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 a source 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. 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.