happycatcher - 11/29/2021 16:40


For centuries, the most common image of Jesus Christ, at least in Western cultures, has been that of a bearded, fair-skinned man with long, wavy, light brown or blond hair and (often) blue eyes. But the Bible doesn’t describe Jesus physically, and all the evidence we do have indicates he probably looked very different from how he has long been portrayed.

The Bible offers few clues about Christ’s physical appearance. Most of what we know about Jesus comes from the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. According to the Gospels, Jesus was a Jewish man born in Bethlehem and raised in the town of Nazareth, in Galilee (formerly Palestine, now northern Israel) during the first century A.D.
We know Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his ministry (Luke 3:23), but the Bible tells us virtually nothing about what he looked like...except that he didn’t stand out in any particular way. When Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane before the Crucifixion (Matthew 26:47-56) Judas Iscariot had to point Jesus out to his soldiers among the disciples, presumably because they all appeared similar to one another.

For many scholars Revelation 1:14-15 offers a clue that Jesus's skin was a darker hue and that his hair was woolly in texture. The hairs of his head, it says, "were white as white wool, white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace.”

We don't know what Jesus looked like, but if all of the things that we do know about him are true, he was a Palestinian Jewish man living in Galilee in the first century.

So he would have looked like a Palestinian Jewish man of the first century. He would have looked like a Jewish Galilean.

So, why do we continue to portray Jesus as a white man with long, wavy brown hair, and blue eyes?  He was not European, he was not white.  So why in our churches and on candles and pictures, do we portray him this way?

Is it because some are uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus not being white? Do humans feel they need to share the same ethnicity as Jesus?

EDIT: Because I can already see people are becoming hysterical, I am not saying Jesus was a black man. I am pointing out scripture that gives us indications of what his physical appearance might have been and it wasn't white. There are more colors than black and white. And Jesus was not black.

The Scripture you are using for reference is Jesus with his resurrected body, what John saw in his vision. Apparently he didn't have the same appearance as he did when born of Mary and walking the earth as a man. Scripture backs this up with his disciples not recognizing him after he was resurrected, John 20:14-16 and John 21:4 are two examples of this, there are others. Fast forward 2000 years or so. I have Jewish friends that are light skinned with lighter hair. Skin color to me is a moot point, same goes for color of his hair and his eyes.