For the last 20 years or so, conservative commentators have convinced the Christian Right that there exists a “War on Christmas,” in that secular society is moving away from what they consider the “true” meaning of Christmas. I don’t intend to retread once again the true origin of the holiday; I encourage everyone who hasn’t listened to go back and listen to the first three of my Very Historically Blind Christmas specials for more insight into the historical and folkloric basis of the holiday. But I want to start our conversation this year by looking at the outrage over taking the Christ out of Christmas. We hear it almost every year, when some media company or retail chain wishes us an inclusive Happy Holidays rather than a very explicitly Christian Merry Christmas. Perhaps the most outrageous controversy occurred in 2015 when café juggernaut Starbucks toned down the seasonal imagery on their red cups. But a great example of the historical blindness of these claims is the argument that the common abbreviation of the word “Christmas” as “Xmas” is a clear representation of this supposed anti-Christian trend, in that it literally crosses out the word Christ. In reality, the letter X has long stood for the word or name “Christ.” In Greek, the original language of the New Testament, the word for Christ, Christós, is spelled starting with a big old capital “X” and an “r.” Constantine the great, the 4th century CE Roman Emperor who famously converted to Christianity, is said to have popularized the letters “XR,” or chi and rho, as an abbreviation of Christ’s name emblazoned on his military banner. The “R,” or rho, looked like a P in Greek, and the first Anglo-Saxon usage of the abbreviation to shorten the word Christmas dates to 1021 CE, written as “XPmas.” The shortening became more common through the centuries, with Google Ngram showing spikes in usage in the 16th and 18th centuries, and a gradual upslope in the 1800s, when many examples of it can be found in literature. Indeed, Ngram shows that its use had actually dropped significantly by the 21st century. But never mind the actual truth of the matter that history shows, I guess. In the same way, we can see episodes in history when there really was a literal War on Christmas, and that historical perspective refutes those who claim that plain red cups and wishing people Happy Holidays is a suppression of their religious observance and should make them feel rather silly. After all, Christmas only started to become a legal holiday in U.S. states in the 19th century. Back in the 17th century, in New England, Puritans had outlawed it, and even after the Crown brought it back, it was out of favor for a long time. The objection was that Christmas encouraged a Catholic sort of worship, which Puritans considered pagan in character, and idolatrous. This view can be traced back to Europe and the Reformation. First, Lutherans did away with the celebration of saints’ days, keeping only Christ Mass to honor Jesus, but Calvinists did away with Christmas and Easter too, reasoning that only the Sabbath was acceptable to observe, as it was the only holy day mentioned in scriptures. This view was further popularized in Great Britain among Presbyterians who banned Christmas in Scotland in the 16th century, and among Puritans in England, who outlawed it during the 17th-century Civil War. Clearly the long history of carousal and topsy-turvy, anything goes partying during the holiday contributed to the Puritan distaste for the celebration, but a large part of the Protestant resistance to the holiday resulted from their iconoclasm. Calvinists especially criticized the Catholic veneration of saints and Mary through portraits and statuary as a form of idolatry and paganism, and it seemed to them that all the trappings of Christmas smacked too much of a Catholic-style religion. Indeed, this debate is occasionally raised even today, as Catholics call Protestants hypocrites for criticizing them over their veneration of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in statuary when they put up nativity scenes in their homes every Christmas. Who knew that the image of baby Jesus in the manger could cause such controversy? Well, the answer to that should be most people—Christian apologists, theologians, biblical scholars, historians, art scholars, and even just your average Christian—for many and various are the robust debates and controversies about the image and likeness of Christ.

To begin our study of popular imagery of Christ, and to more concretely anchor the discussion as a holiday topic, let us look more closely at depictions of the Nativity. The first thing that may jump out to a critical mind when examining most nativity scenes is that the Christ child is very often pictured as a lily white babe. But we will get to depictions of race or ethnicity in icons of Christ. Here at the start, let us examine how the image of the Christ child became so tied up with Christmas imagery. I have spoken at length about the origin of midwinter celebrations and how they came to be viewed as a commemoration of Christ’s birth despite the fact that he most certainly wasn’t born during that time of year. This notion of the birth of baby Jesus being celebrated in December led to some odd adaptations of former traditions during the Reformation. Gifts had formerly been given to children on December 6th, the feast day of St. Nicolas, but Martin Luther, seeking to move away from the veneration of saints, insisted on focusing on Christmas Eve as the day of gift-giving. This led to a notion of a visiting gift-giver other than St. Nicolas, which Luther told children was Christ himself, or rather the Christ child, or Christkind. The legend of a gift-bearing Christ child visiting households on Christmas eve spread among Germans and evolved. Unsurprisingly, this Germanic Christkind was depicted like a little blonde white boy. On Christmas Eve, children were sent to their rooms to await the Christkind, whose arrival was announced by a ringing bell, but when the children raced out to see, the Christkind has already gone, leaving their presents behind. Over the centuries, the depiction of the Christkind evolved, such that the little boy became a little girl, and eventually a little white female angel. Likely this is because the figure of the Christkind, also called the Christkindl in the diminutive, was conflated with the angel characters that accompanied him in Christmas parades. The iconography is most distinctive in antique Christmas postcards, with the Christkindl depicted as a little girl carrying a bell or lantern, bearing a basket of presents across a snowy countryside. The figure of the Christkindl was even folded into the myth of the gift-giving St. Nicolas, or Santa Claus, who would sometimes himself be called Kris Kringle, a corruption of Christkindl, and on some postcards both can be seen pictured together, Santa cradling the Christkind angel child in his arms as both beam. And where is the image of Christ in this? It is the perfect example of how iconography evolves and adapts to other cultures until it is absolutely unrecognizable from its original subject.

A typical image of the Christkindl from a vintage Christmas card.

So let us move to modern depictions of Christ and begin our journey back through the ages to better understand how images of Jesus have likewise evolved to the point that they cannot be viewed as legitimate portraits of the historical man. To begin with, we must start with the most popular of images of Christ. It may surprise many that the most widely used image of Christ today, called the Head of Christ, can in no way be considered an accurate portrait. Also called the Sallman Head, the portrait was drawn in 1924 by an American, Warner Sallman, who sold it to a devotional magazine and later reproduced it as a painting. After the image was popularized, having been provided to soldiers in World War II for them to carry around and meditate on, the artist claimed to have sketched it from a miraculous vision late one night after beseeching God in prayer, but that rather sounds like mythmaking after the fact. The image has been venerated by the Coptic Orthodox Church since 1991, when it credited the report that a boy in Texas miraculously recovered from leukemia after seeing the portrait shedding tears. It is no surprise that the portrait was around in the nineties for that young leukemia patient to contemplate, as since the reproduction was painted, a company devoted to marketing lithographic prints of the portrait made it into the single most popular portrait of Christ, rivaled only by the Divine Mercy Image, a painting commissioned by a Polish nun who claimed to have received specific instructions from Jesus about what it should look like during a 1931 vision. Since both images are claimed to be divinely inspired, some might claim that they represent accurate portrayals of Christ, and there are some real similarities between the images, a white robe, long wavy brown hair and trim beard, long nose, high forehead, and white skin, or at least a light olive complexion, depending on how one perceives the tone and lighting. Importantly, we cannot compare the images to written descriptions of Christ in the scriptures, as those are glaringly absent from the New Testament and even from apocryphal works. Lacking any textual description, then, do we have any way of checking the authenticity of these supposed products of divine inspiration? Well, they are not the first images of Christ, of course, so we may begin by comparing them to predecessors to see how they fit into the genre of Christian iconography.

Interestingly, the Divine Mercy Image shares some striking similarities with a famous work of the High Renaissance called Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World—not just in the likeness of Christ but even down to the position of Christ’s hands. This work is either an original work by Leonardo Da Vinci, or it is a copy of a lost work by Da Vinci. This in itself is something of an interesting mystery, but it opens to our discussion the work of Da Vinci and how his portrayals of Jesus Christ might be viewed as the invention of the modern image of Christ. Da Vinci’s depictions of Christ would certainly be influential on Christian iconography. That cannot be reasonably argued against. However, there are some odd claims that must be addressed made about the work of Da Vinci and who he used as the model of his portraits of Christ, including Salvator Mundi and The Last Supper. One notion is that since Da Vinci is believed to have used his young pupils and assistants, Gian Giacomo Caprotti and Francesco Melzi, as models, that one of them may have served as his model for Christ. Since these young men were intimate companions of Da Vinci’s, this theory has sometimes been used to troll conservative Christians by saying their image of Christ was modeled on a homosexual, but in truth, we don’t have concrete evidence about the nature of Da Vinci’s relationship with these men or whether either served as a model for Christ. Another tale has it that he used a fine-looking young man named Pietro Bandinelli as his model for Christ in The Last Supper, and years later, as he continued work on the fresco and it came time to paint Judas Iscariot, he went looking for a wretched looking beggar, and that model turned out to also be Pietro Bandinelli, who had fallen on hard times and whose beauty was marred by a sinful life. This story appears to have been wholly invented by a 19th century Presbyterian evangelist named John Wilbur Chapman for a sermon intended to show the harms of sin. Lastly, there is the claim, virally circulated as a meme on the Internet, that the modern image of Christ was modeled on Cesare Borgia, son of the controversial Pope Alexander VI, and that Borgia’s father commissioned images of Christ by Da Vinci and others and commanded that his son’s likeness be used. To this is added the claim that the pope did this to rid the world of images of a semitic Jesus, and even ordered all such other images be destroyed. The problem with this claim is that there is no evidence for it. Novelist Alexandre Dumas, of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo fame, is credited with recording this “fact” in his essay on the Borgias, but Snopes debunked this, finding no evidence of the claim in Dumas’ work. We know who Da Vinci’s patron was for The Last Supper, and it wasn’t a Borgia or a pope. Moreover, images of a European-looking Christ predate the Renaissance. There may be some kernel of truth present in this that has nothing to do with the model Da Vinci may or may not have used, in that there is reason to believe Da Vinci was influenced in his depictions of Jesus by an effort to Europeanize Christ’s image, even if he may not have been aware of it.

*Salvator Mundi*, attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci

In the latter half of the 14th century, some 35-40 years before Leonardo Da Vinci began work on The Last Supper, a curious letter was published and circulated around Italy. Purported to be a missive written by a Roman official identified as the governor of Judaea, or sometimes as the governor of Jerusalem, the letter’s purpose is to inform the Senate of Christ’s existence and his activities, specifically the miracles he was performing, such as curing disease and resurrecting the dead. Curiously, though, these momentous reports are mentioned only briefly, rather offhandedly, and the bulk of the letter is devoted to a physical description of Christ. The Letter of Lentulus says he is tall, with a respectable countenance. More specifically, it says his hair is the color of “an unripe hazelnut,” or light brown, is parted in the middle and straight until his ears, at which point it falls curly to his shoulders. A beard, too, is described, full, also brown, but not long, and forked at the chin. Even the color of his skin is suggested with a line about its “slightly reddish hue,” indicative of a certain cheerful disposition according to the medieval notion of bodily fluids, or humors, determining temperament, but also hinting at a very European lightness of skin tone, in which ruddy complexions are more common. The circulation of the Letter of Lentulus in Italy during the High Renaissance offers a clear and convincing explanation of the origin of modern images of Christ. In Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and The Last Supper, as well as in later variations like the Divine Mercy Image, we see it all, the good looks, the mild expression, the pale skin, the light brown hair, long and parted in the center, and even the forked beard. However, this image was certainly a 15th century invention, as scholars agree that the Letter of Lentulus is not genuine. It identifies one Publius Lentulus as the praeses or governor of Judaea or Jerusalem depending on the version, and putting aside the problem that there was no governor of the city of Jerusalem, other than a military commander, the actual term praeses as an honorific designating a governor would not be used until the 3rd century CE, and thus is anachronistic. Moreover, some of the earliest versions of the letter give the name of an emperor who would not have been in power at the time the letter was supposedly written, an error that was amended in future versions. But the biggest tell that this was a fabrication is the simple fact that the letter’s entire purpose seems to be to establish that Christ looked like a European. Simply put, it was a piece of fake news, a hoax artifact, designed to rewrite history by representing an ancient Middle Eastern Jew as European-looking, and it succeeded, not only by inspiring many works of art, but also, later, by inspiring white supremacists.

From the 19th century onward, the Publius Lentulus Letter has been resurrected and touted by those who argue Jesus was white. Long after it was discredited as a forgery, it began to gain credence among whites in America and Britain, where most acknowledged that it was a fraud but nevertheless felt that it rang true or wanted it to be true. In the U.S. especially, where Judeo-Christian scriptures were used to bolster first chattel slavery and later Jim Crow oppressions, the Lentulus Letter gradually went from being a known forgery, to being disseminated in the Gilded Age as a true eyewitness description of a white Jesus. Later, the Nazis would follow suit. Their Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life put great effort into promoting the notion of an “Aryan” Jesus, promulgating the false history that Galilee was peopled by nothing but converted Gentiles or non-Jews, so it stood to reason that Christ, who was from Galilee, was himself a Gentile. This, however, is pure speculation, and misrepresents the ethnic demographic of Galilee. Roman-Jewish historian Josephus does mention forced conversion when Judaea expanded just before the time of Christ, but to suggest the populace of Galilee was comprised only of Gentiles is insupportable. Indeed, all passages touching on his ethnicity in canonical scriptures clearly indicate he was a Judaean Jew. In Galatians, it is said he was born under Judaean law, which is matrilineal, in that his mother, Mary, was Jewish, and in Romans, it is said he was of the seed of David, and not metaphorically, clarifying that this was “according to flesh.” Later in Romans, again, it specifies that Christ was descended from the “root of Jesse,” the father of David. Essentially, Christ was descended from the royal lineage that had formerly ruled Judah. While it’s true that the gospels indicate this Davidic line of descent from Joseph, who was not his biological father according to the doctrine of Immaculate Conception, and that there were traditions in the 2nd century CE suggesting Christ’s real biological father was a soldier named Panthera, there is no claim that Panthera was not himself a Jew. In addition to his Jewish status as the son of a Jewish woman, there is the further evidence that, in John, it’s said of the Jews in Jerusalem that “his own did not accept him,” and when the Romans crucified him, the sign hung on his cross to define his crime said he was killed for being “King of the Jews.” All signs point to Jesus being a Jew, and any who argue otherwise do so with some bias or agenda.

A so-called “Black Madonna” portrait, appearing to depict the Christ child with darker skin.

White supremacists are not alone in misrepresenting Christ’s likely skin color, though. In the 19th century, a dubious connection was made between the story of Christ and the Hindu god Krishna by English antiquarian and reformer Godfrey Higgins, who suggested that their names were derivative, and that Krishna, typically depicted as blue but whose name means “black” or “dark blue,” originated as the god of a black people, therefore making Christ black. This claim has evolved over the last two centuries, such that atheists and critics of Christianity will delight in claiming that the story of Christ was stolen from the ancient Hindu story of Krishna, claiming that Krishna too was born on December 25th, of a virgin, in a manger, lived only 30 years, and was crucified, and rose again after three days, none of which is true. Even the etymology of their names is known to be completely unrelated, as the name Christ is derived from a Greek word approximating the Hebrew word for messiah. The notion of a Black Jesus would rise again, as it were, championed Black American ministers, starting with George Alexander McGuire in 1924, who pointed out that, since Christ is said to have been descended from David, and David counted among his forebears some ancestors of Hamitic descent, and Ham was widely thought to have been cursed with dark skin, making him the origin of the Black race, then it meant that Christ was at least of mixed race Black heritage. Of course, the entire notion that Blackness is a curse put on Ham and his descendants by God is a pernicious claim that was long used to justify slavery and racist oppression. Although it must be admitted that McGuire’s turning of this logic against white supremacists is admirable, as a basis for a real inquiry into Christ’s appearance, it is not sound. Starting in the 1950s, civil rights activists and radical theologians continued to preach against the notion of a white Jesus and argue instead for a Black Jesus, but not typically on grounds previously cited. The first major champion of the movement in the Civil Rights era was Albert Cleage, Jr., a Detroit minister whose black separatist message was based principally on revolutionary anti-racist sentiment. He wrote numerous books claiming that Jesus was literally, ethnically Black in his effort to remake Christ as a messiah more closely identified with the Black Church. Mostly Cleage relied on the claim that Christ’s people, Judaean Jews, were a people who, having come out of Egypt, had mixed with dark-skinned African peoples, and his evidence was itself just as problematic as any evidence of Christ’s whiteness in that he relied on the numerous Black Madonnas, or statues and paintings of Mary and the infant Jesus that seem to depict them with dark skin. These works are typically Byzantine in origin, and depictions of people with darker skin are common in such Greek style works of that era. Additionally, many of them are believed by art scholars to have darkened with age and exposure to candle smoke. The argument for a Black Jesus would be further developed in the 1960s by James Cone, but his Black Liberation Theology was not focused on arguing that Christ literally was African. Rather, his was more of an iconoclastic theology, calling out White Jesus as an idol that ought to be smashed. Later developments of the Black Jesus doctrine suggested that Christ’s identification with blackness had nothing to do with the color of his skin but rather the parallels of the historical suffering and oppression of both the Jews and Black people. Despite the fact that no strong literal argument has been put forward with historical source evidence to support the notion of Jesus as a Black man, the idea, both literal and figurative, stands as an admirable challenge to white supremacists and remains popular. Recently, an image claiming to show the earliest known depiction of Christ, revealing him and all of his apostles to have dark brown skin and hair, went so viral that it was even picked up and spread by the the Daily Mail. In reality, however, the painting, which hangs in the Coptic Museum in Cairo and depicts Doubting Thomas placing his finger in Christ’s wound, dates only to the 18th century. Like the Black Madonnas, the darker skin tones of figures in it can be attributed to the Byzantine style and darkening because of age and smoke. As of now, the artistic work that holds the record as the earliest depiction of Christ is called “The Healing of the Paralytic,” a Syrian work dating to 235 CE that pictures Christ beardless, with short hair, in a sketch that makes it impossible to determine skin tone.

So the conundrum is apparent. In a world in which the racial identity of this religious figure has become an important point of contention, we really have no clear sense of what he looked like. Most early images show a shorter haired man, and the bearded Jesus doesn’t seem to have shown up until centuries later, but even the earliest images of him as a short-haired, beardless man originate from more than two hundred years after his death. So after all of this, essentially we find that all works of art depicting Christ prove inadequate and untrustworthy in credibly portraying what Christ the historical man may have looked like. However, the faithful will tell us that we should not look to the works of man for an accurate depiction of Christ, but rather to the portraits made without hands, acheiropoieta, icons supposedly formed miraculously, through some supernatural impression. I have spoken a great deal about such artifacts in the past, such as in my investigation of the Guadalupe Tilma. More germane to our topic today, I devoted an entire episode to the Shroud of Turin, in which I raised numerous issues such as its carbon dating and indications of pigment having been added to the blood present in the image. When I researched and wrote that episode in 2018, I left it somewhat open-ended because of recent evidence published in PLOS ONE that the iron particles present in the blood traces on the shroud’s fabric are consistent with the blood of a human enduring trauma. However, since that time, that paper was retracted. Furthermore, I’ve come around to the possibility that the staining may have been accomplished through the suffering of a person purposely imitating Christ’s suffering as a kind of penance, a not uncommon practice in the Middle Ages, which would be consistent with the carbon dating. So we can rule out the Shroud of Turin. Additionally, in a patron exclusive, I spoke of another acheiropoieta, the vernicle or Veil of Veronica, a supposed miraculous impression of Christ’s face made when he wiped his bloody sweat upon a woman’s veil on his way to crucifixion, and in both my episode on the Turin Shroud and my minisode on the Vernicle, I spoke about the Mandylion, or the Image of Edessa, another supposedly miraculous image of Christ’s face on cloth. Both, it turns out, began as legends, and only much later did actual portraits appear purporting to be the legendary images, with many competing versions, all of which are manifestly works of art. Neither are these the only acheiropoieta to discuss. There is the Ancha icon, called the Keramidion and said to have been miraculously copied from the Mandylion through contact with it. This artifact is actually just a hot wax painting. Then there is the Kamuliana, once venerated in Constantinople, which was supposedly an image of Christ imprinted on a piece of linen and discovered in a well by a pagan woman who had previously doubted Christ’s existence. Except it was actually painted on canvas, and it turned out to be big business for the churches built to house it and charge people admission to view it. Lastly, there is the image of Christ in the Sancta Sanctorum within the Lateran Palace in Rome. This image, unlike the others, was never claimed to be anything other than a painting; however, at the time of its first veneration, it was claimed that it was painted by angels. Afterward, it was said that St. Luke sketched it and angels finished it. Eventually, it was just said that St. Luke painted it, which would suggest it was an original portrait by a biographer of Christ, but in truth, there is no record of the image until the 7th century CE, and it is further useless as evidence of Christ’s appearance since it long ago faded to become indiscernible and was replaced by a different silk painting of Christ. In the end, all these supposedly miraculous images turn out to be mere works of art, just as untrustworthy as any other painting, none of which can be relied on as accurate portrayals of Jesus.

If no image can be trusted, we are forced to rely on the written record. With the Publius Lentulus Letter revealed to be a fraud, we look to the Gospels, which as I have already said, are curiously silent about Christ’s stature, facial features, hair color and style, and his clothing. They give us absolutely nothing to work with. And why is that? It is a remarkably curious omission. It is not a matter of physical description merely being uncommon in ancient works of biography. As Joan Taylor, author of my principal source, What Did Jesus Look Like?, points out, most ancient Greek biographies give ample details about the appearance of their subjects. This was even true of ancient histories focused on Moses, and elsewhere in New Testament scriptures, descriptions are not withheld, so why did the writers of the Gospels resist telling us what the most important figure in their religion looked like? Strangely, the closest we get to a description comes after Christ’s resurrection, when he appears to the Apostles and they fail to recognize him! This episode would go a long way toward supporting the theory I discussed in my recent patron exclusive that perhaps it was not Christ who was crucified, or that it was another, such as his own brother, who appeared to disciples after the crucifixion claiming to be a risen Christ. Some early Christian scholars and Gnostics, however, took this as further evidence of the notion that he was polymorphous, a shape-shifter who might appear differently to those who looked on him depending on the quality of their souls. But regardless of the value of either of these hypotheses, this passage raises the idea that Christ may have been so very unremarkable that it was difficult to describe him, and perhaps even difficult to recognize him. What would a biographer say if he was not tall nor short, not handsome nor ugly? Taylor points out that if he were handsome, it may have been something the authors of the Gospels would have emphasized, as attractiveness was commonly thought to be typical of royalty, and this would have demonstrated Christ’s kingly heritage. But if conversely, he were unattractive, this might have been emphasized as well to drive home the point that he was a longsuffering servant of his Father. Indeed, in later years, citing a passage in Isaiah thought to prophesize the appearance of Christ as a “Suffering Servant,” it would be said that “he had no form of majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity, and as one from whom others hide their faces.” Indeed, not counting prophecies believed to be speaking of him, the earliest known genuine physical description of Christ, from 2nd century philosopher and critic of Christianity Celsus, tells us that, “as they say, [he] was little and ugly and undistinguished.” Celsus’s description has variously been criticized as malicious name calling by a critic or as yet another identification of Christ with Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, but as Taylor points out, the wording “as they say” indicates he is sharing what others at the time said about Christ, opening the possibility that he had heard an accurate description passed down from one who had seen or known Jesus. The notion of a short and ugly messiah lines up with the image of Jesus as a philosopher, she points out, suggesting he may have been a kind of unkempt wandering sage, and this may account for many of the aspects of the image of him we have received, such as his being bearded and clothed raggedly in robes. The fact remains, though, that none of Christ’s biographers specify these details of his appearance. Taylor suggests that they might have been stuck, not wanting to portray him either way, as good-looking or ugly, and so purposely avoided the matter. Many faithful would say this had something to do with modesty or focusing more on matters of the spirit than on the physical, but of course, a simpler explanation comes from the consensus view among scholars that the writers of the Gospels weren’t there and didn’t know Christ and therefore could not accurately describe him. What are we left with, then? Simply the knowledge that he was a Judaean Jew, living around the turn of the Common Era, and that he may have been exceedingly average in his looks. And that, it turns out, is enough.

Running with the aspect of Celsus’s description of Christ as “undistinguished,” Taylor sets out to develop the thesis that Jesus was exceedingly average, an ordinary-looking man for his time and place and ethnicity. A more accurate image of Christ can then be extrapolated based on a scientific understanding of the circumstances of his birth and life. From the ample data on the measurements of human remains kept by the Israel Antiquities Authority, as well as other osteological records, she calculates an average height among Judaean Jews of his locale and age as five feet, five inches tall. She cites expert biohistorian Yossi Nagar who asserts that, based on historical knowledge of intermarriage or lack thereof and analysis of chromosomal pools, the extant people today who appear most like ancient Judaean Jews are Iraqi Jews, which fills in with relative certainty several prominent features of the historical Christ. He must have had black or dark brown hair and brown eyes. As for the much debated color of his skin, it likely was some shade of olive or honey, though of course there would have been variation in any community, such that his complexion may have been dark or light within that certain range. What we know about the common practices among Jews at the time when it came to hair, practices governed by religious codes as well as by the need to keep oneself free of lice, Christ likely had short hair and a beard but not a long one. As for his dress, the notion of a robe is not that distinguishable to us today from the traditional Jewish garb he actually wore, a mantle, called a tallith, wrapped around the body and slung over a shoulder. Here we have as precise and credible a description of Jesus Christ as we are likely to ever find, and still, we cannot know the exact tone of his skin or the features of his face. In 2001, a BBC documentary famously attempted a computer modeled approximation of a Judaean man’s face from a skull in an effort to see what Christ may have looked like, but the shape and arrangement of soft tissue features like lips and nose and eyebrows can only be guessed at in such models, and even if it were accurate for that skull, to suggest that all Judaean Jews of the era must have had similar faces is the very definition of stereotyping. So after everything, we don’t, we can’t know what Christ looked like, not really. But we can determine that the innumerable popular images of Christ are inaccurate, no matter their age or whether they are claimed to be miraculous depictions. We see a clear tendency in all art depicting him and all cultures in which he is venerated to remake Jesus in our own image, just as we are said to have been made in God’s. The inclination is so strong that it is etched into people’s brains, such that they think they see the image of Christ everywhere they look, in clouds, shadows, trees, frying pans, toast, tortillas, and once, in 2011, on a dog’s butt. In reality, though, this Jesus, only ever existed in their heads.

Until next time, remember, when you fry up a grilled cheese sandwich, it’s not Jesus you see on its toasted side, but rather a politicized and racialized iconographic representation of a historical figure who you probably wouldn’t recognize if he showed his face on your dinner.

A Very Historically Blind Xmas: The Iconic Christ

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