Who Is This Man? JESUS HAS BEEN DEPICTED IN EVERY CULTURE AND CORNER OF THE EARTH. BUT WHO IS HE? by Ingrid Barratt
JESUS IS THE MOST depicted person who ever lived. We all know what He looked like—the long hair, beard, tall slender frame. So when Richard Neave, a medical artist and forensic anthropologist, created a realistic depiction of what Jesus may have looked like, the results were shocking: Jesus seemed to resemble a New York City taxi driver. Jesus’ facial features were gleaned from first-century Jewish skulls and other archaeological data. Neave reasoned that Jesus would have been about five and a half feet tall. His lifestyle would have made Him
muscular but slight. According to cultural data, His black, curly hair would have been short, and His beard closely cropped. All depictions of Jesus are imaginative, of course. The way we’ve depicted Jesus over the ages says a lot more about us than it says about Him. The fact that biblical accounts are stubbornly silent about what Jesus actually looked like is God’s first clue to us: He does not judge by human standards. In Jesus, He was about to turn all our expectations about power, success and even divinity inside out. faithandfriends.ca I APRIL 2020
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