From Jews and others he questioned, he heard that Jesus “wandered about most shamefully in the sight of all”. He interviewed people, and he – like us – was quite interested in what Jesus looked like. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Jesus was remembered as looking shabby by a scholar named Celsus, writing in the mid second century, in a treatise against the Christians. We shouldn’t think of contemporary underwear, but wearing a one-piece on its own was probably not good form. One-piece tunics in first-century Judaea were normally thin undergarments or children’s wear. That’s strange, because mostly tunics were made of two pieces sewn at the shoulders and sides. Jesus’s tunic was also made of one piece of cloth only (John 19:23-24).
Indeed, Jesus specifically identifies men who dress in long tunics (“stolai”, Mark 12:38) as wrongly receiving honour from people who are impressed by their fine attire, when in fact they unjustly devour widows’ houses. Among men, only the very rich wore long tunics. He wore a tunic (chitōn), which for men normally finished slightly below the knees, not at the ankles. Jesus’ garb would have been a far cry from the depiction in da Vinci’s The Last Supper. He walked in sandals, as implied in multiple Biblical passages (see Matthew 3:11 Mark 1:7, 6:9 John 1:27), and we now know what ancient Judaean sandals were like as they have been preserved in dry caves by the Dead Sea. Usually made of wool, a mantle could be large or small, thick or fine, coloured or natural, but for men there was a preference for undyed types. From the Bible (for example, Mark 6:56) you can discover that he wore a mantle – a large shawl (“himation” in Greek) – which had tassels, described as “edges” a distinctively Jewish tallith in a form it was in antiquity. There is no neat physical description of Jesus in the Gospels or in ancient Christian literature. Once we’ve got the palette for his colouring right, given he was a Jewish man of the Middle East, how do we dress him? How did he seem to people of the time? Dressed in basics What we do with our bodies creates an appearance.Īnd so Jesus’ appearance would have had much to do with what he was wearing. In a crowd, we may look for a friend’s scarf rather than their hair or nose. We can be old, young, tall, short, weighty, thin, dark-skinned, light-skinned, frizzy-haired, straight-haired, and so on, but our appearance does not begin and end with our physical bodies. As the sociologist Chris Shilling argues, they are “both personal resources and social symbols that ‘give off’ messages about identity”. 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.
#Real jesus piece chain skin#
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.
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