how accurate are the paintings and drawings of Jesus Christ ?

Question

are paintings and drawings of Jesus Christ that we see every day, accurate?

Answer 1

Here is what a contemporary forensics scientist says Jesus may have looked like:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282186.html

Answer 2

There's no way to know what Jesus looked like.

But to hear some people squawk about blue-eyed Jesuses, you'd think that was the only way He had ever been portrayed. The blonde-haired blue-eyed portrait most are familiar with was painted in the 1940s.

THE 1940s, PEOPLE---GET OVER IT ALREADY!

2000 years of sacred art, thousands and thousands of paintings and sculptures and mosaics of Jesus with dark hair and dark eyes and a big nose and a thin face; black Jesuses, Chinese Jesuses, Japanese Jesuses, and Indian Jesuses; no, none of those matter. All of the prior representations of Jesus were utterly ERASED seven decades ago by the appearance Jesus the Blond.

It's silly to assume most people think Jesus had blond hair and blue eyes. It's silly because it assumes nobody has seen anything else but. Anyone who's ever been in churches, let alone museums and art history books, knows differently.

And that forensic reconstruction is ridiculous. You can't determine what *I* must have looked like by reconstructing the skulls of my neighbors down the block. In fact, this comes perilously close to saying "All Jews look alike", and they certainly don't. Not now, and not then.

Answer 3

No - and you have all the reasons why in the answers above.

However, one of the reasons why the Shroud of Turin is venerated as a possible likeness is that it seems to come closest to an accurate portrait out of all the images we have.

Answer 4

No. He did not have blue eyes, he was not white. Earliest paintings ar at lest 100 years after he died and very much 'cartoonish' The more realistic paintings are over 500 years after he died.

We have no clue what he looked like besides his obvious ethnic background.

Answer 5

The previous answer is correct. There was no tradition of portraiture in Judea at the time of Jesus, as Jews were forbidden from making images of people (as Muslims also are), and the earliest pictures were by Greeks, who made images in the way they knew (beardless male), and it's gone on from there. Artists have represented divinity personified by handsome/beautiful in their own cultures. There are some interesting depictions in Ethiopian art of Jesus as an Ethiopian, but pictures of him as a Middle Eastern Semite are rare as hen's teeth.

Answer 6

probably not. think about it. Why would there be a blond blue eyed jesus in isreal? That doesn't make sense. Blond people are from northern europe.

Answer 7

Didn't know he painted.