"WOULD THE REAL JESUS PLEASE STAND?"

LET'S ALL HAVE A BLESSED CHRISTMAS

BUT LET'S NOT LET HALLMARK CARDS DEFINE CHRISTMAS FOR US! 

OUR TRADITIONAL DEPICTION 

CLOSER TO REALITY

Jesus was not white. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise if you’ve ever entered a Western church or visited an art gallery. But while there is no physical description of him in the Bible, there is also no doubt that the historical Jesus was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew.

WHAT RESEARCH AND SCIENCE CAN TELL US ABOUT JESUS

OUR TRADITIONAL DEPICTION

CLOSER TO REALITY

In 2001, the retired medical artist Richard Neave led a team of Israeli and British forensic anthropologists and computer programmers in creating a new image of Jesus based on an Israeli skull dating to the first century A.D., computer modeling and their knowledge of what Jewish people looked like at the time. Though no one claims it’s an exact reconstruction of what Jesus himself actually looked like, scholars consider this image—around five feet tall, with darker skin, dark eyes, and shorter, curlier hair—to be more accurate than many artistic depictions Jesus.

In her 2018 book, WHAT DID JESUS LOOK LIKE?, Taylor used archaeological remains, historical texts and ancient Egyptian funerary art to conclude that, like most people in Judea and Egypt around the time, Jesus most likely had brown eyes, dark brown to black hair and olive-brown skin. He may have stood about 5-ft.-5-in. (166 cm) tall, the average man’s height at the time.

While Cargill agrees that these more recent images of Jesus—including darker, perhaps curlier hair, darker skin and dark eyes—probably come closer to the truth, he stresses that we can never really know exactly what Jesus looked like.

“What did Jewish Galileans look like 2,000 years ago?” he asks. “That's the question. They probably didn't have blue eyes and blond hair.”

ALL THIS REMINDS ME OF A STORY THAT SOMEONE TOLD ME YEARS AGO

Several years ago, a man died and went to heaven. For some reason, God let him come back to earth for one day. The news people heard of it and decided to send out reporters and cameramen to see what he would say. There were reporters from every radio and TV station in the world waiting in breathless anticipation. They were told that they would all have to agree on one question and one question only. After hours of negotiation they settled on one question and decided that  Brian Williams of MSNBC would to be the one to ask the agreed on question at noon on Christmas Day. 

They brought the poor man who had died and come back from heaven and seated him in a big chair in the center of the stage. His name was Jack. Brian Williams went up to Jack with his hand held microphone and asked timidly, "Jack, you have been to heaven and back. You are the only one who has seen God face to face and returned to earth. We all want to know! Here is our question. What does God look like?" There was a long anxious pause as Jack took the microphone. Jack took a deep breath and said softly into the microphone, "She is black!"

People all over the world fainted at the news, but they all went back home knowing that their inherited cultural perceptions of God had been seriously challenged!