A search for Jesus’s face, whatever he looked like
There’s a quotation going around the internet from Cicero: “The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced.” Readers quite often put it into a letter to the editor. The trouble is that it is not by Cicero but by Taylor Caldwell, who made it up in 1965 for her historical novel A Pillar of Iron.
Similarly a quotation attributed to Josephus, the Jewish historian, gives a description of Jesus as “three cubits high, hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows”. It’s not from a historical novel, but is certainly not from Josephus. It’s from a reconstruction made by Robert Eisler in 1929 of what he thinks Josephus might have written. His sources include a medieval manuscript based on Josephus, and the so-called Letter of Lentulus, also thought to be a medieval composition, which gives a description of Jesus as good-looking and well made.
The complica-tions are patiently untangled in Joan E Taylor’s What Did Jesus
Look Like?, which I reviewed in The Sunday
Telegraph and won’t go over again here. What I’d like to say is that people are barking up the wrong tree if they think that El Greco, for example (a detail of one of whose paintings of the so-called veil of Veronica is pictured here), was trying to portray what Jesus looked like.
El Greco’s face of Jesus is intended to do several things. It is meant to evoke sympathy, since it shows him suffering under a crown of thorns before his death. In that way, it is a devotional tool, typical of High Renaissance humanism. But El Greco started off as an icon painter in Crete. That convention is very distant from individual portraiture. Icons are meant to be windows into heaven. Their images stand for the invisible.
The tension between the visible representing the much-desired invisible is present in the Bible – the Jewish Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament), which insists that God cannot be seen. “Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God,” and yet “The Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.”
The Bible also repeatedly enjoins: “Seek the Lord, and his strength: seek his face evermore.” The Psalmist responds: “When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.”
The writers of the books of the Bible were perfectly aware of metaphor. When they wrote that God would let his face shine upon them, they did not imply that God had a material face.
When Abraham entertained three mysterious guests, they did not indicate that God was three men but gave an image of what God was like.
Christians (those who were not iconoclasts) developed the teaching that Jesus, as God incarnate, could be depicted and his image reverenced as an act of worship of the unseen God. The image is of a man, but that person, Jesus, is God, too. The point was not what Jesus looked like, but that he had a human face. “Shall I not make an image of him who took the nature of flesh for me?” asked St John of Damascus in his classic defence, Of the
Holy Images in the eighth
century.
Christians took over the Psalms as their foremost formulas of prayer. In repeating the phrase, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek,” they expressed the search to see Jesus as the image of God the Father and the hope that in the life to come, through the beatific vision, God would enable them to be like Moses and meet God face to face.