Was Jesus a Manly Man?

(and other models for his physical appearance....)

My monograph, Jesus’ Physical Appearance, was published in December with a rather hefty price-tag (£81… at 10% off). So in this mini-series, I have begun to sketch its key arguments.

Previously, I have asked whether it is surprising that the gospels don’t describe Jesus’ appearance, and explored the gospels’ relationship to ancient biography. In this piece, I turn to the gospels’ characterisation of Jesus.

The question of why Jesus’ appearance is not described in the gospels has long puzzled scholars. Not only was physical description a common topos in ancient life-writing, there was a whole panoply of models in which Jesus might have been cast: the evangelists might have said that Jesus was ugly and disfigured, based on the suffering servant of Isaiah, or beautiful and strong, like a royal figure or divine man.

Yet rarely have scholars stopped to ask themselves: do the physical profiles of these types – a disfigured slave, or a beautiful divine king – actually match the profile of Jesus we encounter in the gospels? Or is there something about the gospels’ characterisation of Jesus which precludes a description along such familiar lines?

That is the question I ask in chapter 3 of my book (‘The Christology of Appearances’), the results of which I outline here. As we shall see, the question of Jesus’ missing image in the gospels leads us to a range of fascinating problems that relate to it: Is Jesus depicted as the suffering servant? How do the gospels construct Jesus’ masculinity? And what might a missing image have to do with Jewish aniconism?

The Suffering Servant

If you ask Christians today whether there is a physical description of Jesus in the Bible, they might turn to a figure in Isaiah 52-53 known as the ‘suffering servant’.

While the Hebrew Bible has no word for ‘ugliness’, the passage in Isaiah piles on a litany of unflattering terms to describe the servant. He is ‘marred’ in his appearance, and he has ‘no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him’ (53:2). In short, he was far from a stunner.

The reason why Christians might look to this passage today is that the New Testament saw the servant as a type of Christ. In an arsenal of early Christian texts, Jesus is looked to as this rejected, servant type. In very gospel-sounding language, Isaiah goes on to say that he ‘bore the sins of many’, as Jesus would come to do.

Strikingly, however, the New Testament authors – including the gospel writers – swerve around the servant’s physical appearance, when they might have employed it. One of the questions I considering during my research was: why? Was there any problem with using Isaiah’s suffering servant as a depiction of Jesus’ appearance?

In my book, I offer two broad suggestions. The first is that it is far from clear whether the evangelists had any special interest in presenting Jesus as the servant. As scholars have pointed out, there are a number of allusions to the servant in the synoptics. Yet there is no clear identification of Jesus with the servant in John. And where the allusions do appear in the Synoptics, they are generally regarded as ‘traditional’. That is, they are not allusions which the evangelists have crafted themselves.¹

Yet I think there is a second – and more vital reason – why the evangelists may not have cast Jesus in the servant’s likeness. Namely, that his appearance would have been a considerable source of embarrassment for early Christian writers and theology.

Consider what Celsus, a pagan philosopher writing in the second century, has to say about Jesus’ appearance, having heard from Christians that he was unattractive:

‘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.” (Origen, Cels. 6.75)

Today, we are used to insults being thrown at the looks of politicians and celebrities. Yet Celsus was not merely being churlish. In the mindset of ancient Rome, the gods and their human counterparts were expected to be beautiful, and many of Celsus’ readers would have thought he had a point: if Jesus was ugly, he could not be divine.

Yet the PR problem gets worse. To say that someone was ‘ugly’ in the ancient world was not merely to comment on their physiology – it was to comment on their soul. The ancient Roman milieu was saturated with physiognomic ideas. It believed that one could discern (gnomon) the nature (physis) of someone from their outward appearance. To say that Jesus was ugly would be to open him up to slander and invective – a point that the evangelists may have wished to avoid.

We see the same avoidance strategy in the work of other first-century Jewish writers. For example, in the biblical story of Exodus, we find that Moses was not a good public speaker, and at one point his hand turns white like leprosy – both traits a source of embarrassment. So in their re-telling of Moses’ life, the biographer Philo and historian Flavius Josephus variously explain these bugs or cut them out altogether.²

A perceptive reader might argue that it is plausible that the evangelists wanted to avoid the ugliness of the suffering servant, but the early Church did not seem to have a problem with it. In a host of apostolic and patristic writings – from Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen, all the way through to the present day – Christians have often drawn upon the imagery of the suffering servant to describe the appearance of Jesus.

Yet as I point out in my piece Before Jesus was Beautiful, the early Church drew upon the servant typology for very specific reasons. Primarily, it helped them to establish Jesus’ humanity, against heretics who thought Jesus was only divine. For there was no way that a being who was ugly, like the servant, would have been non-fleshly.

Yet as it turns out, the early Church were not entirely comfortable with letting Isaiah have the last word on Jesus’ appearance. Several of them said he was in fact beautiful (for those with eyes to see), or at least he would be on his second coming. We see, then, that there were good reasons for the evangelists to avoid casting Jesus in the image of the suffering servant. With all of the problems that could arise in its wake, the image of an unattractive Jesus was simply not that attractive to them.

Jesus and the Elites

If an ugly Jesus didn’t suit the evangelists, we might consider why they did not choose a more attractive mould. Like David in the Hebrew Bible and countless figures in the Roman world, kings and elite men were expected to be strong and beautiful. This not only displayed their proximity to the gods, it showed that they were, by nature, destined to rule. Often, this is why we are told that a king was beautiful from birth.

At first glance, it may seem that Jesus is an obvious fit for a handsome casting. All four of the gospels cast Jesus using imperial language: he is a Son of God or Divi Filius who takes on standard kingly traits. And in Matthew and Luke (it is less clear in Mark), Jesus is depicted as the royal Davidic messiah. All of this might lead us to expect a Jesus who was, at least literarily speaking, handsome, tall and strong.

Yet I think when we look closer at how the gospels define Jesus’ kingship, we see something curious going on. Jesus does not like a ‘kingly king’, but rather subverts the standard expectations of kingship. The ‘omen’ at his baptism is not the war-like eagle, but a dove;³ his adventus into Jerusalem is not on a horse and chariot, but a donkey;⁴ and his joyful messianic symposium starkly contrasts the bloody feast of King Herod.⁵