Looking for the face of Jesus
What did Jesus look like? The gospels give us no physical description of the Son of God. GÜNTHER SIMMERMACHER looks for Jesus’ face.
The 6th-century icon of Christ Pantocrator, kept in St Catherine’s monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert, set the template for depictions of Christ with a beard and long hair. Some believe that the physiognomy of the face on the icon and that on the Shroud of Turin match up perfectly.
The gospels are silent on whether Jesus was handsome or plain, tall or short, whether he had long hair or was bald, bearded or shaven.
To the evangelists it didn’t matter. After all, Jewish law prohibited the depiction of human figures, in line with the Third Commandment, so there was no need to describe Jesus’ appearance, nor to create images of his likeness.
Living much of his time during the public ministry on the road, Jesus might not have had much time to cut his hair, and as a Jewish man of his time, he most likely sported a beard. As a Semite, he probably had the features of any number of Palestinians today.
So the popular images of Jesus with blow-dried hair, fair complexion and Caucasian features probably do not correspond with reality. He will have been olive-skinned and Middle Eastern, with limited access to haircare products.
For those who believe that the Shroud of Turin bears the genuine imprint of the crucified Jesus, the inquest into his likeness ends here. Indeed, the shroud may well be the answer, for the evidence that it is a first-century burial cloth of a man who was crucified in Palestine in the manner of the execution of Jesus of Nazareth as described in the gospels is more compelling than the proposition that the shroud is a medieval fraud.
The shroud image depicts a lean man of about 1,80m in height. His hair is long and he has a beard. The face is oval and the eye sockets suggest that the man had fairly big eyes (on the image the eyes seem to be covered by coins, according to Jewish burial custom of the time). His nose, big and slightly hooked at the tip, seems to have been broken, presumably before the crucifixion (cf Jn 19:36).
There are some who argue that the first known painting of a bearded Christ, the 6th-century icon of Christ Pantocrator in St Catherine’s monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert, bears a striking resemblance to the image on the shroud, even that the physiognomic characteristics of the faces match exactly.
Painted in around 550 AD, the icon’s Jesus is unmistakably Semitic. As in the shroud image, the face is long, the nose crooked, the lips fleshy, and the eyes are big beneath a strong brow.
A 6th-century mosaic of a beardless Jesus as a Roman emperor in Ravenna’s basilica di San Vitale. • The Holy Face of Genoa, reputedly a copy of the face on the lost Image of Edessa. • A negative image of the face of the man on the Shroud of Turin, believed by many to be the crucified Christ.
A late 7th-century wall painting of Christ Pantocrator in the catacomb of St Ponziano in Rome is often presented as a smoking gun that the iconography of Christ was based on the image on the Turin Shroud.
In the fresco, a distinctive topless square mark is seen on Christ’s forehead — exactly the shape that can be seen on the shroud, due to a fault in the weave. Why would the artist have included a random shape on the forehead, one that is identical to that on the shroud whose existence is first documented in the 1350s, half a millennium after the catacomb of St Ponziano closed?
Some argue that the Turin Shroud is, in fact, the lost Image of Edessa, which was reputed to be “created by God, and not produced by the hands of man”. Famous in its day, it disappeared in 1204 during the sack of Constantinople by French Crusaders, some 150 years before the shroud appeared in the possession of a French descendant from a Crusader family.
The Image of Edessa (also called Mandylion) is first referred to by the 4th-century historian Eusebius — the bishop of Caesarea in Palestine whom historians don’t trust as being reliable — and positively documented in modern-day Turkey in 520.
Few artistic representations of the Edessa cloth have survived. One of them is the Holy Face of Genoa, an icon that was reproduced from an earlier one which was reputed to be of the image on the Mandylion.
The Holy Face of Genoa bears a strong resemblance to the Christ Pantocrator icon at St Catherine’s as well as to the image on the shroud: long hair, beard, oval face, big eyes, strong brow, big (but unbroken) nose, fleshy lips.
The Edessa cloth was brought to the Hagia Sophia basilica — then the centre of the Eastern Church — in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in August 944. In the basilica’s famous Deisis mosaic of Christ with his mother and John the Baptist, made in 1261, Jesus bears strong resemblance to the Sinai icon. At that time, an 11th-century mosaic of the Edessa image still existed in the apse of the Hagia Sophia; it disappeared some time after the 17th century.
Was the face of Jesus in the Deisis mosaic based on the traditional Christ Pantocrator iconography, or on the Edessa cloth mosaic — or both?
The Christ Pantocrator icon is the source of all future depictions of the bearded, long-haired Jesus in art and, more lately, on film. But especially in the West, earlier depictions of Jesus showed a variety of physical characteristics. Images from the third century and later tended to represent Jesus in the fashion of Romans: clean-shaven and neatly shorn of long hair. In one 6th-century image, kept in Ravenna, Italy, he even appears as a Roman emperor as he defeats Satan.
In the West, beardless Christs still appeared in art until the 12th century. After that, the artistic consensus represented him with facial hair. That image became so entrenched that Michelangelo got himself in trouble when he included a clean-shaven Christ in his Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel.
7th-century fresco in the catacomb of St Ponziano, Rome, with the mark on the forehead which some believe is copied from the Shroud image. If it was, then the Shroud was known before its energence in medieval France • 13th-century Christ Pantocrator in the Deisis mosaic in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. • Rembrandt’s 1648 painting of ‘The Head of Christ’, for which he used a Sephardic Jew as a model.
While the Eastern icons of Christ retained the Semitic features of Christ, Western art localised Jesus. He became increasingly handsome (at least by the standards of the time) and dramatic. The Jesus of the West usually was pale and European, much as more recently African, Asian or Latin American art has inculturated depictions of Christ to reflect the physical characteristics of the people in their regions.
The 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn returned to the ethnographical view of Jesus, choosing as his model a young Sephardic Jew who lived in the neighbourhood. It was quite revolutionary, and not only in artistic terms: here a European painter chose a Jew to represent Christ at the time when Jews were persecuted by the followers of Christ. The irony, one suspects, was lost on the persecutors.
Rembrandt’s depictions of Jesus were influential, not by way of setting a template but by overturning the previous, more rigid templates.
In 2001 a BBC documentary on the face of Jesus attempted to find the face of Jesus by way of reconstructing a face from the skull of a 1st-century man from Palestine. The result was the swarthy, round face of a man with short, curly hair and a trimmed beard. Clearly the man was not Jesus, and the model obviously was a gimmick. But it clearly communicated one thing: Jesus of Nazareth undeniably was a Semite.
When one goes to the Holy Land and sees the faces of the Palestinians of Nazareth, Cana or Bethlehem, one sees the faces of Mary, of Simon Peter, of Mary Magdalene — and perhaps even that of Jesus.
Günther Simmermacher is the editor of The Southern Cross and the author of The Holy Land Trek: A Pilgrim’s Guide
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