Christianity
Christian Mythology 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 19, 1998
What Jesus Looked Like
What did Jesus look like? There are no descriptions of him in the gospels but descriptions must have been written of him—when the Sanhedrin issued its warrant for his arrest as John describes (Jn 11:57) and when Pilate submitted his account of the trial. Each of these would contain the name, charge and description of the criminal.
The Christian image of Jesus is derived from a forgery issued to counter the publication of the Acta Pilati, The Acts of Pilate, which proved that Jesus was a bandit, justly executed under Roman law. This forgery is called the Letter of Lentulus, Lentulus being a Roman of higher rank than Pilate to discredit the latter. “Lentulus” describes Jesus as a man of classical European beauty. He has light (red, in early pictures, like king David), curly, shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, a ruddy complexion unblemished by spots or marks, a faultless nose and mouth, and a short divided beard. He has a grave demeanour. This has been the Jesus of Christian art ever since, though earlier imagery had been pagan—Jesus was a beardless youth like Attis or Orpheus.
His brow is smooth and very calm, with a face without wrinkle or blemish, lightly tinged with red. His nose and mouth are faultless. His beard is luxuriant and unclipped, of the same colour as his hair, not long but parted at the chin. His eyes are expressive and brilliant. He is terrible in reproof, sweet and gentle in admonition, cheerful without ceasing to be grave. He has never been seen to laugh, but often to weep. His figure is slender and erect; his hands and arms are beautiful to see. His conversation is serious, sparing and modest. He is the fairest of the children of men.
This forgery describes Jesus as medium height, but that is belied by the measure of his height which is given as 15 palms and a half, not more than five feet two inches if a palm is understood to be four inches—it was probably three! St Ephraim in his Gospel Commentaries writes:
God came down to us in small stature.
Christians are normally ecstatic about the Jewish scriptural prophecies of Jesus, and love to cite them, but they do not like to cite the prophecies about the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, which Jesus is compared with by Luke in Acts 8:32-33, by John 12:38, and by the Church Fathers:
His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men…Isaiah 52:14
…like a root out of dry ground, he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and forsaken by men, a man of pains and acquainted with sickness, and, as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.Isaiah 53:2
Why would they have drawn these parallels unless there was reason for it? The implication is that Jesus was marred in some way. He was deformed, or sick, or both.
Paul, in Philippians, might imply Jesus looked less than perfect when he explains Christ had taken the shape of a slave, contrasting it with his true form as a God. John seems to imply that Jesus was middle aged. In Luke 4:23, Jesus curiously said to his own synagogue members after he had announced the good news for the poor, the captives the oppressed, and sight for the blind, that doubtless they would quote to him the proverb, “Physician, heal thyself”. It is a plain admission that Jesus was not whole or well in some obvious way. He was announcing that others would be healed and saved, but it implied he ought to heal himself first! If Luke 19:3 is to be taken literally, Zacchaeus sought to see Jesus who he was…
…and could not for the crowd, because he was little of stature.
For Christians this ambiguity means that Zacchaeus was little of stature, when it could equally mean Jesus was. And Jesus calls himself “but little in the kingdom of God” (Lk 7:28) meaning the least significant but punning on his small height. Then, in Luke 23:3, Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” It sounds an innocent question, but in the Greek it implies an incredulity that we would show by intonation. “Are you the king of the Jews.” Pilate could not believe that the figure before him was a king. In John 8:57 the Jews say to Jesus: ”Thou art not yet fifty years old.” The implication of these words is that Jesus was nearer fifty than forty. How would that tally with his being 30 at his baptism? Well, perhaps he looked older than he was. Or perhaps the baptism made him crown prince but he did not become leader until John was imprisoned. Or simply his ministry was longer than the gospels tell us.
The Slavonic Text of Josephus’s the Jewish War pictures Jesus not as fair, handsome, tall and upright, and in the prime of life but as a bent, short, possibly hunchbacked, elderly man with beetling brows and a dark skin. The first paragraph of the original text of the Slavonic Capture of Jerusalem, according to Robert Eisler, is:
His nature and form were human—a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high, hunchbacked with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows, so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazirites, and with an undeveloped beard… if I look at his commonplace physique, I cannot call him an angel.
A cubit is about 18 inches or 45 cm, so Christ here was little more than four and a half feet tall. Both Tertullian and Origen described Jesus as short, insignificant in appearance and ill-favoured. Celsus, about 180 AD, wrote of Jesus’s body as being “contemptible” and with many “serious imperfections”. The first church scholar, Origen, in his polemic against Celsus (Contra Celsum), did not contradict what Celsus had said, as he did in other respects, that being his purpose in writing, but made out that such physical faults must have conferred some sense of the divine. In other words, he quite simply admitted it was true. He could not, at that time deny it, because it was in Josephus, and Christians then did not have the right of census. Tertullian, in 207 AD, made no more attempt to deny what must have been common knowledge. He agreed Jesus had a body that was not of truly human form. Irenaeus said Jesus was graceless, weak, and inglorious. Clement of Alexandria thought Jesus was ugly to look at. Cyril of Alexandria did not think he was “the fairest of the children of men” but “the ugliest of the children of men”. The apocryphal Acts of John says Jesus was a man of small stature and Jesus’s twin brother is described as small in the Syrian Acts of Thomas.
Could such a man of such unappealing appearance have been married? If Jesus was unmarried, it was unusual. Celibacy was unusual for a Jew at the time. But Moses had stopped living with his wife to undertake his prophetic role and the rabbis deduced that prophecy and marriage were incompatible. However at the time of Jesus the age of prophecy was over and it was the duty of all Jews to procreate—some first century rabbis compared celibacy to murder. The Hasidim had mixed views. Some, like Honi and Hanina were married but others accepted that abstinence led to holiness and ultimately to the holy spirit.
Soldiers in campaign and those taking part in worship had to abstain from intercourse. The wilderness Essenes, who regarded themselves as preparing for the terminal battle, did segregate themselves from the opposite sex in their pursuit of holiness. Jesus seems to have had little in common with Essene asceticism possibly because he was a leader of the branch whose duty was to persuade Jewish sinners that they were needed by God in the coming battle. The provision needed for widows in Acts of the Apostles 6:1-6 shows that Nazarenes in general married like the village Essenes of the Damascus Document. A village Essene was unlikely to have been unmarried, but because Jesus considered himself a soldier in the coming battle he, and his companions, would have chosen chastity. If Jesus was a leading Essene, as the evidence suggests, he will not have married, the speculations of Dan Brown notwithstanding.
Jesus was of Royal Blood
The code word for kingship in the first gospel is “authority”. People say often that Jesus spoke with authority meaning he spoke as if he were a king. Of course, the messianic hope was for a royal prince, a son of David, to arise and defeat the enemies of Israel. Jesus is hailed as a son of David on his entry into Jerusalem and Christians have always considered that he was in the royal line of David. The genealogies in Matthew and Luke were provided as proof.
So, we can take it as read that Jesus was a royal prince—literally a king of the Jews? Unfortunately not. Saviours were nearly always of royal blood but humble upbringing. It is the stuff of fairy tales. The fact that Christians believe Jesus was royal proves that they do not read their bible. No less a person than Jesus himself denied it! Jesus denies in masterly fashion that the messiah could be of the house of David in Mark 12:35-37:
How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David? For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The LORD said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool. David therefore himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then his son? And the common people heard him gladly.
Here we find Jesus replying to a question which has been crudely omitted because the editor has already written that no one dared ask any more questions. Carelessly he writes that Jesus is answering it. It was:
How can you be a son of David when you haven’t got a father?
Jesus seems to consider himself messiah. He and his supporters have just captured Jerusalem from the Romans, so Jesus was at his highest zenith. He was the Messiah—he had liberated the Holy City. In reply, Jesus quotes the beginning of Psalms 110. The elder is the Lord of the younger in Jewish lineages. The point is that David (who traditionally was the author of Psalms) as head of the line is its Lord. So, if the messiah were his son (meaning a descendant) then the messiah should call David, Lord, not the other way around. Therefore David in the psalm cannot regard the messiah as his son—ergo, the messiah is not literally David’s descendant.
The common people “heard him gladly” because they liked his answer. He proved from scripture that the messiah could not have been a son of David. Why should he want to do this? Because he was not, or could not show that he was a son of David himself. The common people accepted that the Son of David was a man in the mould of David and not necessarily of his stock. Jesus had persuaded them that the Essene view was the correct one. Mark can have had no reason for including any passage in which Jesus seems to deny what was already accepted by the church unless it was genuine tradition and he felt obliged to put it in this particular spot.
The Qumran Essene monks took in waifs and strays and so they could have placed no importance on lineage. Though they considered themselves Zadokites, they considered themselves priestly from practice not by descent. They were interested in Melchizedek, the priest of Genesis 14:18-20 who preceded the Zadokite line. The Essenes probably had arrived at symbolic ways of fulfilling scripture just as, it seems, they had ritual coronations to confer titles on to their chosen candidates. Mark has nothing to say about Jesus’s father. Though Jesus is described as a carpenter, his father is nowhere mentioned either as the carpenter or as Joseph. This suggests that, in the earliest tradition, Jesus was an orphan. Jesus was not necessarily a claimant to the throne of Israel by lineage but a star, a man whose destiny it was. Like Son of Zadok, Son of David was a position to be attained or granted by God not one that came by birth.
As soon as Christians believed in Jesus as Messiah, they handed back to him the tradition that he was of royal blood, and have believed it ever since, even though their own god denied it plainly in the shortest and oldest of their gospels. The royalty of Jesus is a transparent lie, accepted out of piety. Christianity is like that through and through.
The Catholic Teacher
Many of Jesus’s sayings have been distorted in recording them either deliberately to suit one faction or the other or, in many cases simply by faulty recollection, faulty translation or misplaced context including attributing to Jesus sayings that were originally those of the evangelists, the words of Essene catechisms or those of the Essene Teacher of Righteousness.
Jesus’s method of teaching as expressed in the gospels was probably traditional. He appeared to teach in midrashim and pesharim, quotations from scripture with a commentary or interpretation. Christian editors however have often dropped the Old Testament quotation to make the interpretation or commentary stand alone and sound original when they often expressed the active principles of pious Jews of the time whether Pharisees or Essenes. Such passages can often be detected by the comment being introduced by ”For” with no apparent purpose.
Most of the gospel sayings were reiterations of old truths. Thus the Psalms say that the meek shall inherit the land and Jeremiah says He giveth his cheek to him who smiteth him. Many seem to oppose barbaric Jewish practices. Yet from the Old Testament we find that Jeremiah rejects blood sacrifices, appealed to individual conscience and preached non-resistance to enemies and Isaiah prefers the concepts of justice, truth and love. The biblical Jesus was introducing little or nothing in these respects that Jews of one sect or another did not already accept with the provision that Jews only were considered.
Jesus urged his followers in Matthew 5:48:
Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect,
using characteristic Essene language, but even that, with minor change, comes from Leviticus 19:2, which records God’s command:
Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord thy God am holy!
Pharisees tried to obey these commands—though they realised they could not be achieved outside of Heaven—just as it appears Jesus did. Was the command of Matthew 5:44 to love your enemy? Not really! The practical side of it is expressed in Proverbs—where people are urged to help their enemies—and as far back as Exodus 23:4. Essenes believed in brotherly love as the Damascus Document makes clear but brotherly love could have extended no further than the Children of Israel, and even then probably only in the End Days. It did not extend to foreigners.
Jesus’s most controversial innovation as a teacher seemed to be the rejection of the Jewish dietary laws expressed in Mark 7:19 as
Thus he declared all foods clean.
This must have been so controversial that it could hardly have been forgotten if true. Yet both Peter in Acts 10:13-16 and Paul seem unaware of it. Peter is much troubled by his dream of eating things unclean before visiting the gentile, Cornelius; and Paul, though glad to get rid of such troublesome laws for his gentile converts, never once cites the teaching of Jesus as authority for it—unless it be in Romans 14:14:
I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself,
which sounds more as though he is expressing his own view, convinced in his faith that he is correct. In reality, he neither knew nor cared what Jesus had taught but, from his supernatural knowledge of Jesus, he justified himself in what he did. Later the gospel writers had to justify Paul’s ruthless innovation through Jesus in their accounts of his life. Thus the immovably orthodox Jesus unknowingly became the author of a huge change to the Law of Moses.
Jesus respected the Law so highly that the gospels record his saying that no one who transgressed the least of its ordinances could enter the kingdom of God. Mark’s apparent refutation of it is an alteration to suit the later teachings of the Pauline church. In the original story the dietary laws were quoted to illustrate a spiritual point not to be rejected.
The Sermon on the Mount occurs in Matthew and Luke but not in the other two gospels where the sayings included in the sermon are scattered throughout the narrative. The sermon is an attempt to indicate the exhortation of the Mebaqqer of the Camps to the Essene faithful at the Annual Renewal Festival. It serves to pull together a variety of Essene maxims. Possibly it was used in the common source of Luke and Matthew and the latter in particular used it to emphasise Jesus’s authority and the novelty of his message. Thus Matthew gives Jesus great authority to change what the Jewish Scriptures had taught;
You have learned that our forefathers were told…but what I tell you is this…
We saw that Matthew might have been an Essene and a similar formulation has been found in polemics at Qumran. Luke does not make the words so assertive.
The historian, Arthur Weigall, apparently loyal to Christianity, says the authors of the gospels could not have collected all this wisdom and make it seem to fall from the lips of an imaginary figure, especially one so simple, tender and gallant, concluding ”If ever there was an authentic personality in history, it is that of our Lord”. But manifestly this is nonsense, the sayings could easily have been collected by others from a variety of Essene sources and the gospel writers simply used them. They could also have drawn upon some other simple, tender and gallant figure for their model of Jesus—Judaism, had plenty of them but the obvious model was the Essene Righteous Teacher. The Essene origin of the Jesus myth could explain all this.
No attempt had been made to create a romantic figure deliberately but a consistent personality emerges from the uniformly Essene origins of the sources. The emphasis in early Christian societies on purity of living in readiness for the coming kingdom would have given the incarnate life of their god the characteristics of a holy teacher. It proved convenient to attribute to the failed rebel the wisdom of the Essene Teacher of Righteousness. All of these stories were originally related in Aramaic. The very act of translation would have added a smoothing effect, and we know from Luke that there might well have been several renderings of the stories before they came to us in the gospels.
Not that Jesus Barabbas would have been a rough lout to be the leader of a rebel gang. He was a prince and would have had to have had a prince’s wisdom and authority. The gospels tell us that he had. Furthermore Jesus was described as a carpenter and the son of a carpenter. In Jewish writing of the time the name for a carpenter (naggar) also means a craftsman in general and includes the meaning of ”scholar”. The only subject available to a ”scholar” was to study the Scriptures. The real meaning of scholar was apparently rendered literally as carpenter at some stage, probably when the work was translated into Greek. And, in fairness, there is nothing absurd about the scholar being a carpentar! In those days there were no endowed professorships. Even rabbis had to earn a living in some practical way. Perhaps the scholar worked his passage as a carpenter.
