Within Reason - #72 John Nelson - What Did Jesus Really Look Like?

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

John Nelson holds a PhD in Biblical Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His thesis is the first book-length study of Jesus' physical appearance in the Gospels. He runs a weekly Substack called "Behind the Gospels" which aims to make Biblical studies accessible to all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. John Nelson, welcome to Within Reason. Mr. O'Connor, 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, and we always just have 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 fair bit will have heard your points. We'll have heard me mention you by name on a few occasions, including recently to a certain Dr. Peterson, will have heard 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 so glad to finally sit down with you and do this. I'm finally here within reason. Yes, yes, yes.

We'll try to keep it within reason. but hopefully not just within the podcast because you also have a substack which is www.bhindthegospels.com where you write on biblical scholarship and I think that it's a, I mean, it's a relatively new, but brilliant resource for biblical scholarship

and critical commentary on the gospels. So if people are interested in that at all, I'd recommend at least go and check it out. Open it in a tab. Do it now. You're listening to the podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, click the link in the description,

open it in the tab, out later. Just if you're looking for that kind of thing, it's a wonderful place to subscribe. And I'm not just saying that because you're my friend. 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 question of the day? 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 God, Jesus, looks like Elon Musk? Was this a SpaceX funded study? 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 Chapel Hill or North Carolina in Chapel Hill got a representative sample of the American public, I think about 500 Americans, to pick faces which they thought resembled God's own appearance. And it turned out that they found what is called an egocentric bias in our kind of imagination of God. So if you're, and this is along the lines of, I think, race and age and usefulness and attractiveness as well. Attractiveness

is another one, yeah. If you're attractive, you're going to imagine God as attractive. If You're old. You're going to imagine him as old. And I think liberals, interestingly, imagined God is slightly more feminine, slightly more darker-skinned. I wonder whether implicitly that's because they're thinking of Jesus' appearance. And they know that Jesus wasn't the sort of Caucasian man that Western art has often made him out to be. Yeah. But it was actually Middle Eastern.

Yeah. I mean, and so they've, 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 resemblance when you look at it. It doesn't not look like him. We'll put it up on screen. I think that would say something very interesting about the American people as a whole in terms of what do Americans see as devise? Is it truly Elon Musk? I think it might have something to do with the headline that sort of motivated seeing Elon in the face of God there.

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, 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 are some indications in Christian scripture as to what God is like. You know, God is male. Outside of that, there's very little in terms of his, you know, when Jesus appears, his hair color, his height, his skin color, this kind of stuff. And so 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. why that was sort of considered important and not. And I want to talk about that. But first, I want to ask you, given that you've just completed a PhD in the physical appearance of Jesus, which is a sort of fascinatingly specific area of research within theology.

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' physical appearance. So we have sort of fleeting glimpses into his wardrobe in a few moments in the Gospels.

John talks about his seamless tunic. We have instructions to his followers about what they're to wear on their missionary journeys. So when they're ambassadors of his own ministry. So presumably, you know, Jesus was wearing something. 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 essentially read, I think, around 100 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 their subject,

or maybe it's just a particular attention to some physical trait. Sometimes, as in the case of writers like Swatonius, who are writing shortly after the evangelists or maybe contemporaneous to the later evangelists, he gives us a full-bodied sort of physiognomic description. So this seems very important to the ancients. 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 fuchsis, 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. 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, blonde-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.

Yossi Nagar, who is a specialist bio-historian with the Israeli Antiquities Authority. He's looked into the sort of the genes of Jews of the time in Palestine, and he thinks that if you take an Iraqi Jewish male today, that's probably the closest that we can find to the appearance of Jesus. 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 complexion, we're not to imagine the sort of the white Christ, obviously, that we've often made him out to be. Yeah, I'm really interested in this ancient biographies so heavily invested in the image of their subjects because 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'll want to describe them 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 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 any indication? I mean, do they sort of not describe it at all? So there was an interesting article in JBL, the journal of biblical literature, by a scholar called Isaac Soon. And the article's called, I think, the Little Messiah. And it looks at Luke 193, which is the classic Sunday school story of, Zechias 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, Zekees wanted to see Jesus from the crowd, but he was not able because he was short in stature. Who's he? Right. So is it Jesus or is it Zichias? Is Jesus short and that's why he couldn't see Jesus? or is Zechias short and that's why he couldn't see Jesus? So the classic approach, at least in sort of recent studies, has been to say, we know it was Zechius because Zekees is introduced in Luke's Gospel as, I think, a chief tax

collector and very wealthy. And, you know, I mean, last night we went to King's College Chapel in Cambridge and we heard the Magnificat, which opens Luke's Gospel. You know, he has sent the rich empty away. You know, he feeds the hungry, but he sent the rich empty away. You know, he feeds the hungry, but he's sent the rich empty away. So this is one of the themes running throughout the Gospel of Luke. Is that Jesus is one who comes to the poor.

He comes to liberate the poor. So Zekias 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, you know, pointing to a physical aspect of a character to imbue their character with a certain interpreting. Yes, and there is a certain sort of embarrassment about short height. So, Swaytonius in his life of Caesar Augustus gives quite a glowing description of the sort of godlike emberra and then mentions that there's a record that 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 five foot nine. 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 people. I mean, yeah, 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 mythological figures, I guess height can imbue a sense of power, of stature. I mean, in terms of there is that narrative 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 Zakias is small, maybe this reflects something negative about his character as well. But it's possible that the Gospels were actually saying Zekias 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 can 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 Zekirs was just a normal height and had to climb up the tree. And soon supports this contention, very interestingly, by pointing to other philosophers in the ancient world like, like Esop, 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, esopic-like characterization of Jesus. And there are hints of this actually in Luke's special material. So the material that Luke alone has amongst the evangelists. That is, when you say the evangelists, you're talking about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Yes, the canonical gospels. And when you say the Luke and sort of special sources, you mean that which appears in Luke's gospel, but alone, only in Luke. Yes, yeah. So 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 Luke's gospel. And thanks for outing me for going to church, by the way. I'm not jumping on board with this whole cultural Christian thing 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 even. Even song. That's why I was there. Okay. I won't have any more conspiracy theorists in comments. I won't out you any further. My Christian conversion that's supposedly forthcoming. 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 people were reading Luke, Luke 193 as an indication that Jesus was short. Sure. So, you know, we have people being referred to as a Zechius, for example, in the tradition because they are short. So we know that people were reading Zekees as the short one. Okay. 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. So I think we maybe we don't like the idea of Jesus, the sort of perfect embodiment of this charismatic leader as shorter than us. So maybe that's sort of playing into the interpretation. But I think for the reasons outlined earlier, this kind of physiognomic connection with Zechias as being a sort of arc baddy is quite a good reason for us to think that he is the small one. It's so interesting to hear C.S. Lewis say something like, oh, 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 many religious traditions reject Jesus as God on the

grounds that God would not lower himself and that's what Christianity celebrate so it's interesting to hear C.S Lewis there saying yes oh well you know I wouldn't think he's short I think I think he was almost being surprised at himself right right right but I but um so you know I I suppose the ancient equivalent of the cosmic skeptic would be Kelsus in the late second century. He writes this critique, this anti-apologia of Christianity. And in it, he mentions that Jesus, he says, as they say, they say is usually a sign that he's referring to something that he's heard Christians say. 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 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 LX, X, 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. I don't think he's getting that from Luke, because Luke, at least in the infancy narrative, says that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature.

Yes, yes. That's the same word. So if Luke was later going to present Jesus as small, and I should say here, not everyone thinks that that infancy narrative is original to Luke. Increasingly, there's sort of a growing number of scholars 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 he was actually short in stature. So my question was wrong. My question was wrong, you know, asking about whether the Gospels describe Jesus' physical appearance. Because, of course, this isn't the only place where we can get our information about Jesus.

But 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 height, his skin color, his hair color, you know, the shape of his pans, you know, like anything. You said about the clothes that he wore, you know, the tunic is mentioned. around the time of the crucifixion. So we've got something about clothing maybe, but like, is there anything else? So in terms of his physical traits, Craig Kina, there is a scholar called Craig Kina 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 almost like a polymorphic occurrence. It's almost Jesus being, it's almost. Jesus being able to 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 Lucan and Johannine depiction of Christ as divine in some sense. Right. As opposed to, you know, telling us anything about his, you know, average looks.

Yeah. But Jesus is really shadowy in the Gospels. I mean, if you think about it, 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 Jesus in John's gospel? Well, at some point he becomes sort of 33, but I guess in John's...

This is unique to Luke. So Luke gives us this indication that he was around the age of 33. And 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 Ironaeus, took this as an indication that Jesus must have looked at least 40 or like on his way to being 50 as opposed to the younger age. So, 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 physiognomically in the ancient world in relation to really anything.

that would mark him out as a specific individual. It seems like what the Gospels are doing is they're enhancing his kind of paradigmatic character. So they're sort of upholding him 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 were told by the Gospels 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 like Jesus. But actually, looking at you now, Alex, and 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 take that to the bank and smoke it. Does Jesus look like Elon Musk? No, but perhaps Alex had not. 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 or long flowing hair

with this kind of wavy with a sort of middle parting. This seems to derive from the letter of low. which is this late 15th century forgery, which was written by this precess, this governor of Judea, by the way, precess, 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' appearance. And it's very odd because it almost, the whole purpose of the letter is to describe Jesus' appearance. Suspicious. And it tells us that he had the hair of an unripe hazelnut, which we're not supposed to imagine is a kind of alien green. I think it's supposed to be a sort of light brown. So this is, I think sometimes people try to say that Leonardo da Vinci modelled his depictions of Christ on his gay lover or something like this, which I think was one of the popes. It's not. It comes from this letter of lentilus, which was so popular. at the time, this description with the middle parting, the wavy hair from the ears down,

and tall, attractive, handsome and so on. 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 gospel. Is that your ultimate conclusion that that was in the back of the mind of the writers of the gospel? 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.

So he is one that we can emulate. And I'd 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, you know, I have shown you what it is to love. Now love one another. So this kind of, 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. 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 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 least disposed to describe their subject's physical appearance. So insofar as maybe the Gospels resemble lives of philosophers more than other sorts of lives, maybe what they're doing is less exceptional. 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.

But he's also a divine figure. And I mean, divine, if you were an elite male, you were expected to manifest your, you're, 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 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. 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, his garments turn white. I think Mark says, so white that no bleacher could ever bleach them like this. It is very sort of intimate description. But we're not told that Jesus was beautiful, as we might get in, as with Athena in the Odyssey, or with other divine epiphanies. Or indeed with David. with David in the in the in the 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 they made a they made a choice not to I think given that 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 lucan transfiguration narrative because mark describes the transfiguration as a metamorphosis. So literally a change in form, okay, a change in outward appearance. But Luke, instead of telling us anything about the beauty of the Lord, he says that 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 theophony, 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 pictured God. They thought that God had a body. They thought that God could walk around in the garden with Adam and Eve and so on. It's not that Jesus, 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, 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 almost catch a glimpse of God. But it's, the language is often that of analogy. You know, his hair was like wool or, you know, his feet were like bronze and so on. It's very similar to the theophanic description we get of Jesus in the book of Revelation. So it's not a description of the physical appearance of Jesus of Now.

Azareth as he was walking around, but it's this highly theological, symbolic description. 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 metamorphosis and replaces it 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 gospel writers felt like they could describe Jesus' appearance, but there was actually a kind of something part of their Jewish background was actually pulling them away.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 was it the Church of the Annunciation? Yes, the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, where churches from around the world, Catholic churches from around the world, had sent in artistic 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 draw, 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 done. I think most of us aware that Jesus came from Galilee and Palestine and was a Middle Eastern looking man. I think it's natural, though, the message of Christianity is the incarnation. It's that God becomes one like us. You know, God becomes so close. And I think it reflects that truth of the incarnation, that that sort of intimacy of Jesus to be able to imagine him, you know, within our own ethnicity. And I think mostly it's harmless.

I don't think we should look too, back too harshly on the way that sort of modern European artists, you know, a Dutch artist would depict Jesus as a Dutch man and an Italian as an Italian and so on. I don't think we should look 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 church of the enunciation 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. And I think that has some dangerous repercussions.

So there are studies that, you know, have suggested that if you look at a picture of a white Jesus, that this will give you more favourable attitudes, to white people. Or there was a book by Cheney MacDonald, who is the director of Theos, 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 God as a black woman, that it really sort of punctured her

assumption, that it sort of made her aware of her assumption that she'd always thought of Jesus as white. So I think Was it Mary Daly The feminist theologian who said that When God is man Man is God Well when God is white

White is God I think that's the problem Is that sort of the divinisation Of a particular physical form It's a bit like what you were saying before About 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... Oh, sure, okay, yeah, because 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 and 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, 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 imbueing 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 seems like an odd choice.

So it wasn't always the choice of the church. So I think from the 6th 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 fairly beautiful sort of young men and they're quite androgynous and maybe deliberately say why would you place an androgynous looking Jesus in a baptistery 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 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 ourselves in Christ and vice versa. So it's not always been the case. I mean, there is a, there is a sculpture called Krista, 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. So maybe there is some value to those. But surely that's heretical. I mean, I understand in a sense, somebody could say if you depicted like a just a visibly Ethiopian Jesus, somebody might object to that and say, well, 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 heretical. But somebody might say, yes, but we're trying to. humanized Jesus in a way that's, in a way that I feel like if they try to, you know, trans Jesus into a woman, I feel like it would be less accepted. In other words, there seems to be like a bigger significance of the gender of Jesus than there is on, say, the race of Jesus. And I wonder why that might be the case. And therefore, also this depiction that you're talking about, the statute 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 Jesus, even if both are sort of speaking from a secular level. Yes. But 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 iconoclast debates about whether we should use images in our worship. I think the question is always, always been the use of them. So when we make a crystal 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. 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 not depicting Christ at all in the Gospels is that it allows us to imagine Christ as identifying with us. There's something quite apathetic, I suppose, about imagining Christ as one like us. Yeah. 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 a 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 that 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 their abilities, 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, 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 unbridgedable theological problem. That's not what Jesus was like. I think Jesus was disabled. I think he was 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. But I also think that, you know, 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 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. It's a sort of picture of stoic masculinity for him to be able to enjoy. this. I think there are elements of that. It may be in the later gospels, in the gospel of John. We have a Jesus who very much embraces his fate and says, you know, will I say that this

cup should not, you know, be taken from me? No, I'm going to go to the cross and is triumphant. It is finished. But in the Gospel of Mark, and I think this applies to all of the Gospels as a whole, Jesus' death is still very much a slave's death. You know, Christianity, is the only religion, which celebrates as its central ritual, 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 say that.

And, I mean, just to give you an impression of how humiliating this was, in the late second century, early third century, there was a graffiti. I think it was on the Palatine Hill of Rome, where, 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, Alexandanos, worship your God. Worships is God. Worships is God.

Worship your God. It's an imperative. Oh, like, worship your God. Yes, this is a sort of common mistranslation. Really? Worship your God. And who is Alixaminos? I mean, a Greek name, I think, maybe a convert to or an idealized convert to Christianity.

And just like Kelsus earlier and saying, you know, Why would you be worshipping a God who is crucified? This is very much the sort of pictorial side of that. Why would you worship a God who gets crucified? And, you know, the donkey is a humble creature. You know, Jesus rides in, not on a horse or a chariots like the Roman Emperor would, but humble, on a donkey. So this is a foolish creature.

And that's how Jesus is being presented on the cross. It's fascinating that this is potentially our early. 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 British Museum, there's some kind of coin that's, or some kind of, you know, medallion or something. Maybe a gemstone. I don't know, some kind of that seems to have an image of Jesus's head, but it competes with this Alex Aminos graffiti, which as you say is just, it's 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 worshipping you know worship your God as a joke 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 a historical depiction of Jesus with a donkey's head. Similarly, if somebody draws a female Jesus or a 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 a historical painting depicting Jesus in a particular way, you know, maybe that's more justified. The problem is that 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. You know, 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. And that seems to 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 humans are made in the image of God, it says male and female, he made them. Yeah, sure.

So I think there is some kind of theological president there, and, you know, this is just one of the divisions between Christian and Islamic theology is that I think maybe Christian theology sees God in the human in just a way that Islamic theology, in a way that 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. too much of a guess on a historical level. So it clearly wasn't the case that Jesus was unable to walk around Galilee and so on. I mean, he's presented as a peripatetic, you know, itinerant preacher. He's able to sort of escape the crowds and so on. But I think, I mean, what do we know about Jesus in terms of his background? He was a tectone in the Greek.

Now, this is often translated as a carpenter. And he may have been a carpenter. Maybe 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 Cephyrus. By the way, the Vatican Museum don't claim that they have a boat that's built by Jesus. It's just they sort of have a Jesus boat. They do.

They're sort of replica of the kind of boat that someone like, you know, Peter, Simon Peter would have been a, would have been a fisherman in. Just in case, you know, anybody would, you know, we don't like to unintentionally disparage the Catholic Church on that. 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 serve some of our recent reconstructions of his image or at least 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 is no uh health care in the ancient world at least not in the developed sense that we have it today and that kind of work as a carpenter or a stone mason, a tectone is someone who works with hard materials.

So that could have also been stone. These people were likely, I think, to pick up some injuries. So if there's this sort of 30-year period, or maybe if Jesus had been working for 15 years as a tectone, that he would have picked up some, you know, some bruises, some damages on the way. So I don't think we should imagine him as this sort of perfect picture of health. I mean, 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 long as well, you know, if he was constantly going around and touching leopards and engaging with people. Unless he was getting ill and then just sort of healing himself.

I mean, possibly. It's one of the tricks he's got up his sleeve a little better again. So we don't know. But yeah, so I don't know whether this idea that Jesus was disabled is necessarily an outlandish one. I think it's something he could have been. But if we say that Jesus was 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 Philo writes, he's a contemporary of Jesus.

he writes a biography of Moses. And Moses in the biblical narrative, he has some physiognomic deficiencies, shall we say. So he is unable to speak before Pharaoh. You know, it seems like in the biblical narrative, like he's just got a list for 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 white like leprosy. And these details, Philo and Josephus, are careful to modify or omit. So they sort of Photoshop Moses' 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 royal household is because they look at him and see such a beautiful baby.

Really? So 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, robustness. not sort of physically beautiful, but in the Greek translation, he becomes a Staeos, which is like Ibain, almost 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 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 emit or adapt. elements of Moses's physiognomy, which could be seen as deficient. As for the Lisp, if you like, I think Philo explains it as saying that he was just so starstruck by his conversation with God that he couldn't speak. It was just ineffable. So 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 physiognomically awkward for them or take the suffering servant that we talked about earlier the suffering servant is something the evangelist depict Jesus they don't make a huge thing out of it but there are allusions to that

to that song in the gospels so why don't they just describe Jesus as marred as disfigured well maybe it was because it was awkward for them to do so the suffering servant being who the servant in Isaiah 52 So why don't they play that up?

Well, is it because it was awkward for them to do so? Right, right, right. So I think there is some scope here for sort of envisaging the historical Jesus as ugly. Something I'm toying with at the moment is one of the earliest writings, if we see it as pre-existing Paul, is the Philippian hymn in Philippians 2, verse 5 to 11. And there it says that though Jesus was in the form of God, he took upon the fore. form of a slave. And the word there again is Morphae. And this is the word that we find in biographies to describe someone's form, their outward form with their visible appearance. Now, it may be, it may be that Jesus is just being described as of the form of a slave

when he's being crucified. This is 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 the gospel. 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 wear a kind of tunic that would give you some sort of like scope for movement. And then maybe if you were, you know, high up sort of in the economy, then you would look more like you would be less distinguishable 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. And the law was to distinguish slaves by some kind of mark. And 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 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, I think they're called clavi or clavi, which are these stripes. So sort of the higher up you go, the more stripes you can put on your tuning. I think so the one item of Jesus's closing in the Gospels that is described in some detail is his seamless tunic 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 garment 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 seen seamless. He also says that it was woven as a whole from above anothen. And this is a word that sort of appears multiple times throughout the gospel. And it always has, or two times before, and it's always a kind of double entendre. So it can mean, say, born anothen, born again, but it can also mean born from above. Okay. Or it could be, I think Pilot also uses this phrase. that his authority is from above, and again, it's a double entendre.

Pilate is thinking that about his kind of 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 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 theoretically 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 a majority of commentators, if we can appeal to numbers in this field, probably still do see John as sourced 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 authorship of John's Gospel is this other John, John the elder who is the scribe. So who seems to be, I mean, Richard Borkman 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. By the Dead Sea, there is a cemetery. 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 piece of cloth. And they're called bag tunics sometimes because it gives us this impression of loneliness and humility. And I think that runs like a thread throughout, you know, if you know, it runs like a thread throughout the Gospels. Because 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 stollet, their long robes. There's an irony here that the clerical alb is, is itself a long road. And Jesus ends up in the post-Constantinian era as being depicted almost like Zeus with

this long flowing beard and with gold and this long toga. 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 dons today or students, you know, walking around in their long gowns. So he gets annoyed at this. He gets annoyed at people who were broadening their philactories, which are these little boxes which contain the Jewish scriptures in them. And enlarging their tassels.

I'm going to pronounce this incorrectly, but they're Sitzith, which are these all. almost violet or blue tassels that you would, that Jewish men would wear on their outer garments, their cloaks. And in, in the story of their hemorrhaging woman, the woman with a flow of blood, she touches the cresped on, the edge of the garment. And 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 probably looks much closer to a Middle Eastern Muslim than he does, certainly than he does, a kind of modern Western man. So he's in a 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 in the cynics, the cynics from that word cune, 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 a 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, we're 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 pice, 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. It's almost a stark contrast, I think, I once went on the Mormon website, and there

are very specific instructions about how to dress, sort of conservative manner, You know, looking very nice with your tie and so on. And it's almost the opposite in the mission instructions of the Gospels. Yeah. You know, dress very shamefully. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's clear that people are obsessed. Yes.

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 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'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 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 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 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. The eyes are the window of the soul. Yeah.

So I can see your heart for me and your love and so on by looking into your eyes. You know, so, so it's very difficult, it's very difficult to know, but, you know, people have very different agendas, I think, in terms of reconstructing Jesus's appearance and their interest in it. And I think some of those are probably, you know, more healthy than others. 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 Cohn in his black liberation theology. So when people are describing Jesus as black, 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 there is a kind of theological claim to be made there Right

So when I can't remember who it is you said wrote this book But says Jesus is black He doesn't mean that the physical Christ walking around in Jerusalem Had dark skin No He means something more theological Yeah I think so I think he's talking about

I think there probably are people out there Who would try to make the claim that Jesus was actually black Just as the Nazis made the claim that Jesus was actually an Aryan, you know, and they put forward all of these arguments, they would say that Galilee was actually, where Jesus was from, was Galilee of the Gentiles, as it's described in 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 Boulder Dash, basically.

We know that Galilee was a heavily Jewish area, Nazareth was a very pious place and so on. So, yeah, it's a load of nonsense. You know, Jesus was a Jew. He would have been maybe dark honey colored 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, behind the gospels.com. Well, www.

It doesn't work without the www. It's, yeah, some kind of domain issue. go to go to www. Remember the W's Behind the Gospels.com where you'll find John's substack where you write about once a week on some area of biblical scholarship. And I think you do so 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 will be linked in the description to make sure that they remember the W's. 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 wanted 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