Western culture normally depicts Jesus as a skinny white bloke, with long straight hair, but scientists have now got a completely different idea of what he may have looked like…
Popular Mechanics reported that forensic scientists went through the pain-staking process of constructing the image below to demonstrate what they believe an average man of Jesus’ time, place and background.
Although they admit that this reconstructed face is not the definite face of Jesus, it’s a lot more accurate representation of the real Jesus, than the images we normally associate with him.
To make this reconstruction happen, they first had to make a model using computer analysis of a first century Semite skull from the Galilee region in northern Israel- this is where the face gets its features and shape from.
The skin colour was then chosen, based on paintings of Semites during that era and from that region.
Forensic anthropologists finally relied on clues from the Bible to decide what hair to give their model. They settled on one chapter which described long hair on a man as ‘a disgrace’, so they went with short hair- which was appropriate to men of the age.
Despite the fact his body isn’t depicted in these particular images, it would be accurate to point out than an average Semite man of that time was 5ft 1 and about 110 pounds- so he would have been a lot less lanky then we though as well.
This will definitely flip our perception of what the most famous face in history could have actually looked like…
