What's the point of having an image of Christ if there is no physical description to go by?

Nowhere Man said:

It seems the popular image we see today had started with Constantine from murals that depicted Christ as being long haired with a beard wearing a robe and sash and distinctly European.

There is no record however of his physical description as a template for which a picture could even be made.

It comes across as very strange people would accept such an image that was apparently created out of the blue like that.

So if nobody really knows what Christ looked like, what is the point of having such an image altogether?

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'mud said:

There have been artists for 10000 years,
but there weren't any around when Jesus preached the scriptures !
Maybe there are some replicas in some caves somewhere ?
Baffling isn't it ?

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Axe Elf said:

If He didn't look like me, then He probably looked a lot like this:

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'mud said:

There have been artists for 10000 years,
but there weren't any around when Jesus preached the scriptures !
Maybe there are some replicas in some caves somewhere ?
Baffling isn't it ?

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Fool said:

actually it was believed he had red hair and beard; which would mean he was probably fairer.


Some Islamic accounts describe Jesus with a reddish complexion as well. One stating that he was "a reddish man with many freckles on his face as if he had just come from a bath". I'll share some of the paintings I've come across which depict a red-haired Jesus below.

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Axe Elf said:

I can show you some paintings in which "it is believed" that Jesus had long blond hair and blue eyes, but these would not represent the typical 1st-century Galilean Israelite either. It is much more likely that Jesus looked like the typical Iraqi Jew than Howdy Doody.

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Fool said:

Genesis 25:25
And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.


During the Spanish Inquisition, people of red hair were identified as Jewish and isolated for persecution.[24] In Medieval Italy and Spain, red hair was associated with the heretical nature of Jews and their rejection of Jesus, and thus Judas Iscariot was commonly depicted as red-haired in Italian and Spanish art.[25] Writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair, with red-hair being given by the authors to villainous Jewish characters such as Shylock and Fagin.[26] The antisemitic association persisted into modern times in Soviet Russia.[27] The medieval prejudice against red-hair may have derived from the Ancient biblical tradition, in relation to biblical figures such as Esau and King David. The Ancient historian Josephus would mistranslate the Hebrew Torah to describe the more positive figure of King David as 'golden haired', in contrast to the negative figure of Esau, even though the original Hebrew Torah implies that both King David and Esau had 'fiery red hair'

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Axe Elf said:

Although I didn't really need your help in proving my point, I do appreciate it.

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Fool said:

On the other hand, in Caucasia, where the natives are dark, the Jews show 96 per cent of dark hair. The proportion of red hair is also quite high, reaching 4 per cent in some observations. This has been considered characteristic of the Jews by some anthropologists. It appears to be not of recent origin, and was not unknown among the ancient Hebrews (Esau was "red, all over like a hairy garment"; Gen. xxv. 25).

Races are also differentiated, more or less, by straight, curly, or woolly hair. Among the Jews the distribution of these varieties of hair is shown in the following table (No. 3):

Table No. 3: Variety of Hair Among Jews.
Variety of Hair. Blechman. Weissenberg. Yakowenko. Elkind. Majer and Kopernicki. Fishberg. Glück.
Straight 36 84 64.90 97.0 96.56 66.97 52.9
Wavy 36 14 25.71 1.0 2.6 25.66
Curly 28 2 9.39 2.0 0.84 7.37 47.1
The next table (No. 4) shows that the beard is usually darker than the hair:

Table No. 4: Color of the Beard.
Color. Authority.
________________________________________
Blechman. Weissenberg. Fishberg. Yakowenko.
Dark 61.0 73.0 63.72 74.97
Fair 36.0 15.0 25.38 13.23
Red 3.0 12.0 10.90 11.8
By comparing these figures with those in No. 2 it is found that in the beard the proportion of light to dark is much higher. The number of red beards also increases perceptibly.

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Skwim said:

What puzzles me is that, with the exception of a few modern renditions of Jesus,

View attachment 25229​

the most common European depiction of him bordered on the effeminate.

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.

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That Philo's philosophic views are grounded on the Midrash, and not vice versa, is evident from his seemingly senseless statement that the "heavenly man," the οὐράνιος ἄνθρωπος (who is merely an idea), is "neither man nor woman." This doctrine, however, becomes quite intelligible in view of the following ancient Midrash. The remarkable contradiction between the two above-quoted passages of Genesis could not escape the attention of the Pharisees, to whom the Bible was a subject of close study. In explaining the various views concerning Eve's creation, they taught ('Er. 18a, Gen. R. viii.) that Adam was created as a man-woman (androgynos), explaining (Gen. i. 27) as "male and female" instead of "man and woman," and that the separation of the sexes arose from the subsequent operation upon Adam's body, as related in the Scripture. This explains Philo's statement that the original man was neither man nor woman.