“What is most real: the image of Jesus? the historical Jesus? or the essence of Christ, the idea of spiritual reality that corresponds to the believer’s recognition of the picture and affirming utterance? Believers don’t have to choose amond these; instead they compile them in their devotional gaze. The power of visual piety consists in enhancing the imanence of the spiritual referent through the image, reifying it, and merging it with a concept of the historical Jesus.”[i]
In recent study, an emphasis has been placed on what the historical Jesus might have actually looked like. This search for “truth” says more about our modern culture than it does about the person of Jesus. For example, early Christians were more concerned with the personality of Christ and sought to edify their audience as to who Christ was and the miracles he performed on earth. Today, we would rather know what he looked like than what he acted like.
Perhaps this is because of the recent discovery that Christianity has been a white-and-western-dominated movement since it’s beginning. In this section, I will look at the history of the attempt to figure out what Jesus actually looked like. Instead of looking at one image, I will look at multiple to get a glimpse of the viewpoints for all of them.
The quest for what Jesus has actually looked like and acted like has been going on since the Enlightenment, when the idea of the historical method first came into existence.[ii] Ever since then, worshippers have wanted to know the truth about who Jesus was and various stories, pictures and scholarly methods have been found to tell it. In the Blackwell Companion to Jesus, Gowler wrote about the quest to find the historical Jesus as he relates to scripture, but what he said is still relevant because people are just as concerned with the truth about his physical appearance as they are with the truth about his actual sayings and actions. He writes
“…the Jesus for whom we look, because of our presuppositions, determines to an extent the Jesus we will find, as well as the aspects of Jesus that we overlook or even misconstrue. As we search for the historical Jesus, how and where we begin influences where we will go, and what we look for influences what we see.”[iii]
This statement, when used to refer to the quest for what Jesus actually looked like, says something about the way audience members can project their feelings onto the image. The search for finding the truth about what the historical Jesus looked like would do well to remember the same statement Gowler gives for finding what the historical Jesus acted like. If we are searching for an image of a man with certain ethnic features and without certain ethnic features, we will not be satisfied with anything else, even the truth, until we find an image that satisfies both of our criterions.
This article is concerned about the similar methods used in finding true images of Jesus, and is not interesting in passing a true or false judgment on those images. It will look at three images of Jesus widely considered true: The shroud of Turin, Akiane’s Prince of Peace, and a computer-modeled image from a BBC production team.
Before any of the three images were popular, other images of Jesus called archeiopoietons were popular. Those images were images not made by human hands. They became popular after and during the iconoclastic period from 728 to 843. Where portraits stood as proxies of authority, Jesus had no portrait until the Acheiropoieton, the Mandylion of Edessa and the Veronica of St. Peters were discovered. Both of these images were images that had legendary backstories. The Mandylion was supposedly by St. Luke while the Veronica was a handkerchief that Jesus wiped his face on before being crucified. All of the images were highly revered during their time. The Archeiopoieton was kissed and venerated by worshippers until most of the original was lost and it had to be protected. The Veronica was reproduced and prayed to.[iv] These images are worth mentioning because they help us generate a wider sense of the audience searching for truth and the artists in search for truth. As we shall see the audience, when searching for the truth is concerned with proof while searching for what Jesus actually looked like. For many audience members, this concern is satisfied with miraculous occurrences surrounding the image or with legends explaining its existence. They are also often changed by the images when they believe the reality. The artists or finders, as we shall see, are concerned with truth and are satisfied with truth by the creative process taken to find or discover the image in the first place.
Shroud of Turin[ii]
“…If you can be affected by the face of the shroud, which is the face of suffering, then once in a while you see a man and you are able to understand his suffering and help him…That is the extraordinary gift which the shroud can give you: the ability to understand others…The universal nature of pain in the face of others…after that I was no longer capable of harming anyone.”[vii]
The artists, or discoverers of the shroud see its veracity in two ways. In 1389, it was the burial shroud of Jesus after he had been crucified with the blood and the markings to prove it. After the photographic negative was seen, it became verified because of the hitherto unknown detail now revealed.
Akiane’s Prince of Peace [iii]
BBC’s Historical Jesus
The third image discussed in this section is different from the other two because it attempts to be verified not through the miraculous or the transcendent, but through scholarly research. It also does not fit the categories of audience and audience creation. BBC as part of the Son of God series created the image in 2001.[x] The team went to the Middle East and studied ethnic appearances of people who lived there now and Jews who lived there in the first century AD. They combined the two elements. Unlike the other two images, the artists of this image of Christ do not claim to it to be the truth, only that it may resemble the truth. This image is interesting though because it suggests that people are no longer satisfied with the contemporary accepted view of Jesus as a white man. It is also interesting because it shows us that scientists are applying their own methods in the search to find out what Jesus looked like.
The search for truth also brings controversy, a Google search of the Shroud of Turin brings many articles up on proving it false. A similar search on the historical Jesus brings up websites debating his existence at all or discussing different theories applied to the search of finding it.
In conclusion, the search for the truth goes back since the time of the Enlightenment. It has permeated the study of Christianity and our culture. Where ancient Christians evaluated an image based on its ability to edify, and later Christians used images of Jesus as proxies, we now evaluate images based on its ability to tell the truth. There are often legendary backstories to prove images true, stories describing the images existence and its power to change people. How much of these images do we believe because of our preconceived notions and how much do we not believe because of them? That is a question for the audience.
[i] David Morgan, Visual Piety, (Las Angeles: University of California Press, 1998) 43.
[ii]David B. Gowler, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus: An Overview,” In The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, edited by Delbert Burkett, 300-17, (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011) 301.
[iii] Ibid., 301.
[iv] Neil Maccgregor and Erika Langmuir, Seeing Salvation, (London: BBC Worldwide Limited and Yale University Press, 2000), 85-93.
[v] Ibid., 99.
[vi] Ibid, 101.
[vii] Ibid, 102
[viii] Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent, Heaven is for Real, Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2010.
[ix] Ibid, 143
[x] BBC Photo Library, Son of God, Computer-Modeled image, 2001. http://www.rejesus.co.uk/site/module/faces_of_jesus/P9/ Accessed June 5, 2012.
Images of Jesus 
