Christianity is currently the world’s largest religious movement, with an estimated 2.2 billion followers. And because he plays such a huge role in christian mythos and practice, and because of the influence he’s had on the course of history (we even date our years after his birth), we all know how Jesus Christ looks like. We’ve seen it in paintings, on TV, in church, on Christmas; he’s white, long haired and wears something thorny. Right?
Well, truth is we’ll never really know for certain, but we can approximate what he would have looked like.
Image via art-sheep
With all the imagery of Jesus that we’ve learned to take for granted it’s easy to forget that not only was he born over 2000 years ago, but for most of you he was also born somewhere very far away — in the region of Galilea, today in northern Israel. So, to help us get a clearer picture, back in 2002 Richard Neave, forensic facial reconstruction expert and former medical artist from the University of Manchester, decided to recreate a typical resident of the region Jesus was born.
Neave and a team of Israeli archaeologists started from three Galilean Semite skulls found in the area around Jerusalem. Then they used computerized tomography to create 3D cross-sectional images of these skulls, which they fed into a facial generator software to create a mock-up of what the men looked like.
From these, Neave was able to cast a typical skull of a man from that area. With information on soft tissue thickness from another reconstruction software he applied layers of clay to the 3D cast to recreate the muscles and skin. The team had to turn to ancient drawings found throughout the region to estimate how his hair, skin tone or eyes looked like, with the final result in the picture above.
Inasmuch as the very existence of Jesus of Nazareth is a mater of conjecture and has never been firmly established, any assertion of what he looked like is highly speculative at best.
In the light of all the evidence , how is the existence of the historical Jesus of Nazareth a matter of conjecture ?
To meet any minimum standard for this person’s existence in any meaningful way three criterion need to be met: An actual man at some point named Jesus acquired followers in life who continued as an identifiable movement after his death; this is the same person who was executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities; and finally it is the same Jesus worshiped as the Son of God after his death by his followers. If any one of these is false, then there was no historical Jesus in any pertinent sense.
Given there are no contemporary records of his life or existence and all records of his historicity come from one or more generations after his death, (The only known possible contemporaneous source is Paul of Tarsus, though he expressly states that he got his information through revelation, and not through any direct observation, and that is hardly proof by any rational meaning of the term.) it is hard to see how any of the above requirements can be met.
OK but why does he look like a Neanderthal?