(NNPA) — What, then, did Jesus actually look like? Despite the absence of a detailed description of Jesus’ physical appearance in the Gospels (though John the Revelator saw the risen Christ apparently with wooly hair and black feet, Rev. 1:14-15), there are non-Biblical evidences that actually allow us to visualize the Son of God from Nazareth.
The first century Jewish writer Josephus (37-100 A.D.) penned the earliest non-biblical testimony of Jesus. He reportedly had access to official Roman records on which he based his information and in his work Halosis or the Capture (of Jerusalem), written around 72 A.D., Josephus discussed “the human form of Jesus and his wonderful works.” Unfortunately his texts have passed through Christian hands, which altered them—removing offensive material. Fortunately, however, Biblical scholar Robert Eisler in a classic 1931 study of Josephus’ Testimony was able to reconstruct the unaltered testimony based on a newly discovered Old Russian translation that preserved the original Greek text. According to Eisler’s reconstruction, the oldest non-Biblical description of Jesus read as follows:
“At that time also there appeared a certain man of magic power, if it be meet to call him a man, [whose name is Jesus], whom [certain] Greeks call a son of [a] God, but his disciples [call] the true prophet. He was a man of simple appearance, mature age, black-skinned (melagchrous), short growth, three cubits tall, hunchbacked, prognathous (lit. ‘with a long face’ [macroprosopos]), a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose, with scanty [curly] hair, but having a line in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazaraeans, with an undeveloped beard.”
This short, black-skinned, mature, hunchbacked Jesus with a unibrow, short curly hair and undeveloped beard bears no resemblance to the Jesus Christ taken for granted today by most of the Christian world: the tall, long haired, long bearded, white-skinned and blue eyed Son of God. Yet, this earliest textual record matches well the earliest iconographic evidence. The earliest visual depiction of Jesus is a painting found in 1921 on a wall of the baptismal chamber of the house-church at Dura Europos, Syria and dated around 235 A.D. The Jesus that is “healing the paralytic man” (Mark 2:1-12) is short and dark-skinned with a small curly Afro. This description has now been supported by the new science of forensic anthropology. In 2002 British forensic scientists and Israeli archaeologists reconstructed what they believe is the most accurate image of Jesus based off of data obtained from the multi-disciplinary approach. In December 2002 Popular Science magazine published a cover story on the findings which confirm that Jesus would have been short, around 5’1”, hair “short with tight curls,” a weather-beaten face “which would have made him appear older,” dark eyes and complexion. “He probably looked a great deal more like a dark-skinned Semite than Westerners are used to seeing,” they concluded. The textual, visual, and scientific evidence agrees, then: Jesus likely was a short, dark-skinned Semite with short curly hair and dark eyes.
Colossians 1:15 describes Christ as the “image of the unseen God” and in John, 12:45; 14:9, Jesus declares that whoever sees him has seen God. What Jesus ‘looks like’ then is not irrelevant as it is in some way a pointer to God Himself.
Dr. Wesley Muhammad is a historian of religion who earned a Bachelor’s degree (1994) in religious studies from Morehouse College and a Master’s degree (2003) and Doctorate (2008) in Islamic studies from the University of Michigan.
He has authored several scholarly studies on the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, including The Truth of God: The Bible, The Qur’an and the Secret of the Black God as well as Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam.
