THE REAL FACE OF JESUS, SO?...

[ed. There is a fascination with how Jesus might have looked.  As with anything else that man wants to see, we look for idols.]


If God would have wanted the face of Jesus to be preserved, he would have made Him to be born at a time when photographs were available, or had some other way of preserving his likeness.  Now, through forensic science, we can make an educated guess as to what he would have looked like.  Surprise, he would have looked like other Galileans of the time, not like the Norwegian, blue-eyed Jesus, pictured in vacation bible school posters.

To some, this will be shocking, since they view Jesus as a nordic European, and, perhaps, this face may remind them of their own prejudices against certain racial types.  We hope this is not the case, since Paul made no distinction between Jew or Greek, male or female, when it came to being in Christ. (Gal 3:28)

The article goes on to describe some interesting truths:

The traditional image that most of us have of Jesus is derived from a number of famous artworks, including the likes of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and Diego Velazquez’s Cristo Crucificado. As a consequence, he is often pictured as tall and fair-skinned with long, flowing, fair hair. Yet the reality is that men from the region of Galilee – now in northern Israel – during the time that Jesus is reported to have lived did not adhere to this image at all.

The article goes on to explain how this drawing was designed:

Working with Israeli archaeologists, Neave obtained three Galilean Semite skulls that had been found in the area around Jerusalem. He then used computerized tomography to create 3D cross-sectional images of these skulls in order to reveal their full structure. This enabled a computer program to generate a mock-up of what the fully-fleshed faces may have looked like.
Armed with this information, Neave was able to build a 3D cast of a typical skull of a man from Jesus’s region and time period. Layers of clay were then added to this, in accordance with the precise information provided by a computer program designed to determine the thickness of soft tissue at certain points on human faces.

In the end, it does not matter what Jesus looked like.  What matters is if an individual is one of His.  If this individual hears the voice of his shepherd.  Today, many worship man-made images of Jesus.  Imagine who much more this would increase if they had what they thought was an accurate image?  Well, on the other hand, maybe they would be repulsed by the face.