The Missing Image of Jesus
Sketches of my PhD thesis
This is the beginning of a series of posts in which I sketch the argument I make in my recent book. This first one looks at physical descriptions in ancient biography, and whether it is surprising that the gospels don’t describe Jesus’ appearance.
I often quip that my PhD was a hundred-thousand word argument from silence. The silence in question: why do the gospels not describe Jesus’ physical appearance?
This may not seem like an obvious question to ask. Yet a quiet revolution has taken place in the last three decades of gospels’ research. Rather than seeing the gospels as non-literary compilations of oral traditions, most scholars now view them as a form of ‘life-writing’ or ancient biography.
This paradigm shift has re-opened the question of Jesus’ appearance, as many ancient ‘lives’ do describe their subject’s physical appearance. To be sure, not every bíos contains a physical description. Yet it seemed curious to me that not just one – but rather all four – of the evangelists fail to tell us what Jesus looked like.
In this introduction to my research, then, I want to explore whether it really is surprising that we find no description of Jesus the gospels. Is this a silence which subverts the conventions of biography – or is it a silence which fails to speak?
Descriptions in Ancient Biography
The first task in my thesis was to work out how common descriptions were in ancient lives. So I read all of the complete biographies I could get my hands on, four hundred years either side of the gospels. This took me from the origins of the genre in Greek literature up to the emergence of ‘Christian’ biography in the Roman Empire.
What I found took me by surprise. The evangelists were the only biographers in antiquity not to describe their subject in any of their works. Whether it was highly fictional works like The Life of Aesop or the Alexander Romance, or more historical biographies like Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, physical descriptions kept popping up. Moreover, Jewish biographers would make sure to mention their subject’s physical appearance – even when it was absent from their primary source material.
