Is This What Jesus Really Looked Like?

Biblically, we know Jesus didn’t dazzle His followers with attraction. Rather, Isaiah 53 says the Messiah would have “no form or majesty that we should look upon him nor appearance that we should desire him” (verse 2).

Despite that description, many from Renaissance artists to movie directors have cast Jesus as a tall, lean man, with flowing locks, kind and soft eyes and perhaps a halo or sash to tip off people that he is God’s son.   

Science is trying to prove them wrong by using modern-day technology to reconstruct what could have been Jesus’ face.  

Retired professor and anatomical artist Richard Neave is credited for the recreation, according to Mic. 

“I made a plaster cast of the skull which gives me something to work on,” Neave told the BBC in 1998. “Then I put clay over it and, using soft tissue measurements, build up the anatomy of the face,” he said. “Inevitably there are some areas where you have to speculate, particularly if parts of the skull are missing.” 

The reconstruction, created with a 2,000-year-old Jewish skull, ancient documents, advanced software and forensic techniques, simply shows a first-century Jewish man who would have lived in the harsh conditions of the time, according to Discovery News. 

“Jesus certainly looked far more like that person than me and other males who live in the West,” says James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament languages at Princeton Theological Seminary and one of the experts consulted in the documentary.

“We in the West have for about 2000 years been wrongly influenced by an Aryan Jesus, who looks like us. Nothing is more unfaithful to Jesus.”