How Our Depiction of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actually Looked Like

Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God, you prob­a­bly envi­sion him (or, if you pre­fer, Him) in much the same way as most every­one else does. The long hair and beard, the robe, the san­dals, the beatif­ic gaze: these traits have all man­i­fest­ed across two mil­len­nia of Chris­t­ian art. “How­ev­er, these depic­tions don’t exact­ly match the pro­file of a first-cen­tu­ry Jew­ish car­pen­ter from the Mid­dle East,” says Hochela­ga host Tom­mie Trelawny in the new video above, an inves­ti­ga­tion into how our mod­ern con­cept of how Jesus looked came to be — and into what we can know about his real appear­ance.

First, we must turn to the Bible. In the King James Ver­sion, Rev­e­la­tion describes Jesus thus: “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a fur­nace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. He had in His right hand sev­en stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His coun­te­nance was like the sun shin­ing in its strength.” That’s it for the New Tes­ta­ment. As for the Old Tes­ta­ment, Isa­iah describes a fig­ure that could pos­si­bly be Jesus by cred­it­ing him with “no form nor come­li­ness; and when we shall see him, there is no beau­ty that we should desire him.”

This scant Bib­li­cal evi­dence hard­ly aligns with the high-pro­file depic­tions of Jesus we’ve all seen. For many around the world today, the “default rep­re­sen­ta­tion” is the down­right glam­orous 1940 por­trait Head of Christ by the Amer­i­can painter Warn­er Sall­man (a Chicagoan, inci­den­tal­ly, much like the new­ly elect­ed Pope Leo XIV). One could see that art­work as the cul­mi­na­tion of a fair­ly long his­to­ry of visu­al depic­tions of Jesus, which first became abun­dant in the Roman Empire of the fourth cen­tu­ry under Con­stan­tine. Accord­ing to Gre­co-Roman mythol­o­gy, “hav­ing long hair and a beard were sym­bols of divine pow­er.” Ear­ly Chris­tians thus “want­ed to present their god using sim­i­lar artis­tic con­ven­tions,” plac­ing Jesus in a league with the likes of Zeus.

That’s the basic look Jesus has in most rep­re­sen­ta­tions, from the botched Span­ish fres­co that became a meme to the cru­ci­fied Mr. Uni­verse in South Korea, where I live, to Andy Warhol’s Christ $9.98. And yet, accord­ing to the dic­tates of Leviti­cus, “you shall not round the cor­ners of your heads, nei­ther shalt thou mar the cor­ners of thy beard.” Trelawny takes this into account when attempt­ing to recon­struct the his­tor­i­cal Jesus, also not­ing that, since Jesus could only be iden­ti­fied by Judas’ kiss of betray­al, he must have looked much like all the oth­er men around him. The result, when all of this is fed into an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence image gen­er­a­tor, is very much an every­man, which may be as his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate as we can get. But then, each time and place cre­ates its own Jesus — and now, with AI, each of us can do the same for our­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ten Ear­li­est Depic­tions of Jesus: How Art Visu­al­ized Jesus in the First Cen­turies After His Death

What Makes Caravaggio’s The Tak­ing of Christ a Time­less, Great Paint­ing?

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Paint­ed The Last Sup­per: A Deep Dive Into a Mas­ter­piece

The Real Sto­ry of East­er: How We Got from the First East­er in the Bible to Bun­nies, Eggs & Choco­late

Intro­duc­tion to New Tes­ta­ment His­to­ry and Lit­er­a­ture: A Free Yale Course

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.