IN MY DREAM I SAW A MAN, Short Hair, short beard, dark eyes, handsome.

 

In 2001, a new attempt was made to discover what the true race and face of Yeshua  might have been, and it was documented in the Son of God documentary series. The study, sponsored by the BBC, France 3 and the Discovery Channel, used one of three first-century Jewish skulls from a leading department of forensic science in Israel. A face was constructed using forensic anthropology by Richard Neave, a retired medical artist from the Unit of Art in Medicine at the University of Manchester. The face Neave constructed suggested that Yeshua would have had a broad face and large nose, and differed significantly from the traditional depictions of Yeshua in renaissance art.

Additional information about Yeshua's skin color and hair was provided by Mark Goodacre, a senior lecturer at the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Using third-century images from a synagogue – the earliest pictures of Jewish people– Goodacre proposed that Jesus's skin color would have been darker and swarthier than his traditional Western image. He also suggested that he would have had short, curly hair and a short cropped beard. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, where Paul the Apostle says it is "disgraceful" for a man to have long hair, was cited as support for this, the argument being that as Paul allegedly knew many of the disciples and members of Yeshua's  family, it is unlikely that he would have written such a thing had Yeshua had long hair.

Although it was not literally the face of Yeshua, the result of the study determined that Jesus's skin would have been more olive-colored than white or black, and it also determined that he would have most likely looked like a typical Galilean Semite of his day. Among the points which were made in the study was the fact that the Bible says that Yeshua's  disciple Judas Iscariot needed to point him out to those who were arresting him. The implied argument is that if Jesus's physical appearance had differed markedly from the appearance of his disciples, he would have been relatively easy to identify. James H. Charlesworth says that Yeshua's  face was "most likely dark brown and sun-tanned", and his stature "may have been between five feet five and five feet seven".

Although it was not literally the face of Yeshua, the result of the study determined that Yeshua's  skin would have been more olive-colored than white or black, and it also determined that he would have most likely looked like a typical Galilean Semite of his day.

What Did Jesus Look Like?Edit

In 2018 historian Joan Taylor published What Did Jesus Look Like? which traced portrayals of Jesus back through time from the European Jesus of western art to Jesus himself. By working with Yossi Nagar, an Israeli anthropologist who was able to prove that the physical characteristics of the bones of Jews which date back to the time of Jesus have similarities to the bones of contemporary Iraqi Jews, Taylor concluded that Jesus had honey/olive skin, brown eyes and black hair. As for the honey/olive description, Taylor writes that his skin was "a darker hue consistent with the skin tone of people of the Middle East" (p. 163). Taylor thinks the BBC's reconstruction is "quite speculative" because reconstruction of cartilage (noses, etc.) is guesswork.