What did Jesus look like?

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by Kasama

Well, they called him Son of David, and according to the Bible, King David had red hair. There are two 1st Century eye accounts with Jesus having golden hair. The man in the shroud had blonde hair.

David is indeed described as 'admoni in 1 Samuel 16:12; 17:42, which means "reddish," "ruddy" or perhaps even "earthy" ('admoni = 'adom 'red' = dam 'blood' = 'adamah 'ground', 'earth'); i.e. the reddish-brown color of the soil. However, it is not clear whether this adjective describes his hair color or something else. Some suggest instead that this describes his complexion: it was 'reddish' and/or ruddy. (Note that the same word 'admoni is also used of the newborn Esau in Genesis 25:25.)

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by Kasama

"Dr. Gilbert Lavoie in his Unlocking the Secrets of the Shroud presented another intriguing discovery. The negative image of the shroud as compared with the negative images of photography reveals that the man in question had either white or light blond hair."

http://www.holyspiritinteractive.net...oudofturin.asp

Just seems to match up.

Well, not exactly.

We could wonder about a man who was born of a virgin mother, “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father,” as the Nicene Creed says, and thus say that we cannot even speculate that it is highly probable that Jesus should have common characteristics of a majority of Jews in that part of the world during that late—Second Temple era. If that is so, any appearance will work and that includes blonde hair.
Or we can say, forget about difficult and perhaps unnecessary doctrine and dogma; he was plainly Jewish. That means he almost certainly had dark hair. That would apply to his beard if he had one. But his hair color might have been an exception. There were exceptions then as there are today. Blonde works.
But all this presumes that the image represents reflected light as it would if it was a painting or photograph. That almost certainly presumes that the image is a fake or that is miraculously created in ways we don’t understand. If the latter is the case, all bets are off. Blonde would work. Since there are no reliable descriptions of Jesus almost any hair color would work. Purple would not have worked for there would certainly then have been descriptions of Jesus.
But what if the image was formed by some other form of energy — corona discharge, heat or some form of radiation other than light – we can’t imagine how it might have captured color or even lighter or darker tones. If the image was formed chemically, perhaps as the result of a amino/carbonyl reaction, the hair might serve to concentrate greater amounts of heavy amines to react with some chemical residue on the cloth producing what in the end looks like blonde hair. In fact, Raymond Rogers demonstrated this experimentally.
So until we know how the image was formed, we cannot make any assumptions about hair color. And even then unless we know that Jesus’ appearance was not exceptional, we cannot do so. Blonde works. So does black.

[Credo in Deum]

The History Channel did a cool thing using the Shroud of Turin to construct a CGi of Christ's face. All in all I thought the show was good, except for the plug on Gnostics. As always with the history channel you have to take their programs with a huge grain of salt. Here is the link for the the full program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvAJRp4CXdU&sns=em

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by Credo in Deum

The History Channel did a cool thing using the Shroud of Turin to construct a CGi of Christ's face. All in all I thought the show was good, except for the plug on Gnostics. As always with the history channel you have to take their programs with a huge grain of salt. Here is the link for the the full program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvAJRp4CXdU&sns=em

Here you go.

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by trickster

Then why does Benedict XVI venerate it in Turin?

Bruce
Trickster

That really doesn't tell us anything. After all, the pope's veneration of a relic is not a dogmatic statement about its authenticity.

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by Bezant

I know you lot aren't the only ones who have said this out but I just wanted to repeat something another poster and I raised previously: there is no such thing as "Jewish" physiological features or traits.

Furthermore, keep in mind my point about superimposing modern racial concepts on the ancient world.

I quote from Martin Goodman's Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations:

According to the Babylonian Talmud, it was a religious duty for all Jews, men as well as women, to wear special clothes on the Sabbath: “your Sabbath garments should not be like your weekday garments…” In general, however, expenditure on personal appearance was assumed by Jews to be a characteristic of women rather than men. Jewish clothing, apart from the uniforms of the priests and Levites, seems to have been the same as that of others in the eastern Mediterranean. It would be wrong to imagine the Jewish tallit as an identity marker similar to the distinctively Roman toga; tallit in Hebrew means simply “cloak” and the use of such a garment as a dedicated prayer shawl did not begin until after late antiquity. The biblical prohibition on wearing garments manufactured from wool and linen, stated simply as a general law in Deuteronomy, was explained by Josephus as a way to preserve the unique status of the priesthood: such raiment “is reserved for priests alone.” That priests did indeed wear clothes made from such materials is confirmed in the Mishnah. When the Pharisees chose to “make broad their phylacteries and enlarge the borders of their garments,” they did this in order “to be seen of men;” but such ostentation must have been unusual for it to be alleged that it attracted Jesus’ criticism, and it is probably significant that no gentile pagan source betrays any knowledge of this distinctive Jewish custom. The Jewish figures in the frescoes from the synagogue at Dura-Europus have fringes on the corners of some of their cloaks, but if this reflected standard male Jewish practice, the fringes must have generally been discreet. Jewish men did not specially cover their heads. The dress of Jewish women also seems to have been much the same as that of gentile contemporaries; the Christian Tertullian remarked in Carthage at the end of the second century CE that Jewish women could be recognized as Jews by the fact that they wore veils in public, but it seems likely that such veils, common in the eastern Mediterranean, marked them out less as specifically Jewish than as simply oriental in the Roman West, where women were generally unveiled. According to the Mishnah it was regarded as immodest and shaming for a woman to wear her hair loose. The Mishnah refers to types of jewellery that a woman should not carry on a Sabbath: “She may not go out…with forehead-band or head-bangles if they are not sewn, or with a hairnet…or a necklace or nose-rings…”

Too much pride by males in their long hair was dangerously immoral, as the story of Absalom showed: he gloried in his hair, so he was hanged by it. A few hairstyles were specially forbidden by the rabbis in the Tosefta on the grounds that they looked too gentile and therefore smacked of idolatry or magic: “What are the matters which constitute ‘the ways of the Amorites?’ He who trims the front of his hair, and he who makes his locks grow long, and he who makes a baldness in front for a particular star…” But these restrictions are the exception that prove the rule, that Jews generally looked like non-Jews. Romans often noted that foreign peoples looked different from themselves, but (apart from male circumcision) they never noticed this of the Jews. One passing remark by a Roman author does, however, suggest that some Romans thought Jews had a distinctive smell: the historian Ammianus Marcellinus recorded in the fourth century CE a comment of the philosopher Marcus Aurelius in the second century CE about the Jews as malodorous. This was not a standard form of abuse of other people in the Roman world. It may even have some basis in a real difference. If modesty requires more clothing, in a hot climate old sweaty clothes may become smelly. If everyone smells equally, no one notices, and the issue of body odour (except of tanners) fails to surface in the Jewish texts.

[Ridgerunner]

Originally Posted by Kasama

Just thought it was interesting that the only description of Jesus in the Bible has Him with white hair (Revelation 1:14 His head and hair were white like wool).

and

"Dr. Gilbert Lavoie in his Unlocking the Secrets of the Shroud presented another intriguing discovery. The negative image of the shroud as compared with the negative images of photography reveals that the man in question had either white or light blond hair."

http://www.holyspiritinteractive.net...oudofturin.asp

Just seems to match up.

Interesting to note that Caesar marveled at the oddity of the Celtic childrens' hair. He remarked that their hair was 'white, like that of old men". Well, it wasn't, of course. In my neck of the woods, a good half of children, perhaps more, have blonde hair when they're young. (Scots-Irish, Irish, Germans, Poles) Just because that appeared 'white" to Caesar who, presumably, was not used to seeing it, it doesn't mean Jesus' hair was really "white" let alone that He was albino.

[Kasama]

Originally Posted by patrick457

[indent]went there with lanterns and torches and weapons.

See, I told you it was night, they wouldn't have needed the lanterns and torches if it was daytime.

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by Kasama

See, I told you it was night, they wouldn't have needed the lanterns and torches if it was daytime.

Well, duh.
Even without the lanterns, it wouldn't have been completely pitch-black dark, since the Passover season coincided with the full moon. Barring heavy cloud cover or bad weather, the moonlight would have been just bright enough.

[po18guy]

Since no one recognized Him in His glorified Body, by either appearance or voice, until He revealed Himself to them, I will simply watch for His coming on the clouds of heaven.

[Kasama]

Originally Posted by patrick457

...since the Passover season coincided with the full moon.

Didn't know that, do you mean that there was some way it was determined that there was a full moon during the Agony in the Garden?

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by Kasama

Didn't know that, do you mean that there was some way it was determined that there was a full moon during the Agony in the Garden?

Well, as I mentioned, it was the Passover season. Passover usually starts on the first full moon following the spring equinox.

Of course, this is supposing that (1) the moon is up in the sky during the night and that (2) there were not things like heavy cloud cover.

[Kasama]

Originally Posted by patrick457

Well, as I mentioned, it was the Passover season. Passover usually starts on the first full moon following the spring equinox.

Of course, this is supposing that (1) the moon is up in the sky during the night and that (2) there were not things like heavy cloud cover.

Very interesting, this might make it possible to figure out the exact date of the Agony in the Garden.

[patrick457]

Originally Posted by Kasama

Very interesting, this might make it possible to figure out the exact date of the Agony in the Garden.

Not really, no. If anything, we still don't know the exact year when Jesus died. All we know was that it happened somewhere during the prefecture of Pontius Pilate (AD 26-36) and the high priesthood of Joseph Caiaphas (AD 18-36), which would give us the latest possible date of AD 36. Many scholars suggest a date between 29-33 based on the literary evidence, though a few would propose an earlier or later date.

The Jewish calendar, which was lunisolar, was based not on calculation as our modern calendar is today, but on observation. Since the months were reckoned strictly according to the phases of the moon (though the number of months were adjusted to bring the calendar into agreement with the solar year by inserting an extra 'intercalary' month every two or three years, otherwise the calendar would go out of wack), observers had to look for the first faintly glowing lunar crescent following conjunction with the sun - since after all you couldn't really see a new moon. When ancient authorities fixed the date of Passover, they not only considered the visibility of the moon, but also the season as determined by temperature and the growth of crops: an extra month would have been intercalated if unseasonably cold temperatures meant that barley could not be offered during the festival.

If we calculate astronomically, the best candidate is April 3 (Nisan 14), AD 33, and indeed some people favor this date. But in fact, we cannot be sure that modern astronomical retrojection of the Jewish calendar agrees with the actual calculation of dates in the 1st century.

[Julia Mae]

Originally Posted by TheRealJuliane

So Jesus was more or less an albino?? Why would Judas have had to specifically identify him if Jesus had been a freak of his time? "It's the blonde guy, you KNOW, that guy!"

The area had been invaded serially by a wide variety of people including the Caucasians and the Celts. There's no reason to believe the Jews of Jesus' time looked more like this guy



than like this guy: