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 Dihydrogen Monoxide (H₂O) 06:48, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Jesus

The Romans, at the date that the fresco was painted in Rome, wore close-cropped hair and were usually shaven, unless they were a warrior, some of whom wore a close-cropped beard. Romans did not wear long hair and a flowing beard like the man in this picture. This picture, and a very small number that are like it, appear to be deliberately representing Jesus with his hair and beard worn as per the Jewish custom. This is probably the earliest picture like this in Rome and is significant specifically because it does not show him as a Roman. That's the point.

As for him not looking like a Jew... please don't tell me what a Jew does or doesn't look like. A Jewish man looks like my father, my grandfather, my uncles, my husband and my sons. Amandajm (talk) 13:21, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, Bitbut! Thank you for your reply. The problem is really not with you....

There has been an ongoing argument (conspiracy theory if you like) about pictorial representations of Jesus. There is a misguided idea that many people subscribe to that European artists consistently and deliberately portray Jesus as being of their own racial type, whatever that might be. Moreover, they are thought to do this for "racist" reasons. The theory is that artists want to deny or disguise Jesus' Middle Eastern origins. In fact the tradition is quite different and a very large number of artists have conscientiously strived to make him appear Jewish.

Of course it does happen some of the time, notably in the US movie King of Kings.[1] No beard on earth was going to make this actor look anything except a cleancut all-American boy.

But during the Middle Ages, there was a strong tradition in the portratyal of Jesus as a long-haired, long-faced, large-nosed bearded man with deep-set eyes, with hair varying from mid-brown to black and pale skin. The colouring depends on the media, for example many old murals are painted only in red, green and black.

There is an unproven tradition that all these images depend upon the Shroud of Turin, while many see this as an impossibility, because carbon dating places the Shroud as Late Medieval/Early Renaissance (about 1400). There is also a number of very good reasons why the carbon dating is almost certainly wrong, one reason being that the corner of the cloth that they tested had been held in the sweaty hands of a great number of bishops over the centuries, every time it was displayed.

During the Renaissance, some artists, Piero della Francesca for example, did indeed paint Jesus and other Biblical figures looking like their local people. The city of Arezzo is still full of men who look exactly like Piero's Jesus. Leonardo da Vinci, on the other hand, searched for a Jewish man to paint as Jesus. His preoccupation with searching for models really annoyed the Prior of the monastry where the Last Supper was being painted. He had no tolerance or understanding of the artistic process. Rembrant found a young Jewish man to model as Jesus and was so pleased with him as a model he painted several pictures.

There were two points at which this trend came unstuck. Firstly, in about 1300 they came up with this great technique for painting on glass. In most stained glass windows, the colours are in the glass itself, but in the case of yellow details, they are painted and fired onto the surface. This means that the artist could paint yellow flowers, yellow patterns and yellow hair. The yellow hair stuff got totally out of control, particularly in Germany where blonde hair was very common. There were also a number of C19th British stained glass artists who always did painted bright yellow hair, because it was far easier than cutting separate pieces of brown glass.

Secondly, during the Renaissance, German artists started designing fantastic illustrated Bibles, which were reproduced for centuries. The black and white illustrations are someitmes hand-coloured, particularly in the C19th, and once again, yellow was a favourite hair colour. So although Jesus retained his beard and hair, he became less recognizably Jewish because of the colouring.

On the matter of colouring, there is a fallacy that all Jews have dark skin and dark eyes and that Jesus ought to be depicted that way. In fact, blue and blue-hazel eyes, and creamy white skin are found in many Jewish families. People seem to muddle the appearance of typical Palestinians (of Arabic decent) with Jews simply because they are living in the same region.

There was a recent "reconstruction" by a forensic team (publicised on the BBC) which went along with the modern "trend" to get as far away from the traditional image as possible. They produced a model which was very convincingly publicised, but doesn't stand up to a rigorous examination of the choices that were made.

Firstly, they decided that Jesus was a "peasant" and they needed to examine "peasant" burials to find a suitable skull model. Jesus was the direct line of the royal house os David, so the whole foundation of their thinking was false for starters.

Having been provided with a number of skulls they observed that they fell into two groups, very round skulls, and longinsh skulls. They decided that the round skulls were the Jewish ones. Most modern Jews have longish skulls, and the traditional pics, from the 3rd century onwards show a long-faced man, but never mind that!

The oldest paintings of Jewish men are from about 190 AD (if I remember rightly without looking it up). They are two prophets framing a mural in a synagogue. The forensic artist focussed all his attention on the round-faced, short-haired, swarthy-skinned man on one side. They based the hair, the colouring and so-on, on him. They somehow managed to avoid seeing the equally (or probably more) vaild portrait a few feet away showing a long-faced man with pale skin, and Jesus-style hair and beard. In fact he looked exactly the way that we have been led by tradition to expect Jesus to look. This is not a new tradition. It is a tradition that goes back to the catacombs. But for his own perverse reason, the forensic expert ignored this fact.

In other words, given the same set of data, the forensic expert could have made a set of choices that confirmed the traditional image, rather than contradicting it. They could just as easily have come back to the Beeb and said "Yes, our findings show there is a strong possibility that Jesus did look very much the way that the Roman Christian painters, the Byzantine mosaicists, the Romanesque sculptors, the Gothic illuminators, a great number of Western painters and Franco Zeffirelli chose to portray him.

What they actually came up with is a very convincing model for one of the shepherds who were keeping watch by night. He has a decidedly moronic look about him. [2]

Take a look at the Fayum mummy portraits from Egypt. They are quite wonderful, and give a good idea of the various types, the range of skin colour and eye colour that these ancient Egyptian/Greeks had. At least two people on the page have pale eyes, probably blue or blue-hazel.

Amandajm (talk) 12:27, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

January 2011

Thank you for your contributions. Please remember to mark your edits, such as your recent edits to Cameo appearance, as "minor" only if they truly are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes, or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you. Ken_g6 (factors | composites) 06:37, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

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Cyanide & Happiness

Hi, I have copyedited and reorganized the Cyanide & Happiness article. Please take a look. Thanks! AngusWOOF (talk) 23:16, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

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