Before Jesus was Beautiful
The Early Church Believed in an Ugly Jesus
In the lead-up to the publication of Jesus’ Physical Appearance next month, I will be posting weekly reflections on different aspects of Jesus’ appearance for my supporters.
In episode five of the Netflix-esque dramatisation of the gospels, The Chosen, Mary informs Salome that Jesus will be coming to the wedding in Cana. Salome is excited, ‘I bet he’s handsome!’ and in walks Jesus, played by Jonathan Roumie: physically attractive and head and shoulders above his band of disciples.
For most of ecclesiastical history, Salome’s sentiment – “I bet he’s handsome” – has been widely shared. In the imagination of the Christian faithful, it has seemed difficult to separate the beauty of Christ’s soul from his physical appearance. Putting aside Monty Python’s parodistic Life of Brian, Jesus has had a long history of looking handsome.
So ubiquitous is Jesus’ beauty that it is easy to overlook the fact that Jesus was not always beautiful. The early Church sometimes portrayed Jesus as a handsome young god, like Hermes or Apollo. Yet ancient Christians were just as likely to say that Jesus was not at all good-looking – even that he was ugly in his appearance.
In this piece, I want to unpack a time in ancient Christianity before Jesus became beautiful. Why did Christians present Jesus as ugly? Is there any truth to the idea that Jesus was unattractive? And how did Christians cover-up this negative depiction?
The Invention of an Ugly Jesus
It is well-known that none of the New Testament writers describe Jesus’ appearance. This left early Christians looking for other sources to find out what he looked like. One of the most natural sources was one to which Christians still turn: Isaiah’s suffering servant. Isaiah 52-53 describes a figure who is far from good-looking:
‘… so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance,
and his form beyond that of mortals…
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.’
Today, Christians sometimes use this passage to argue that Jesus was ‘average’ looking. But to say that he was ‘marred’ suggests the servant was diseased.1 And to say that he had ‘nothing in his appearance that we should desire him’ was about as close as the Hebrew Bible, which lacks a word for ugliness, comes to describing it.
Already in the first and early second century, New Testament writers had identified Jesus as the suffering servant. It makes sense then that other Christians might echo Isaiah in describing Jesus’ looks. Yet this still does not answer the question of why early Christians drew upon this passage. Why not ignore this uncomfortable aspect of Isaiah’s description, as the New Testament itself seems to do?
Our first clear reference to Isaiah in relation to Jesus’ appearance is found in Irenaeus’ Against Heresies. He notes that Jesus ‘was a man without comeliness’ (3.19.2) in a litany of Jesus’ humble traits. Yet for Irenaeus, the purpose of describing Jesus as ugly was probably not for the sole purpose of underscoring Jesus’ humility. It also served a more important purpose: to prove that Jesus really was a human who suffered.
By the time Irenaeus was writing, there were groups who believed that Jesus was not really human, but only divine. Sometimes these Christians are called ‘docetists’, because Jesus only ‘seemed’ (dokeõ) human, but he was only divine. These Christians believed that Jesus did not really suffer on the cross – he only seemed too.
On this view, we might suppose that Jesus was beautiful, because divine bodies were typically so. To say that Jesus was ugly therefore served an apologetic purpose. If Jesus had been only divine, he would have had a divinely beautiful body. But he was not beautiful, hence he was truly human. Isaiah served to confirm Jesus’ humanity.
This apologetic agenda is even more explicit in Tertullian’s work, On the Flesh of Christ. Devoted to proving that Jesus was truly a human being, Tertullian claims that Jesus’ ‘body did not even reach to human beauty to say nothing of heavenly glory’ (9). With the help of Isaiah, Tertullian thus avoids the slippery slope that a beautiful Christ may have created for his ‘docetic’ opponents – that Jesus was not really human.
Covering up Jesus’ Ugliness
Yet this created a converse problem for ancient Christians. If Jesus was ugly, and therefore truly human, what good reason is there to think Jesus was divine? This is a problem that the pagan philosopher Celsus points out in his second-century treatise against Christianity:
‘If a divine spirit was in a body, it must certainly have differed from other bodies in size or beauty or strength or voice or striking appearance or powers of persuasion. For it is impossible that a body which had something more divine than the rest should be no different from any other. Yet Jesus’ body was no different from any other, but, as they say, was little and ugly and undistinguished.” (Cels. 6.75)
While we are used to insults of ugliness being hurled at politicians or celebrities, Celsus was not merely being churlish. In a physiognomic world in which appearance was correlated with character, and gods were expected to be beautiful, many of his hearers would have thought he had a point: if Jesus was ugly, he was not divine.
That Celsus was drawing on what Christians were saying about Jesus would have only strengthened in his critique. When Celsus uses the phrase, ‘as they say’, he tends to be drawing on information he has heard from Christians. It is plausible then that the belief in Jesus’ ugliness, based on Isaiah, was reasonably widespread. Even the idea that Jesus was ‘little’ may be derived from Isaiah’s description of a servant ‘like a child.’
This led to something more than a PR problem for early Christians. Anticipating this theological dilemma, we often find early Christian theologians trying to temper or relativise the importance of Isaiah. Tertullian himself claimed that Jesus will be beautiful in his second coming even if he wasn’t in his first, while Origen – responding to Celsus – claims that Jesus was beautiful for those with eyes to see.
To reify the idea of a ‘beautiful’ Jesus, some early Christians drew upon a completely different set of typology – that of King David, who was beautiful. Origen himself quotes the royal Psalm 45:3 as a proof-text for Jesus’ beauty. In a similar vein, Gregory of Nazianzus would claim that Jesus was ugly ‘in the eyes of the Jews… but to David he was fairer than the children of mankind’, citing Psalm 45:2 (LXX 44:3).
In short, it appears that many early Christians were happy to say that Jesus was ugly when it suited their apologetic or rhetorical purposes.2 At the same time, they were not content to let Isaiah have the last word on Jesus’ appearance. At times feeling a tension with their own physiognomic outlook, they re-fashioned Jesus as beautiful.
Was the Historical Jesus Ugly?
So far, we have thought about why early Christian writers believed Jesus was ugly. We have also seen that in various ways they tried to temper this depiction. But is there any basis for thinking that Jesus as a historical figure was less than attractive?
Some Christians today would point to Isaiah as a description of Jesus’ appearance. Yet while the suffering servant provided an important set of typologies for Jesus, there is sparse evidence that Isaiah was prognosticating about the messiah. Indeed, even if we assumed that Isaiah was speaking of Jesus, I am not sure how far it would get. Would it describe Jesus’ every-day appearance? Or just his appearance on the cross?
One Church father, John Chrysostom, argues that Jesus was average-looking, because Judas identifies Jesus in Gethsemane not by his physical traits, but by a kiss. Yet it is difficult to make much of this argument from silence. It was dark when Jesus’ captors came to arrest him, and the kiss of betrayal is pregnant with meaning.
A more tantalising possibility is that the Gospels do not describe Jesus’ appearance because it was not worth a description. We find other first-century Jewish writers such as Philo and Josephus concerned to play down or remove the physiognomic deficiencies of their subjects. So while the Bible describes Moses’ hand as ‘leprous like snow’ (Exod. 4:6), Philo changes the wording and Josephus removes it altogether.
Could the same thing have happened with Jesus? I do not know that we can attach it any level of likelihood, but it is certainly possible. If Jesus was unattractive, then we have some evidence that the evangelists would have had reason to downplay this fact. Just as Philo and Josephus redact Moses’ deficiencies and the Church fathers wrestled to make Jesus beautiful, so the evangelists may have found it easier not to face the problem of Jesus’ appearance – if indeed it was a problem.
A Missed Beauty Revolution?
It is sometimes said that ancient Christianity “justified ugliness” and transvaluated the very concept of beauty.3 Whereas the Graeco-Roman world was obsessed with image, the Christian world focused on the beauty of the inner, rather than outward man. worshipping the crucified God, Christianity underwent a beauty revolution.
I think there is a sense in which this is true. Clearly, the notion that Jesus was ugly struck early pagan neighbours as peculiar and even an offence to the truth of the faith. Yet it is also true that early Christians participated in the same physiognomic expectations of their neighbours, and attempted to play down Jesus’ ugliness. For much of history, the expectation is that Jesus must have been beautiful.
I wonder if Christianity here missed a trick. There was a chance, early on, to contest what Rome saw as ‘beautiful and good’ – to challenge the physiognomy of classical antiquity by showing that Jesus did not conform to the elite beauty of the time. But this opportunity was quickly eclipsed by a flurry of images which cast him in exactly that image. In the end, Christianity came to focus less upon what it might mean for the Divine to look like an ugly Jesus, and more on making an ugly Jesus look divine.
See Jeremy Schipper, Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52.
For a full development of this argument, see Callie Callon, “He Had Neither Form Nor Beauty”: The Physigonomic Curiosity of the Negative Descriptions of the Physical Appearance of Jesus” in Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse, LNTS 597. London: Routledge, 2019.
See Jacob Taubes, “The Justification of Ugliness in Early Christian Tradition,” in From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010).