We’ve all seen the pictures of Jesus. The fine european features, blue eyes, long wavy brown hair. If it’s the picture from my youth, he has a glowing heart you can see through his tunic, too. (My mother grew up Catholic).
We all know that there’s no driver’s license picture of the man.
But, culturally, for 1st century Jersuelem, is the long hair right? Busts of various Ceasars usually have carefully coifed, short hair. What was vogue for the Jews?
Is there any written clues to his appearance? Maybe he was a short, bald, tubby guy. Perhaps he was just a 1st century Jason Alexander.
While we may not have an 8x10 glossy picture of him, is there no representative art from the region and the time that exists? No mosaics, murals, or vases that show “Typical Mid-Eastern Man 30 A.D.?” I find that kind of hard to believe.
The earliest representation of the man that I know of has him with a donkey’s head, but that’s from a couple of hundred years later. I’ll ponder plnnr’s point meanwhile and have a look today. Meanwhile, kids, remember that the “Letter to Lentulus” is a late forgery (just in case anyone comes in here with that as evidence).
You have to be careful, though. What you usually see in those representations are not typical folks but upper-class people. Some of the murals in Egypt give us an idea of what the working class looked like in that place*, but are there similar pieces from Israel around the time of Christ?
*even then you have to be careful-- is that a representation of how people looked, or just a convention of how to depict them?
(I shaved the beard off when people started telling me I looked like Jesus. As I was verging on neo-pagan status then, that made me decidedly uncomfortable.)
Other early representations show him as clean shaven, but after about the 4th century he was always shown with a beard. (Part of this may have been so that people would not make eunuch jokes about him. An oft heard commentary is that the beard was a Byzantine symbol of power and this is repeated in the excellent film Jesus of Montreal, but I can’t put too much stock in that since first Christian Emperor Constantine the Great was clean shaven as was his predecessor Diocletian and his sucessor/son Constantius were all clean shaven (and in fact his first successor to have a beard, Julian (the Apostate), was anti-Christian and returned the empire to paganism. The Shroud of Turin has probably done more to standardize the image of Jesus than anything since, though it was clearly inspired by the already notion that he was bearded and slim (though in Gore Vidal’s Live at Golgotha he’s depicted as obese, but then Gore’s an ass).
He had long hair. He was also tall, athletic, had six pack abs, light-colored skin and perfect teeth. Don’t you ever look at pictures of him?
Seriously, every depiction I’ve seen from that place and time show men with short hair. Not proof, but there is no reason I can think of to support the long hair idea.
One thing I would expect is that the long wavy hair (a la Albrecht Durer) pretty much has to be out of the question. Given the type of hair most commonly seen on people who live in that part of the world, I would expect it to be fairly curly, and, if allowed to grow out, would tend to do so in all directions, rather than mostly downwards.
So Jesus could not have had long hair because he was straight, and not gay – that’s why he never married, and why he hung out with 12 other young men all the time. Really very simple when you think about it.