After all, our bodies are not just bodies. Wikimedia Commonsįor me, Jesus’ appearance is not all about flesh and bones. In contemporary films, from Zefirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) onwards, this styling prevails, even when Jesus’ clothing is considered poorly made. We imagine Jesus in long robes with baggy sleeves, as he is most often depicted in artworks over the centuries. A man with long hair parted in the middle and a long beard – often with fair skin, light brown hair and blue eyes – has become the widely accepted likeness. The Jesus we’ve inherited from centuries of Christian art is not accurate, but it is a powerful brand.
Nevertheless, for me as a historian, trying to visualise Jesus accurately is a way to understand Jesus more accurately, too. Putting flesh on ancient skulls is not an exact science, because the soft tissue and cartilage are unknown.
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Rightly, the skin tone is olive, and the hair and beard black and shortish, but the nose, lips, neck, eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, fat cover and expression are all totally conjectural. This was based on an ancient skull and, using the latest technology (as it was), shows the head of a stocky fellow with a somewhat worried expression. Much has been made of a digital reconstruction of a Judaean man created for a BBC documentary, Son of God, in 2001. Over the past few decades, the question of what Jesus looked like has cropped up again and again.