Does How Jesus Look ACTUALLY Matter?

Описание: We have portraits of real people from Jesus's exact time and place. They're lifelike, human, and stunning. So why don't we use them?

Fayum mummy portraits are the most realistic images of the ancient world — painted in Roman Egypt during the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. Some date to the exact years Jesus was alive. The Lady of Aline was painted in 24 AD, under Emperor Tiberius, while Jesus was walking the earth in the neighboring country.

Yet the most venerated images of Jesus look nothing like these faces. And the more abstract the depiction, the more devotion it receives.
In this video, we trace the visual history of how Jesus went from a first-century Galilean Jew to a Byzantine icon to a medieval European king to Warner Sallman's 1940 portrait — reproduced over one billion times by an advertising artist who never visited the Middle East.

We don't want accuracy. We want sacredness. Somewhere along the way, we decided those two things can't be the same.
But if we drifted this far on his face — how far did we drift on his voice?

📚 Author of Nope, That's Not in There: A Guide to Reading the Bible for Yourself — available on Amazon and major retailers

SOURCES & FURTHER READING:

Fayum Mummy Portraits — British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Lady of Aline, Hawara, Egypt — dated c. 24 AD

Warner Sallman, "Head of Christ" (1940) — reproduced over 1 billion times

Richard Neave forensic reconstruction — Popular Mechanics, December 2002

Shroud of Turin — carbon dated 1988 to c. 1260–1390 AD

Byzantine Iconoclasm (726–843 AD)

Legend of Destruction (2021) — Israeli animated film using Fayum portraits for character design

Dura-Europos church painting (~235 AD) — earliest known depiction of Jesus