almost shameful, dishonorable way. Um, it's almost a stark contrast. I think, I think I once went on the, the Mormon website, and there were very specific instructions about how to dress, sort of conservative manner with, you know, looking very nice with your tie and so on. And it's almost the opposite in the mission, mission instructions of the gospels. Um, you know, dress very shamefully. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's clear that people are obsessed, yes, with this with this notion of Christ. You know, you see the image of, you can see it on, like, I don't know, National Geographic or Time Magazine, you know, scientists construct the image of Jesus, and here it is, front cover, like, this is what he looked like. And it's some sort of surprising look, you know, short hair, you know, not white, for example. And people are fascinated by it. And I'm fascinated by that, right? I'd love to see what that, what that looked like. If, if a story like that broke, do you think it is inappropriate for Christians to be that obsessed with the physical appearance of Jesus? You've spent more time than anyone I know looking specifically at the physical appearance of Christ. You, you've become interested in it, not because I think you're obsessed with the idea of getting to know what Jesus looked like, but because you're interested in why he's not described as a theological point. But those who are interested on that level, well, I just want to know what he looked like. I want to be able to picture him in my head. Do you think that they're making a mistake? I'm not, I'm not sure if they're making a mistake. I think it all depends about the intentions of the person. I think actually, we, you know, Paul says, uh, in one of his epistles, that, you know, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see him face to face." And so I think in the Christian imagination, and the longing of the believer's heart, is to be able to see the, the, the physicality of Jesus. Although I wonder whether even there, the physicality is really just a symbol for the intimacy of that expression. You know, what does it mean to see someone's face? I'm reading all sorts of cues unconsciously from your face. I'm, the eyes are the window of the soul, yeah. So I, I can see your, your heart for me and your love and so on by looking into your eyes, you know. So, um, so it, it's very difficult, it's very difficult to know. But, um, you know, people have very different agendas, I think, in terms of reconstructing, um, Jesus's appearance and their interest in it. And I think some of those are probably, you know, more healthy than others. Um, so, for example, I think liberation theologians would be very interested in saying that Jesus wasn't white. They will sometimes even make statements like, "Jesus, Jesus is black because he was Jewish." So they're very much aware that Jesus wasn't white. Well, what are they saying when they say Jesus is black? They're making a present-tense claim. So this is James Cone in his, his Black Liberation Theology. So when people are describing Jesus as black, they, they tend to be making a present-day claim. They're saying that Jesus identifies with the suffering of black people. Why do they make that claim? Because when God took on flesh, he took on Jewish flesh, and he was part of an oppressed people in the wider Roman Empire. So, so there is a kind of theological claim to be made there, right? Um, so when, when I can't remember who it is, you said wrote this book, but it says, says, "Jesus is black." Yes, he doesn't mean that the physical Christ walking around in Jerusalem had dark skin. No, he means something more theological. I think so. I think he's, he's talking about, uh, I, I think there probably are people out there who would try to make the claim that Jesus was actually black, just as the, the Nazis made the claim that, um, Jesus was actually an Aryan, really. You know, and they put forward all of these these arguments. They would say that Galilee was actually where Jesus was from, was Galilee of the Gentiles, as Isaiah, that he wasn't really Jewish and so on. That when he came down to the really Jewish part, Jerusalem, they killed him. You know, and all of this is a load of bollocks, basically. We, we know that Galilee was, was a, was a heavily Jewish area. Nazareth was a very pious place and so on. So, so yeah, it's, it's, it's a load of nonsense. I, you know, Jesus was a Jew. He was, he would have been maybe dark honey-colored in his, in his skin. So he would have looked like a Middle Eastern man today.

Well, John Nelson, it's been a pleasure to finally get you on the show. If people are interested in hearing more from you, behindthegospel.com, well, www.h the. It doesn't work without the www. Some kind of domain issue. Go to, go to www. Remember the Ws, behindthegospel.com, where you'll find John's Substack where you write about once a week on some area of biblical scholarship. And, um, and I think you do so with a, with a unique, a uniquely fair and balanced critical view, and I think it's well worth people checking out. And I hope that they do so. That'll be linked in the description, um, to make sure that they remember the Ws. And, and yeah, I really do, I really do hope that people, people go there. And it really is a thrill to finally bring you on because I want us to do it for a while. I'm so glad that you finally agreed, and I'm hoping that the people listening will agree that it's been well worth it, and that you will too. Dr. John Nelson, thanks for coming on the show. If you want to get access to these videos early and ad-free, as well as supporting the channel, then go to patreon.com/alexoconnor. Watch more videos by clicking the link on your screen. Subscribe if you want to, and I'll see you in the next one.