"If we have no idea what Jesus looked like, how should he be portrayed?"
It's not often that I disagree with John Piper. But on this question Dr. Piper and I are on opposite sides. Andy Jackson recently pointed to a brief excerpt from one of Dr. Piper's sermons titled "What do you think of pictures of Jesus?". I've transcribed the text from the audio:
I'm a little hesitant about portraits of Jesus at all. There's that argument about whether that's breaking the first Commandment -- don't make any graven images, don't have pictures of Jesus in your house. The reason I'm not a stickler on that is because Jesus became incarnate, therefore we know he had a face. God the father didn't have a face, except insofar as He and the Son are one.
Jesus had a face and even though we don't know what it looked like I think renderings of it to show various things are okay. And if we're going to do that, they should be real diverse. I think they should be real diverse because you lock in on that famous one--I don't know what it's called, the one with the long hair, kind of the idyllic face and the blue eyes---that's absolutely absurd.
But I think they should probably be black portrayals of Jesus, and white portrayals of Jesus, and Chinese portrayals of Jesus. And everybody knows that they're not accurate. There isn't one that's accurate. That's why it's legitimate to do lots of inaccurate works. Because you just say we all know that we don't know what he looked like so what we want to say with our inaccurate Jesus is something true about Jesus. Namely, he's there for everybody.
There are three points in this statement in which I agree. I agree that such images do not break the first Commandment and I agree that Warner Sallman's "Head of Christ" is "absolutely absurd." I also agree that Jesus is there for everyone. Unfortunately, the rest of the passage seems to me to be confused and illogical.
For example, Piper says that the images should be "real diverse." But how much diversity is acceptable? Would he approve of portrayals of Jesus as an elderly man? What about as a woman?
The fact that no particular rendition can be completely accurate does not make it "legitimate to do lots of inaccurate works." Unless the work is intentionally abstract, then a degree of realism is to be expected from the artwork. By offering a portrayal that intentionally veers from the Biblical portrait of Christ, the artist is using Jesus to further a particular racial, ethnic, or political agenda.
Piper is also just flat out wrong in saying that "everybody knows that they're not accurate." Hitler claimed that Jesus was probably Gallic and that "it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew." The view that Jesus has Nordic features is still held today by white supremacists. Similarly, the view that Jesus was black is espoused by syncretic religions, such as Santeria or Voodoo, where African gods were merged with saints of the Roman Catholic Church. The Black Hebrew Israelites (a group that can be found preaching on street corners in our Nation's capital) also claims that since black people are descended from Israelites, Jesus had to be black.
The antisemitism that motivates and inspires most of these images is reason enough to condemn such revisionist art. Christians should stand firm against this vicious ideology by refusing to budge on the truth that our Lord and Savior took the incarnate form of a Jew.
But even when the motives are noble, we should reject such this faux diversity. Instead, we should express our humility by honoring the choices that God made in taking human form. We are created to reflect the image of our Lord; we shouldn’t try to recreate his image to reflect our own.
UPDATE: Abraham Piper adds more some additional thoughts on the Desiring God blog. He adds an interesting point about the metaphorical uses of imagery in order to say something true:
If the goal of art is to strictly represent reality, then, yes, Jesus should always be portrayed as a first-century Jew. But if the goal of art is to interpret reality in order to draw out something particularly true or beautiful, then precise realism is not always required. For example, certain attributes of Christ are highlighted when he is called a lion and others are highlighted when he is called a lamb. Needless to say, neither of these images is "accurate." He is neither a lion nor a lamb; he is a first-century Jew. But beautiful, true things about him become clearer to us when we picture him in these "inaccurate" forms.
I completely agree with his point, yet disagree with the applicability in this situation. Portrayals of Jesus as a lion or a lamb are unmistakably metaphorical. They are also completely Biblical.
The same can't be said for "black Jesus" or "Chinese Jesus." A metaphor is when an image is used that is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance. What would the metaphor of a "black Jesus" mean? That while Jesus is not black he is like black people? While that would technically qualify as a metaphor, it is an insulting one. It is also unnecessarily devisive to images of Jesus with various racial traits is necessary to convince people that he is their Savior too.
Using metaphors in religious art is entirely justifiable. But are these types of images really metaphorical or are they simply revisionist?
I have to agree. I've learned an incredible amount from John Piper but this one he got wrong.
Agreed. While we don't know what Jesus looked like, we do know what He did NOT look like. He was not chinese or russian or swedish or italian, nor was he a WASP like me. He could have had dark skin, as there would have been Jews of African decent...however I doubt he looked african. Nor would he have been particularly good looking...
I like your thoughts on focusing more on reflecting Him and less on the actual form He took - one day we'll see Him in all His glory, white hair, blazing eyes and all.
Which makes me wonder, why are there not more depictions of Jesus based on Revelation's description?
What I have always so appreciated about Pastor John is his careful and insightful thinking on very tangled issues. On this one he seems to have taken a rather easy issue and tangled it.
I agree that the faux diversity has problems.
But ...
I think you should have expanded further on that last statement.
But even when the motives are noble, we should reject such this faux diversity. Instead, we should express our humility by honoring the choices that God made in taking human form. We are created to reflect the image of our Lord; we shouldn’t try to recreate his image to reflect our own.
What are our alternatives? How do we attempt to present Him? Do we represent only his behaviors in art? Shall we employ the few, and pretty obscure, early church statements about His appearance? Shall we allow for artistic divergence? There are many more questions.
IOW, I just don't think things are so simple.
Enjoy.
Collin Shall we allow for artistic divergence?
Absolutely. But the divergence should come from what is unknown, rather than from what is known. For example, we know he was a Jewish male. So we should portray those characteristics. But we don't know whether he had a long hair, a beard, etc. So the artist would be allowed some degree of freedom.
(For what its worth, this rule of thumb doesn't just apply to Christ. Any artist who is attempting to portray a literal representation of a historical figure should do so within certain boundaries. Otherwise, the image is not about the person as a person but rather about an abstraction of the person used for the artist's purposes.)
Well, I'm probably in the minority here, but I'm not a fan of pictures of Jesus in theory, let alone in practice.
Setting aside my perspective that it violates the 2nd Commandment (and Packer explains it better than I ever could in "Knowing God"), the hokey pictures of Jesus I typicallys see make Jesus more like a Saturday morning entertainer of children than the King of Kings, Lord of Lords.
I loves me some Piper, but I have to distance from him here as well. I appreciate the sentiment that Jesus can be the friend of anyone and the Savior of all kinds, but that doesn't mean Jesus becomes all things to all men that He might win some.
That almost felt sacriligious to write, but wouldn't you then have "Biker Jesus" and "Punk Rock Jesus" and "Hill Billy Jesus" and "Proud to be an American Jesus" and "Rap Star Jesus" and so on?
Sure, Jesus can save all those folks and I'm not saying those folks have to give up all their "cultural" stuff to become Christian, assuming it's not sinful in and of itself (e.g., "Hindu Jesus"). But don't ask Jesus to conform either.
Melanie, by the way, asks a really excellent question about why we don't see any portrayals of Him as described in Revelation. That which she listed are the only biblical descriptions of Jesus' appearance (the nothing in His appearance to draw us bit, though the Jewish mideasterner stuff would be in there as well).
I agree that pictures of Christ do not violate the first commandment, but only because, like most Protestants (and even in Piper's own "Baptist Catechism"), it's the second commandment that forbids images of the divine in worship. I concur with the recommendation of Packer's Knowing God; a good short online essay on pictures of Christ can be found here:
http://www.opc.org/nh.html?article_id=438
The way I figure it, he probably looked a bit like Klinger from MASH - Palestinian Arab, and without a beard (since he was culturally Roman, rather than Greek).
The historical human Jesus would certainly look like a first century thirty year old Semite. However, Jesus was more than an historical human being. For three years his closest friends had a very difficult time understanding what he was all about; just when they thought they "got it" he surprised him.
After the resurrection Jesus wasn't recognized at first by even his closest friends. But he was also recognized by people who had never seen him prior to the resurrection.
An artist has a great challenge when depicting Jesus, but also a great opportunity to show one who constantly reveals new and difficult dimensions, one who identifies completely with the viewer and presents no barriers to coming to him, one who is so familiar, yet profoundly surprising.
There's two different reasons to have a picture of Jesus.
One is as a historical representation, to give you an idea of what it was like back then. We don't do this for modern events because we have photographs so we don't need paintings of George Bush, 9/11, Paris Hilton etc. There historical accuracy is the goal so yes "Chinese Jesus" should be out as well as "super white Jesus". These would fail because they are not very good at representing what we know to be the historical facts....just as an illustration of ancient Rome featuring planes and electric street lights would be tossed out of a history book.
But there are reasons to have pictures other than simply as a "poor man's photograph". We also make them to illustrate ideas. One of Christianity's main ideas is that God is fully man in the form of Jesus. If by making, say, "Chinese Jesus" the artist is illustrating that Jesus was man (as Chinese people are men) then I don't think it is objectionable. Likewise "White Jesus" was also Europeans way of relating to Jesus as man by painting what they knew to be a man.
Collin,
You said,"But we don't know whether he had a long hair, a beard, etc."
While you are right in saying we don't have a good description, we can infer that He at least did not have very long hair, as the new and old testament(I forget which books, chapters,etc its in) both say it is shameful for men to have long hair. That being the case I do not think a man with long hair would have been taken very seriously in the Temple.(Just my opinion)
I believe He might have looked like what most today would consider Arab or middle eastern. Also, I believe the entire debate is useless, as Jesus can be reflected through us all when we let Him, and it does not matter what race, creed or color we are.
I think the most critical issue at hand is that Jesus is real. And being human that means real flesh and real blood. Pigmented flesh and red blood. A portrayal of Jesus must reflect the central fact about our God. He is incarnate. He took on flesh. When he is intentionally depicted in a way that misrepresents the historicity of the flesh that he bore he his incarnation becomes an abstract idea rather than a historical reality.
We struggle so much today with the idea that Jesus was just a good teacher to the degree that Jesus is not longer a man, but a philosophy. Depictions of Jesus need to point to the reality this "good teacher" was a historical figure who also died on a historical cross. What flesh died on that cross? Flesh that grew and taught and walked among a particular culture and bore a particular pigment.
---
One more thought ... I also love abstract and art that makes a point. In this case it seems that many things become far game in art that previously would be off limits. I could conceive of a depiction of Jesus that portrays him out of his historical context, but it must be clear that this particular work is attempting to convey an concept, idea, or metaphor and not a historical reality.
This is the problem with the black Jesus or the white, blue-eyed Jesus or any other Jesus but the Jesus who is, they are often deceivingly inaccurate historical depictions of the most important historically real person in all of history.
Check out this piece from Popular Mechanics in 2002, "Real Face of Jesus," complete with portrait:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282186.html
I have to say, it does offend me to see, as I often do in the course of my work, depictions of an Aryan Jesus, blond haired and blue eyed (and I say this as someone with blond hair and blue eyes).
As we read the gospel, I believe the Holy Sprit creates a custom made, one size doesn't fit all, image of Christ, designed to engage the particular reader in a lifetime's imtimate relationship with Jesus.
So when we see a representation of the image that the Holy Spirit has conjured in another person, we are, of course, taken back for a moment, because it doesn't look like our own personal Jesus.
Chris
While you are right in saying we don't have a good description, we can infer that He at least did not have very long hair, as the new and old testament(I forget which books, chapters,etc its in) both say it is shameful for men to have long hair. That being the case I do not think a man with long hair would have been taken very seriously in the Temple.(Just my opinion)
You forget he had a lifetime. He could have very well had long hair, cut it, grew it again several times over. Ditto for a beard. Weren't the Romans known for their close cuts? Perhaps younger Jews grew their hair a bit longer back then as an expression of rejection of the occupation.
Long is a relative term. Most men who think their hair is not long today would probably be considered 'long hair' by 1950's standards. There are some limits to what is plausible, though. I'd be rather surprised if men grew their hair down to their waists back then.
Booton,
I realize He could have grown long hair, again and again. I just think it is unlikely based on standards that appear to be set by scripture. Also, Jesus doesn't seem to be overly concerned by the Roman occupation in the NT, so I find the idea that He would participate in fashion protest rather weak. Having said that, I must grant your point that "long" is a relative term. As a former Marine, my idea of long hair likely differs from most people. As I said, I find the debate useless. My concern is not what He looked like then, but what He looks like through me. To my eternal shame, I do not let Him shine through nearly as well as I should.
Final thought: to put Christ in such a small box by trying to own Him to a particular race or color, is in my mind a dangerous gamble. He is what He is and will never be what we try to make Him.
We should not try to domesticate Christ, to make him like ourselves in our historical/racial particularities. Christ was man, but he was not merely man. He was God and in that regard was wholly unlike us. We should always keep this fully in mind, this aspect of Christ that makes him wholly other than us. He is not "safe", he is not "one of the boys". He came from outside the world, outside human culture and knowledge. The event of his life marks a rupture in human history and is its point of pivot. I don't want him to look like me. I don't want him to be like me. I want him to be what he is - God in the flesh . I want him to challenge me, to take me outside myself. I don't want to feel comfortable in his presence. Thus I'm quite suspicious of any attempt by a group to make Christ look like themselves. It looks like an attempt to make him safe, to make him simply mundane.
Chris,
"fashion protest" might be a bit strong. I'm thinking more like being a general style that is meant to differentiate. Cutting your hair like the Romans might have been seen as being on their side. He might have avoided that not so much to protest the Romans but to avoid giving people the impression he was pro-Roman. I could see how Jews of the time would have choosen to look different from the Romans even if they weren't particularly interested in insurrection movements.
Another interesting question is how would he have cut his hair? I'm sure cutting instruments existed but they were probably expensive. Keeping your hair Marine short and your face clean-shaven was probably kind of tricky unless you often had access to high quality blades (a perk of the Roman army).
I suspect for many normal men getting your hair cut was a hassle which maybe they only put up with once a year at most. Perhaps the passages about it being shameful for men to have long hair have a slightly different meaning than you think. Maybe it isn't that men all had short hair, perhaps it was common for them to have long hair and they had to be nagged to clean it up at least once a year.
Hence the passage would be more along the lines of something like "it's shameful to walk around with wrinkled clothes" or "don't dress like a slob in public"....something you're not supposed to do but it would be a rare person who didn't violate such a rule at least a few times in their life.
while Jesus was indeed God in the flesh, i don't think that the particulars of the flesh he inhabited while on earth are irrelevant. in fact, it seems unlikely to me that his physical appearance would not have been very specifically chosen. now what that looks like, we don't know. but just like everything else about him matters, that did too. maybe because we live in a rather superficial culture, it might matter a little too much, but it's not something to be totally disregarded.
a parallel: if in 200 years, a supposedly historically-accurate movie came out where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was white, that would be cause for alarm. of how much more significance is Jesus' appearance, then?
It seems to me that there is need for balance here. Surely in there is much in the great tradition of Western religious art that need not be condemned, even though we know it to be inaccurate according to modern historical discoveries. There seems to me to be a fine line in letting an artist do his best without having to be some sort of historical expert, and the artist willfully misrepresenting Jesus.
Thanks, Joe. Glad to see another Piper fan like myself had a similar concern. Jesus' prophetic identity and role as redeemer of the nations is inextricably tied to his being a Jew. Therefore, our attempts at representing him artisticaly should reflect this truth--as much as the truth of his manhood, virgin birth in a town called Bethlehem and lineage traced to David, etc.
Does this discussion prove that we have too much time on our hands?
Check out this piece from Popular Mechanics in 2002, "Real Face of Jesus," complete with portrait:
That's an interesting article. I wonder why the artist gave "Jesus" such a vacuous expression. He looks as though he has just been hit on the side of the head with a brick.
Uhh, isn't the graven images one the second commandment, rather than the first? Anyway, I think such portraiture clearly does violate the commandment because it becomes an object of worship. But nobody (except the Muslims) really cares about the 2nd anyway, these days. Heck, the Catholics (of which I was once one) ignore it completely.
tgirsch:
Uhh, isn't the graven images one the second commandment, rather than the first?
Good question. The answer is that the precise delineations between the first and second commands are somewhat ambiguous, and various Christian traditions have separated them in different ways. This is not seen as a problem because the Scripture verses do not list the commandments as 1. ... 2. ... etc., and the divisions have no theological significance.
Joe Carter:
It seems the responses have made an impression. The staff have responded here.
Their general point I think holds, that Scripture validates the use of artistic metaphor in describing real things.
Whether it is too dangerous to illustrate Jesus as a man of a different ethnic background because people might miss the metaphorical meaning and actually think he is a African/Asian/female in his incarnated reality is a pastoral question.
In my judgment, the danger is small for most serious Christians who believe the basic fact of Jesus' male Jewishness, and people have more to gain from using their mind and creative imagination to know God more--something our hyper-modern Enlightenment sensibilities are often averse to doing due to an entrenched bias against the role of imagination in acquiring true knowledge.
Minus 5 points for using Hitler as an illustration for anything. ;-)
Perhaps when Piper said "everybody knows that they're not accurate" he meant "everybody who's not mental". That scratches out your illustrations of Hitler and white supremacists.
Just a note about a little pet peeve of mine.
Why do so many of you who believe in Christ refer to Him in the past tense?
Jesus Christ is alive today. Jesus Christ was resurrected in the flesh, friends. So when you speak about what He looks like, please feel free to speak of Him in the present tense.
Is it possible that these different renderings of Jesus minimize His humanity. By this I mean Jesus “humbled Himself” to come to earth as a real person in real time but when pictures render Him in all different ways, this includes movies as well, the audience may come away without a firm grasp on His actual humanity.
There are probably at least two reasons we do not know what Jesus looked like, other than being a Jewish man. First is that if we had an accurate description we would have any number of renderings that we would then worship. The second reason is that He is not described in detail because He came and looked like any other person. He did not act as any person but His physical appearance was such that He looked like any other Jew of that time. If we are to render pictures of Him should we not take our cue from scripture and not our desire to be imaginative.
Baggi:
So when you speak about what He looks like, please feel free to speak of Him in the present tense.
Good point! :)
There's only one reason we do not know in detail what he looked like. No one made a record of it, or if they did that record did not survive.
It was rare to make such a record back then. There are plenty of Emperors, Kings, Queens etc. of whom no record was made of what they looked like. The Scriptures of the Bible only present a brief piece of Jesus's life. I don't know if the non-Biblical scriptures ever mention what Jesus looked like but considering they were written long after anyone would have physically been able to see Jesus I doubt they could be fully trusted.
Another fact is there really isn't a good reason to write a long textual description of what someone looked like. I once read a description of Mohammed (don't know if it was a translation from the Koran or another source). Perhaps it gave some idea but nothing really all that solid. It's not an easy thing to capture in text and why would anyone have captured it? Back then text was very expensive. You either had to memorize it word for word or you had to painstakenly copy it by hand. There were few people who could write & even given scribes paper was pretty expensive. Since each paragraph would have been a struggle why would they have written ones that didn't serve much purpose?
When people wanted to preserve what someone looked like back then they either had a painting or sculpture done. Fine for Kings and such but Jesus didn't sit for anything like that during his life & didn't seem to think it important to do upon ressurection. Perhaps his friends or family made carvings, sketches or whatnot (doubtful considering the Jewish sense that such pictures would have been graven images) but they would have hardly been preserved in a Temple in Rome or anything.
What I'm saying essentially is that I don't think it's fair to say there's any special reason we don't have a clear picture of what Jesus looked like. People 2,000 years ago were thinking of what they needed to do then....not what would make bloggers happy in 2007. By the time it started to become necessary to committ the stuff to text it was too late to retrieve from eyewitnesses what he looked like on earth & it was thought other things were more important to capture in text.
I'll stick with the classic portrait of Jesus. It's very doubtful that the Jews of first century Galilee looked anything like Jews of today. Many Jewish authorities deny that the Jews of today are physically descended from Abraham. 40 years ago the average, "typical" denizen of Los Angeles was a white person. Been there lately? The typical Angeleno today is dark brown. No telling what Angelenos will look like in 2000 years, but I doubt if they'll look like the people in the old Dragnet reruns. So what makes us think Jews of the first century looked anything like Jews of today? There's no evidence for it. People move, integrate, intermarry, and change. In a space of 2000 years, an awful lot of this has gone on. I imagine that Sallman's Head Of Christ is a lot closer to reality (except for the hair) than the Popular Mechanics image. There are a great many places in the OT where fair skin is praised, and darker skin is looked down on. The Song of Solomon for one. This hardly fits the "swarthy Middle Eastern Jew" template we're all trying to shove our image of Jesus into. David was described as "ruddy", hardly an adjective which springs to mind when describing you average 21st century Jew. I know of no place in the OT where Israelites were described as swarthy, dark, or anything like that. In addition, in Ezekiel 28, God says that if Israel intermarries with strangers, they will "defile their brightness". AH Sayce's Races of the Old Testament used to be considered a standard reference work on these topics, but most people these days seem to be unfamiliar with it. It probably fell out of favor for being too unPC, as Sayce, who was no Christian Identity whack job, basically says that the ancient Israelites were a lot closer to today's Europeans than to today's Jews.
Please remember that genetics is only part of the story as far as a persons looks are concerned. Diet, medical history, climate, etc. all make their mark.
We can only guess, and if we guess, we must know that our guesses are informed by our preconceptions, and that our guesses may inform the prejudices of the future. Artists will portray Jesus according to their own ideas of what is beautiful, and because an artist may be good at it, it will influence other people as to their imagined Jesus. They do not worship Jesus; they worship the human construct that represents Jesus.
Many artists portray Jesus as looking special, and so we get the idea that Jesus looked special, and we think that if we had been back there, we would have recognized Jesus's specialness, and that the contemporary witnesses must have been real dummies or willfully perverse. This reinforces a belief that "we are superior" and people who didn't or don't follow Jesus are inferior. In fact, when we are enabled to accept something like Jesus, it is not because of our superiority over others, but because we have received a blessing. Do I deserve praise for being a receiver of Grace?
As far as I am concerned, the artist who portrays Jesus must show someone who is all of us, and none of us. I don't think it possible to do this in a picture, a statue, or a movie, though I recognize that such artists (often) are trying to express Love the best way they know how.
Such images are a stumbling block, past, present and future.
Wow! This is wonderful post on Jesus and it had raised very good thoughts on our mind regarding the Jesus and his color and I will appreciated Pastor John for his careful and insightful thinking on very tangled issues. Thanks for sharing this important information with the blog.