Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God, you probably envision him (or, if you prefer, Him) in much the same way as most everyone else does. The long hair and beard, the robe, the sandals, the beatific gaze: these traits have all manifested across two millennia of Christian art. “However, these depictions don’t exactly match the profile of a first-century Jewish carpenter from the Middle East,” says Hochelaga host Tommie Trelawny in the new video above, an investigation into how our modern concept of how Jesus looked came to be — and into what we can know about his real appearance.
First, we must turn to the Bible. In the King James Version, Revelation describes Jesus thus: “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength.” That’s it for the New Testament. As for the Old Testament, Isaiah describes a figure that could possibly be Jesus by crediting him with “no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.”
This scant Biblical evidence hardly aligns with the high-profile depictions of Jesus we’ve all seen. For many around the world today, the “default representation” is the downright glamorous 1940 portrait Head of Christ by the American painter Warner Sallman (a Chicagoan, incidentally, much like the newly elected Pope Leo XIV). One could see that artwork as the culmination of a fairly long history of visual depictions of Jesus, which first became abundant in the Roman Empire of the fourth century under Constantine. According to Greco-Roman mythology, “having long hair and a beard were symbols of divine power.” Early Christians thus “wanted to present their god using similar artistic conventions,” placing Jesus in a league with the likes of Zeus.
That’s the basic look Jesus has in most representations, from the botched Spanish fresco that became a meme to the crucified Mr. Universe in South Korea, where I live, to Andy Warhol’s Christ $9.98. And yet, according to the dictates of Leviticus, “you shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.” Trelawny takes this into account when attempting to reconstruct the historical Jesus, also noting that, since Jesus could only be identified by Judas’ kiss of betrayal, he must have looked much like all the other men around him. The result, when all of this is fed into an artificial-intelligence image generator, is very much an everyman, which may be as historically accurate as we can get. But then, each time and place creates its own Jesus — and now, with AI, each of us can do the same for ourselves.
Related content:
What Makes Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ a Timeless, Great Painting?
How Leonardo da Vinci Painted The Last Supper: A Deep Dive Into a Masterpiece
Introduction to New Testament History and Literature: A Free Yale Course
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
