What Research and Science Can Tell Us About Jesus “Cultures tend to portray prominent religious figures to look like the dominant racial identity,” Cargill explains. In fact, many different cultures around the world have depicted him, visually at least, as one of their own. Of course, not all images of Jesus conform to the dominant image of him portrayed in Western art. “They have evolved over time to the standard ‘Jesus’ we recognize.” “The point of these images was never to show Jesus as a man, but to make theological points about who Jesus was as Christ (King, Judge) and divine Son,” Joan Taylor, professor of Christian origins and second temple Judaism at King's College London, wrote in The Irish Times. At that point, Jesus started to appear in a long robe, seated on a throne (such as in the fifth-century mosaic on the altar of the Santa Pudenziana church in Rome), sometimes with a halo surrounding his head. The long-haired, bearded image of Jesus that emerged beginning in the fourth century was influenced heavily by representations of Greek and Roman gods, particularly the all-powerful Greek god Zeus. Painted in the sixth century A.D., it is the earliest known image of Christ found in Israel, and portrays him with shorter, curly hair, a depiction that was common to the eastern region of the Byzantine empire―especially in Egypt and the Syria-Palestine region―but disappeared from later Byzantine art. The restored fresco depicting Jesus and his apostles in the Roman catacomb of Santa Domitilla.Īnother rare early portrait of Jesus was discovered in 2018 on the walls of a ruined church in southern Israel.

Bible verse images