Even though billions of people profess faith in him, there are quite a few misconceptions
about Jesus Christ. From the basics of his appearance to popular beliefs about his theology,
a number of surprises are in store. These are the things many people get wrong about Jesus.
Even though a major world religion centers on him, there's surprisingly
little direct evidence that clues us in to what Jesus really looked like. And,
if you happen to abide by the classic images of Jesus — that is, "classic" as defined by centuries
of European-influenced artmaking — then chances are, your internal image of Jesus is all wrong.
According to History, the Biblical evidence about Jesus's appearance is practically nonexistent.
We know that he would have been about 30 years old when he started making waves as a religious
leader. It's also pretty reasonable to conclude that he was a normal-looking guy for the time,
so standard issue that Judas Iscariot had to point him out when it came time for Jesus's arrest.
“Arrest him.”
It doesn't help that Western art has changed its depiction of Jesus many
times over the years, often depending more on cultural trends and personal
preferences of the artist than documented fact.
That said, we can make some reasonable conclusions about his appearance,
extrapolating from common traits seen around the region at that time. In the book "What Did Jesus
Look Like?," academic Joan E. Taylor advances an educated guess that Jesus likely had curly hair,
dark eyes, and brown skin, much like other people in his community.
It's often presumed that Jesus began his life as a humble carpenter,
working with his hands in obscurity, before he became a major religious figure.
However, the use of the word "carpenter" isn't quite right here.
There are really only two verses – Mark 6:3 and
Matthew 13:55 – that even bother to reference Jesus's occupation or
that of Joseph. It seemingly wasn't that important to the writers of the Gospels.
And when that occupation is mentioned, in the original Greek text of the early Gospels, the word
tektōn is used, according to the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. As Architectural
Histories reports, the job description of a tektōn can include plenty of woodworking.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean carpenter. Rather, a tektōn has been defined in any number of ways,
with jobs that can encompass carpentry work, but it's more tied to the work of a general builder.
It may be more accurate to think of Jesus and Joseph as general contractors working in Nazareth.
It appears that we got to "carpenter" because, when English translations of the Bible started
to debut, there was already an established tradition of referring to Jesus as a carpenter,
despite the lack of clear Biblical evidence.
So many Christians celebrate the birth of Christ every year on December 25th, but
what if he wasn’t born on that date? If you traveled back in time to the
first few centuries after Jesus's death, you'd be hard-pressed to find any celebration of his birth,
much less one taking place around that time of year.
According to History, the oldest known record of a Christmas-like celebration
is an observation of the Nativity that took place in Rome in 336 AD. Before that,
no one claimed to know at what time of year Jesus would have been born, nor did
they seem very concerned about it. Easter, which commemorates Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection,
was considered far-more central to the Christian celebratory calendar. Later, theologians would
contend that God had created the world on the spring equinox, implying that Jesus was
probably conceived around that same time of year (the lack of Biblical support notwithstanding).
There's no directly stated reason why early church leaders picked December 25th as the
holiday - but it’s worth noting that the feast of the Feast of the Annunciation is March 25,
that’s the day Catholics celebrate Mary becoming pregnant. Add nine months to that
and you get December 25th. Another commonly reported fact is that Christmas lines up with
pagan festivals like the Roman Saturnalia, which themselves tended to occur around the
winter solstice. Saturnalia actually ended on the 23rd, so the dates don’t really line up but
it's still commonly thought that Christmas is on the 25th because of a pagan holiday.
It’s not. We don’t really know specifically why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th.
History reports that scholars commonly agree there was a real, historical Jesus. However, the more
complicated truth is that direct evidence for his existence is frustratingly hard to come across.
So, while we can be reasonably certain that there was once a religious leader named Jesus who lived
in what is now Israel around the 1st century, things after that point get murky pretty quickly.
First, there's no officially verified archaeological evidence for Jesus,
meaning that no one has yet found any tangible things that are without a
doubt connected to the man. Yes, this means that even long-venerated religious relics,
like the supposed crown of thorns traditionally housed in Notre Dame Cathedral, or bits of the
so-called "true cross" displayed elsewhere, are unconfirmed as relics associated with Jesus.
But what about documentary evidence? That avenue has proven more useful,
though not exactly fruitful. Some non-Biblical writers did confirm a few spare details of
Jesus's life. Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian living in the 1st century,
offers up one of the earliest such accounts. In his Jewish Antiquities, he writes of a man named
James who was unfairly executed, mentioning that the victim is the brother of, quote,
"Jesus-who-is-called-Messiah." Yet, a longer account may have been doctored
by later Christian editors. Another brief mention comes in the Annals of Imperial Rome,
where historian Tacitus refers to a man who, by the 2nd century, was called "Christus."
Quite a few depictions of Jesus over the centuries have shown him with long hair. Perhaps a bunch
of artists have just found that image more exciting than showing him with short hair.
And as it turns out, the long hair of Jesus in so many depictions may not have anything
to do with historical fact. According to the BBC, having a big ol’ beard and long
hair was traditionally the mark of a Greek or Roman god, such as Zeus.
Everyday men at the time would have been far-more likely to have short hair. In fact,
the earliest known images of Jesus from the 3rd century show him in just such a manner.
A beard might not have been totally out of the question, though. If Jesus were busy traveling
for his preaching, he may not have had time to visit a barber and could have developed something
of a beard. But long hair would have certainly marked him out as a member of a group known
as the Nazirites. Yet, because no one ever claimed Jesus was a Nazirite and because he drank wine
(another no-no for the Nazirites), we can make a reasonable conclusion that he had short hair and,
at most, a short beard like everyone else.
Jesus was, by many modern accounts and retellings of his story, a generally loving guy who preached
peace and togetherness during his time on Earth. On its face, that can’t totally be disputed,
as there are plenty of Bible verses where Jesus tells people to love one another. According to
Christianity.com, he’s also commonly known in Christian circles as the "Prince of Peace.”
But it would be a mistake to assume that Jesus was a meek,
thoroughly chill dude who gave out blanket kindness. In fact, as Got Questions relates,
there are plenty of Biblical verses that reveal far-more nuance in his emotions. There's the
incident where he overturned some tables and upset moneylenders working in Jerusalem's Temple,
a story so striking that it's mentioned in three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and John.
“My house shall be called a house of prayer, says the Lord. But you have made it a den of thieves!”
He was also known to get frustrated at people who weren't meeting him halfway with his teachings,
as when the Pharisee fundamentalists wouldn't answer his questions, in Mark 3:1-5.
According to Got Questions, Jesus's anger wasn't a bad thing. No Bible verses really indicate that
his emotions ever tipped over into uncontrolled rage (though the moneylenders may have argued
otherwise at the time). Neither is there any textual evidence that Jesus stewed over his
anger and allowed it to become a grudge. For many believing Christians, while this may be
a surprising point of Jesus's actions and personality, his anger appears righteous.
Though it's the name many of us know him by today, the 1st-century Jewish religious
leader and prophet who is now called “Jesus” would have never heard that
name applied to him during his lifetime. According to PBS's Origin of Everything,
his original Hebrew name was actually “Yeshua.” If we were to translate that to a more-modern form,
the originator of Christianity would more accurately have gone by the name “Joshua.”
So, how did we get to Jesus? It's all due to the Greek language employed in the New Testament.
His name went from "Yeshua" to "Iesus," mainly because Greek
just didn't have the same characters to handle the sound of the original Hebrew.
"Iesus," which rather easily became "Jesus" down the line, was their best approximation.
As Slate reports, Yeshua would have faced the same problem borne by modern kids with popular names:
a bunch of people in the region, apparently, were named "Yeshua."
It certainly pops up often in the Hebrew Bible, though those individuals often became
"Joshua" in later translations. Furthermore, just from the time of Jesus's crucifixion,
excavators have uncovered over 70 tombs bearing the name. Not only does that make
it incredibly hard to find archaeological evidence of Jesus's tomb — which would be
an absolutely groundbreaking discovery for Biblical scholars — but it also
underlies just how common and unremarkable Jesus may have seemed upon first glance.
Given how many stories there are of Jesus's life, including those
in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you’d think we’d have some confirmed,
contemporary reports of his comings and goings. But we really don’t. We’ve got some accounts
written within a few generations or so of Jesus’s time, just like that of Josephus.
When it comes to eyewitness accounts from people who actually met the man,
things get pretty shaky. Speaking to NPR, religion professor Bart D. Ehrman notes that we can't be so
sure that the Gospels were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Instead,
it's quite possible that later writers simply attached the names of the apostles to their work.
If they were actually written by the people in question, then why are there so many
significant differences between the details of the Gospels, like whether or not Jesus was divine?
Perhaps most significantly, there's no language in any of the Gospels that clearly indicates the
writer was there as a witness. The faithful may argue against this idea. But, looking at things
strictly in reference to the books in the New Testament, there's no confirmed proof that the
apostles, or anyone else who was part of Jesus's inner circle, ever wrote down their own accounts.
Contrary to some modern folks' expectations, there's practically no way Jesus would have
thought of himself as a Christian. First of all, as the BBC reports,
the "Christ" part of Jesus Christ was not a feature of his actual name. It's actually a
Greek word related to a Hebrew term for "messiah" and is effectively translated as "anointed one."
That title really only caught on after Jesus's death, according to Britannica.
Moreover, PBS's Frontline contends that Jesus would have very likely seen himself as a Jewish
person. He was born in a Jewish community, to a Jewish family, and would have been intimately
familiar with the various laws and practices of Judaism in the 1st century. As professor Shaye
J.D. Cohen argues, even the Gospels tacitly assume that Jesus was Jewish, with nary a
mention of him starting a new religious movement, much less one that would be called Christianity.
For Jesus and everyone around him, it's far more certain that he was seen as someone with
a unique connection to God, but not an individual in the process of breaking away from established
Jewish tradition. It's only after that religious movement grew from a Jewish sect into independent
Christianity over the following centuries that anyone would think of him as something more.
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