With Easter just one day behind us, we have been bombarded with images of Jesus Christ of Nazareth from TV to the Internet.
In a lot of depictions of Him, he is quite Caucasian looking, sometimes even with blonde hair and blue eyes. Perhaps those artists at that time in history believe he would be most accepted in that image. This, despite the fact that he was Jewish, with features far from those of a white man.
In today’s world with artificial intelligence, an image of what Jesus may have looked like popped up in 2020 and has been going viral ever since, from publications to YouTube to social media feeds.
What was generated in AI mode most resembles what is being portrayed in the series Chosen. This was a 3 season show of Christ and his students, or disciples or apostles as we more commonly refer to them. In this program, the actor depicting Jesus most looks like the artificial intelligence image of Him. You can still catch this series, by the way, on the free Angel Studios app.
More than any other implicating factor, what Jesus most looks like depends on the country that is creating his appearance. Because as humans we identify with what is familiar, He takes on the ethnic characteristics of those who would be looking to find images his countenance.
What Can We Suppose With Some Accuracy?
Jesus was a carpenter, and during His ministry he traveled very many miles. This seems to indicate he had a robust and likely muscular stature. He did after all also clear the Jewish temple not once but twice, during which he overturned tables and drove out livestock with a whip.
It is probable that He had a beard as the Bible describes his facial hair in Isaiah 50:6 in a prophecy about His suffering. Also, at the time, Jewish law prohibited adult males from “disfiguring the edges of their beard,” as described in Leviticus 19:27 and Galatians 4:4. And despite that He is often shown with long hair, in 1 Corinthians 11:14 it says, “long hair is a dishonor to a man,” so it is more likely than not that his hair was short.
The basic question is, why is it that the Bible does not describe what Jesus looked like? Perhaps Jesus is just one name for a Higher Power, as is Buddha, Allah, Addonai, Shadai, and the like. This is called Omnitheism. It is the belief that all religions recognize God as the same God just with a different name. An omnist is someone who believes in all faiths or creeds.
And in the final analysis, maybe it really isn’t important at all what we think Jesus looked like. What matters is His spirit, which lives on seemingly into eternity.
