The depiction of Jesus, and His physical appearance!

Today you can see the Christian’s depiction of Jesus, in Catholic Churches, religious magazines, Posters, Christian art, and most Christian blog sites. Yet, the version depicted is of a tall well-dressed blonde blue-eyed northern European male, and not the description of a Middle-Eastern Semitic man of two thousand years ago. (That said, there are some among the Kurdish people who inhabit the Middle-Eastern area known as Kurdistan, who have blonde hair, and green eyes.)

So what did Jesus look like from the scripture accounts, Christian writings, Jewish sources, and traditions, and scientific papers. My data is taken for a Semitic person, and not necessarily a Jew, of the Lavant area of the Middle-East to give a more précised detail.  For a start, Jesus would have been short by today’s standards, standing no taller than 5’-1”, with olive skin and dark hair and eyes.  He was probably malnourished (Matthew 25:35; Luke 3:10-11), owing to relying on others for his food, and clothing.  To cover his heavily tattooed body (Talmud 104b-5), he was probably shabbily dressed, in an old well-worn thawb or dishdāshah type garment, with a bisht over in milder weather, that is if he had one. However, we must not forget, Jesus would have worn a turban to cover his head from the sun.

What of his ancestry, well, there are several to choose from Jewish, Christian, and ancient Pagan (philosophers) authors. The Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 17:24) states that the people that populated the then kingdom of Israel/Samaria, which included Gentile Galilee after 721 BCE, we find they were Mesopotamians, and others.

What I find interesting is that the artificial map of Kurdistan, if you place a tracing of the Kurdish lands over the map of Mesopotamia, you get an almost perfect match. So the bigoted view of Christians could in all honesty be partially true.  Just changing the eye colour from blue to Kurdish green, then they could theoretically be closer to the truth.  However, that is just a hypothesis on my part to stimulate a discussion.  Still we are looking for the historical truth, and hypotheses, and crystal balls are what Christianity used to come up with for their faith.  If that was the truth, then God’s begotten son, Matthew and Luke’s genealogies, King David’s (non-Israelite) bloodline, visits to Bethlehem, and Jerusalem.  Would all have to be thrown in the non-historic biblical dust bin… Which, they are in any-way because of their fabrication in the NT, and there would be no reason to get them back out of the bin.

What of the messiahship.

The four canonical gospels, each have parts taken from Mark, especially the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).  The Gospel of John is the odd one out, and the favourite of the evangelical Christians.  It gives Jesus just over a three-year ministry, whereas all three of the synoptic gospels give Jesus a one-year ministry, out of a thousand-year reign of the Mashiach/Messiah/Christ.  This Messianic period of an interregnum, also called the reign of peace, the Millennium.  The Gentile religion, that took Jesus to heart for the last two thousand years, is claimed to of been peaceful.  Far from it, a rein of terror or an attempted mass extinction of humanity of those who would not follow the doctrines of Rome, would be more apt.  Protestantism in its 500 years has learnt nothing of past religious savagery, and like the Mother Church, which gave it, its life.  It, too, has used violence in the past, and has fractured into a myriad of sects, all mimicking the Mother Church in their sexual abuse of children.  As well as perpetuating myths as being true.  What do you say?

J.E. Jeanne p.p. Jero Jones.

R&I ~ MJM